The majority of our interviews so far have been with authors who write primarily horror fiction. There have been exceptions; Tom Piccirilli seems to excel in every genre he tackles. Similarly, Adam-Troy Castro juggles science fiction, fantasy, horror, non-fiction and even Spider-Man novels. His new novella, The Shallow End of the Pool, is now available from Creeping Hemlock Press, and we just posted an excerpt from it. It was a pleasure interviewing someone with so many interests; be sure to visit his website.

You've been nominated for a Hugo, a Nebula and a Stoker for your work, which covers science fiction, fantasy and horror. You've also written Spider-Man novels and regularly movie reviews for Science Fiction Weekly. Are you basically a great big fanboy at heart?

Yes. Absolutely. I grew up reading Marvel and DC Comics, was first in line to see THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, remember most incarnations of STAR TREK with fondness, and spent much of my childhood cutting pictures out of Famous Monsters Of Filmland for my bedroom wall, only to be told that my imagination was too morbid. There are some interesting gaps in my fannish diet. For instance, DOCTOR WHO never stuck with me until the new BBC series started. I'd been exposed to it, but just couldn't care less.

I'm not a fanboy to the limited extent that my voracious appetite for story makes room, a lot of room, for stuff outside science fiction, fantasy, and horror. I enjoy mainstream books and movies and enjoy any story from classics to the contemporary that strikes me as well told. I probably read more crime fiction than genre fiction, and would rather see a new Sidney Lumet or old Billy Wilder film, or interesting indie, than the latest CGI-heavy superhero adaptation. Pretentious as it may be, I frankly grow impatient with fans of the fantastic whose eyes glaze at any threat of exposure to stories, whether between covers or on celluloid, that have something to do with life as it is lived on this planet. I don't consider that common complaint from people who eschew that kind of content, "I just wanna turn off my brain for a while," a fit criterion for enjoying anything. More than anything else, when I dive into a story, I want an emotional experience. I want to care.

How do you apportion your time between work-for-hire or media projects and more personal work?

That presupposes that there's ever been a conflict. The truth of the matter is that the Spider-Man novels rescued me, professionally; Up to that point I'd never succeeded in finishing any novels of my own, always trailing in despair somewhere around the twenty thousand word mark. An advance and a deadline are great motivators for keeping one's behind wedged into the chair, even if those books became a professional and financial nightmare for reasons involving a publisher who is, literally, no longer among the living. Afterward, I knew that I could do this thing, and it was only a matter of time - still a number of years -- before I made the leap.

My reviews don't take up all that much time. There's a book crunch every two months, that lasts for about a week and a half while I'm writing my column for SCI FI magazine, and maybe four or five hours during every other month that I spend reviewing what usually turn out to be lamentable direct-to-video DVD features. (Sometimes I get a good one, and cheer.) These assignments also energize the fiction in that fiction writing encourages procrastination, and deadlines of any kind keep the pace constant.

I don't do all that much media or work-for-hire fiction anymore, but there's one other thing about that kind of work that deserves mention, which is that I'm not even remotely tempted by characters I don't care about. I like Spider-Man, and writing those novels gave me the opportunity to scratch that creative itch and include a number of scenes I'd always wanted to see in Spider-Man stories. Writing them was fun. But when I was done, I turned down nine, count 'em, nine, offers for subsequent media novel assignments. The idea of writing, for instance, the Transformers trilogy I was offered was enough to make my eyeballs bleed. And while I would have liked to take another assignment I was offered, The Prisoner (for which I had a take that was truly startling), I'm kind of glad I never commenced work, especially since it turns out that the folks making the offer didn't actually bother to get the rights first.


Has serialized SF TV, like BABYLON 5, FARSCAPE, and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, impacted what SF publishers are looking for in new projects?

I suppose so. But the day I figure out exactly what motivates publishers in any decision they make is the day you'll find me banging Angelina Jolie in the hot tub at my palatial estate in the Bahamas. Don't hold your breath. (You either, Angelina.)


Your new novella, The Shallow End of the Pool, which Creeping Hemlock Press shipped last week, represents your return to horror after several years. Did you move into science fiction and fantasy because the market for horror has shrunk so dramatically in the last couple of decades?

Well, to start with, I disagree with the premise of the question. I never left horror. I had a short story in Cemetery Dance just a few years ago, another published in Jeanne Cavelos's Van Helsing anthology, and a novelette nominated for a Nebula ("Of A Sweet Slow Dance In the Wake of Temporary Dogs") in 2004 that was probably as much horror as it was anything else. Over the years, some of my horror stories, like "Locusts" or "The Last Straw," went unnoticed within the genre because they were published in markets that aren't often pegged as places to look for horror. (And, for what it's worth, my novels Emissaries from the Dead and The Third Claw of God have some pretty horrific passages themselves.) If you look at the complete bibliography on my website, which is categorized by genre, you'll see that horror stories still outnumber the stories in any other subgenre I've ever worked in.

I moved into science fiction in the early 1990s because I figured out how to write it. (Certain critics would disagree.) The higher word rates were a factor, and certainly the limited market for horror stories, especially novellas, has kept me from acting on a number of story ideas I've had over the years when the same effort could be more put to completing work that will be easier to place, but the real reason is that I get bored, terribly bored. I want to write a little bit of everything.

What prompted your return to horror with this novella?

Same answer. Except...every once in a while a story pops up and demands to be written even if you know that marketing it's going to be an uphill battle. This is especially true of novellas, and even more so when you're talking about horror novellas. It was just time to write this one, that's all. There was no possibility of accomplishing anything else until it was done, because I was sharing the nightmare, and honestly did not know, until I reached the end, how the characters would end their journey.

Was it a relief to get away from describing technology?

I don't think I do all that much of that, even in my science fiction. I invoke it, which is not quite the same thing. My heroine Andrea Cort says in the upcoming The Third Claw of God that she has no idea how a star drive works, but has no problem occupying a berth as a passenger. I'm like that, really.

You know what I truly get tired of describing, mostly because I'm not very good at it? Facial expressions. It's all arched eyebrows and pursed lips and grimaces and stares, and every writer knows what it's like to peruse a first draft and realize that the character has "shrugged" ten times in one conversation. At that point it's no longer a gesture, but Tourette's syndrome. Maybe that's why I loved writing about the Marionettes, aliens who resemble mirrored spheres with tentacles. They don't have faces. How considerate is that, to the overworked author?

A lot of the horror shorts listed in your bibliography are humorous, yet you've also written very dark, shall we say 'nasty,' familial horror. What appeals to you about exploring such different facets of the same genre?

Horror's a versatile field, with a wealth of different tonal opportunities. One thing's for sure. When you're writing nasty, looking away is not a virtue. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got came early in my career from an editor who said, "Those first horror stories you sent me, you felt uncomfortable writing them, didn't you?" I confessed to the awful truth. "You were a little shocked that this stuff was coming out of you?" Yes, I said. "And the stories you've sent recently, you felt safer?" I nodded. "Well, that's what you've been doing wrong..."

I think the main trick, when writing fiction in general but especially important in horror, is letting the reader know, early on, that he or she can't trust you; that you have signed no contract ensuring a happy ending that includes a positive resolution to every conflict. You don't have to kill the cute kid, but you have to make sure the reader knows that you're the kind of son of a bitch who would.

Your first non-tie-in novel, the SF Emissaries from the Dead, is in stores now and you've already completed a sequel. You also have a zombie story in the Bits of the Dead anthology. Categorizing genres is so important to publishers, even if it isn't for an author. Have you had any trouble moving from one genre to another?

Again, I think I'd have more trouble if I didn't.

Reading The Shallow End of the Pool, I was struck by the elegance of your prose. How have you seen your style evolve over the years?

Semicolons are a little less thick on the ground than they used to be. I haven't weeded out all the adverbs yet, but I'm trying. And the endless sentence with a thousand different phrases, that's supposed to evoke a chaotic moment but which instead tangles the reader in nested pronouns? Now often disappears after the first draft. This sounds flip, but I'm a hundred percent serious. I'm somewhat better at writing women than I used to be - still not great, but not laughable, as I now feel I was in some of those early published stories.

What's in the pipeline?

Two Analog stories, the novella "Gunfight On Farside" and the novelette "Among the Tchi." The next Andrea Cort novel, The Third Claw of God, scheduled for March 2009. Set to be published almost simultaneously with that, from BenBella Books, a very silly and very strange mainstream novel written in collaboration with Frank Sibila and Kathie Huddleston, Fake Alibis. Two projects I can't talk about yet, which I hide under the labels Project D and Project Z. (Project D is especially exciting, so cross your fingers.) Many more DVD and movie reviews at Scifiweekly.Com.

I hate the generalization inherent in the "What advice do you have for upcoming writers," so let's try this: how do you think your career has developed in ways that are unique?

My professional model has always been Dan Simmons, who has written terrific horror, terrific science fiction, terrific fantasy, terrific historical thrillers, and terrific mainstream stories, in styles that range from the lyrical to the spare down-and-dirty, and tones that range from the grim to the deeply silly. You can't say that there's such a thing as a typical Dan Simmons story, or even a typical Dan Simmons paragraph. I can't say that I'm anywhere near as good as he is, but I've jumped around so much that there's no such thing as a typical Adam-Troy Castro story or paragraph either, and while that may have kept me from forging a brand name, it's still something I'm proud about.