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| Ray Garton, Author of Ravenous and Bestial |
Ray Garton is the author of over fifty books including popular 1980s horror novel Live Girls and its sequel Night Life. He has also written numerous short stories, novellas and has completed movie novelizations for: Invaders from Mars, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, Nightmare on Elm Street 5, and Warlock. Garton received the 2006 World Horror Convention Grand Master Award at the World Horror Convention in San Francisco, placing him in the company of some of horror’s best!
Garton fans are calling his most recent book Ravenous "the quintessential werewolf novel!" Bestial, which will be in stores on April 1, 2009 promises to be just as chilling and entertaining. Fangoria Magazine's Mark Kidwell says "Razor-Sharp and gut-punch brutal. Garton will scare you!"
Join us today for an interview with Ray Garton!
Ray, you've written several excellent books in the horror genre. What is it about horror that inspires you?
I don't know if "inspire" is the right word. Before I discovered the horror genre, I was kind of living in it. I was a pretty frightened kid, afraid of my own shadow. There was a good reason for this. I was raised a Seventh-day Adventist, an end-of-the-world pseudo-Christian cult. From my very earliest memory, I was terrified of the end of the world. I know that sounds crazy, but it was very real to me, because it was very real to my family. Seventh-day Adventists, who observe the Saturday Sabbath, believe that the Pope is the Beast of Revelation and that worshiping on Sunday is the Mark of the Beast. They believe that someday, the Catholic church will take over the government, and all the other "Sunday-keepers" (meaning the protestant religions) will do the Pope's bidding (I’m not making this up). A Sunday law will be passed requiring everyone to worship on Sunday. The Seventh-day Adventists seem to believe they will be the only ones disobeying this law (I don't know what the Jews will be up to), and the Sunday-keepers will hunt them down, arrest, torture, and kill them for their beliefs.
This was the future I had before me. Hardly a day passed when I wasn't told that all of this could happen at any moment. Whenever a TV show was interrupted by a special news bulletin, I used to have a panic attack because I was afraid Walter Cronkite was about to announce that the Sunday law had passed. I didn't sleep much for the first twenty-something years of my life because of this. Some of my earliest memories include praying to god to kill me before this "time of trouble" began. My father is a WWII veteran, and he used to watch a lot of documentaries about the war on TV. Whenever we saw footage of the naked and emaciated corpses of concentration camp victims being bulldozed into pits in black and white, he'd say, "That's what they're going to do to us." Meaning that's what the Sunday-keepers would do to us Adventists when the time came. Things like that make huge impressions on a small child. On top of that, I was also terrified of my father, because I never knew when he was going to blow up and drag me through the house by the hair kicking me the whole way. So I spent most of my time tensed up in a state of dread and terror.
When I saw my first horror movie, it took my natural state -- which was fear -- and made it fun. It was actually a relief from my life. My first horror movie was William Castle's 13 Ghosts. I saw it when I was about five, and I was hooked from that moment on. Horror movies, and then comic books and novels, were like a drug for me -- they provided an escape for me. My love of horror also made my life as a Seventh-day Adventist difficult, because it's forbidden -- but that's another story. I always had a natural affinity for storytelling, and my stories were always creepy. Even those that didn't involve anything supernatural tended to be dark. That's still true. I've written fiction outside the genre, but even though it's not horror, it tends to be far from cheery. But I never set out to write horror. That's just what came out of me. In fact, when I was a little kid, it was my dream for quite a while to be Rob Petrie and write comedy when I grew up. The Dick Van Dyke Show was a favorite of mine, and I wanted to grow up and be Rob Petrie and write jokes with Buddy and Sally for The Alan Brady Show in an office with a piano. But when I put pen to paper, what came out was horror. And it's been that way ever since. So, as I said, I’m not sure "inspire" is the right word. I am inspired by all kinds of things – I never know what’s going to inspire me next. But whatever it is, that inspiration usually leads me to write something dark.
There are plenty of things I love about the horror genre. I enjoy its sense of morality. It’s odd that so many people dismiss it as trash, as something that lionizes and encourages bad behavior. Not that there’s no bad behavior in horror – there’s plenty of that – but it is typically punished. It has consequences. The genre has a clear understanding of right and wrong that, in some cases, is almost old-fashioned. Horror also has a sense of justice that we too seldom see in life, which can make the genre very satisfying. Sometimes it’s an angry genre, and there’s usually plenty to be angry about. Especially lately. And I love the humor that can come out of horror. It can produce some pretty funny stuff that is sometimes even profound.
What scares you the most now?
What scares me these days? Quite a few things. Willful ignorance. Apathy. Reality TV. Mental illness. Religion. The Olsen twins. Casual, acceptable hatred (see Religion). The success of Dane Cook. I could go on and on.
You've written both fiction and non-fiction. In one case in particular, a book that was labeled "non-fiction" should have been labeled "fiction" (through no fault of your own). For those Horror Bound readers who have a huge interest in the paranormal and who have followed the careers of Ed and Lorraine, what would you say?
Ah, the Warrens. Ed, of course, has gone to that great haunted house in the sky, but Lorraine is still around. Back in the early ‘90s, I was offered a chance to write a book for Ed and Lorraine. As a kid, I used to follow their ghost-hunting exploits in the National Enquirer. I thought it sounded like a fun job, so I took it. I went to Connecticut and spent time with the Snedeker family. They’d moved into a house with their sick son and learned the place used to be a funeral home. They claimed all kinds of spooky things had happened in the house. They’d called in Ed and Lorraine, and after investigating, the Warrens announced that the house was infested with demons. Some of these demons had anally raped members of the family.
A little aside here. Back when I was reading about the Warrens, they were ghost hunters. Every house they investigated had at least one ghost, and there was always a spooky story behind it. But after The Exorcist was so wildly popular, first as a novel and then as a movie, Ed and Lorraine stopped encountering ghosts and began to uncover demon infestations. And it seems that wherever they went, people were being sexually molested by demons. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?
Carmen Snedeker was an unemployed wife and mother who was running an illegal interstate lottery business, about which she asked me numerous times to tell no one. I never met the son, who was said to be ill, although I was allowed to talk to him on the phone once, supervised by Carmen. When the boy began to talk about drugs and told me that he didn’t hear and see strange things in the house once he began taking medication, Carmen ended the conversation. As I gathered all the necessary information for the book, I found that the accounts of the individual Snedekers didn’t quite mesh. They just couldn’t keep their stories straight. I went to Ed with this problem. "Oh, they’re crazy," he said. "Everybody who comes to us is crazy. Otherwise why would they come to us? You’ve got some of the story – just use what works and make the rest up. And make it scary. You write scary books, right? That’s why we hired you. So just make it up and make it scary." I didn’t like that one bit. But by then, I’d signed the contract and there was no going back. I did as Ed instructed – I used what I could, made up the rest, and tried to make it as scary as I could. The book was called In A Dark Place: The Story of a True Haunting.
As soon as it was published, I started telling my story, knowing full well that it would not be too popular with the Snedekers or the Warrens. I was right. Carmen Snedeker, now Carmen Reed, has denounced the book. She claims they had little involvement in it, which is a lie. Since the release of that book, the Discovery Channel has aired a "re-enactment" of the story called A Haunting in Connecticut, which, of course, presents the Snedekers’ story as hard cold fact. Now a feature film based on the story is going to be released soon called The Haunting in Connecticut. I suspect the movie will begin with the words "Based on a true story." Be warned: Just about anything that begins with any variation of this phrase is trying a little too hard to convince you of something that probably isn’t true. Last I hard, Carmen is working on a new book, to tell the real story – apparently they’ve settled on one. I don’t know if Carmen runs her little interstate lottery operation anymore, but now she’s claiming to be some kind of psychic healer. She says she’s always been a psychic healer, although I didn’t hear anything about it in Connecticut back in the early ‘90s.
These days, John Zaffis is the "investigator" being used to make this cockamamie tale look like something remotely resembling legitimate. Zaffis is the nephew of Ed and Lorraine Warren. He was around back when I was working on the book. He didn’t do much, just stood around. Lorraine told me he was learning the business. He told me a story about something he saw in the former funeral home – some kind of "fully formed demon," or some such nonsense.
During my stay in Connecticut, Ed, Lorraine, and Zaffis repeatedly told me they had videotape of supernatural activity they’d shot in the demon-infested former funeral home (which I never visited because the current owners claimed the Snedekers were full of it and wanted nothing to do with the Warrens’ little dog and pony show). They assured me I would see that footage. Throughout my visit, they kept telling me the videotape was coming, that they were having trouble finding it, but they’d show it to me. By the end of my visit, there had been no sign of any videotape. After my experience with the Warrens, I talked to a couple of other writers who’d written books for Ed and Lorraine – and their stories were nearly identical to mine.
There is a rather interesting story behind one of your early novels, LIVE GIRLS? This novel was a Bram Stoker Award nominee and immensely popular in the 1980s and is still doing very well more than 20 years later. What inspired the novel?
I was visiting New York City for the first time. I was 23. I was with my editor in his office at Pinnacle Books, which had published my first two novels. He told me to take a walk through Times Square. He knew what a sheltered, small-town boy I was and how little I'd seen, and he knew it would be a great experience for me because, having read my work, he knew I had a taste for the dark side. This was back in the '80s, before Rudy Guiliani showed up and turned Times Square into a family shopping mall. Back then, it was a filthy den of pornography, prostitution, peep shows, and drug dealers. So I took a walk through Times Square and tried not to look too goggle-eyed and slack-jawed. Adult bookstores, porn theaters, peep shows – there sure wasn’t anything like it in my little hometown of Anderson, California. It was like visiting another planet for someone who'd had such a cloistered, religious upbringing and had gone only to religious schools.
I decided to try one of the peep shows. The way I described the Live Girls peep show in the novel is pretty much a reproduction of the place I went into that day. It was identified only by a sign outside that read LIVE NUDE GIRLS. I went into this filthy, smelly booth, figured out where to insert the tokens I'd purchased at the door, and then a rectangular panel opened up in the wall in front of me to reveal a stained window. On the other side was a frighteningly emaciated naked girl sitting on a stool, or a bench, something like that. She was "nude" and she was a "girl," but "live" was questionable. She was as pale as death and looked very unhealthy. She was so skinny that her bones stuck out all over the place, especially her ribs. There was a big sore on her lip. Her breasts were just thin flaps of skin over the ridges of her ribcage, and one had a pierced nipple, but it had gotten infected and was inflamed. Her arms and legs were bruised sticks. Her head was tilted back, eyes open only slightly, and she seemed almost unaware of the fact that one of her hands – with the filthiest fingernails I’d ever seen – was groping her genitals in a mechanical, gynecological performance that was anything but erotic. There was an opening beneath the window, and after my eyes adjusted to the bad light, I could read a small plaque near it: INSERT TIP THROUGH SLOT. But the opening wasn’t exactly a slot anymore. The middle of the slot expanded into a roundish opening. There were rough grooves in the edges of the opening, as if it had been made with a tool of some kind, a sharp piece of metal, or a knife. I thought, It almost looks like it’s been chewed open. The girl behind the window was so horrifying, it was hard to look away from her, but once I saw the opening in that slot and had that one little thought, it was all I could see or think about. The first thing to pop into my head was, Vampires! Afterward, I rushed back to Pinnacle, found a typewriter that wasn’t being used, and started writing.
You've been both criticized (and applauded) for your use of excessive sex and violence. What would you say to those critics?
I always knew from the beginning that my writing wasn’t for everyone. Among the people it wasn’t for were nearly all the people in my life at the time because all I knew were Adventists. That was my introduction to rejection, and because of that, it’s never really bothered me that there are people who turn their noses up at what I do, or who are offended by what I write. It’s not written for them. Their opinions don’t interest me. These days, I’m kind of amused by people who are offended by my work. "Too much violence and gore and sex!" they say with disgust. And then they go home and watch CSI or NCIS, which are unbelievably gory. I watch them, too, they’re great shows, but they always amaze me. I guess I’ve gotten old, because at some point in nearly every episode of CSI or NCIS, I think to myself, I can’t believe what they’re showing on TV now! I’m not offended by it, I just marvel at how much things have changed.
I grew up in the era of the "Family Hour." To placate all the grumbling church ladies in America, television networks had an unwritten agreement that they would avoid airing shows with sexual or violent content before ten o’clock, but even after ten, things were pretty tame compared to television today. Again, I’m not complaining at all, I’m just pointing out the difference. I happen to think it’s great that there’s more freedom in television today. But back then, if the Tiffany network had aired CSI or NCIS, even after ten, first of all, people would’ve been baffled by all the initials. And then, as soon as the camera settled on an eviscrated or torn-apart body or an opened-up corpse in a morgue, traumatized viewers all across the country would’ve been puking all over their carpets and furniture, and there would have been a torch-bearing mob of angry villagers pounding on CBS’s doors before the closing credits rolled.
A lot of the same people who think there’s too much sex in my work would never miss an episode of Grey’s Anatomy or Desperate Housewives, and those shows are spattered with more DNA than a motel-room bedspread. And I haven’t even mentioned HBO or Showtime yet! But even worse is the fact that a lot of the people who criticize or condemn my work because it’s too bloody or gory not only went to the theater to see Mel Gibson’s fetishistic orgy of sacred bloodshed and torture, The Passion of the Christ, but they took their kids! I avoided this movie for years, but took a look at it recently – as much as I could stomach, anyway. I’ve been writing horror fiction for a quarter of a century, and I was appalled by the blatant, unapologetic sadism of the movie. Herr Gibson took great pains to meticulously show as much blood and torn flesh as possible. I’d love to know how many times during the shooting of that movie he shouted, "More blood! More blood!" The only other command that probably came close was, "Make those Christ-killing Jews look more sinister!" The phrase "torture porn" was coined for this movie. It is the Lawrence of Arabia of torture porn! It’s sadomasochism for churchgoers! And a lot of extremely hypocritical people – people who would sneeringly call my work and the work of other writers like me sick, twisted, and perverse – took their little children to this movie so they could see Jesus’s flesh ripped and watch his blood splash all over the place.
My point is that the stuff I write is everywhere you look these days, it’s just that my fiction is intended to frighten and disturb. The horror genre has always been a rebellious troublemaker, and without even trying, it manages to root out hypocrisy. All it has to do to accomplish that is exist. The people who are disgusted by what I write probably haven’t read it, and even if they have, they don’t have a lot of room to point fingers because they enjoy the same kind of stuff – they just prefer to have it packaged differently so the neighbors won’t think they’re weird.
Interest in Horror seemed to have reached its peak in the 80s. What do you feel is the state of horror today?
It’s changed in a lot of ways. The word "horror" isn’t used much anymore, except by Leisure Books. It has to be called something else. For example, "Paranormal romance" or "urban fantasy" or any of the other combinations that are out there. In a lot of those books, things like vampires and werewolves are commonplace. Supernatural creatures are a given and they tend to make up a good portion of the cast. "These are my friends Todd and Shecky. Todd is a vampire and Shecky is a werewolf, and they both work at Costco." Todd and Shecky ripple with muscles and do a lot of pulsing and heaving and throbbing, and the big dilemma faced by our heroine is deciding which one she wants the most. You can put fangs on Fabio, but that doesn’t make him a vampire. A lot of the currently popular horror mutations are, in my opinion, fantasy. Personally, I’ve never been a big fan of fantasy, and I see this stuff as a more of a blend of romance and fantasy than horror. What always drew me to horror was the fact that it was set in a real, familiar, and believable world. The best writers in the genre have a firm grasp of this real-life world and the people in it – who, by the way, are everyday mortals facing everyday problems. Then this world is disrupted by the injection of menacing supernatural (or psychopathic, or cannabilistic) elements. That equation can be turned on its head in all kinds of ways, but that’s the horror I fell in love with and that’s how I continue to define it. If half the cast of characters casually drink blood or turn into animals from the beginning, I’m not interested. And I’m especially not interested if they sparkle, okay? No sparkling, please. If you have to sparkle, get a room. I certainly don’t mean to insult anyone who writes or reads these novels, but it irritates me a little when it’s called horror. There are still writers out there creating more traditional horror, there just isn’t much of a market for them. Back in the ‘80s, they were given front-row seats, now they’re lucky to get past the lobby of the theater.
Speaking of theaters – horror movies these days are either remakes of Japanese movies or remakes of ‘80s horror movies, and most of them are bad. For one thing, they’re all aimed at kids. Most horror movies are rated PG-13, which is always a bad sign. Gotta get those kids in the seats, so we can’t have an R rating because they won’t be able to get in. Making a PG-13-rated horror movie is a little like making a big flashy musical, but with songs that are only hummed off-key and have no accompaniment. That’s not always the case, there are some exceptions (although I can’t think of one off the top of my head), but I think it’s generally the rule. Another problem with horror movies is that they’re made specifically as horror movies. Sights are set low by the people behind the camera.
My favorite horror movies do not place their emphasis on horror, they place it on relationships and characters – like any other movie – and the horror takes place around those things. The Exorcist focused on the relationship between Chris and Regan McNeil and on Father Karras’s crisis of faith. Rosemary’s Baby focused on the relationship between Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse and their relationship with their strange neighbors, the Castavets. Alien focused on the crew of the Nostromo. Poltergeist focused on the Freeling family. Session 9 focused on those HazMat guys cleaning the old mental hospital. The Mist focused on the relationships between the people in that grocery store. Everything else existed outside the central focus and then moved in. Each of these directors did not set out to make a "horror movie," they set out to make the best movie they possibly could. They were concerned with quality first, with the same things any good director would be concerned with when making any movie. They just happened to be horror movies. But they’re great horror movies. (In fact, if I’m not mistaken, when adjusted for inflation, The Exorcist is still the highest grossing R-rated movie ever.) These directors did not say, "Okay, I’m gonna make a horror movie and it’s gonna be really cool, ‘cause there’s gonna be lots of blood and gore, and I wanna do a scene where a guy’s intestines shoot straight up into the air, duuude!" William Friedkin has said repeatedly that he did not set out to make a horror movie when he directed The Exorcist, and he did everything he could to avoid falling into that mindset. He just wanted to make a great movie. Now the attitude seems to be, "Well, it’s a horror movie, so how good can it be?" And that’s self-defeating. It seems to me that the people making horror movies now are focusing on the wrong things. They’re not setting out to do anything special or great, they just want to get some cool gory shots, get it done, and cash their checks. Either that, or they have good intentions but no clue how to make horror work well. Or maybe I’m just a horror snob and I should shut the hell up.
Would you tell us a bit about your upcoming work?
My new novel Bestial will be in stores April 1. It’s the sequel to Ravenous. While Ravenous was a fairly traditional werewolf tale, Bestial is a bit more offbeat. Off and on for a few years now, I’ve been working on a humorous novel called Dismissed From the Front and Center, based on my two years at a Seventh-day Adventist boarding academy. I’ve got a new novella that’s been kicking around in my head for awhile and is about ready to fall out, and I’m also working on an untitled mainstream thriller. Who knows what else will pop up?
Who are you reading right now in the horror genre?
I haven’t been reading much horror fiction lately. There are plenty of talented writers working in the genre – people like Thomas Tessier, Graham Masterton, Doug Clegg, Brian Keene, and of course that obscure writer from Maine. In that list of names alone there is a wide variety of moods and styles, which keeps horror interesting. There’s plenty of good stuff to read, but my interests have led me elsewhere lately. I go through reading moods, and I just haven’t been in a horror mood for awhile. Right now, I’m reading an old Richard Condon novel called Winter Kills.
Any advice to aspiring authors?
The best advice I can give is to be wary of advice. It’s always interesting to hear how other writers do what they do, but there is no secret formula to this line of work. Find what works for you and stick to it, even if it sometimes looks like everybody else has a completely different method. When you’re not writing, you should be reading, and read everything, not just the stuff in your chosen genre or field. Most importantly, do not rely on this work alone. Have something to fall back on besides your ass.
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