SEEING MORE RED
An Interview with David J. Schow

It's an incongruity that a character in the weird world of a David Schow story might understand: the horror field is imploding, with publishers becoming more miserly as the flow of new books tightens -- and Schow is busier than ever. Eye, his new collection of short fiction -- an impressive fifth for the decade -- is out now from Subterranean Press. Likewise Hell on Earth, the second volume of rare fiction and non-fiction he has edited for The Lost Bloch series honoring the literary achievements of friend and mentor Robert Bloch. He is still earning plaudits for the recently revised edition of his definitive critical study, The Outer Limits Companion, and is anticipating the re-release of most of his backlist through new publisher Babbage Press. And these are just the projects he's willing to go public on for the moment. We caught up with Schow in the midst of his usual flurry of work in print, electronic and visual media.

SD: Let's discuss your new collection. What's going to be in it?

DJS: If a horror writer is just a supplier of reliable bogeys, then the answer would be "more of what went before." But if you look at any writer of unsettling fiction as a war correspondent of the human condition, then each new collection is like a bundle of dispatches from the front -- a packet of news, perhaps with scuffs or bloodstains on it. It's the latest batch of previously uncollected stories, from the usual various sources.
Content-wise, it's an oddball. I purposefully left three slots empty so I would be compelled to fill them in order to stick to the schedule I'd imposed on myself, and I've never done that before. I wound up with a longish story that could be classified as science fiction, a vein I don't mine very often.  Two stories, come to think of it. No introduction. After inflicting that duty on T.E.D. Klein, Richard Christian Matheson, John Farris, and Bob Bloch, I'm done with the "celebrity intro" phase. I'll probably write the usual verbose Afterword, though, which is just another way of filing the dispatches.

SD: Aside from the contents what distinguishes it from your other short fiction collections?

DJS: That forces me to determine what the other collections are "about." The central organizing presence for Crypt Orchids was Robert Bloch, as the Afterword to that book suggests, and a very observant review by Gahan Wilson states explicitly. It was a sometimes flagrant, sometimes subtle, but very organic and fundamental influence.
Seeing Red and Lost Angels are really one big collection, hinged on "Red Light." They're also a summation of my output during the Twilight Zone Magazine era, a period which Joe Lansdale and I agree merits its own retrospective anthology. Black Leather Required sort of charts a before-during-and-after timeline from the heyday of splatterpunk to post-splatterpunk, if you will.
The new collection seems to be forming itself around the idea of the Millennium, of standing with one foot in each century and looking in both directions. Hence it contains -- not coincidentally -- the first fiction I ever sold to internet markets. This time, the theme is that there is no theme -- not coincidentally, the organizing principle of better anthologies.

SD: All of your collections to date have featured stories noticeably devoted to horror film and television. Can we expect some more in this collection?

DJS: Not noticeably. It's a great way to editorialize, when I have something I need to set down for film babies and the people David J. Skal calls "Monster Boomers." Having written several stories dealing with that subject matter over a ten-year period, I think it's pretty much covered ... until I change my mind again or have another insight I think is worth fictionalizing.

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