Tom Piccirilli was born May 27th, 1965 in New York, where he grew up on the south shore of Long Island. He attended a year at Suffolk Community college before moving on to graduate from Hofstra University. Just across the street from SCC is Pilgrim State Psychiatric Hospital, which became the basis for Tom’s chilling Panecraft Asylum, featured in several of his novels and short stories.

Anyone who meets him will discover a soft-spoken, pleasant man with a cheerful smile and a mischievous sparkle in his eyes that hides…well, readers of this collection know what it hides. He's friendly, devoted, and a hard-working writer…one of the good guys. His work will affect all who read it for a good many years to come.

RL: There's an old cliché that all writers had unhappy childhoods. In my own case, the cliché isn't particularly true. How about you? Were you mistreated as a child? By family, by schoolmates? Were you a "happy" kid?

PIC: I certainly wasn’t a happy kid, but neither was I mistreated. My father died when I was seven and that’s obviously had a lasting effect on me. I was moody and hypersensitive but not because of any other real reason I could name. I’m still pretty much the same way.

RL: When did you first realize that you wanted to be a writer? Did a particular incident-or series of incidents-nudge you in that direction?

PIC: I started writing “seriously” back in high school, spending a lot of time during study hall and lunch scrawling stories in a marble notebook. Since I was a hypersensitive kid, everything seemed to hit me extremely hard, especially all those crazy feelings and turmoil of the teenage years. The angst just soaked those pages, but it was a way to bleed off some of the anguish and anger. I read all the time and wrote a lot of short stories in school, and whatever I couldn’t quite get a grasp on in my head I suppose I tried to understand on paper.

RL: After you took a notion to be a writer, what steps did you take to accomplish your goal? Did you read writer magazines, books on how to write, biographies of authors? Did you take classes in writing? Whatever you did, it obviously worked. But what do you think was of special value to you?

PIC: I did everything you just mentioned and a lot more, and it all counted and helped to a degree. As a matter of fact, I still have my old Writer’s Digests around here somewhere, from 1980-81 or thereabouts, back when I was 15 or 16. In college I took a bunch of creative writing courses where the professors thought I was real strange and didn’t quite understand why I wrote the stuff I did or what I was trying to say by writing it. I had a penchant for being highly experimental but didn’t have a narrative voice or stylistic strength yet to tell a good story, so the pieces just skittered way out there. I’m lucky to have found the encouragement of a few good teachers back in high school and professors in college who saw something of my potential. I’m still a big reader of author biographies, and the more in-depth and detailed they are the better. Everyone likes to see how the lives of famous authors overlap and parallel their own.Ultimately though, the lessons that help your writing the most you can only learn from reading and writing as much as you can.


RL: I can tell you truly enjoy Edgar Allan Poe's work. Not only does the title of this tome come from "The Raven," but some of your short stories read almost as if they've been written by Poe. "Water Music for the Tillers of the Soil," for instance, has a lyrical and dreamlike quality that we find in such Poe pieces as "Silence-A Fable." And your story, "Of Persephone, Poe, and the Whisperer," (one of my favorites) is about Poe and is written in a style that brings to mind such stories as "The Fall of the House of Usher." Anything you'd like to say about his works or his influence on you?


PIC: Poe is one of the few horror authors who most people are exposed to and encouraged to read at an early age. Other than having to write a paper on Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” which you get in every anthology in the world, I can’t think of another horror author that teachers would find acceptable. Maybe some Lovecraft or Bradbury, but that’s about it. Anyway, I read the Scholastic version of The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Stories when I was nine or ten, but I quickly moved on to reading science fiction and didn’t return to Poe until much later. “The Raven” isn’t just a beautiful poem, it’s an exciting and ghastly sequence of events that is, I think, the true distillation of his life and work. “The Cask of Amontillado” is one of those tales I reread two or three times a year because it hits the exact perfect pitch of terror and must’ve been so risky at the time. Who else would have written a body of work where so many of the protagonists are completely out of their minds? Whatever his faults and flaws, he was incredibly courageous in his art.

I really didn’t know a great deal about the man until I did some research a couple of years ago. When I wrote “Of Persephone, Poe, and the Whisperer” for Ed Gorman and Marty Greenberg's anthology Cat Crimes Through Time, I had to press myself to find a 'cat crime' that would play into my strengths and interest me enough to do. It took a few days of worrying the idea and reading biographies on Poe until I came up with the plot: a young Edgar must solve a 'Poe-like' crime of murder and madness that involves a black cat and other elements and characters from his stories. It was difficult writing in a Poe-ish voice, but I’m not happy unless I can put a little extra spin on a project.

Titles are extremely important, a lot more significant than some authors realize. The title is the first stop in getting a reader interested in the story and garnering his attention. Also, you’re hoping the title is sharp enough that the reader remembers both it and your name, and then is willing to search out more of your work. The lyricism of titles appeals to me, and a number of mine are taken from the romantic poets or are stylistically similar.

RL: Do you know when you first became attracted to the dark side of literature? Was your interest triggered by a particular incident, a film you saw, a book you read?

PIC: I was hooked nearly from birth. My father loved horror flicks, and the first few movies I ever remember seeing were the original Planet of the Apes (in a drive-in when I was three), The Abominable Doctor Phibes,

Tales from the Crypt…that’s the one where Santa Claus runs wild and tries to kill Joan Collins…War of the Gargantuas starring the great Russ Tamblyn, and Horror Hotel, which featured a very young Christopher Lee as a Satanist, a film that absolutely scared the shit out of me for years. We’d sit and watch

Creature Features and Chiller Theater, where this claymation hand with six fingers would rise up and go “Chillleerrrrrrr…”

It didn't take long before I started reading kids' books that had a mysterious, supernatural or fantastical bend to them, and you’d be surprised how many comic books back in the 70s had a horrific or occult theme. Television shows like Night Gallery, The Night Stalker, and the Richard Matheson-scripted series Ghost Story/Circle of Fear really left their touch. Swamp Thing was a classic comic book with some truly powerful and moving plotlines which sucked me in, as was Werewolf By Night and Tomb of Dracula, and the anthology comics like Witching Hour, The Unexpected, Creatures on the Loose and Fear. From there I moved on to King, Straub, Blatty, and the other great writers of the late 70s when I was a teenager.



RL: Would you tell us about a few "horror" writers of bygone days who had the most influence on you?

PIC: Not sure if these guys are considered to be bygone, exactly, but certainly Robert Bloch, Manly Wade Wellman, Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, and Rod Serling rank right up there. A lot of people forget that Serling was a writer, they think he was just this guy who walked all across the Twilight Zone smoking cigarettes every week. The Alfred Hitchcock anthologies influenced me in my adolescent years, as did H.P. Lovecraft. It wasn’t until only a few years back that I started reading more of Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, and William Hope Hodgson. I still have yet to read a hefty amount of pre-1930s work. For one reason or another I never really got into the likes of Arthur Machen, Ambrose Bierce, August Derleth, Basil Copper, or any of the other famous Arkham House authors. Eventually I’ll get around to it, and I’m sure they’ll have their effects on me as well. Almost everything does to some extent.

RL: You not only write the sort of horror and dark fantasy stories that have been collected in Deep into that

Darkness Peering, but you've written some excellent crime novels such as Shards, The Dead Past, and Sorrow’s Crown. Such stories as "Familiar Child" and "Take it as it Comes" in this collection read like dark, noirish crime stories-with some supernatural weirdness thrown in. Poe, the master of horror, pretty much invented the mystery story. What do you see as the connection between horror and crime fiction?

PIC: There are often times you can’t tell the two apart, and you wouldn’t want to, either. Dark fiction spans the genres, whether you’re dealing with demons from hell or demons of the mind, has a common ground. Some people like tales that are fundamentally based in reality while others enjoy fantastical works. Some folks need a slavering monster, and some need a wise-cracking villain. I believe that nightmare is nightmare, so long as you can impress fear on the reader. Since I’m a big fan of crime fiction, especially from the 40s and 50s, it’s clear why I throw private investigators and cops into my dark fantasy work, and why a ghost or insane asylum might appear in my mysteries. If you read Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me or David Goodis’ Street of No Return or Charles Willeford’s The Burnt Orange Heresy or Cornell Woolrich’s Waltz Into Darkness you know that you’re reading bleak, dark, slug in the guts horror. It’s called “Noir” fiction for a reason-it’s black, it’s bleak, and it can shake and scare the hell out of you.

RL: Would you like to tell us about some of the other mystery/crime writers who've had a special influence on your own writing?

PIC: Besides those I just named, others include James M. Cain, Ed Gorman, Lawrence Block, Robert B. Parker, Joe Gores, Ed McBain, Bill Pronzini, Raymond Chandler, and Elmore Leonard. These are some of the first authors I read in the field and their impact was tremendous. My mystery novels are probably something like a brew of Parker, Gorman and Willeford. I try to link humor with extremely dark elements and come up with something that is witty but also disturbing.

RL: How about mainstream literature? Which of the classic and contemporary fiction writers do you have a special fondness for?

PIC: I personally enjoy all genres and types of writing, and I think it’s important that no matter what field an author specializes in he should read everything from classics to European literature to everything else he can get his hands on. Classics to poetry to 50s science fiction to the pulps to non-fiction Vietnam War stories. It all counts in a writer's development, and the more he knows of other genres and material and storylines, the more themes he'll have on his mind and the better he'll be able to hold a reader's interest. Some of the most surreal, moving and potent writing you'll ever read you'll find among the works of James Agee, Albert Camus, Richard Brautigan, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, John Steinbeck, and Donald Barthelme. I think John Irving is a phenomenal and poignant writer, and his novels have stirred me in ways no one else quite has. Jack Cady’s novel Singleton is a mainstream novel that is overflowing with its humanity, just like all the rest of his work is. I also consider Orwell’s 1984 and Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun to be two of the most powerful novels ever written, true classics in every sense of the word.

RL: A great many of your stories in this collection deal with demons and various mythological figures. What is the source of your interest in such matters?

PIC: There’s not really much of a distinction for me between what’s generally considered to be the “occult” and what is believed to be “religion.” If you study enough you find that a millennium or five ago most gods, ideals, moral laws, ancient texts and practices and belief systems cross all over the world throughout antiquity. For me, raised as a Catholic, going to catechism was a terrifying experience. Here you are, only eight or nine years old and you’re walking down in the cellars of churches named after these strange saints, and you’re going past all these men in black robes and women who are the “brides of Christ” (that alone is enough to freak a kid out, and still sort of bugs me), staring at icons of a bleeding, broken Christ in torturous poses, only to have a nun tell you that somebody else died for your sins... and you can almost hear the “you little fucker” in their voices... “he died for your sins, you little fucker,” like it’s your fault. I’ve said it before and I’m telling you, that was some seriously scary shit for me. They were out to make an impression, and they sure as hell made one.

So, from my curiosity and concern over figuring out exactly what this stuff meant, I studied the bible and tried to see how it fit into the larger spiritual world and compared to other religions. You can’t study religion and myth without studying history, as well as archeology and geography, and take into account the living conditions and societies of the time. When you’re dealing with theology, mythology, and magical practices, you’re dealing with the foundation of mankind, really, as well as the foundation of God. Once I started researching, I just kept going, and took some of the more scary and fun parts and put them into my novel Hexes and my other work. I mixed religious and occult ceremonies just because I thought it would help to tell a better tale. I spent a lot of time in various libraries reading all kinds of weird books and getting fearful askance glances from the reference librarians.



RL: The "Self" stories are a nicely balanced mixture of realism and supernatural. It's as if your Necromancer protagonist is fairly normal but has a really unusual "sidekick." What’s the origin of your "Self" series?

PIC: That’s still a mystery to me. As I mentioned, I started researching the occult when I wrote the first draft of

Hexes, and about that time I began one of my earliest short stories, which was entitled “Convene.” I guess you can call that one a proto-Self story. It was about a college student who finds out some of his professors and fellow students are witches, and how he wants to take over the coven. I submitted the tale to Ken Abner at Terminal Fright magazine, but it took him a while getting back to me. Actually, Ken and I have a running gag about this because neither of us remembers exactly how much time passed. Maybe it wasn’t all that long and I was just even more impatient waiting to hear back from editors than I am now. So I sent another copy of the tale out, which Crispin Burnham promptly accepted for Eldritch Tales (and never did publish after five years). Ken phoned and asked for a similar, traditional dark fantasy horror story and I wanted to get him something as quickly as possible.

“Neverdead” was half-written, right up to the paragraph when Self makes his first appearance, and for some reason I drove the tale in that direction. A necromancer and his demonic familiar second-self wiseass sidekick (or maybe it’s the Necromancer who’s the sidekick) wandering modern-day America and dealing with all kinds of evils seemed a good way to do a series similar to Manly Wade Wellman’s “Silver John the Balladeer” series. It was a well I could continue to return to because the material was so rich. Self seemed like a character I’d want to write about again, and after I sold the second Self tale “Bury St. Edmonds” to Ken we discussed the idea of publishing several more in the magazine.

I wanted to create my own kind of mythos which I could return to over a number of years. True historical accounts concerning the Inquisition and hysteria surrounding the witch trials are fascinating and shocking. Amazing and awful stuff, with descriptions of some of the most terrible and savage periods in our world history. So the challenge was to use real-or at least realistic-accounts from history, along with ceremonies, ritual, legends and superstitions in order to weave them into a cohesive body of work. With each new Self tale I try to play with elements of a different legend or religious practice or piece of folklore while also allowing the reader to learn more about the dual identities of Self and the Necromancer.



RL: While on the subject of weirdness, what's the deal with "The Works" stories (featured in your story “Inside the Works” and the novella “Recovery”)?

PIC: I wanted to somehow merge the best and worst elements of New York City and condense them into a much smaller setting: a spot where you got the energy and art along with the depravity, drugs and squalor. And beauty. Writing about a place where artists, madmen, criminals, and the insane all met and shared ideas and lived a communal existence proved to be pretty easy (but don’t tell anybody I said that). The stories are reality-based, but I get to play with the concept a lot, and the end of “Recovery” is almost a supernatural twist but doesn’t exactly read that way. Originally I planned on writing more pieces in the series from different characters’ viewpoints, but eventually I thought it would be best to stick to the main storyline and have my two protagonists associated. I suppose loss and revenge was that connection as much as the death of a woman.

RL: Most readers are probably under the impression that horror writers must be plagued by terrible nightmares. I find my own dreams are usually fairly pleasant, though once in a while I have a doozy of a nightmare. Perhaps this is because "getting it out on paper" removes a lot of subconscious anxiety. How are you in the nightmare department? And a related question: have any of your stories been inspired by nightmares or dreams? Have any of your own stories (places, characters, etc.), ever turned up in your dreams after you've written them?

PIC: Quite honestly, I don’t remember my dreams or nightmares. Except for a few odd images here and there and an

overall sense of anxiety at times-I seem to get an occasional panic attack just when I’m nodding off or waking up-I can never recall anything I’ve dreamed. I wish I did, it seems that some writers go to sleep and during the night all this great stuff happens. Their subconscious does a lot of work creating stories for them, and they wake up with these complex tales already sorted out and finished for them. So there’s been no inspiration there, really, and conversely, I’ve never dreamed of matters I’ve written about. At least I don’t think I have.

RL: Do you use your own fears in your writing?

PIC: All the time. But my fears shift depending on whatever circumstances I’m currently in. Again, it goes back to anxiety and dread more than anything that might be considered a phobia. Some folks crawl out of their skin at the

idea of spiders or heights or enclosed spaces. Most of my fears aren’t as focused as that, although to me drowning and dying in a fire seem like pretty awful ways of dying. I’ve used those images before. Usually my fears are just those things that cause us day to day stress, more than anything. Shame. Fear of failure.

RL: On a few occasions, elements of my stories have "come to pass" shortly after I've written them. Have you had any experiences along those lines?

PIC: The life imitating art imitating life has happened a few times for me, usually when I’m talking about relationships. You get a sense of what’s happening in your own life, you write some altered version of it, and sure enough, you’re dead-on and those events come to pass. I know that stories of yours deal with viciousness or severe criminal acts might eventually be committed in the real world, but nothing like that has ever happened to me so far as I know. Sure hope to God it never does.

RL: Have you ever written anything that you thought was so vile or scary (or whatever) that you plan never to have it published?

PIC: No, except for a couple of rough themes and disturbing scenes-especially in my first novel Dark Father - I don’t think I’ve written too much raunch. I’ve used a good deal of religious imagery in my work, and so I tend to be more blasphemous than disgustingly violent. On the overall, anyway. I would never go so far into that territory to only say at the end, “I’ve gone past the point of no return, I can never publish this.” For one thing, authors like yourself and Edward Lee and Jack Ketchum have proven to me that a writer can never truly go too far, so long as the scene is effective. There will always be a readership for extreme horror, and kinky dark fantasy erotica, and whatever other weird shit you or I can think of. Even if something gets chopped out of a novel it will eventually turn up in a story or another novel or some chapbook called ‘the censored chapters’ or something like that. If it works, and the readers enjoy it, then eventually it will see the light of day.

RL: Has some of your material been rejected by publishers who admitted that it was too extreme in one way or another? Or have you been forced to edit out passages that were deemed unfit for readers' eyes?

PIC: Here’s a goofy story concerning the editing of Dark Father. I wound up receiving a letter written by one of the line-editors that had been sent to the editor of my novel. I wasn’t supposed to see it-in fact, the line “show to author” was crossed out on the note-but somehow it wound up in my hands. I still have it with my original manuscript, and maybe I’ll frame it for kitsch value someday.

Anyway, it turns out that the line-editor was totally shocked and disgusted by my “obvious anti-semitic” bend to the novel. There is a scene with six prostitutes working out of a mobile home who drive all over this haunted town looking for action. Well, this guy saw the six hookers as representing the six points on the Star of David, and the mobile home to mean “wandering.” From this he inferred that I was slamming the proverbial “wandering Jew.” I mentioned Jehovah and Ra and Buddha and Christ and-in his words, other “dead gods”-in the book, but never stated the Hebrew name Yaweh. There were other elements like that…I mean, this note was long.

So at the end of it all, this guy claimed I was an anti-Semite. Clearly he was either Jewish and highly faithful and over-sensitive to whatever issues he might find if he stared at the page long enough, or he was a kid who recently graduated college who’d spent four years searching for symbolism in every story he’d had to read in his Lit. classes. Or both. It rattled me that a person could misread not just one sentence or one theme to my book, but spot something every few pages in every chapter, symbols and ideas that I simply didn’t have in there. I could see if he was Catholic and took offense to certain passages and scenes, because I do get nasty and blasphemous in the book. There’s a crazy priest and an evil Christ-like figure who raises the dead and a couple of demonic folks who have rough sex in a pew.

So my editor half-heartedly asked me to change a few things. I said I’d comply but I never did rewrite anything, I don’t think. The only other thing I’ve ever been asked to change was one scene, also in Dark Father, where I said one of those hookers had a voice that sounded exactly like Howard Cosell. The publisher feared a lawsuit from Cosell, I guess, so I wound up saying that the prostitute sounded like Yogi Bear’s sidekick Boo-boo.

Fortunately, Boo-boo never sued.


RL: There are other certain themes and symbols that recur in your work. As you’ve mentioned, the Catholic church, or churches in general. I’ve also noted water and dogs, among others.

PIC: There are certain styles and voices I fall into much more naturally, of course, but I try to mine new areas if I can. I’ve explained why churches and religion fascinates-and disturbs me-the way it does. It’s also true I have what I call my “water stories.” Since I grew up on Long Island and spent a lot of time at the beach, I suppose it’s to be expected. We were talking about fears before. I mentioned one would probably be drowning…especially at night. It’s such a forlorn and lonely thought. The vastness of the ocean is a powerful concept, beneath the waves in all that darkness. It sparks a lot of ideas for me, a lot of primal urges and awe and panic.

Dogs are, to me, a connection for man to nature in a way, I suppose. They’re domesticated animals but still very much a part of the wild, and can be downright spooky at times. You’re sitting there watching television and your sleeping dog suddenly rolls over and starts howling at the ceiling…well hell, that’s going to get your heart pumping. A dog can represent many things, too: friendship, attack, animal urges, complacency.

I think it’s important to have something-an image or a setting or a concept-that you use as a signature of sorts.

RL: You write about your father a great deal, and earlier you mentioned how he died when you were a young age. He also recurs in various forms in your fiction. In fact, you’ve dedicated this collection to him. There’s even a quote from Shakespeare about ghosts.

PIC: My father has become a sort of myth in my life, someone you hear stories about but never really get a chance to know. Although I was seven when he died, I can hardly recollect anything about him. That’s a real sadness in my life. I suppose he’s the ghost that haunts much of my fiction. By writing about him-or the possibility of him, the promise of him-I’m writing about my own potential. If you’re an adult when someone dies you look at your own mortality, you look at your children, your past, you stare down at the dirt of the cemetery. If you’re a kid you look at God, you look up at the sky, you try to sift through the mystery. I sometimes go through photos of him when he was a teenager and wound up in the Philippines in World War II, and later on with me sitting next to him on the stoop or at the beach. I’m never sure what he would have thought of me as the man I am now. It’s a driving force, trying to live up to someone who you really know nothing about, and hoping he approves.

RL: Among my favorite stories in the collection is, "Where the Swamp Folks Go When the Need Comes." It's a fine example of swamp fiction. Is there a story behind the story?

PIC: Being a kid from New York suburbia, I’ve always been intrigued by other American settings: New England, the South, the southwestern deserts. I knew I had to write my own bayou story after I finished reading Charles Williams’ River Girl and Robert Edmond Alter’s Swamp Sister, both of which are wonderful novels of backwoods crime, summer swelter shenanigans and swamp tramps. I’m sure that the Swamp Thing comic book character from my youth had something to do with it, as well-again, it’s the idea of utter loneliness and lawlessness in this big, unknown territory. The image of endless greenery and primordial morass, and hundreds of dead men sunk into slough kept haunting me for days. I originally wrote the story hoping to sell it to one of the Hot Blood anthologies, but by then the editors had already diverted into accepting mostly realistic dark stories. The supernatural edge to ‘Mama’s Girlies’ kept it out of the anthology, I guess, but it appears to be one of my readers’ favorites.

RL: "Take It as It Comes" was bitchin'. You mentioned you don’t write much raunch, but that one qualifies.

PIC: I thought you might like that one, Dick. I consider that piece to be a crime story that eventually crosses the line into the really vicious and unsettling stuff that can be called horror. That’s the first tale I wrote for the Hot Blood series, and I finished it without ever having read their guidelines. I’d read the anthologies and thought I knew what they were after, but they had three rules you couldn’t break if you were going to get into the books. No underage sex. No bestiality. And no rape scenes. Well, the entire story is basically one long rape and brutalization scene, and although the twist-ending casts the whole story in a different light, I’m still shocked that they actually read to the final paragraph without rejecting it for content.

RL: I thought one of the most tense and scary stories in the collection was "Mind of the Moon." That was a terrific piece. Is there anything about this story that you would like to tell us?

PIC: I wrote it right at the end of the serial killer craze that was all the rage after Thomas Harris’ Silence of the Lambs hit. At the time a serial killer only hunting other serial killers was a fairly original premise. The piece sold to two or three different small press magazines, all of whom up and died before they managed to publish it. So the idea had already been done a bunch of times by the time “Mind of the Moon” finally got to the shelves. I still think it came off with a certain atmosphere that hadn’t been delved into previously. I’d planned on doing a series featuring the protagonist tracking different killers, but the theme started to burn out too much, and I didn’t just want to rehash things further. Maybe one day I’ll have a serial killer idea I feel warrants a return to the character.

RL: One of the most striking features of the collection-and of your work in general-is how versatile you are. To quote you, "I think my tales are about equal parts realistic, occult and fuckin' weird shit." The novels of yours that I've read so far are pretty realistic-with smidgens of weird shit here and there. The extremely weird stuff is more to be found in your short fiction. Is this a function of the marketplace, a preference on your part, or . . ?

PIC: Ack, I knew I never should have tried to categorize myself, that just sounds so dumb to me now. In my mystery novels my own basic acerbic sense of humor works well, so my protagonists have more of my natural voice and are the closest to the real me. In my horror novels, for some reason, writing in the third person seems to work a lot better-at least it has so far-and I feel that I can go much further with the story in that form.

But you’re right, Dick, I’m more comfortable writing the funky weird shit in the short form. I have a couple of different ways I approach doing the first person there. One where you get to know the narrator extremely well and another where he’s cryptic and has no name and is completely fucked up throughout. I enjoy doing stories that are essentially based in reality yet swerve into an atmosphere of dread, and I also enjoy creating a more fantastic realm where the tales are set in some sort of dark, mythical, nightmarish world right from the start. I believe an author should constantly experiment and attempt new venues, try other styles, and find different forms. The challenge means nearly as much as the final product, and it can only help to broaden someone’s career.



RL: Do you have any particular favorites in Deep into the Darkness Peering and why are they special to you?

PIC: The six pieces that are original to the collection hold a special place for me because they do run the gamut of my styles and forms, I think. “Where the Martyred Flesh Knows Serenity” and “Mimi the Pregnant Hamster and the Mathematics of Dread” are two of my strangest tales. I just wound up tossing in as many off the wall elements into them that I could think of and then followed where they led me. “Water Music for the Tillers of Soil” is a dark fantasy story in a sort of warped Lovecraftian-tradition, which I’d never tried before. The Self novella “Mount of the Oath” adds more to the series and follows threads taking the overall arch into a new direction. I think it’s some of my best writing yet. And then there are the two shorter stories, “Of Baby Gogol and the Nun” and “Strew Upon her Your Roses” that just sort of exploded on impact. Quick and biting. So you get my long pieces and short ones in a number of styles. There’s my occult fiction, my series fiction, the offbeat dark crime stuff, erotica, and weird shit all laid out in those six tales.

RL: When we met you last spring in Phoenix, my wife and daughter and I all liked you immediately. You impressed us as being genuine, confident, sensitive, quiet, down to earth, and a somewhat covert wise-ass. An unbeatable combination. It comes as quite a shock to people who meet horror writers for the first time that we're not a bunch of leering, drooling maniacs with horns on our heads. (Wish I had a buck for every time I've been told, "I thought you'd have horns." The most recent time was just last week at the 1998 World Fantasy Convention.) I've noticed over the years that horror writers, as a class, seem to be unusually friendly, calm and cheerful, and they (we) generally look more like school teachers than demons. Also, one of their most striking characteristics is their sense of humor. Horror writers are the funniest people I know. (There are exceptions, of course: a few are bitter, dour, surly, backbiting bastards, but they're rare.) Have you also found this to be true?

PIC: Absolutely. I think horror writers are much more capable of shaking off troubles, probably because they spend so much time studying them up close in detail for their fiction. They also don’t take themselves quite as seriously as mainstream authors or other artists. I think having to live through the stigma of writing horror does a lot to keep us, as a whole, pretty down to earth. It’s hard to act pretentious when some publisher has tossed a dancing skeleton on the cover of your book or a melting monster that doesn’t have anything at all to do with your story. Or some cute girl in a bar says, “You write horror? That kind of shit?” Or your mother keeps begging you to go back to college to get a real job. Or you get those snide looks like you can’t be a real writer if you’re not writing about horses or extramarital affairs or falling in love in Byzantium, because that horror stuff is just so goddamn easy. A great number of people, including most of our families and friends I tend to think, just don’t get it and they never will. They think we run around with hockey masks, carrying chainsaws. It gives horror authors a pretty focused perspective and a strong sense of humor. The dream has to be pure if you’re going to take this much shit for it.

RL: Do you think it's the nature of people drawn to horror, that it's a result of writing about such bad stuff?

PIC: That’s certainly a part of it, too. Writing is a form of venting. You get to open the pressure valve. You get your revenge. You get to replay scenes from life and say all the things you didn’t think the first time around. You get to kick the asses of your enemies and make love to all the women you ever dreamed about. There were a couple of rough patches in my life where, if I hadn’t been able to throw the (slightly distorted) details down on the page, I don’t know what the hell I would have done with all those emotions rushing around inside my skull. One thing I’ve noticed about horror writers is that we might bitch and rage and glare, but we don’t very often wallow. We vent and go on to the next story, the next book, the next challenge.

RL: Do you write full time? What's your writing schedule like? Do you have a daily or weekly goal for the number of pages you turn out?

PIC: I don’t have a writing ritual. I try to work on something every day but if I don’t I’m not going to tear myself up about it. Newer writers often get caught up in the goal of getting out four or five or ten pages a day. Or finishing 20 chapters in 30 days. Or a novel every three months. Sometimes they get too wrapped up in the numbers, so that if they don’t hit their target they wind up adding more pages to their load the following day. I think that kind of system is destined to blow up after a while and you start feeling like you’re not accomplishing anything if you only write a few paragraphs a sitting. You get no joy out of the work and start to hate the process. It’s too damn easy to feel like a failure in front of an empty page. When I’m working I have stretches when the writing is going quickly, slowly, or isn’t moving at all. Sometimes I take a longer while to come up with an idea that excites me enough to put my life and energy into the piece. To say what I have to say, and give it my best. That’s what matters most, not the time you put into the work, but what you and the reader get out of it in the end.

*Originally appeared as an afterword to Deep Into That Darkness Peering


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