So things got away from me for the past month, but I’m pleased to have a guest post from a very talented author and a really great gal, Sumiko Saulson. I love her thoughts on horror, and she has some great insights for us today!
Characters in Campy Horror
My campy novel about ghouls, zombies, and the lifecycle of the prehistoric gut flora that creates them both received what to me was an unexpectedly “warm” reception. “Warmth,” the twisted tale of a six hundred some year ghoulish zombie hunter named “Sera” was a project I started to blow off some steam between two serious stories, “Solitude” and “The Moon Cried Blood.” In fact, parts of “Warmth” were written while I was in the process of writing “The Moon Cried Blood.” “Warmth” was unlike my other novels, which are both serious in tone and character driven. “Warmth” was almost the opposite: action-packed and plot-driven with relatively static central characters.
Like many debut novelists, I was very, very serious when I approached my first book-length work, the sci-fi/horror novel “Solitude.” In case you are wondering what a sci-fi/horror novel looks like, “Frankenstein” is a good example of a work that bridges the two genres. At first, “The Moon Cried Blood” was going to be my second novel – I started it right after the first – but I was overcome by a sort of writer’s block, something that rapidly abated when I was inspired to write a comic parody of the current obsessions with vampires and zombies, a parody where so-called vampires were actually one part of the lifecycle of creatures known as ghouls, and zombies another. It was the grossest, goriest thing I’d ever written, and I was afraid that if people read the story, with its unabashed love of gruesome acts of cannibalism and brutal acts of sadism on the part of a major character, an ancient phlebotomist named Fadrique, they would be turned off and not want to read my other, less ghoulish (pun intended) stories.
As it turns out, I was wrong…
To learn more about Sumiko, check out her awesome blog, Things that go Bump in my Head!
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