October 2016

DW: one of the themes of this issue is heresy. In the Shadow Saga series that you will be reissuing as hardcovers with JournalStone, you were way ahead of the Dan Brown trend in popular fiction with themes of heresy and church secrets. myths, legends, and archaeology have been important elements in your body of work at large. What originally got you interested in mythology?

CG: as a kid, I loved, obviously, books and comics and creature feature movies and all of that stuff but that sort of grew sideways, and extended into folklore and mythology, into history… My interest in archaeology springs from my love of history, but also a love of stories involving how mysterious history is, and how we’re constantly able to discover essentially new and exciting information about the past through archaeology. I’m not an archaeologist but I’ve been fascinated by that field and what it means for history. I mean, our history books are full of stuff that may or may not be true. And then the folklore stuff and mythology is all part of that. You know, when you’re uncovering the history of civilization or a village or a particular writer or storyteller of an era, you can be really informed by what they believed. And I’m fascinated by what they believe, and I always try to connected to what I think is amusing about why we think what we believe is anymore reasonable than what they believed, and now we laugh at what they believed or we look at it as a sort of fascinating oddity. And what many people believe today is no less strange or odd.

DW: I imagine the research involved in all of that must have changed a lot in the years since your first novel. Of Saints and Shadows does a bit of globetrotting, and that was written before the Internet was as rich of a research tool as it is now…

CG: that was written almost before the Internet. The Internet existed at that time…

DW: but just barely.

CG: I was a double major in history and English in college and my history side was in European history and one of my specializations in European history was Byzantine history, and also I had a concentration in classics. So none of that was really an academic interest, it was a cultural interest I guess I would say. It was just me legitimately studying the things that intrigued me, and I hesitate to say because I know so many of our colleagues are so much more academic and smarter than I am but I really wasn’t looking at it from a place of enrichment so much as I was just following the threads that interested me. As far as research is concerned, it’s different every time. It’s different everywhere I go, but from the beginning I was fortunate enough to travel. Unfortunately, my dad died when I was 19, and he died with $4000 in cash in his sock drawer and a $10,000 life insurance. So we used the cash to bury him, and my brother and sister and I split the life insurance and I took my portion of it because my dad was completely irresponsible his whole life, so I decided it was incumbent upon me to also be irresponsible with that money. So yeah, I took that money and went to Europe for a month. I did at the summer I turned 21, and that was great and formative and I used a lot of that in my early work. Experiences in Europe enabled me to sort of envision… You know, it isn’t enough sometimes to just be able to look stuff up. It’s nice to have a tangible feeling of what it’s like to be in a place and I think it’s Emily Dickinson who used the phrase a certain slant of light, right? And it’s nice to be able to convey that. However, more often than not, you’re not able to and that’s where the sort of real, legitimate research comes in. People like Chelsea Quinn Yarborough, and Quinn is a phenomenal writer and I’ve been a fan of hers for decades…but Quinn is a research maven. I mean what you see in her work is the tip of a gigantic iceberg of the research that she actually did. And sometimes perhaps you see too much of that research. The research you see in my work is usually at least 80% of what I researched (laughs). Because I try not to overdo it. But the best story about research is at one point, and you know the media tie-in stuff that I do is fun, I do it sort of to entertain my 14-year-old self width of the things that I like. But I was working on a Wolverine novel 1 million years ago that is set behind the Iron Curtain, and I was trying to write that book without knowing what the puck I was talking about. And at a certain point I realized this is just stupid. So I actually had to stop what I was doing and take a couple of weeks off and just go to the library and read and read and read about the Cold War and the Iron Curtain and East and West Germany and Interpol and all of this stuff…

DW: did new ideas for the book that you hadn’t previously considered emerge from that stuff? Did trigger some new possibilities?

CG: usually it does. In this case, I don’t know that it necessarily triggered new possibilities, but it’s definitely made the book 10 times better than it otherwise would have been. As far as of saints and shadows is concerned, I went to 12 years of Catholic school. It mostly taught me how to get away with shit.

DW: (laughs) It usually does.

CG: but I had a great relationship with the nuns and the chaplain in my high school. And the nuns who taught me in the seventh and eighth grade have been family friends forever. And Of Saints and Shadows is by any measure a work of blasphemy. That one, and the sequel, the second book in the series especially. They’re blasphemous works, there’s no question. And it’s not intended to be disrespectful, it’s just a really cool story. It’s one of those stories where, as a writer you think, what if this happened? And immediately, branching out from that, you have 10 other answers to that question that also lead to well, what if this happened? And everything in there was just logical answers to questions I asked myself.

DW: questions that couldn’t help but lead to blasphemy.

CG: yeah. But it’s fiction. And I have to say, these two nuns, Sister Maureen and Sister Rena, loved those books. They both read them and they both loved them and they were super enthusiastic.

DW: that’s got to be gratifying.

CG: yeah, absolutely. And so they saw it for what it was, which was essentially, it’s just a story. Although, that was, I think the Catholic Church of my youth was a kind of kinder, gentler Catholic Church than exists now. Ironically.

DW: That’s interesting. You’d think that they would be getting a little more enlightened and liberal, especially given our current Pope. I say “our,” but I haven’t been Catholic since I was about 15.

CG: yeah, I’m agnostic, but I still, you know, I’m a recovering Catholic.

DW: aren’t we always?

CG: yeah, and I feel like hope Francis is an extraordinary person to have stepped up into the church as it has been. But, and now we’re somewhere way off track, but subsequent to the child rape scandal, the church divested itself of all of its moderates. Not by choice. The moderates all left the church, leaving only the hard-core fundamentalist Catholics. So those are the people who are in charge and Pope Francis I think is the first turning of the corner since that happened.

DW: getting back to fiction, one of the things that impresses me most about your books is the character development. Are there methods that you have come to rely on for delving deep and making each character rich and unique?

CG: I guess there are two answers to that question. When I was writing my first novel, of saints and shadows, the agent that I was working with at the time, my first agent, give me a great piece of advice. A million years ago Dean Koontz wrote a book that very few people know about. It’s called how to write best-selling fiction. And I’ve only ever read one Dean Koontz novel… But this book, Dean Koontz published it and then he regretted it and he bought it back from the publisher and he got as many copies as he could and destroyed them. But I did find this book that she loaned me very instructive.

DW: do you know what he objected to?

CG: he objected to a lot of the things he had written. I don’t know why. Maybe he thought it was presumptuous of him? But it was really helpful, and I’ve suggested to other writers over the years. One of the exercises in it was a fantastic exercise about creating a character window. And as part of that, he suggested basically writing down all of this sort of back story information about your characters, whether or not you ever use it. And one of the things is like… What is your character’s full name? What is your character’s birthday? What is the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to your character? And sort of similar things, and it’s this aggregation of information that you may never use in the book, but it helps you, especially if you’re a beginning writer, get better at thinking about your characters as people. And to me, that’s the key element, right? And another thing… So, I should say, I’ve never done those exercises again after doing them for of saints and shadows, but I think it gets in your head. I think it informs the way that I think about characters as sort of three-dimensional human beings more. The other element of the character stuff to me is trying to think about who their families are. Too often I realized in my books that I was writing about characters who were islands. You know, who had no real family, no people around them, and I needed to figure out why. So if I was going to have characters who had… I needed them to have childhood friends, I needed them to have families, and even if they didn’t have contact with those people in the book I needed to know what their presence was. I needed to know why these characters were isolated.

DW: often isolation is very helpful in putting a character in peril. If they’ve got a great support system…you lose tension.

GC: Exactly. But the reality is people who are isolated in their lives are either isolated by choice or their isolated because they don’t really have anybody. By attrition, or they are isolated because they’ve been excommunicated from their familial and friend groups.

DW: why and how did that happen?

CG: exactly. So you’ve got to sort of figure it out. And I’ve come in some books, snow blind in particular, you have so many people who knew each other four years because it’s a small town story. And that’s the other thing is so many people, especially people who write horror stories, want to write small-town stories but they don’t consider the fabric of a small town. That every single person basically either know somebody or, you run into somebody in the store and they might not be somebody you know but they probably know somebody you know, and you have to take that into consideration. So it’s just a thought process but I’d like to think it’s become second nature over the years so it’s not a chore, it’s just…

DW: something you’ve integrated.

CG: for me these days I feel like it’s not any different from creating the visual elements of the setting. It’s the same sort of general idea.

DW: we talked a bit about research in terms of setting. I was really impressed with your Writing for a Better World keynote speech at the DFW Conference. Readers can find that on your web site. It seems to me that fiction is always, or should be, an exercise in empathy. We do this as writers, and to give the readers, and experience of the world through someone else’s eyes that’s not the same as ours, and yet I often feel like we’re kind of damned if we do and damned if we don’t in terms of diversity because if I don’t include the diversity of the real world then that’s bad, and if I do then I can be accused of cultural appropriation or of not doing the research.

CG: Correct. No question.

DW: So I wonder what your thoughts are, and we could probably talk about that for an entire interview…

CG: we could talk about that for hours.

DW: if we don’t want to only write fiction that mirrors the people and places of our own lives, what advice do you have for writers trying to branch out and not be so insular?

CG: So again, there’s a dichotomy here. I would say that yes, you are damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. But if you’re going to be raked over the coals by people one way or the other, why not do the right thing? Right? And to me, the idea of expressing the world, even if we go back to my first novel, it’s filled with people of color, they’re not the central characters, but there are people throughout the story, there are gay and bisexual people in the story, and that was not any kind of crusade and I’m not patting myself on the back or whatever for it… And that’s just me not thinking about it because it was a world that I lived in, right? That said, I also feel like if you are attempting to write a character who comes from another background than yours, whether that be someone of a different race for someone who is disabled or someone who has a different sexual preference or what have you, then you need to be really careful to focus on their humanity and not focus on the depth of culture… That doesn’t mean you don’t study it, you don’t try to learn what you can about their culture… But what people run into, and I’m not going to name any names, but I’ve seen other writers fall into what I think is a big trap is if you try to write a story set in an urban environment or set at like the Mexican border or something and you want to have characters who are Mexican, and you try to craft what you think is an authentic patois, you know a style of speech, appropriate to those characters, you are invariably going to fuck it up and insult people. That’s a mistake. You can try to get a little bit of the flavor of the culture in the way the person presents themselves in their speech, etc. But…

DW: Less is more?

CG: less is definitely more because at the end of the day you can’t understand their culture, you can’t understand the world they live in, all you can do is try to educate yourself and you know try to present characters as you find them.

DW: I really like what you said in that speech about if you’re using their ethnicity or whatever as a shorthand for character, you’re in trouble.

CG: absolutely. Because what you should be exploring…

DW: because it’s the humanity that we have in common, that we all have a lot of the same fears and the same hopes…

CG: exactly. You have to be exploring the humanity of the person. The perfect example is the current Marvel comic of Ms. Marvel. The main character is Kamala Khan (sp) and she is a Muslim and she’s a superhero. And the story certainly includes a lot of cultural elements, but more importantly there are a lot of universals to the story about how she’s dealing with her parents and how she’s doing with her brother and how she’s dealing with sort of being shy and being a nerd at school and all of that stuff. So you’ve got to create the human character. Because really at the end of the day if you’re going out of your way to diversify in the presentation of characters in your stories, why are you doing it? You’re doing it to paint the world as you’re seeing it and the world as we see it is made up of human beings and not types.

DW: you mentioned comics. Is there something particular that you’ve learned from writing comics that has possibly influenced how you approach writing fiction?

CG: comics and screenplays and novels, they’re all such different mediums in different disciplines, right? So I think comics are the strictest discipline as a writer that you can have because of the structure of it, so I’d like to think that it’s made me a better structural writer? And that doesn’t mean that I ape comic book structure, but I do think that it allows me to think a little bit more clearly… One thing that comics has done: I think more about setting. I think more about what will be an interesting location in which to set this story. Even though the novels aren’t illustrated, the same still holds true. I mean, if the setting is more interesting, the story is more interesting.

DW: in dead ringers, you paint very authentic portraits of Boston. And your affection for the city was already evident in your first novel, of saints and shadows. You don’t currently live in the city, so what is it about Boston that keeps you interested in revisiting it and writing about it over all these years, and how do you feel the city has changed in that time?

CG: interesting. I think Boston just keeps getting better as a city. It’s absolutely to me certainly in the United States my favorite city that I’ve ever visited. I mean I love New Orleans but I would want to live in Boston. What’s great about Boston is it’s one of the major cities in the country and yet it’s a small town. Because of its universities, it’s one of the smartest cities in the country. You know, universities come with research labs and hospitals and we have so much amazing progress being made in Boston constantly. And yet it also has this great historical quality. I love London, and London is much bigger obviously, but it shares some of those elements. I don’t know… I think also it’s just it’s a walking city, it doesn’t feel like this enormous cosmopolitan place, it feels like a neighborhood. As far as how much it has changed? I really feel like it has changed for the better.

DW: except that I can’t figure out how to ride the subway anymore (laughs). When I lived there I could use tokens. But now I need a card and I’ve got to figure out how to use the machine and I feel like an old man.

CG: well, the beautiful thing about Boston, is if you give yourself the time, you can pretty much walk wherever you’re going.

DW: the final title in the shadows saw the series was published in 2014. So this has spanned 20 years of your career. So what’s it like revisiting your first novel and a series that you’ve written over the entire span of your career to reissue in this hardcover series?

CG: you know, honestly the best thing about it is that this is a series that I’ve continued to come back to and people have continued to ask to have new books in the series, and yet because of the way that it was published originally, there are a lot of people who read only the first two books were the first three books and didn’t know that there were any more than those first three books. There are people who read the first four books and had no idea that there was a fifth book.

DW: the last two were only available in the UK? Is that right?

CG: books 6 and seven, yeah, were only available in the UK. Because, well I could tell the whole story, but essentially the manner in which the fifth book was published, and I share equal blame because essentially the publishing plan was my idea but I thought the publisher was going to handle it differently…um, You know, basically it was published in a way that nobody knew it was a new book. They just assumed it was another reprint of the original series. And so the sales were just not good, and so the deal that I had with the UK went forward and the situation here was not fertile enough at the time, and I really wanted to do this. So I got all the rights back and it was great because I had a lot of cooperation a lot of people helped me at Penguin even though they didn’t have to, so I really appreciate that.

DW: and now you’ve got the opportunity to roll it all out as it was meant to be, in very short order.

CG: they will be coming out, as far as I know, every two months, but more important to me they will have a unified cover design for the first time ever.

DW: that cover is gorgeous. I mean, when I say that cover, I mean the completely interconnected concept of the cover art is so beautiful.

CG: what I said to Chris Payne at JournalStone was the most important thing to me was that the books have a unified cover look because it will be the first time ever that fans of this series, and again most of them probably don’t even know that if there are books 6 and seven, but it certainly will be the first time that any fans of the series can have all of the books in a way that you can put them on the shelf and they match. Previously they were different sizes, different cover designs. And also it will be the first time ever that these books are in hardcover. They are doing hardcover and trade paperback.

DW: I just wrote my first sequel, my first book 2 in a series, and that was a bit of a learning curve to me. I felt like there were some things that were easier about writing a book that you’ve already laid the foundation for and there were other things that I had to work out. What are some things you learned along the way about writing a series that started with your first novel? What have you learned about writing series fiction?

CG: my rule from the first book was that at the end of every book I wanted to fuck the world up so much that there was no way that I could repeat it. So there was no way that it could be like cozy mysteries (which I love). But fans of cozy mysteries want the same thing over and over again and essentially, right? And in this thing, I wanted to make absolutely certain that at the end of every book I had changed the world enough that I could not repeat myself. So each book is a very different from the previous books. More so as they go on. The first three have a certain similarity, although the world changes dramatically within it. And the fourth fifth sixth and seventh books are all very dramatically different from each other. And I just think for me that’s what I wanted, for each one to be different. I will say that I have a friend named Nancy Danos who is a huge fan of the series and as I got into the later books and more time passed between books, it was great to have an opportunity to send her the finished manuscripts and have her read them because I wrote them obviously and up and threw them a couple of times obviously, but Nancy has written entire series probably 10 times, so she has been great about being able to say, “No, this is an error. If you go back, you’ll be able to see that blah, blah, blah.”

DW: so these reissues will be somewhat updated?

CG: no, she’s done this as we’ve gone along. I’ve just gone through the first book and I was sorely tempted going through the copy edit to really go back and revise… I changed a couple of words, and then I thought no, because…

DW: Once you open that door…

CG: Yeah. There’s one thing in the second book that I’m going to change because it’s an error. A significant error. And other than that, my plan is to, you know, I had an old friend from college who apparently objects to the use of the word ‘penis’ for some reason… She think is an awkward word. She thought I should go through and change or delete a lot of the uses of the word penis because you things other people are bothered by it too. And maybe they are, but I’m not changing it.

DW: there’s bound to be other words that other random people aren’t comfortable with…

CG: exactly. One thing I did do is, I noticed in the first book, and hopefully they’ll change it, I asked them to change it is: in the first book there are several uses of the word ‘Oriental.’ One of them is in dialogue and I think it’s fine because it’s 1000-year-old vampire. But a couple of them were in narrative and even though it’s from the point of view of the same characters who it would be perfectly natural for them to still be thinking that word, I asked them to change it because again, I started writing the book in 1989 and it was published in 94.

DW: It stands out more now.

CG: I have no problem with a offending people, but I never want to do it by accident.

DW: I feel like in any one interview, we can only scratch the surface of your work. You’ve published one book at least per year since you’ve started. Looking back on a super prolific phase of your creative life, is there anything that stands out that you’re most proud of?

CG: you know, I could give you a list of sort of probably my top 10 of my work… And certainly, I’m very proud of the seven books as a whole because I think that they accomplish something, I think that they are unique and different and still, if you read them, you’ll find that there is nothing else like them. I’m really proud of the fact that other writers have come forward over the years, including Charlene Harris and Jonathan Mayberry and other people and have pointed out that of saints and shadows is essentially, um… and I hesitate to say this myself because it sounds so self-aggrandizing and it’s not my intention at all because it had to be pointed out to me by these other writers that Of Saints and Shadows is sort of the bedrock of what became urban fantasy.

DW: Yes! I was gonna say it for you. Yes it is. It foreshadows so much of what came to define the genre. Even the sexuality that’s become a part of it, you know, it took a while, but that’s become a phenomenon unto itself, it’s all there…

CG: yeah, I mean, Charlene said you could make a list of all the core elements of what urban fantasy became and most of those elements, or many of those elements first appeared in Saints and Shadows. So I’m proud of that, and certainly that there are books of mine: Baltimore and the comic series Baltimore, Ararat which is coming out next year, snow blind, and the boys are back in town, and the ocean dark which I wrote under a pseudonym, a book I did with Tim Lebbon called the map of moments, which is set immediately post Katrina… Which, we came up with the idea before Katrina and we knew at the time that we had a huge responsibility on our shoulders to represent the community of New Orleans despite the fact that we were doing fantasy to represent the resilience and pain and sort of history of pain in that community and yet also the joy and the uniqueness of it.

DW: Quite a challenge. That sounds great.

CG: and we worked really hard and did a lot of research to do that and the response from people in the city of New Orleans was phenomenal. Just so great to get their feedback. However, all of that aside, and I know that this is corny but the thing I’m most proud of his being a father. I love my kids. I think my wife Connie and I have raised and are raising terrific kids, and that’s at the end of the day, like the best thing about being a freelance writer for the last 24 years was that when my kids got home from school I was there.

DW: your next full-length original novel coming out next year will be our rat. What can you tell us about that?

CG: Ararat is what Hollywood would call an elevated supernatural thriller, right? To me, obviously it’s a horror novel, but it is sort of a bigger… As we talked about mythology and folklore and archaeology and history and all of that is all feeding into this book and it has a sort of Raiders of the Lost Ark kind of thing. But essentially it’s about… There’s an earthquake on Mount Ararat in Turkey and it reveals this giant cave that no one knew was there. And when they go up to check on this cave they discover that it is not even really a cave. They go inside and they discover that the walls of the cave are made of timber and they realize that the cave itself is a buried Ark, and they immediately think it’s Noah’s Ark because they been looking for that unmount our rat for centuries, right? And at the back of the park a find a sort of sarcophagus like coffin and inside that they find the skeletal remains of something that had horns. And of course they think it’s probably a demon. So there’s an archaeological dig anthropologist on the team and people recording it for documentary and all that stuff and it’s December on Mount Ararat and a storm comes in and while they’re all sort of trapped in the cave by the storm, people start disappearing and people start dying and people start behaving in ways that they otherwise wouldn’t behave.

DW: Wow. That seems to take so many threads of previous things you’ve written and they all converge.

CG: exactly. It’s all the stuff I love all jammed into one spot. And I will say also that it asks an intriguing question for me, which is: when you present a thing that will be perceived by some people as verifiable proof of what they believe, but the people around you is made up of Christians and Jews and Muslims and atheists… They’re all going to believe something different about what this thing is. So that’s really fun…

DW: the elephant in the dark.

CG: yes, exactly. And there is also an element of… As a kid, other than monster movies and Abbott and Costello, Clint Eastwood movies were the absolute end of things for me. Like they used to do Clint Eastwood week on local television and there’s some influence from the Eiger Sanction in this, which is such an amazing movie.

DW: That sounds very exciting. Can’t wait for it.