When you look at mass market horror today, you will notice at least a few trends. One is that horror is very sexually charged. Another is that the werewolf legend is very close to the vampire legend and visa versa. Religion has been written about constantly, but more often than not the Catholic Church has been the author's focus. In Bestial, Ray Garton touches on these trends, but also applies a generous slant.

Ray taps into his personal experience, having been raised a Seventh Day Adventist, to offer a fresh alternative to religion in horror fiction. This experience in a lesser known faction has helped him to create sympathetic characters that some readers might consider unbelievable, but Ray swears by them. An author known for such sensual novels as Live Girls!, Ray continues his carnal tradition in Bestial.

When I sat down to chat with Ray, I hoped to learn more about his viewpoint on religion in horror, not to mention how much sexuality figures into the mix. Ray was very candid, which will come as no surprise to his loyal followers over the last few decades.


In a constantly evolving horror genre, what approach did you take to BESTIAL to help a traditional archetype like a werewolf to keep up with the competition?


In Ravenous, I'd already established lycanthropy as a sexually transmitted disease, so I wanted to do something with the werewolf story that I hadn't seen done before. I added religion. It often plays a role in vampire stories - at least, in the more traditional vampire stories, not so much in the kind of vampire fiction that's prevalent today - but I'd never encountered it in a werewolf story before. I'm kind of tired of religion representing a force of goodness in horror fiction. It's been done for so long that if you don't do it - or if you do the opposite - you're accused of religion-bashing, or more specifically, Christian-bashing. I've gotten some of that with Bestial, but I ignore it. The older I get, the more I see that religion is not a force of goodness. People are. Some of those people happen to be religious, but any goodness that may be in them has absolutely nothing to do with that - it's there or it isn't. Religion itself is a source of repression, control, and enormous revenue picked from the pockets of the gullible, as well as a source of tremendous abuse, division, bigotry, and fear. It always has been. I have no problem bashing those things or being accused of bashing them.

In traditional vampire stories, religion always represented goodness and purity, and it beat back the vampire, which represented sexuality and passion. In Bestial, I used religion to illustrate a kind of transformation. Plenty of people in Bestial are transformed into werewolves. But one character, Bob Berens, has been raised in a rigid, fundamentalist Seventh-day Adventist family and it has turned him into an emotional cripple riddled with guilt and shame. During the course of the book, we see the beginnings of Bob's transformation as he gradually begins to come out of this.


The lore in this novel includes lycanthropy as an STD - did you worry that this might bring werewolves even closer to vampires?


Actually, that was kind of my intention. Vampires have always had all the erotic cache. I think that's part of the reason for their enormous popularity, while the werewolf has languished. Vampires are metaphors for our sexuality, and werewolves seem to be a metaphor for our more animalistic urges. I think there's a lot of overlap there, and I wanted to exploit it.


Having been raised as a Seventh Day Adventist, you were certainly equipped with a strong background to work with. How much of this is based on your own experience? What precaution did you take to separate social commentary from fiction?


It's not based on my experience specifically - that's a very different story - but I certainly drew on my knowledge of Adventism, having been raised in it. I wanted to use religion and wasn't setting out to write about Adventism specifically, but that's the only religion I know inside and out. Catholic writers write about Catholicism, Jewish writers write about Judaism, and so on. I was raised an Adventist, so I wrote about Adventism. Also, Adventism was particularly appropriate to this story because it's far more repressive than most denominations, and far more repressive than non-Adventists realize. As for fiction - nothing I wrote about Adventism in Bestial is fictional. Every word of it is very accurate. Even Bob Berens is very accurate.

Bob is based on my oldest friend, someone I've known since first grade. He and I were both educated entirely in Seventh-day Adventist schools and raised in the very insular, cloistered world of Adventism. He's the same age as I, 46. I got out - actually, I was chased out - but he didn't. He still lives with his widowed mother and grandmother - taking care of them is his entire life. He has been so beaten down by his family and their religion that he can't imagine any other life. He has no social life, no friends, he's never had a girlfriend - frankly, I don't think he's ever had sex, although he claims to have had it once in his teen years - and he is paralyzed by the abject terror of wondering how god is going to punish him for masturbating as much as he does. I'm not exaggerating or trying to be funny - fear is the primary ingredient of his life. And he's not an odd case. There are a lot of people like him in the Seventh-day Adventist cult. A lot.

People on the outside are unaware of this. The cult has done a wonderful job of passing itself off as a mainstream Christian religion that has a few odd quirks, like observing Saturday instead of Sunday and following certain dietary restrictions. But it isn't. It holds beliefs that are completely heretical to Christianity; it fosters great fear and hatred of mainstream Christian religions, particularly Catholicism; it teaches a terrifying end-time scenario which it believes could begin at any second, and which had a lot to do with what happened in Waco, Texas in 1993 with the Branch Davidians, an offshoot of the Seventh-day Adventist church. Adventism teaches that under the leadership of the Catholic church, which it believes to be the Beast, all the other Sunday-keeping Christian religions will get a law passed requiring everyone to worship on Sunday. Those who don't - namely, the Adventists - will be hunted down, arrested, tortured, and killed. This is what they teach their little children. The religion is entirely fear-based, and no matter how much the Adventists you know might smile and appear happy, I assure you that, deep down inside, they are afraid. While it puts on a very pleasant face for outsiders, it deals pretty harshly with members who don't toe the line. It divides families, ruins marriages, and meets any reasonable definition of a religious cult. In fact, it is recognized as such by most anti-cult groups. People coming out of Adventism have to go through a certain amount of deprogramming - I know because I went through it myself - in order to function properly in the outside world. This is not a formal kind of deprogramming, it's a process of trial and error, it takes a long time, and it's quite painful and frightening. Many never recover from the emotional and psychological scars left by the cult, especially those raised in Adventism. Seventh-day Adventism is probably one of the most misunderstood religions around, and when I talk or write about it, people often accuse me of being harsh or bitter, of having an axe to grind. That's not the case. You'll hear the same things from other former Adventists, particularly those who grew up in the cult. I'm simply telling the truth about it, and I try to do that whenever possible, because I think people on the outside should know the truth about what's going on in that cult. The more the better.

So both the Seventh-day Adventist cult and my old friend who has been so emotionally crippled by it were perfect for Bestial, and I used them.


Did you expect a negative response from the Adventist Church? Any surprises?

The co-founder and "prophet" of the Seventh-day Adventist cult, Ellen G. White - who, almost a century after her death remains the final infallible interpreter of scripture and arbiter of doctrine for Adventism, and who is still believed by the church to have been a messenger of god - wrote that fiction is evil, that it physically damages the brain and reading too much of it can cause mental problems and physical paralysis. (She was shown this by god, who allegedly gave her many, many visions filled with useful information - like the fact that "other races" are the result of human beings having sex with animals and that eating meat can stir up "animal passions" and make people want to masturbate, which causes diabetes, neurological disorders, cancer, death, and a host of other ailments.) So officially the church frowns on the reading of fiction. There are many who read it anyway, but in general, Adventists are not big readers of novels. So they're probably not even aware of my book. They were aware of my first novel, which was published in 1984, and they let me know of their disapproval in some pretty ugly ways. I haven't heard from them about Bestial and don't expect to. However, if I do end up getting a negative response, I won't be surprised. I just hope they're a little more civilized about it this time.


One of the novel's central characters is a clear social outcast, and one that is not surprising to find in a horror novel. How sympathetic is such a character to the mainstream readership that are not social outcasts?


One of the challenges of the book was making Bob Berens as sympathetic to readers as possible. I think there's a bit of a social outcast in all of us, even the most mainstream and conventional among us. I think most people have some aspect of their personality or a particular interest or passion that they feel - correctly or incorrectly - is not something their friends or peers would accept if they knew about it. I think this is something we all share in varying degrees. That's why in literature and film most of us so readily side with the outcast, or the underdog. Personally, I think it's harder to get readers to sympathize with someone who is fully functional and completely accepted by everyone and has no fears or insecurities or weaknesses. That would be a very unrealistic character and one with whom it would be difficult to indentify.


Your novels are known for being sexual in nature and BESTIAL is no exception. Does this come naturally to you or do you pour it on more for your target audience?


The distinction of the horror genre is that it frightens and unsettles, it disturbs. People who enjoy reading horror fiction are people who enjoy being messed with in a safe, controlled way. They like to be asked, "What if this happened to you?" And this is always something scary, threatening, dangerous, something awful. The best way to do that is to involve some familiar aspect of the reader's life, to twist something that is a part of the core of the reader's existence. Sex is the great equalizer. It's the one thing you can be certain all of your readers have in common. They may not all have the same interests, they may not all be the same color or religion or sex, they may not have the same jobs or political views - but they all have sex. If they don't have it, they want to have it. If they do have it, they want to have more of it. Sex is the one area where we all come together. No pun intended. People are interested in sex, intrigued by it, titillated by it. It's appealing. It's even more appealing given the fact that, in our culture, which has been so heavily influenced by the repressions of religion, it remains a forbidden fruit, even in spite of the relaxed mores of our time. Birds do it, bees do it, we all do it. What sets humans apart from the birds and the bees is that we also enjoy reading about it.

I have always been of the opinion that literature should cover every aspect of life. The genre doesn't matter - horror, romance, science fiction, mystery, whatever. When I read, I want to share the lives of the characters I am allowing inside my head. Sex is a significant part of life. I think it should be covered. It's not only a part of life, it is an expression of one's personality, an important element in character development. How a character feels about and engages in his or her sex life - how a character does or doesn't integrate sex into his or her life - says a lot about that character. So I have never hesitated to include sex in my work. Part of the reason for that, I'm happy to admit, is that sex sells. But that's not all of it. I genuinely believe that sex is an aspect of character, and I think including it makes the relationship between my readers and my characters more intimate. That intimacy is a goal of every writer, I think. As a result of this, I've gotten a reputation for writing erotic horror. I don't shy away from that at all. If you're at a cocktail party and you tell people you write horror, you'll get some rather dour looks. But tell them you write erotic horror and watch their eyes light up as they step forward to have a conversation. Like I said, sex is the great equalizer.


BESTIAL does have some of the familiar. When you outlined the novel, what was the first idea that struck you to make the novel different?


I don't outline. I've tried it and it just doesn't work for me. The only way I can write a story and the characters that populate it is to start writing. Then it all unfolds in front of me. I can't plan it, I have to discover it. Before I start writing a book, I do a lot of thinking about it, maybe write some notes. When I was thinking about Bestial, I knew I didn't want to just rehash Ravenous. I wanted to retain the things that I think make werewolves interesting, but at the same time do something different. The first idea that came to me was a werewolf baby. The book's prologue, in which a werewolf is born, dropped into my head in one whole piece. At about the same time, I decided this was an ideal chance to bring back Karen Moffett, Gavin Keoph, and Martin Burgess from Night Life, characters I enjoyed writing and had planned to use again. I had already included sex, so it occurred to me to throw religion into the mix. But I wasn't sure how. That's when my attention turned to my old friend, the guy on whom I based Bob Berens. He lives about ten miles from me but I seldom ever see him anymore because he doesn't get out much unless it's to run an errand for his mother, and I don't go to his house because I can't stand to be around his mother, who truly is an awful person - but a great Adventist! That's when I began to think along the lines of transformation. I have always wished I could get my friend out of the hellish pit his life has become, but I don't think there's any chance of that ever happening. One of the great things about writing is that you can make life turn out the way you want it to turn out, the way you think it should turn out. And with that, I was off and running.