Interview by Robin Lindzer
I RECENTLY HAD THE PLEASURE OF TALKING WITH BEV VINCENT.. He is a renowned Stephen King expert, having written books about King that include, “The Road to the Dark Tower” (a Bram Stoker Award nominee), and “The Stephen King Illustrated Companion,” which was nominated for a 2010 Edgar Award and a 2009 Bram Stoker Award. Bev has also written more than 70 short stories that have appeared world-wide in various mediums. He is a contributing editor to Cemetery Dance Magazine, where he provides articles entitled, News from the Dead Zone. He also writes book reviews for Onyx Reviews.
I wanted to talk to him solely about the process of writing, but found that I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Stephen King in my interview. Warning: Possible spoilers ahead.
Robin Lindzer (R.L.): Of Stephen King’s novels and short stories that have not made it to the big screen, which would you like to see created for either television or the movie theater?
Bev Vincent (B.V.): I’ve never seen the adaptation as a necessary part of the creative process. I haven’t seen some of the already existing adaptations, because so many of them are poorly done. I haven’t bothered with, for example, the recent adaptation of “Gramma,” called Mercy. I do have sort of a vested interest in seeing the Dark Tower series come to the big screen, because my most recent book, “The Dark Tower Companion,” was written as a response to the news that Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman were planning to film the series. I thought there would be people who came to “The Dark Tower” without having read the books and who might want to know more about a certain event, character or place.
I am looking forward to seeing 11/22/63 on Hulu this year, and I’ll be curious to see how they adapt the Bill Hodges trilogy. There’s a Cell adaptation starring John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson that I had high hopes for, even though I didn’t particularly like the novel, but the fact that the movie has been in the can for well over a year and can’t find a distributor doesn’t bode well.
R.L.: Can you name your favorite Stephen King short story?
B.V.: I think I have a defective “favorite” gene. I’ve never understood how people can pick a favorite of most things, given that there are so many options to choose from. Or to rank a top ten list in order—I might be able to come up with ten choices, but putting them in an order pretty much paralyzes me. What makes this one a smidgen better than that one?
One story from “The Bazaar of Bad Dreams” (King’s recently released book) that I find interesting because of what it does with readers’ loyalties is, A Death. It’s about a man accused of murder, but the story isn’t so much about whether or not he is guilty. Rather, it’s about the things that make another character change his mind about whether the man is guilty, and how that makes him feel when he learns the truth.
R.L.: How about your favorite novel—other than the Dark Tower series?
B.V.: Again, that faulty gene gets in the way. There are so many to pick from. Generally, when I’m asked this question, I say “Bag of Bones.” It was the first King novel that I got to read in its first draft, well before it was published. What intrigued me the most was the way King changed the story upon revision. In the first draft, the subplot wherein Mike Noonan suspects his late wife of infidelity isn’t present. King added this by sprinkling little details throughout the book. It ends up being fundamental to the story, and another writer might have radically upended the book to accomplish this, but I was in awe of how King did it with such a light touch. Then, when I mention “Bag of Bones,” I always add “Lisey’s Story,” because I see the pair as bookends: One is about the writer who has lost his wife, and the other is about the writer’s wife who has lost her husband.
R.L.: Please describe what is was about Stephen King’s writing that piqued your interest.
B.V.: I picked up “Salem’s Lot” in a used bookstore among a stack of other books one weekend back in 1979. At the time, I was reading mostly fantasy and science fiction, but I remembered someone mentioning the book to me a year or so earlier. I didn’t know anything about it or the writer, but I was impressed: by the story, by the storytelling and by the characterization. I hadn’t read another author who made me care so much about a character like Susan Norton that I was disturbed when something bad happened to her. I sought out his other books—there weren’t many in 1979—and quickly discovered it wasn’t a fluke. The guy knew how to tell a story and he knew how to create characters. I’d probably still read him if he wrote romance novels, because I know the stories would be clever and the characters credible. There are other writers whose work I’ve read over the same span of years, but when I look back at the titles, I’m hard pressed to remember what the stories were about, let alone the names of the characters, whereas I have vivid memories of King’s books and characters, even if I haven’t read a particular book or story in a number of years.
R.L.: I’d like to step away from Stephen King, and turn the talk towards your writing career. You have written several books (not just about Stephen King), along with over 70 short stories. I believe our readers would be interested in your writing process. At what age did you discover books? Please tell us about the types of books you read while growing up. Has that changed any, or do you still read the same types?
B.V.: I was what they call a precocious child in that I started reading at a very early age. I used to drive my parents crazy by reading all the signs on the side of the road when we traveled. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t read. I even used to go to school dances with a paperback stuck in my back pocket in case I got bored. I have a vivid memory—I was probably seven or so at the time—of buying three paperbacks from a discount bin at a department store: “The Wizard of Oz,” “The Jungle Book” and “Tales of Mystery and Imagination.” I have no doubt that I read the first two, but it was the Poe that stuck with me. I read that book to shreds. The stories were so vivid in my memory that when I went back to reread them later, I was amazed at how brief some of them are. I was sure they were 20 or 30 pages, because there was so much packed into them, but The Tell-Tale Heart and The Cask of Amontillado are only about 2300 words each.
I migrated to the Hardy Boys and then matured into Agatha Christie. Read ‘em all, most of them more than once. I discovered Isaac Asimov and Heinlein, and went through a high school, late-teens phase that was mostly science fiction and fantasy. The Xanth books. Stephen R. Donaldson. Then King led me to horror—all those great anthologies in the early 80s. Koontz, Matheson, Farris, Bradbury—that was a discovery for sure. I’ve always been fond of crime novels, though. John D. MacDonald, Dashiell Hammett, Chandler, Ross Macdonald.
I don’t read nearly as much horror as I once did, and it’s rare for me to read science fiction or fantasy these days. I still read Donaldson, though he can be frustrating at times, and the only science fiction that I’ve read in recent years is Dan Simmons’ Hyperion/Endymion series, which I enjoyed. Mostly it’s mystery, thrillers and crime fiction, which is one reason I was delighted to hear that King was trying his hand at the genre with the Mr. Mercedes series. I’d enjoyed his straight crime short stories.
I read a bit of non-fiction (I’m reading a book by Frank Delaney right now about The Flying Enterprise, a ship that was disabled in the North Atlantic in the 1950s), and some non-genre fiction. I keep a list on the message board at my website if anyone’s interested in what I’m reading. I also have a review blog (Onyx Reviews) that will show you where my interests lie.
My fiction writing has followed a similar arc—I used to write mostly horror but now I write more crime fiction and thrillers. Even when I’m working on something nominally in another genre, I find myself gravitating toward the crime angle. For example, I was invited to submit a story to an anthology that wanted a fresh and contemporary take on vampires, so I wrote a serial killer story where the victims were vampires. I’ve had a couple of stories in MWA anthologies, one edited by Michael Connelly and another by Jeffery Deaver and Raymond Benson, and I was gratified and thrilled to have the story in the latter, The Honey Trap, nominated for an ITW award in 2015. Awards are nice—I won the Al Blanchard award for a crime story in 2010, too, with the story published in the “Thin Ice” anthology.
R.L.: What event(s) in your life led you to writing?
B.V.: I find it hard to imagine someone who grew up reading as voraciously as I did not wanting to try their hand at writing at some point. I was given the chance in Grade 8 to write a short story instead of an essay for my English class and the teacher was very supportive. He read the story (and two others) to the class, and wrote on the paper when he returned it that it was good enough to be published. It wasn’t, but that’s the sort of encouragement that an impressionable mind takes to heart, so to speak.
As a teenager, I typed up novels that I never finished. Heavily derivative stuff that was a cross between Mickey Spillane and Charlie’s Angels! After I started reading King, my interests switched to writing horror short stories—this was when I was an undergraduate at university. I read them to my friends in dorm, but I never considered submitting them anywhere. I rediscovered the manuscripts many years later and found that some weren’t bad. With some revision, a few have been published.
But I didn’t write for the better part of a decade after my undergraduate years. Doing a Ph.D. in chemistry didn’t leave much free time, and I lived overseas for a couple of years, where I spent most of my spare time traveling. I did enter Twilight Zone magazine’s short story contest for unpublished writers, but that story was terrible, and I was relieved to discover that one of the judges—Peter Straub—has no recollection of it! The winner was this guy named Dan Simmons—I was well out of my league!
In the late 90s, after attending a local writer’s guild meeting where Joe R. Lansdale was the guest speaker, I was inspired to start writing again. Lansdale didn’t talk a lot about writing. Instead, he sat at the front of the room and told stories. Anecdotes from his life, many of them probably tall tales or embellishments.
My biggest barrier was the fact that I didn’t have a place to write. Each time, I had to dig out my laptop, find a place to set up, assemble my papers, and it was far too easy to convince myself to do something else. Watch TV. So, for my birthday I asked my wife for a place to write, and she got me a roll-top desk where I could spread things out and work, but then pull the top down at the end of a session and leave my mess as it was. Best. Gift. Ever. That was really the beginning of my secondary career as a writer.
R.L.: Can you talk about what you are currently working on?
B.V.: I’m getting ready to do the third draft of “The Dead of Winter,” a 40,000-word novella that is the longest horror story I’ve ever written. It will be paired with a novella written by Brian Keene for a project we’re calling “Dissonant Harmonies.”
Rich Chizmar is doing this project called “Stephen King Revisited” in which he is rereading King’s books in publication order and writing his thoughts about the book from his first reading and now. I’m doing companion essays that set each book in its historical context: what was going on in King’s life when he was writing the book and anything else interesting I can dig up about the book’s creation. This will take us a couple of years, and eventually the essays—which are being posted at the “Stephen King Revisited” website—will all be collected into a book, I expect, but I have to make sure I keep a step or two ahead of Rich, so I always have one of these essays on the go!
I’m also knee deep in a novel. I started one in September, but I realized after a few weeks that I needed to write a different book first, so I set those pages aside and have about 12,000 words done on the new book. Ideally, there will be a series featuring this set of characters. They’re crime novels, and I’ve been thinking about these stories for a number of years. At last I think I’m ready to see them through to completion.
Plus, there’s always a short story or two percolating in the background.
R.L.: Is there anything that you dislike about the writing process?
B.V.: I’m not a big fan of the waiting that’s involved when you submit something. I like instant gratification, and having to wait three or six months to find out if something you’ve written will be accepted for publication sucks. But it’s part of the process, and too many young writers are taking shortcuts by self-publishing before they’re ready. Editors are sometimes regarded as gatekeepers, preventing people from being published, but they’re there for a reason. Can you imagine what it would be like to go to the movie theater and see a thousand possible movies made by anyone who could figure out how to use video editing software? How would you ever find the good stuff from among all the dreck? So I accept that waiting is necessary, but I don’t like it!
I also dislike waiting for something to come out after it’s been accepted for publication. In the small press especially, things can drag on for months or years, publication dates fly by, and some markets just vanish without ever coming out. That’s frustrating.
R.L.: Do you recommend a new author finding an agent for a book that he or she has written? If so, do you have any advice on the best way to find a reputable agent?
B.V.: I didn’t get my agent in the usual way. I first “sold” my book—or at least found a publisher for it—then I went in search of an agent to represent my interests during the contract phase. It’s a lot easier to get representation when there’s already something to represent. But I was cautious about who I went with. I researched agents on Preditors and Editors to find out which ones to stay away from. At the time I did my research, most of the annotations were neutral unless they were negative, but the Ethan Ellenberg Agency was marked “recommended,” which caught my interest, as did the fact that they took email queries, which wasn’t the norm 10+ years ago. My agent subsequently left the agency to strike out on his own, and I went with him. I haven’t paid a lot of attention to the agency business since then, but at the time there were some dodgy characters out there—enough that Preditors and Editors had to exist to warn people away from the bad actors. The biggest red flag is any agent who wants to charge you money up front. They try to make it sound reasonable—to help defray the costs of photocopying or postage—but reputable agents make their money AFTER they sell something of yours, not before. They take a commission from the sale. That motivates them to sell your stuff and to get the best deal. If they can get enough people to pay them trifling amounts up front, then they have less incentive. Also beware of agents that are affiliated with specific small presses. If you see that all of their clients are published through the same small press you’ve never heard of before, beware!
The best course is to contact other writers who are represented by the agent you are interested in querying, after you’ve done your due diligence to winnow down the field. Find out how happy they are. I never mind answering questions about my agents when they come up.
R.L.: How do you feel about social media when it comes to promoting books and short stories?
B.V.: I’ve been involved with the internet since its inception. I used email in the mid-1980s, before the internet was a thing, and I started the corporate website for the company where I work over 20 years ago. I’m a big fan of social media. I’m as likely to post a link to something that’s new from me as I am to repost or retweet an interesting news article. It’s all about balance. Some people are ferocious self-promoters, and that can be wearisome. I don’t have any Facebook pages devoted to my books or stories, and I’ve never become a fan of someone’s book page. I don’t see the point. I’m generally a one-and-done poster when it comes to promoting something new, though that “one” means one FB post, one tweet, one mention in my blog, one post on a relevant message board, one announcement to the newsletters of the organizations to which I belong, etc. Maybe even a press release to local papers if it’s something big, like when I was nominated for the Edgar Award. In other words, I try to hit all the bases. But I also generate interesting content unrelated or only peripherally related to my output, so I have a “following.” People have emailed me to say I make their Twitter feeds more interesting—I liked that a lot. I want people to have a bit of a sense of who I am, or what I like or what I think is important / relevant in modern society. I’m not just a self-promotion engine.
R.L.: Since you are also a Doctor Who fan who wrote the short story, Leap Second, in the book “Doctor Who, Destination: Prague,” I thought we’d have some fun. If you could travel in the T.A.R.D.I.S., would you visit the past or the future? Why?
B.V.: It might be interesting to go back in time to find the answer to a lingering mystery, like who was Jack the Ripper, but the future is the real mystery. How much of one do we have? But it might be depressing to jump ahead and find out that things have become dismal and dreary. So, rather than risk that, I think I’d go elsewhere, assuming there is any other place that has life. It wouldn’t matter whether it was past or future. Just finding out that something existed off this chunk of rock, and getting to see what it’s like, that would be the best, I think. One of my issues with Doctor Who is that it is too Earth-centric sometimes. There’s a whole universe out there to explore.
R.L.: This last question is one that I would have a difficult time answering, because I like so many different authors. If you were able to go out to dinner with four authors, which ones would you like to have sit at your table? What would you like to discuss?
B.V.: One of the cool things about this business is that I’ve had the chance to go out to dinner with many authors over the years, primarily at writing conferences. Peter Straub and I had dinner when he was on a book signing tour a number of years ago and I’ve gotten to hang out with him at conferences. I made friends with Michael Koryta at a conference a couple of years ago and went to dinner with him when he was in town for a book signing recently. Michael Slade and I have gone out drinking in New Orleans! I’ve gotten to spend time with King and Doug Clegg and Brian Keene and a whole raft of other writers.
I met Ray Bradbury many years ago, and have a photo of him tugging on my ear on my Facebook page, but I only got to exchange a few words with him at the signing and I think he’d be a fascinating person with whom to break bread. I’m not sure I could keep up with Umberto Eco, but I’ve always been fascinated by his work. I’d add Haruki Murakami to the list—I’m intrigued by the way he sets stories in a culture that is very alien to ours and makes them totally relatable. To round out my four, let’s add PD James. I admire the fact that she started writing later in life. I’d hoped to meet her at the Edgars ceremony—we were both nominated in the same category—but alas she wasn’t able to attend. That would be a good mix of writers, eras, cultures, wouldn’t it?
And as for the discussion, I’d probably just sit back and let them go at it. See where the conversation led. Each would be fascinating in his or her own right. I don’t know that I’d contribute much because I’d want to hear what they’d have to say.
That could be a fun pastime, couldn’t it? Figuring out different sets of four writers to match up. The living and the dead, the American and the foreign. Young and old. Have dinner with Poe, John D. MacDonald, Agatha Christie and Alex Haley. Wow. I could do this all day! Bev, I’d like to thank you for taking the time to answer my many questions. You have been an inspiration of mine for years, and I have enjoyed talking with you. If readers are interested in keeping up with Bev Vincent’s success, they can navigate to http://www.bevvincent.com for the latest information.
