five with frights:- robert r. best
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All great stories start with a writer, Mr. Best happens to be a writer of horror novels, such as his Memorial zombie trilogy, and he happens to be pretty great at it. Check out our interview below...
MR. FRIGHTS: You're Facebook page says you're "..a writer of mostly horror at the moment". What else are you into besides horror?-
ROBERT
R. BEST: Sci-fi and fantasy. Typical nerd stuff, really. Especially fantasy of the sword and sorcery variety. Tolkien especially, but basically anything where there's wizards and swords and questing. And for sci-fi I prefer space opera like Star Wars to "harder" sci-fi like 2001. I'm an unrepentant Star Wars nerd (all SEVEN movies, darn it) and I don't care who knows. I've tried my hand at writing sci-fi and fantasy, but to poor results. I discovered early on that horror came much more easily to me. Not sure what that says about me, but there it is. -
MR. FRIGHTS: For your book "All Kinds of Things Kill", is this more an anthology of fiction listing real ways to be killed or something more that you had to research real stories for?
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ROBERT
R. BEST: The title "All Kinds Of Things Kill" came at almost the last minute of putting the anthology together. I wish I'd been clever enough to think of the title beforehand and written the stories to match. But they were really just the nine stories that I thought were ready to publish. There were several others that didn't make the cut. I keep intending to update and finish those, but I've always got something else I'm working on. Maybe someday.
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MR. FRIGHTS: Zombie trilogy... why zombies and why a trilogy?
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ROBERT
R. BEST: I love zombies! When I was maybe eleven or twelve MTV showed the original Night Of The Living Dead on Halloween night. It freaked me the hell out and I've never forgotten it. There's something gripping, on both an esoteric and visceral level, about death literally consuming the living. But most important of all is that my wife Laura loves zombies. And when I started focusing my writing on horror years ago, she said "write me a zombie book." So I did.
And why a trilogy? I'm not sure, but it probably has something to do with my Star Wars and Tolkien obsessions. -
MR. FRIGHTS: Being an author of horror books, do you find you have the same kind of "built in audience" that horror movies have?
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ROBERT
R. BEST: To a certain extent, yes. I know I search out horror fiction when I go into a library or book store. And while I may be looking for a specific author, I'm open to a title or cover that grabs my attention. And I'll give it a chance just because it's horror. I think there's a lot of crossover between horror film fans and horror readers. And both groups will try new writers or filmmakers just out of love for the genre.
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MR. FRIGHTS: Are you currently working on any new horror stories?
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ROBERT
R. BEST: At the moment, I'm outlining the third and final book in the Memorial Trilogy. It will most likely be called World Memorial and will wrap up the central story and mythology. After that, I'm not sure. I've got a werewolf novel in mind that will probably be next. As far as short stories, nothing at the moment.
Hit the Grab Bag Questions below to go on with the interview...
GRAB BAG QUESTIONS
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MR. FRIGHTS: Do you have some authors who help inspire you?
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ROBERT
R. BEST: I love Kurt Vonnegut. He wrote in a way I could only dream of. His sentences are so direct, lean and powerful that sometimes they knock the breath out of you. I'm always trying to emulate that. I don't like things to be too wordy. The less words you can use, the better. The more concentrated the impact will be. Piling on adjectives and other descriptive crap will only weaken your writing.
I also love Jack Ketchum and Edward Lee.
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MR. FRIGHTS: Can you tell us about something that you might do other than writing that people might not know about?
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ROBERT
R. BEST: I dabble in audio production and recording. My wife Laura had a band in college and I loved recording their demos on an old four-track recorder. That was fun. We've since done some podcasting, like a podiobook version of "All Kinds Of Things Kill," and I loved doing the mixing and editing on that. I'm also a co-host of a genre movie review podcast called "Don't Look In the Podcast." We're currently on summer break, but you can find old eps in iTunes.
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MR. FRIGHTS: What would your reaction be if you found out that the things you write become real?
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ROBERT
R. BEST: Depends. Some of the stuff, like people who just go crazy and kill people, are real already. I think dealing with those things in horror defuses some of the emotional power they have over us. We can face them in pretend-land, so we're less terrorized by our everyday lives. But about the supernatural stuff, like zombies and werewolves, I don't know what I would do. I guess they would cease being supernatural as soon as they became real. They would just be another frightening thing in the world. I probably wouldn't last long. I'm not very resourceful.
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MR. FRIGHTS: Is there any kind of horror you would refuse to write about and why?
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ROBERT
R. BEST: Not really. I think just about any subject matter is fair game, so long as it's handled well. And that's the trick. If you're going to deal with really heavy-weight stuff, like child abuse or something, you need to tread very carefully. Not to avoid offending, but to make sure you handle the subject matter with the gravity it deserves. Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door is the most disturbing book I've ever read, and a perfect example of handling very taboo subject matter. I like fiction that takes risks, so I'd be willing to try just about any topic if (and that's a big if) I thought I could do it justice.
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MR. FRIGHTS: Are you the kind of author that one of your fans might turn Annie Wilkes on you?
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ROBERT
R. BEST: Do you mean would I be willing do kill off a beloved character? Absolutely. Not out of any maliciousness, though. I try to go where the story seems to want to go. To where it seems right on an emotional level. And sometimes the overall story demands that painful things happen. Especially in horror. But I can see where a fan might not like seeing a character go.