*Thanks to Armand Rosamilia for letting me reblog this great interview with Joe McKinney.
Joe McKinney Guest Post for #WinterZombie2014
Why I Write the Dark Stuff
Joe McKinney
In my day job, I’m a patrol
supervisor for the San Antonio Police Department. I work the west side
of town. The police officers who make the calls, who make the arrests,
who keep the peace in the busiest part of the city, they work for me.
I’m the one they call when they have major crime scenes that need
managing or when something just doesn’t look right.
What that means is that I have to see a lot of dead bodies. And I mean a lot of them.
Like last week. One of my
officers called because he had a decomp (police parlance for a body
that’s been rotting in place for a good long while) and he wasn’t sure
if it was suicide or homicide. So I showed up to the apartment and
there was the dead guy, seated on the floor (or almost on the
floor, his butt was about two inches off the carpet). He had a noose
around his neck, though you could barely see it because his skin was so
bloated and gummy with rot that it had sort of oozed over the rope.
“So, what do you think?” the officer asked.
“Suicide,” I told him.
“But he’s sitting down. Wouldn’t
he have rolled over or something when he started to choke? That’s like
an instinct or something, isn’t it?”
“No,” I said. “What you’re looking at is an act of will power. If you want to do something bad enough, you’ll see it through.”
He looked from me to the body and shook his head.
“Besides,” I added, “look at all
that medication in there in his bathroom. Those drugs are for hepatitis
and cancer. He did this because he was hurting pretty bad. And look
up there.” I pointed to the ceiling where our dead guy had nailed the
rope to the rafter. “He did that because he didn’t want the rope to
slip off. And look at where he chose to do this, here in the bedroom,
so his relatives coming in the front door wouldn’t have to see him. I
bet if you look around here, you’ll find a note. Probably in the other
room, out of sight of the bedroom.”
The officer nodded.
We both stood there, staring at
the body. The apartment didn’t have air conditioning, and it felt like
standing inside an oven, even though it was the middle of the night.
The smell was really bad.
The officer kind of chuckled and said, “So, Sarge, I guess this is one for your next book, huh?”
I offered him a bland smile. Cops
develop their gallows humor long before they learn that it’s actually a
defense mechanism against the horror of confronting your own mortality,
and this officer was one of the young ones. He still had a lot to
learn.
“Go look for the note,” I said.
He stiffened. “Yes, sir.”
When he was gone, I found myself
looking at that dead man’s face. Suicides always get to me. Something
about standing in the presence of someone so desperate to take control
of their pain and their emotional devastation that they would resort to
this makes me feel numb.
In the other room, the young
officer was clumsily knocking around. Something fell over and broke. I
almost called out to him to be careful, but held my tongue. You see,
my mind had drifted from my day job to my night job. I was thinking
about what he’d said about my next book. So many people seem to have
that opinion about horror, and about zombie fiction in particular. To
them, a book about shambling dead things eating the living must be
nothing but gratuitous violence and gore. What else could it be?
Well, I take exception to that.
I started writing because I was
scared of the future. My wife and I had just gotten married. Then we
had a daughter, and the world suddenly seemed so much more complex. In
the wink of an eye, I went from a carefree young cop—a lot like the one
in the other room knocking stuff over—to a man with more
responsibilities than he could count. I had obligations and commitments
coming at me from every angle.
I’d been writing stories for a
good long while at that point, starting sometime in my early teens, but
never with the intention of doing anything about them. I would write
them out on a yellow legal pad, staple the finished pages together, and
leave them on the corner of my desk until the next idea came to me.
Never once did it occur to me to
do something with what I’d written. I just threw those stories away and
forgot them. But then came adulthood, and parenthood, and I found
myself groping to put the world in order, to regain some of the control I
felt I had lost. I realized that writing could help me with that. I
realized that I could focus my anxieties and make something useful of
them.
And so I started writing a science
fiction novel. It was a big space opera epic, and it was pure trash.
Every word of it was awful.
The reason? Well, it wasn’t authentic. It wasn’t me.
The real me, the kid who sat at
his desk filling up yellow legal pads rather than going out bike riding
with his friends, was a horror junkie. I was crazy for the stuff.
Horror was my first literary love, and I figured, seeing as love was
what drove me to return to writing, that I should write what I love. I
was feeling like the world was rushing at me from every side, so I wrote
a zombie story about characters who had the living dead rushing in at
them from every side. That’s when things started to click. That’s when
it all made sense.
But it wasn’t just that simple.
You see, I sincerely believe that fear is the most authentic, and the
most useful, emotion available to the storyteller. It is as vital as
love, and indeed, gives love its profundity, for what makes love, and
family, and everything we treasure so valuable but the fear that it
could all go away in the blink of an eye. For me, fear goes far beyond
monsters. It is the catalyst for my creative process, and without that
creative process, I’m afraid I would wither up inside. I’m not saying
I’d end up like that suicide I just told you about if I couldn’t write
anymore, nothing that melodramatic, but absence of that creative outlet
would be a hole that nothing else could fill.
So that’s why I write the dark stuff.
San Antonio, Texas
September 11, 2012
* * * * *
The stench of frozen rotted meat
is in the air! Welcome to the Winter of Zombie Blog Tour 2014, with 10
of the best zombie authors spreading the disease in the month of
November.
Stop by the event page on Facebook
so you don’t miss an interview, guest post or teaser… and pick up some
great swag as well! Giveaways galore from most of the authors as well as
interaction with them! #WinterZombie2014
AND so you don’t miss any of the posts in November, here’s the complete list, updated daily:
