Welcome to Roundtable Reviews.

 

RR:  Devil Glass is your first published novel.  It is an honor for me to get to ask you a few questions.  Can you tell readers a bit more of the path you’ve taken to becoming published?

 

 

RC:  Having Devil Glass published is the culmination of a dream that started when I was about sixteen. Back then it was simply the initial spark of a desire to find an outlet for the incredible imagination with which I was blessed. It didn’t take much thought to conclude that pencil and paper were considerably cheaper than a movie camera and all the trappings of the visual media, so early on this spark became a desire to write.

I was driven to create, but clueless as to the direction I might send my imagination. I dabbled in science fiction and I went through a political phase, but nothing clicked. And, of course, when I wasn’t trying to develop my writing talent I was consuming horror movies with wild abandon.

I grew up watching all of the movies starring Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Vincent Price and Lon Chaney, but there came a point in my tenure as a consumer of these movies when I began craving something different. All of the studios were doing remakes of Dracula, Frankenstein or another werewolf movie and I wanted new stories. I wanted fresh material and I wasn’t getting it.

The day of reckoning came for me at the end of a particularly dissatisfying movie. As I left the theater a thought leaped into my mind: I could do that good. The thought created an explosive three way collision between my desire to write, my imagination and my love of horror.

That’s when it all really started for me and I was filled with a completely new passion, I was driven to give something back to the Horror genre, something that would satisfy my own need for fresh material. I was beginning my labor of love. Devil Glass was originally a short story with which I was dissatisfied. After two rewrites I had a version of the story that was sixty-eight pages, but I was still unhappy. It didn’t have the emotional impact I wanted. I finally concluded that more character development was the only thing that would help. That’s when I realized I had to write a novel to tell the story.

It took me eighteen years to craft Devil Glass. I was absolutely anal about the story and the quality of the writing, constantly comparing both to the works of my two unwitting mentors, Stephen King and Anne Rice. The story was finished in August of 1999 and it took until March of 2000 to complete all of the required rewriting (to fully understand this timeline it must be noted that I was also working full time). In March of 2000 I obtained my copyright and started looking for an agent. I guess I’d have to say that was when the fun ended.

The first agent replying to my query responded this way: “Sorry, not interested. My publishers tell me Horror is dead, no pun intended.” With that response came my first small taste of what I call authorship-induced depression, but I wasn’t to be stopped. After about four months of searching the Internet and sending out queries I signed with an agent and I was ecstatic, but in hindsight it wasn’t the blessing I thought it was. This “agent” charged me $200 a month for his representation. The contract with Publish America that he finally secured for me could have been obtained without his help had I been a little less naïve about the marketing end of the business. After two years and nearly $5000 in fees the agent dropped me like a hot potato when I lost my job and was unable to pay him his $200 a month. That was a wake up call for me and shortly thereafter I learned how absurd it was to pay an agent a monthly fee.

For me, getting published was a very long road filled with some serious potholes, but things are starting to look better, thanks in large part to the efforts of my publicist, Patty Nunn.

 

RR:  It isn’t a huge secret that I found Joyce Robbins from Devil Glass to be a bit obnoxious.  I felt her treatment of a fellow professor, who I took to be a bit shy, was very harsh.  Why have her act so rude?  Please say she wasn’t based on any woman you’ve known!

 

RC:  First, let me say that I was surprised by your low opinion of Joyce, but that’s all right. It’s a fact of life that nobody in this world finds everybody else likable and the dislike is usually based on a first impression. And no, Joyce Robbins was not patterned off of anyone in my past. I’ve never known anyone as emotionally damaged as her. She was an only child who wanted a sibling more than anything else. When she was seven years old, fate, with the help of a drunk driver, ended her chances of ever having that dream fulfilled. It was later in life during her college years when she received the most devastating blow, a blow that turned her heart cold. She loves men in general and loves sex, but only lets them get so close to her. Get too close and you find a heart of stone and certainly under the right circumstances she could be described as a cold-hearted bitch. Life has crushed her ability to love. The rudeness to which you refer was a result of a sudden, life changing shock. Had the professor kept their relationship where she wanted it he wouldn’t have suffered such a cruel blow. Had circumstances allowed the conversation at the museum he intended to have, he would have understood. Life doesn’t always follow our expectations and certainly not for the professor that day. 

 

RR:  Now along those lines, my mom picked up and read your book in one sitting.  She loved it.  Like you she is a big fan of Anne Rice.  Would you say that she had an influence in your writing career?

 

RC:  Absolutely. As stated earlier Stephen King and Anne Rice were my unwitting mentors. Anne taught me about relationships and how to make characters real. I read “The Vampire Chronicles” completely out of order, starting with Memnock the Devil. I watched Interview with the Vampire starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pit and was stunned. I listened to my wife rave about The Witching Hour, but nothing prepared me for Memnock. I was spellbound by her writing and left speechless by her descriptions of heaven and hell. I pay close attention when I’m affected so profoundly. Anne has done for the vampire legend what Henry Ford did for transportation. And the way she weaves the different stories together makes it seem impossible that they are works of fiction. Lestat, Marius, Armand, Pandora, Merrick…they’re all deadly killers with the dark, preternatural blood and yet the reader is hopelessly in love with them. What skill Anne possesses!

 

RR:  It’s obvious that you enjoy horror.  And I’ve read you enjoy horror movies.  What do you consider to be the most frightening movie of all time?

 

RC:  That is truly a difficult question. It’s like asking for someone to pick the most beautiful woman in the world. It’s cause to ramble on endlessly. The Fly with Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis certainly merits mention as does Alien and Aliens. Night of the Living Dead was frightening as hell and The Evil Dead was absolutely terrifying, but quality tends to eliminate them from serious consideration. As I recall, Day of the Triffids with those horrible carnivorous plants with the ability to move around was very scary, but as an adult there is one movie that stands alone in my mind as the scariest of all. Prince of Darkness, a John Carpenter film with Donald Pleasance, in my mind, takes the award. The environment that mixed scientific scrutiny with the cylindrical artifact that had been hidden away by the Church for centuries was enough to produce a permanent case of the heebie jeebies. Add to that the influence the artifact had on the homeless inhabitants of the neighborhood and the swarms of flesh eating bugs, the jitters became a very noticeable part of the movie affect. With the recurring shared dream came the creeps and the music tied everything together like the stitching on a corpse fresh from the autopsy table.

There was one other movie I should mention, simply because it was the driving force behind my love of horror. I was seven when my mother started bowling on an afternoon summer league. Being a one-car family, my dad had a choice of being stranded at home or taking her to the bowling alley. He chose the car, which left us with some time to kill while my mom took her frustrations out on the bowling pins. The Ohio Theater was just across the street from the bowling alley, so it wasn’t exactly an intuitive leap as to how to spend our time. I saw a lot of movies with my dad that summer, but I only remember the name of one of them, Dracula Has Returned from the Grave starring Christopher Lee as Dracula. My God, the things I saw that afternoon! I eventually reached my saturation point and asked my dad to take me out of the theater before the movie ended, but an amazing thing happened when I got outside in the warm sunlight. Looking back at the darkness of the theater I realized that having the crap scared out of you wasn’t really all that bad.

Yeah, that movie scared the hell out of me, but more to the point, it left me with an unquenchable thirst for horror.

  

 

RR:  Where did the idea for the Antitheus Vitrum originate?

 

RC:  Right out of my head. Antitheus Vitrum is the core of the story and its concept was the very first thing to be served up by my imagination when I decided to write horror. The rest of the story is just window dressing. The deep friendship between Joyce, Randy and Kim and their dangerous secret; the carved petrified wood of the artifact; the VanBurg museum; the diamond smuggler with the plans for murderous revenge; the museum guard with the nightmares, all window dressing to present the horrifying concept, which I will not expose in this interview. Bram Stoker gave the world Dracula, Mary Shelley gave the world Frankenstein and I gave the world Antitheus Vitrum, an aberrant crystalline structure with a horrible secret that the world doesn’t want to discover.

 

RR:  Your next book, The Bookseller , is in the works right now.  What will this book be about?

 

RC:  George Saunders and his wife Elizabeth own The Bookseller, a bookstore in which only rare books are bought and sold near Boston Common. The bookstore was a wedding present from Elizabeth’s father years before and is the foundation upon which they have built their lives, lives that are marked by love and contentment.

John Stoner is the lead man for one of the largest construction firms in the country. His current assignment has brought him to Freetown, Massachusetts where a mall is to be built. Before the construction can begin a woods must be cleared and a house within the woods demolished. This house, referred to as The House by locals, has been the source of legend for years dating back to the time of the Salem Witch Trials. When The House is razed a book is found, a book of unknown origin written in Latin on pages of parchment.

Carlos Ramirez is the head of a South American drug cartel that has just perfected a method of smuggling cocaine in the pages of books. They are looking for the perfect bookstore to “acquire”. Carlos is the latest incarnation of a spirit that has been attached to humanity from almost the beginning. We have known him by other names, some of which are Cain, Attila the Hun and Adolph Hitler.

Take these facts, mix well with an incredible imagination and a couple huge secrets that I’ve kept covered and you have a story that will take readers places where they’ve never been.   

 

RR:  Who do you feel has done the best portrayal of Dracula to date?

 

RC:  There have been so many great actors who have portrayed Dracula, Jack Palance is not one of them. Frank Langella was visually convincing and Gary Oldman added his own special touch to the character in, but I don’t think anybody can touch Christopher Lee. In my opinion Christopher Lee is Dracula, of course that could be a result of him scarring the hell of me when I was seven.  

 

RR:  Thanks so much for your time.  If there is anything that I have not asked that you would like to share with readers, please don’t hesitate to do so.

 

RC:  I worked on Devil Glass for so many years that I’ve actually become a bit calloused to the horror in the story. When I take a few conscious steps back away from the work and try to see it through the eyes of a stranger I find a truly horrifying tale. Devil Glass is destined to be a movie someday and when that film is released I’ll be forced to revise my answer about the most frightening movie of all time.

 

 

C. Robert Cales