An Interview with the author
Q: Have you always been interested in literature?< xml="true" ns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" prefix="o" namespace="">
A: I’ve always been a fairly avid reader. I spent a great deal of time as a child in a neighborhood where there weren’t many other kids, so I turned to books: Ian Fleming, early Stephen King—this was the 1970s—science fiction like Frank Herbert’s Dune series, Tolkien. My mother had a bookcase full of mostly pop novels, but also a volume of the collected works of Poe. That one I came back to over and over.
My tastes became more eclectic as I got older. I had a couple of very good teachers along the way—one of them had us reading Shakespeare in the eighth grade. In high school, I read a mix of contemporary writers like John Irving and Kurt Vonnegut, classics like Joseph Conrad, Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 was a favorite. Lots of non-fiction too. I was a big fan of gonzo journalism, Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, things like that.
Two of my favorite writers these days are the late Philip K. Dick, and Phillip Roth, who continues to produce first-rate American literature.
Q: How did you become a writer?
A. I began writing stories when I was about 14, but I didn’t take it seriously. I wasn’t then (or now) as imaginative as I would have liked, and I got discouraged. A few of those pieces are extant; they make for amusing reading but aren’t anything more than curiosities.
I became interested in journalism, wrote for the school newspaper, copy-edited the yearbook, things like that. As a high school senior, I had just about covered all the requirements, and I was allowed to create a special workshop-style class for myself where I met once a week with one of the English teachers, and I wrote whatever I felt like. Stories, film reviews, essays—a cornucopia of material. I wish I had more of that work now, but it seems to have vanished into the ether.
I also became a movie buff and tried writing scripts for a while, which was my major at USC in the mid-eighties—screenwriting and film production. So I got distracted from fiction by that, and after getting my degree I had a couple of different careers, one as a motion picture archivist, another as a small retail business owner.
I began writing seriously again maybe 10 years ago, and went into overdrive about 2000 when I said to myself, you’re not getting any younger and if you want a shot at writing, you’d better get serious.
Q: Tell us about King’s Highway. Is this your first novel?
A: First to be published. But King’s Highway is actually the third one that I’ve finished. The others are longer and perhaps a touch more ambitious than this one. Nothing heavy in King’s Highway, just an immature kid trying to gain a sense of his own identity, But this is a theme I seem to come back to again and again.
The most interesting aspect to me as a writer is that King’s Highway was meant to be the second novel in a series about a private investigator character I’ve developed, and this was to be a flashback to an early adventure that got him interested in crime. I decided to use this character as part of another novel rather than on his own, however, so I took the basic story I had mapped out and just created a new protagonist, lost the modern-day framing devices, and now King’s Highway is a stand-alone piece.
Q: What made you want to write a novel in such a setting?
A: I vacationed every summer for a week with my family in Myrtle Beach, and loved it. I grew up in a very small, rather prosaic South Carolina town, and that beach week was something to which I looked forward with great anticipation -- the tourist town full of interesting people, the amusement parks, the sense of fun and adventure. Downtown Myrtle Beach seemed like an exotic, big city to me, since at the time I hadn’t traveled much.
I was a bit younger than Ray DeKalb (the novel’s protagonist) in 1978, when King’s Highway takes place—I would have been only 12 or 13 then. I remember watching older kids like Ray, though, and fantasized about being “grown up” like them, on my own, going to Mother Fletcher’s or some other nightclub—typical adolescent desire to be more mature, independent. Those people seemed so adult to me, which in retrospect is hardly the case, as is demonstrated in the plotline of the book.
Q: What else have you published?
A: Only one short story so far. I won Pearl magazine’s 2006 fiction competition for a story called “Forever 27.” I have two other novels that are complete, as well as something like 25 stories with which I’m satisfied. I hope to publish a thematically linked story collection one of these days soon.
Q: What’s next?
A: At any given time, I always have two or three stories cooking. I have about half a dozen novels under way in some form as well. The next one I think I will finish is a psychological horror piece called The Dogs of Macon Downs, sort of an animal-lover’s horror story: I call it Deliverance meets Pet Sematery. I hope it will turn out as creepy as I have envisioned it.
The other major project under way is called The Widow Darby, a mainstream, romantic thriller about a woman who believes her supposedly dead husband has reappeared as a famous, successful mystery novelist—and she wants revenge for his having faked his death and left her in the lurch. It’s pretty fun so far, very different from anything else I’ve written, with a decent enough twist and payoff. One (or both) of these should be complete later this year.
