The Price of Empathy: Thirteen Questions for Gary Braunbeck

Ever since his first professional short story sale of "Amymone's Footsteps" to Twilight Zone's NIGHT CRY Magazine in 1986, Gary Braunbeck has worked hard and emerged as one of the best writers in the field of fantasy and horror. His 200 plus published short stories have appeared in such venues as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Cemetery Dance, APEX Science Fiction and Horror , and Thomas and Elizabeth Monteleone's Borderlands series. He has earned three Bram Stoker awards, two for the short stories "Duty" in 2003 and "We Now Pause for Station Identification" in 2005, as well as for his 2006 collection, Destinations Unknown.

His novels, In Silent Graves (originally published as The Indifference of Heaven ), Keepers, Prodigal Blues, and, most recently, Mr Hands, have all garnered him praise from fans and colleagues alike for their emotional power and heartbreaking characters.

He has also produced some outstanding novellas, such as the 2006 International Horror Guild award winner "Kiss of the Mudman" (which is included with Mr Hands), and garnered a Stoker nomination for his non fiction collection, Fear in a Handful of Dust, examining horror fiction in film and print as well as his own struggles and hardships in life and writing.

Braunbeck writes moving, character-driven stories with strong dialogue and often difficult subject matter, stories of regular folks contending with the hardship and frailties of everyday life as well as the dark edge of the human condition. Elements of the fantastic and macabre abound in these tales, serving the needs of the story instead of mere genre fireworks to get your attention. In this respect, Braunbeck has much in common with Harlan Ellison and Joe Lansdale, two of his many diverse influences. While a firm believer in reading and writing across all genres, his storytelling voice, which ranges from despondent to redemptive to humorous tones, makes the reader aware very quickly that no matter the structure or approach or subject, they are reading a Braunbeck story. No small feat.

Gary lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife and fellow writer Lucy Snyder. He is currently an instructor with the Seton Hill Popular Fiction MA programme.

1. Raymond Carver once said that every good writer recreates the world in their stories, and these worlds are filled with the author's beliefs and passions. For those who have not read your work, how would you describe the world of your stories? What beliefs and passions dominate them?

Interesting that you should bring up Carver. Until about five years ago, I'd never read any of his work, and then a reader at a convention remarked to me, "You know what you are? You're Raymond Carver with blood, guts, ghosts, and your heart on your sleeve." Well, that sent me right to the library where I checked out Carver's posthumous collection, Where I'm Calling From. I knew who Carver was, being a huge admirer of Robert Altman's film Short Cuts (wherein Altman combined 8 of Carver's story in one incredible narrative), but I'd never read his work. Shame on me. I've now read everything Carver wrote a few times over. The reader at the con who said this to me was, I think, overstating the point, but I did find a lot of similarities - at least, in the central concerns that permeate the overall body - between Carver's work and my own. Note, please, that I am not comparing myself to Carver, I'm nowhere near in that league; I'm only saying that I found thematic similarities when comparing my work to his.

I agree wholeheartedly with what Carver said, because whether they want to cop to it or not, every fiction writer creates stories based on and filtered through their own observations and sensibilities. The trick is to make sure that while you're filtering these beliefs, passions, and sensibilities into your fiction, you don't find yourself climbing up on a soapbox. While the subject matter of my stories goes all over the road, everything I write is concerned with exploring the connections between violence, suffering, and grief, and how we try to reconcile those things with the existence of a supposedly loving God that watches over a universe where even our most mundane daily actions carry some greater meaning. A lot of this is filtered through a hardcore blue-collar sensibility because that's what informed my actions and beliefs while I was growing up, and at the center of that sensibility is a palpable, perpetual, and sometimes spirit-breaking internalized desperation that you're always just one piece of bad luck away from losing your job, your home, and your family. There's a line from one of the Cedar Hill stories--I can't remember which one right off the top of my head--where a character says, very simply, "We must love one another or die." Those seven words probably best sum up the belief that lies at the core of all my work.

External bogies and beasties don't have much of a place in my fictional universe; I find it much more fascinating to explore what happens when a character has held in their desperation, or loneliness, or anger, or grief, or guilt, or regret for so long that it achieves sentience and externalizes itself.

2. Your latest novel, Mr. Hands (Leisure 2007), continues exploring a theme that has permeated a lot of your work: the price and benefit of empathy for the human condition, and the monsters a lack of empathy can create. What was the genesis of this novel and why does this theme compel you?

Get comfortable, this one might take a bit.

There were actually two things that lead to my writing Mr. Hands . The first, obviously, was the series of paintings done by the great Alan M. Clark, which is why the novel is dedicated in part to him. Alan had this stunning series of paintings depicting one of the damnedest monsters I'd ever seen. Basically, he showed these paintings to me and asked me to tell him the story behind them. So I spent a good long while just looking at the paintings, both as a whole and in detail - if you know Alan's work, then you know that every piece he does contains layers upon layers of imagery, some of it so small or subtle as to be nearly microscopic. He's just brilliant, Alan is.

Anyway, right off the bat, I had a problem: whatever story I told about the paintings had to have this monster physically present. Like I said before, external monsters hold little interest for me as a writer - as a reader and creature-feature fan, I love 'em, always have, always will - and I avoid using them in their traditional form because monsters, vampires, zombies, or whatever else you want to have come shambling out of the darkness, create a definitive line of conflict: us against it or them. It makes the moral area far too black and white because once the external creature shows up, the us-or-it boundaries are set, and the overriding central concern is boiled down to one thing: how can the characters get away from or destroy the monster? Where's the challenge in that?

Then I remembered something Clive Barker once said in an interview when The Books of Blood first hit the states. He was asked about the unbelievably graphic nature of the gore in his work, and he replied: "I want the reader to see past the gore to what the gore means." So part of me replaced the word "gore" with "monster" - see past the monster to what the monsters means. That got the gears moving, albeit slowly. I was reading a book about the use of the supernatural in Jewish fairy tales and legends, which of course included a section on Rabbi Lowe and the creation of the Golem to protect the Prague ghettos. The Golem was born out of fear, guilt, and vengeful fury - and externalization of the desperation Lowe saw in the ghettos. And by doing a little research into the Golem, I discovered the original meaning of the word "monster" was "warning."

The gears started moving a bit faster, then. I knew that Mr. Hands was going to be the sentient externalization of someone's grief and fury, but the question remained, whose?

Around this time, a young girl who my sister used to baby-sit, was killed in an awful traffic accident. She was only 14. And when I attended the funeral, I heard more than one person say, "I don't understand how anyone can survive the death of a child." Having lost a child myself, I knew damned well that all of you doesn't survive; part of you is buried with it, and it's up to you to learn to live with that empty space that's going to be in your heart for the rest of your life and honour your child's memory by trying to live as good a life as you can. On the drive back home, my mind wandered as it often does during a long car trip, and I was remembering this girl's face and the way she used to call me "Goofy Gary" when she was a child, and I forced myself to not think about her because it just hurt too much, so I thought about the story instead but the little girl kept creeping back into my thoughts...and I suddenly had it. The story would be about a mother who loses her child, and becomes so submerged in her anger and grief and regret that she implodes, but not before giving life to her own Golem, born of that same anger, fear, and grief.

It was originally published as a 16, 000-word novella serialized in Cemetery Dance , and as happy with that version as I was, there was nearly 10,000 words of material that I'd cut. I restored it for the collection that Alan Clark and I wrote, Escaping Purgatory. About a year ago, I realized that I still hadn't told the entire story, and so set about at long last to tell it all. I wrote over 50,000 words of new material for the novel, and what was published in August of 2007 was the final version. Sometimes it takes a few years to finally get it right.

3. Mr. Hands employs a very different narrative structure than either In Silent Graves (told in first- and third-person) or Keepers (first- and second-person). You use a hybrid of first-person narration told as if from a third person point-of-view. It made for a very personal use of conventionally distant POV. Why this kind of narrator?

Because most human beings find it difficult--if not impossible--to be completely truthful with one another when speaking in first person; it's easier for many to employ second-person because it still maintains a safe distance from whomever they are speaking to - "You try your best but your best is never good enough," is easier for them to express than if they had to admit flat-out, I feel insufficient, foolish, and inept most of the time. Yet this same person, when telling a story about someone else, finds even more safety in third person, because now they are so far removed from the genuine emotional core of the person and the tale that they can be completely open. When we speak to others or are just thinking to ourselves in the lonelier hours of the night, we employ all three voices - first, second, and third - so why not try to tell stories in the same way? In the case of all three novels you mention, each in its own way is built on the structure of stories-within-stories-within-stories; each person uses a different voice in life, each story requires a different and distinctive voice, so to me it seems a natural progression to employ hybrid voices.

4. Mr. Hands is your fastest paced novel, yet it still carries the emotional charge that your work is best known for, considering it deals with the cruelty of neglect and domestic violence. How did you manage that balance?

Thanks for the kind words about the pace - I think it's actually a toss-up between Mr. Hands and Prodigal Blues for which one is faster-paced, but at least now I know neither one is boring.

As to how the novel maintained the balance between content and pacing...I wish I could tell you that I have, over the twenty-seven years I've been writing, developed a fail-safe formula, but I wouldn't be able to keep a straight face. The closest thing I can offer as an answer is that when it comes to portraying violence, cruelty, all that happy stuff--especially in a realistic, domestic setting--I try to focus on one or two telling details rather than graphic descriptions. I find that in a lot of horror fiction graphic descriptions of torture or mutilation that go one for pages do nothing to propel the story forward--in fact, for me, they bring everything to a screeching halt.

There's a scene early on in Stephen King's The Dead Zone that I use to illustrate this point when I teach workshops. It's the scene where a young Greg Stillson kicks a dog to death. The scene is very short, but many people who've read the novel come away believing that they've just read one of the most vicious, violent, bloody scenes of horror ever written. In truth, there is very little graphic description of violence in the scene, it only appears to be more violent than it really is because King knows what telling details to focus on and--just as important-- when to focus on them. Do this long enough, and you begin to get a sense of where and when and how and what, Often times I find that if, rather than focusing on the physical aspects of violence, I instead focus on sensory aspects of the brutality, it comes across much more effectively than if I'd spent fifteen pages describing every scream, whimper, cry, and twitch. Describe violence through the senses of the person suffering it, equating each act of brutality with something internal, and the reader will feel it without your having to tell them what and how they should be feeling.

There's a scene in Mr. Hands that, for me, anyway, is one of the most disturbing I've ever written - and I say this as writer who's rattled himself maybe, maybe three times in as many decades. Ronnie finds a small boy who's been dumped in an alley after his father has beaten him nearly to death. When Ronnie holds the little boy, he experiences what happened to the child, only every last bit of it is filtered solely through the child's viewpoint, and all of it focuses on the emotions the child was feeling. There's almost no description of any physical brutality, yet the scene reads as if you're experiencing this child being tortured to death. The telling detail, knowing what and when and how, is the key, I think. That, and knowing when these elements have overstayed their welcome. I'm probably in a minority here, but when it comes to physical violence, torture, brutality, anything along those lines, I find that well-timed restraint is the most effective tool at my disposal.

5. Your advice for young writers in the Seton Hill Popular Fiction MA program is to forget genre and just focus on the story, an argument you developed in the essay "Storytelling Unbound" in Fear in a Handful of Dust. This advice seems to be in direct contrast to the kind most young authors who like genre fiction receive. Why did you develop this stance?

Because if you sit down and say to yourself, "I'm going to write a horror story," (or fantasy, or science fiction, or [insert genre label here]) you will almost without fail begin to unconsciously graft "expected" horror elements onto a storyline where they probably aren't needed or even welcomed. "Oh, it's horror? Hmmm...better make sure there's some blood, or somebody who gets trapped in a dark place with a psycho killer, or maybe I can work some zombies in so long as it's scaaaaaaryyyyyy ..."

Okay, I know that may be a bit of an overstatement, but trust me--it's not all that far off the mark. There's a whole generation of horror writers emerging now who are under the impression that horror literature didn't exist until Stephen King came along. (Not blaming King for anything, so send no angry letters.) He almost single-handedly redefined horror literature, and too many new writers try to imitate him with dreadful--sometimes laughable--results. If you circumscribe the definition of horror only by the elements popularly associated with the term, you're going to find yourself working in a pitifully limited range, if not trying to create something new in a vacuum.

An aside: It continually amazes me how many writers and readers will defend the tunnel-visioned stance that horror literature must, above and beyond all else, be scary. I actually came across a discussion thread on a message board where dozens of people were bemoaning the fact that some writers expected them to--and this a direct quote--"...put up with pages and pages of some character's inner-thoughts or listen to people talk about their relationships and feelings and dreams and shit like that. Horror is SCARY, period."

That is so moronic it almost leaves me speechless. I want to grab these people by the throat and say, "Explain to me how the fuck you're supposed to tell a SCARY story if you first don't establish characters that the reader is going to care about so they have someone to be scared for?"

You have to, first a foremost, regardless of genre, have a compelling story at the center; if it then turns out the story takes you in fantastical, horrific, mysterious, or science fiction-ish direction, great, wonderful. But when you first sit your ass down to write, you sit down to write a story --not a particular kind of story, just a good story. That's why I tell my students to "forget genre" in the early stages. If you begin with the sole intention of writing a "horror" story, you've hobbled the tale before you've gotten Word One down on the page.

6. The late J. N Williamson was a great mentor to you and a personal friend. What was the best advice he gave you and what Williamson novel or story would you recommend for the uninitiated?

Jerry was like a second father to me, and not a day goes by that I don't miss him terribly. In many ways, he was an underrated writer, and one of my fears is that the massive body of work he left behind is going to be forgotten.

The best piece of advice he ever gave me was, like a lot of his advice on writing, so simple it was brilliant: "Once the story is finished, cut 500 words. Then go back and see if you can't 250 more." Jerry never read a story submission over 3500 words that couldn't stand to lose at least 500 of those words. I remember that advice always--nearly any story can lose 750 words without collapsing in on itself.

If you've never read any of Jerry's work, then remember these titles: Ghost, The Black School, Don't Take Away the Light, Babel's Children, The Evil One, and his Leisure short-story collection Frights of Fancy. These are my personal favourites, and I know that Jerry was particularly proud of Light and Frights. Those six books illustrate the depth and breadth of his redoubtable skill as a story-teller.

7. You also took up the task of finishing the final anthology in Williamson's acclaimed Masque series ( Masque V). What was the experience like co-editing this work and what can readers expect from the book? Any plans of editing your own anthology?

I didn't "co-edit" it in the traditional sense--two editors working as a team from start to finish. I took over editing the book when Jerry's health took its final downward turn. He called me at home one day and said, "Buddy, I'm just too sick to finish this. Will you do it for me?" As far as I'm concerned, I owed my career to Jerry--plus I loved him very much--so no way was I going to say no. I was honoured to finish it for him. So a friend of mine and I drove to the nursing home in Indiana where Jerry was living and he passed all the stories to me. Over the course of the next year or so, I contacted those writers who'd had stories accepted to see if they'd still let me hang on to them (most said yes), and by the time I had that settled, I realized that the book was only a little over half full, so I then went to Jerry and Barry Hoffman with a list of writers I wanted to invite to complete the ToC.

What readers can expect is a final Masques that not only stays true to the vision and spirit of the first four volumes, but branches out in new directions, as well; there's not only lots of horror, but some fantasy, a few stories with a touch of science fiction, some mystery, and--in the case of the stories contributed by Poppy Z. Brite and a few others--experimental literary fiction.

Jerry didn't live to see the book's publication, but he did live long enough for me to show him the final ToC, and he thought it was going to be "...the best of the bunch." He was deeply moved by the writers who'd come aboard, and--one of the few times I'd ever seen tears in his eyes--by the fact that Clive Barker gave us two paintings to use for the cover and an additional piece of interior art (for the lettered edition). Clive did this because he wanted to contribute somehow in honour of Jerry. Clive Barker is true gentleman.

Another, quite wonderful tribute to Jerry and the Masques series came a couple of months back, when Masques V was nominated for International Horror Guild Award for Anthology. It's the first time a Masques anthology has ever been nominated for that prestigious award, I believe, and were Jerry still here, he'd have simply beamed at the nomination.

I just finished co-editing an anthology with Hank Schwaeble entitled Five Strokes to Midnight that will be out before the end of the year. I felt a little odd coming on as co-editor because I also have work in the book, but the final product is just so damned good I want to spread the word whenever I can. I won't go on about it here, but if you'd be so kind as to include a link to the website for the book somewhere before or after the interview, I'd appreciate it. (www.hauntedpelicanpress.com)

As to whether or not I'd want to edit an anthology on my own...jury's still out.

8. In Fear in a Handful of Dust, you cite many non-print influences on your work, specifically John Frankenhimer's film Seconds , Rod Serling's TV series The Twilight Zone, and The Who's rock opera Quadrophenia. How did these visual and musical works influence your development as a writer? How do they differ from literary influences?

Briefly, in order: imagery, dialogue, and hidden structure.

Not so briefly: John Frankenheimer was and remains my favorite film director, not only because his films dealt in extremes, but because he had a visual style that managed to be both epic and claustrophobic, often simultaneously. His signature image, which always appeared during confrontation scenes, was to have a particular face or object in the foreground, taking up nearly two-thirds of the screen, while another person or object stood off in the farthest corner of the one-third remaining, like something trapped with its back figuratively--and sometimes literally--against the wall. In no film of his (the possible exception being his four-hour film version of The Iceman Cometh, arguably the best play-to-film adaptation of Eugene O'Neal) is this signature image more effectively employed than Seconds. I talked earlier about "the telling detail" in a scene. That's how I find it if it doesn't reveal itself to me in a timely manner: I look at the scene and say to myself, "Okay, imagine this is confrontation scene from a Frankenheimer film: what image would he focus on here?" And guess what? Whomp--there it is.

I know that a lot of people--especially younger writers and readers--would probably find Rod Serling's dialogue to be a bit too on-the-money, or self-consciously poetic, or--as one person in a dialogue workshop I once taught said, "...corny." But Serling's work--even when he wasn't on top of his game--showed me not only that dialogue could be literate and poetic, but was perhaps the strongest tool a writer has at his or her fingertips for revealing characterization. There are episodes of Twilight Zone that I will never tire of watching, simply because the writing is so exquisite: "Walking Distance," "The Changing of the Guard," "And When the Sky Was Opened," "The Trade-Ins"...I could go on and on. If you study Serling's work--not only on Zone and some episodes of Night Gallery, but the work he produced in the days of live television drama, you begin to see how much he and other writers of his time--like Paddy Chayefsky, Reginald Rose, Robert Alan Aurthur, Ernest Kinoy, and J.P. Miller, to name a handful--had dialogue and only dialogue to use in order to engage viewers' emotions and interest. These were writers who came from the days of radio into a new medium that had to compete with the movies, so they not only had to strive to make their work accessible to a generation of people seeing TV for the first time, they also had to bring the radio audience with them, as well as give movie audiences something they couldn't be guaranteed they'd get on the silver screen--and what they had was the music they created with mere words, and the themes those words dared to explore.

Quadrophenia taught me about hidden structure. There is a piece of music near the end of the opera, and instrumental called "The Rock," wherein the four musical themes that have been introduced separately throughout are briefly repeated once again, and then one by one are layered on top each other until they create a fifth, new theme. That blew me away when I was twelve and it still blows me away, and remains the single strongest musical embodiment of how a story or novel should be structured; introduce your central themes individually, then begin bringing them together as your story builds toward its finale, and somewhere within your finale bring all themes together to reveal what has been the central theme of your tale all along.

This is what works for me.

9. Your own work has recently been translated into different mediums, from podcasts to short films. How has that experience been? Is more on the way?

The podcasts have been great, because I'm always asked to read my own work, which I love doing. The short film being made of "We Now Pause for Station Identification" is still in the pre-production phase, and the producer/director has made it a point to bounce ideas off of me and has been quite receptive to my own ideas and suggestions, so I have high hopes.

The short film made from my story "Rami Temporales" is, as we do this interview, less than a week away from its premiere on the web. I've seen the rough cut, and it's just terrific. The writer/director, Earl Newton, consulted with me on almost every aspect of the adaptation because he wanted to remain true to the core of the story. If you've read the story, you're going to be initially taken by surprise with the changes that had to be made. Some changes were made because of the limited budget and run-time (it clocks in at just under 15 minutes), while others were forced on Earl and his actors and crew because of location problems. At one point during filming, Earl called me on his way to the shoot and explained about a change that had forced on them because of the weather (they only had the location for one day) and while he was driving to the location, he and I worked out how to change a scene in the script so the problem could be fixed. It was guerrilla filmmaking at its most raw and energetic, and the final film is as a respectful an adaptation as any writer could hope to have the first time one their stories jumps from the page to the screen. Its spine and heart made the move fully intact, and that was the important thing. (It doesn't hurt that in a couple of scenes, Earl used my dialogue nearly word for word.) Earl and his crew and actors have done a superb job, and I can't wait for other folks to see it.

It will be on the StrangerThingsTV website.

10. While you are best known for your short stories and novels, you've also had success with novellas, my favourite being the sadly beautiful In the Midnight Museum (Necessary Evil Press 2005). How is writing a novella different from short stories and novels, and what are some of your own favourite novellas?

I'm one of those writers who think that the novella is the perfect length for telling a story; you needn't be so intensely focused as you have to be in short story, but you also don't have the temptation to get wordy--which can lead to sloppiness and even carelessness--that comes with writing a novel. You've got more than enough room to build richly-textured characterizations, create equally rich atmosphere, and fully explore one or two secondary plotlines. I think I'm a pretty damned good short story writer, and I think my novels continue to improve with each new one, but my heart will always belong to the novella.

As to my personal favourites...hmmm. Of my own work, I'd have to say In the Midnight Museum, "The Ballad of Road Mama and Daddy Bliss," "Tessellations," "Kiss of the Mudman," "The Sisterhood of Plain-Faced Women," and the forthcoming "Afterward, There Will Be a Hallway."

Among my favourite novellas written by others--and this is off the top of my head and is by no means the full list--I'd have to say: "Fixtures of Matchstick Men and Joo" by Elizabeth Massie; "Hell" by Tim Lebbon; "Moonchasers" by Ed Gorman; "The Things They Left Behind" by Stephen King; "Tumble Home" by Amy Hempel; "Dr. Krusadian's Method" by Ray Garton; "Killroy Was Here," "The Time That Time Forgot," and "By Reason of Darkness" by Jack Cady; "The Unfinished Music" by Christopher Conlon; "The Ballad of the Sad Caf?," by Carson McCullers; "Mr. Sardonicus" by Ray Russell; "Dark Harvest" by Norman Partridge; "The Escape Route" by Rod Serling; and "Songs for Bears to Dance To" by Robert Cormier.

11. The novella, "The Ballad of Road Mama and Daddy Bliss" in your collection of travel stories Destinations Unknown (Cemetery Dance Books, 2007), reminded me of the stories by Donald Westlake, Harlan Ellison, and Neil Gaiman that involve modern gods who represent current social values or concerns. In this case, you create a god of "the road" and car accidents, and its worshippers. What was it like creating this mythology?

I hope this answer doesn't disappoint you, but it was actually rather easy; the whole concept of the Highway People and their Road God was something that'd been kicking around in my head since I was kid, and when I finally decided to write it all down, it flowed very easily. Admittedly, since I was a kid my worldview has changed severely, and I've grown--along with most of the world--a tad more paranoid than I like, and have seen more of peoples' pettiness and ugliness and the cruelties, both little and large, that we inflict on one another without considering how those others are going to feel when left alone with the damage...all of that came into play when I wrote "Road Mama..." All of it informed both the moral and mythological core of the piece--but mostly it was a lot of fun.

12. Many of your stories could be categorized as horror, though their emotional core is often not fear but extremes of grief or guilt. It seems you work under a different rubric than, say, Douglas Winter's famous or infamous declaration that horror was an emotion, not a genre. How do you define horror fiction and, indeed, your own work?

I have to go back to the beginning of this interview and repeat myself; I define horror fiction as that which deals--which grapples--with violence, grief, and suffering, and how we as a species reconcile those things with the concept of loving God and a just universe wherein even the most mundane of our daily actions carry some greater meaning.

I don't know that I can define my own work--I don't know that I'm qualified. That's not a joke (well, maybe a little...a very little). But in all honesty, I define my work--be it horror, science fiction, mystery, mainstream, whatever I'm working on at any given time--as being a body of cautionary tales. Especially the horror. Like that Cedar Hill character said, "We must love one another or die." So...cautionary tales. I write cautionary tales.

13. What can fans look forward to from you in late 2007 and 2008?

In the Midnight Museum is being released in Australia by Tasmaniac Publications in a very small print run, and the book itself is gorgeous; I will have stories in APEX Science Fiction and Horror #11, as well as stories in several anthologies, two of which are Nation of Ash and Darkness on the Edge of Town--the latter being stories inspired by the songs of Bruce Springsteen; I will be writing a brand-new Cedar Hill novella for Tasmaniac Publications; the third and final Cedar Hill collection (not yet titled) will be coming from Earthling in late summer 2008, as will my next Cedar Hill novel from Leisure, Coffin County, and I'm in talks with the Sevins over at Creeping Hemlock Press about a couple of possible projects which I'll announce as soon as I can.

Thanks to Gary Braunbeck for taking the time to answer these questions.

# Jason S. Ridler is a writer and doctoral candidate in War Studies at the Royal Military College of Canada.