ith praise from the likes of Tim Lebbon, Edward Lee and Ray Garton, author Mike Oliveri is definitely a writer folks are paying attention to. Brian Keene says "If you wish you had discovered Stephen King with Carrie, then don’t wait to buy this one (Deadliest of the Species)." Over-the-top praise? Nope, his first novel, Deadliest of the Species, won a Bram Stoker award and that's most definitely only the beginning for this guy.

Mike graciously agreed to our grilling, and we agreed to leave out the spit and fire pit -- read on and meet one helluva writer.

Really Scary: First up, a gigantic congratulations on winning the Bram Stoker for Deadliest of the Species...absolutely awesome. Considering the fantastic buzz on your book, did you think you had a good shot or were you completely taken off guard?

Mike Oliveri: I think timing played a small part in my win. For some reason 2001 was a sparse year for first novels, which drastically reduced competition. This year, however, a lot of major mass markets are publishing more first novels, as are several small presses. So in a way, by getting the book out in early 2001 in a limited hardcover rather than waiting for a mass market publisher to make a decision, I did myself a big favor.

As for the win itself, I felt -- based purely on buzz and reviews -- it came down to myself and Joe Nassise for Riverwatch once the nominations were announced, so I figured at best I had a 50/50 shot at the win. But Joe landed an International Horror Guild Award nomination and a Stoker nomination, so I figured he had it in the bag. I was pleasantly surprised when I heard I won.

RS: If you’d been there for the acceptance speech, would it have been more nerve-wracking “watch out for sweat if you’re at the front tables” or more along the lines of “I totally rule and will discuss that now…”

MO: Definitely nerve-wracking, but not because of the outcome but because I hate giving speeches. I've sat on panels and done readings and now I've even been on the radio for a live interview, and I always do okay, but I just get really nervous leading up to that moment. It's stagefright, I suppose.

RS: Currently you’re working on a novella for Brimstone Turnpike? Can you tell us a little about that?

MO: Brimstone Turnpike is a themed anthology edited by Kealan-Patrick Burke and will be published by Cemetery Dance Publications I believe in the middle of 2003. It features five novellas by myself, Tim Waggoner, Robin Spriggs, Scott Nicholson, and Harry Shannon. The characters in each novella will find themselves on the so-called "Brimstone Turnpike", an abandoned stretch of highway where they will stop at a run-down rest stop and meet a rather unusual fella named Johnny Divine. Divine will give the characters some object or artifact that will drive the plot of the story.

My novella "Warning Signs" features a married couple who is taking a vacation to fix their broken relationship. Divine gives the wife a small stone that warns her of impending danger. The only problem is she has to figure out whether the danger is herself, her husband, or some other element.

RS: Another book in the works?

MO: Two, actually.

My next, The Awakened, is complete and sitting on publishers’ desks waiting for a decision. It has a slight science fiction feel to it, but at its heart it is definitely horror, maybe in the same way flicks like Leviathan and Deep Star Six were somewhat sci-fi but mainly horror. The Awakened is definitely more ambitious than Deadliest of the Species and was a bitch to write, but in the end I'm very happy with it. It ties together Atlantis, ancient Egypt (particularly the Sphinx) and the origins of mankind with a pinch of Lovecraft influence for flavor.

The novel I'm working on now, Powerless, is back to what I like to think of as nuts and bolts horror. We've got a young woman with two kids, and at the same time she’s dealing with an abusive ex-husband, the power goes out during the hottest week of the year. And as if that weren’t enough, these big monsters come along and start wreaking havoc. Lots o’ fun.

RS: Do you find yourself working on multiple stories/projects at one time or are you pretty strictly a beginning to end writer?

MO: As far as novels are concerned, I've always stuck to one at a time. But it's not uncommon for me to bounce around other projects during that novel’s progress, especially articles and short stories. I'm also a comic book fan and I'm putting together some ideas for a horror comic, so it will be interesting to see how I manage to fit that into my already-jammed schedule...

RS: How long from idea to end was the process behind creating Deadliest of the Species?

MO: Longer than most people would think, unfortunately. I used to be a manager for a major electronics retailer, and through the four years I held that position I only managed to write the first eleven chapters. Retail management just sucks the life out of you, and it's not a mistake I ever plan on repeating. Once I got out of there in March of '98, I took a couple months off and managed to finish the novel. I edited the draft while returning to summer school at a local community college and had it ready to go by the end of the year. It went through one more rewrite before it got its final title and was published by Vox13 in May of 2001.

RS: Your bibliography lists 1999 as your earliest published work. That’s a fantastic trip from first published in 1999 to Bram Stoker in 2001. Was your first published fiction 1999? It probably wasn't quite the overnight success is appears was it? How long had you actually been working on your fiction before you saw publication?

MO: If you don't count a real piece of crap short science fiction piece published in my college's literary magazine back in '94, then yeah, '99 was the year I first saw publication. I had written my short story "The Burden" the same summer I was wrapping Deadliest, and between Deadliest and "The Burden" I realized I was better at writing horror than science fiction and fantasy. Things just snowballed from there. I did a little bit of submitting during the end of high school and the beginning of college, around ’93-’94, again mostly sci-fi (I was obsessed with cyberpunk but couldn’t write it worth a shit, apparently), but from ’94 through I want to say October of ’98, I never submitted a thing. Hell, I never even had time to worry about it because Deadliest was all I worked on during that period.

RS: Barring lack of talent, heheh, what would you say is the biggest hurdle writers today must get over?

MO: Getting their name out there. When a major anthology opens up, it is quickly flooded with submissions. A good example of this is Shocklines, which reportedly received over 1400 subs. Whether the market is open to new writers or not, the only way to really stand out from all that slush is to be a name people are familiar with. And you can bet the big names are submitting, too. The result is something of a paradox -- you have to be a name (not necessarily big, but recognizable) to get published but have to be published to become a name.

As a result, you have to find alternate ways of getting your name known. In my case, I attended conventions, wrote reviews, made a lot of noise on message boards and in chat rooms, and worked for a nice, quiet, conservative newsletter called Jobs in Hell.

RS: There’s been a great deal of discussion (and hollering) recently within the writing community about the state of the horror-publishing world. Neither all doom/gloom nor all bright sunshine seem accurate -- where do you see it?

MO: Somewhere in between, but headed in the right direction. I'm tired of people pissing and moaning about how bad things are, but I'm realistic enough to know that things aren't necessarily as good as they could (or should) be. Pay rates are a bit low for most markets, and many publishers -- great and small -- are dragging their feet in getting payment to authors. A lot of my friends are getting published and signing new contracts, but almost nobody is holding their breath waiting for a check.

RS: Recently Louis Maistros wrote (I think in Jobs in Hell) that the state of the market is really somewhat subjective depending on whether or not your seeing success yourself as a writer? Do you agree with that?

MO: Yes, that was in JiH, and yes, I agree completely. A lot of the people pissing and moaning are veterans struggling to make sales and get paid with the rest of us. Then you have new guys enjoying various levels of success saying that horror is back and bigger than ever. I just think these two extremes reinforce what I said above ? we’re somewhere in the middle. It’s not easy to get published, not by any means, but there’s more room for horror writers now than even there appeared to be in ’99 when people like myself were just starting to get our feet wet.

RS: If you looked at it from a fan’s point of view, do you think there’s a lot of good stuff out there? If so, would that indicate a positive outlook?

MO: From the perspective of my limited experience within the genre, it seems to me the small presses continued to publish the work they love and respect after the market collapsed, and fans still respond to that. Yet not all horror fans are loyal small press fanatics. They prefer to browse the bookshelves. The so-called “horror boom”, which I think I’d prefer to call the “horror glut” which destroyed the horror mass market, also drove the bookstore fans away. Hell, a similar glut of crap is what drove me out of the fantasy and sci-fi aisles at bookstores.

I think publishers realize they fucked up. And I think they’re all taking it very slow in getting back on their feet. They saw Leisure grow and expand their horror line, so maybe they finally recognize it’s a viable market again. But they’re going to be careful, and I can’t say that’s a bad thing. Publishing good stuff selectively is better than publishing any piece of shit with a monster and a body count.

RS: On the other side of that, if you look at it from the casual readers’ point of view, are they being shown enough, or in some cases any, horror when they drop in the bookstores?

MO: Not in my neighborhood they’re not. All of the Waldenbooks stores and one of the two Barnes & Noble stores in this area killed their horror section two or three years ago. In that last B&N, it survived until sometime early last year. The debate on the good vs. bad of this is another big one, but I have to lean toward the bad. I can’t just go in and browse for horror because there are eight to ten complete aisles to walk through at a typical B&N. Leisure’s newest books aren’t terribly hard to find at the Joliet, Illinois, B&N because there are at least seven or eight copies sitting there. But in the case of their older releases and just about any other publishers’ books, say Scott Nicholson’s The Red Church or even Bentley Little’s The Collection, there are only a few copies and, unless they’re recent, they don’t even get a face-out shelving. (At least not until I come along and rectify that, anyway.)

And when you have entire shelves filled with classic literature or the new mainstream, artsy, classical-wannabe fiction that the coffee house and book club crowds want to shove down your throat, then even the widely-spaced Leisure stockpiles get lost in the crowd. Some people say this is a good thing because maybe the coffee crowd might stumble across horror books they might otherwise skip. That may very well be, but that doesn’t mean they’ll buy it. After all, the back cover copy doesn’t disguise the fact that the book’s subject matter is horror even if the cover does. Otherwise the horror fans might not even buy it!

Let’s pick an example off my own shelf: Richard Laymon’s One Rainy Night. Between the title and the rather simple cover featuring a person holding an umbrella, it’s easy to see why someone might not guess it’s horror. Even the Dean Koontz blurb is non-committal ? “No one writes like Laymon, and you’re going to have a good time with anything he writes.” “…a good time…” Doesn’t exactly invoke horror to me. Then the reader turns the book over and reads the back cover copy: the black rain is “unnatural” and “the inhabitants fall prey to its horrifying effect”. Then come the phrases “become filled with hate and rage… and the need to kill.” And that’s just the first paragraph! And so, unless the shopper’s a horror fan looking for that kind of stuff, the book goes right back on the shelf.

RS: What was the first book you read that scared the crap out of you?

MO: Deathwatch by Robb White, the same guy wrote the original House on Haunted Hill. It was actually part of a book fair when I was in fifth grade, and it sounded cool so I ordered it. It was about a guy who goes on a desert hike, and this other dude steals all his stuff and starts to hunt him. I’m sure it was pretty tame considering it was available to elementary and junior high school students, but I remember being scared by it.

RS: You write the technology column for Jobs in Hell, what got you started with that?

MO: That’s easy. Brian Keene’s a friend of mine and he asked for help with the newsletter. He even offered a paycheck. The technology seemed a logical choice considering that’s my day job.

RS: Technology is your work-a-day field? How do you dedicate time to a fulltime job with the writing, not to mention the needs of important teeny people? Does it call more for planning or just a plain stubborn streak?

MO: Part planning, part a wife and friends who will yell at me for not getting any writing done. What little remains is simply being smart enough to take advantage of the rare times the wife takes the little one with her to the in-laws, the store, or wherever.

What makes things a little easier is I work for a high school three blocks from my home. As such, my work day is typically over around 3:30pm Monday through Friday. This summer I’m on half days for the month of July, I’ve got no commute to speak of, and I get holidays off. It’s great, but unfortunately that may be about to change because the school’s insurance plan sucks.

RS: What’s the best horror novel to movie adaptation you’ve ever seen?

MO: I’m going to go with John Carpenter’s The Thing, which is an adaptation of John W. Campbell, Jr.’s novella “Who Goes There?” I borrowed the book from the library and was amazed at how awful it was. The whole story is told in dialog ? long, rolling exposition that runs for pages -- and as such would probably never see print if submitted today.

RS: Other than the money would be cool ;) , would you want to see ‘Deadliest’ adapted? Dream casting and directing?

MO: Oh hell yeah I would! I try not to think about what would look good on the screen when I write, and I try not to picture actors when I write characters because I don’t want it to influence the writing, but I love movies and I can’t help not thinking about it from time to time, particularly afterward.

Directing I’d like to see David Fincher. I have little doubt he’d make it look good, although it’s not his typical thing. And assuming we could convince the studio not to do Sebastian as CGI, I’d like to see Stan Winston or Tom Savini do up some wicked prosthetics. We’d need a big guy under the makeup, and preferably muscular, like Dolph Lundgren only not Dolph Lundgren.

As for actors, I’ll start with the guys. Johnny Depp is probably suitable for the flick as Tim Wilder, but I can also see Joaquin Phoenix in the role. Maybe Harvey Keitel as Bart. James Gandolfini would rock as Archer. Father Mike’s a bit tougher; I’m thinking Everett McGill could dust off his cassock from Silver Bullet. And finally, the gawky waiter from the beginning who plays a larger role later would be played by David Arquette. Read the book, you’ll see why.

Now for the ladies. Ashley Judd could do Alexandra standing on her head, but the studio would probably throw Angelina Jolie at me. Not that I’d complain. The twins scream to be played by Playboy’s Barbie Twins, but I’d like to see more innocence. Maybe cloning Gwyneth Paltrow would work. I can’t think of any actresses that look remotely like Gretchen, except maybe Natasha Lyonne from American Pie and a Night Visions episode, but she’s a little young. With a little recasting, though, I can see Joey Lauren Adams getting mean & nasty. As for Marie… Camryn Manheim, because I hate her. Again, read the book and you’ll see why.

RS: UPN's reviving Twilight Zone, USA’s doing a new Night Gallery, some film company or another is remaking the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and on and on. Do you see this more as a creatively bankrupt Hollywood or ‘yay, more genre stuff is coming’?

MO: I think it’s a sign that Hollywood is acknowledging that horror is doing well for them, but rather than taking chances they’re going to rehash old popular properties in hopes people will go to see them. In a way, they’re trying to capitalize on horror and nostalgia at the same time. It’s easy for them and it’s probably cheaper to acquire the rights. That is if they don’t already own them in the first place. And it sucks for us because it means less work for the people creating original material.

RS: What’s your perfect writing environment?

MO: These days? Anywhere where the kid isn’t. Heheh. Otherwise I just need a computer and a stereo.

A big thanks to Mike for spending time with us!