First ABSURD Interview: DAVID DUNWOODY

Welcome to my new interview series:

10 ABSURD/ NOT-SO-ABSURD QUESTIONS.

First up is seasoned author David Dunwoody. David dropped jaws with his first foray into the zombie apocalypse with his novel, EMPIRE. Since then he has written not just a sequel to Empire, but a host of other novellas and shorts, as well as two collections, DARK ENTITIES and UNBOUND & OTHER TALES. Dave lives in Utah and can be visited on the Web at http://daviddunwoody.com/

RCT: What draws you to the horror genre? What other genres do you enjoy writing and why?

DD: Fear and humor have always been my favorite areas to tap into. Although not everybody likes to be scared, or to laugh, I think fear and amusement are probably the most universally accessible and compelling emotions. Even love has to rank below a good chuckle. After all, psychopaths, animals and babies all laugh (no offense psychopaths). Humor and fear complement one another beautifully too. Nothing like a laugh to offset a particularly dark scene or set the reader up for one. I’d like to inject more humor into future horror projects. I do write a lot about clowns, but they’re not funny. At all.

RCT: You’ve got a dozen eggs, some fried chicken, 4 zucchinis, a bunch of grapes, wheat bread, spaghetti sauce, two onions, an avocado, 3 hotdogs, cheddar cheese, and a large bowl of chili. What would you make to eat (feel free to combine items).

DD: I would use the uncooked spaghetti to spear the heart of the avocado, as avocados are vampire eggs. A chicken leg would make an effective mallet. I would then eat the whole brick of cheese with my hands and pretend I was a king, because as far as I know kings did that.

RCT: How do you approach writing dialogue?

DD: Dialogue is one of my favorite things to write, probably because it seems to come the most easily. Most characters’ internal and external voices exist for me long before I have a picture of what they look like, or even fully understand their motivation. The dialogue is the thing that feels the most real about them - what a character says to others (and to him/herself) is who they are, even if it’s contradictory or otherwise loony. Some people simply are their self-delusion, and that’s true for a lot of my characters right up till they meet their end.

RCT: You’re naked, stranded on a pacific island. A box of clothes washes ashore. Inside are a speedo, a two piece bikini, a large fig leaf, and a batman cape. Which do you wear and why?

DD: I would use the bikini top and cape to become BEE MAN and then eat the fig leaf. Who the hell’s gonna know? I don’t even care if bees don’t eat leaves. Bee Man does. It’s my mythos and I’ll own it until I die of a heat stroke.

RCT: Do you see the horror genre as a reflection of our lives and times....erm...at times, that is? In other words, does your writing draw from real life, or vice versa?

DD: I think it reflects our times as well as timeless fears from our most primal sources. David Cronenberg called horror a genre of confrontation rather than escapism and I think that’s the right way to go about it. I don’t view a rollercoaster as a pleasant distraction from taxes and reality TV. It scares the goddamn piss out of me to be weightless and slung around hairpin turns. And it’s gratifying to survive the ride and own the experience. Even though I am seriously never going on a fucking rollercoaster again, I get the same rush from good horror and I hope I provide it.

RCT: What was your favorite book to write so far, and why?

DD: It’s a dead heat between my 2010 novel Unbound and an upcoming work called The Harvest Cycle, which was edited by some maniac at Permuted. I think I enjoyed both because I was able to let go of the boundaries of genre (the boundaries I perceived, anyway), and that sense of freedom led to better characters and better plot turns. For me it seems that shedding genre conventions helps me be a more honest writer, which I’m sure has to do with some deep-rooted personal issues, but hey, it works!

RCT: Smurfs or Snorks? Why?

DD: Snorks, and you know why. If you don’t, do a Google Image search.

RCT: How do you find inspiration to bring something new to every one of your books?

DD: It probably goes back to that aversion to genre boundaries. For example, I wasn’t satisfied with the outline for my zombie novel Empire until I thought of adding the Grim Reaper as a nemesis for the undead. Opening the door to dark fantasy really got me excited about writing that book and its sequel. That same desire to do something weird and new drives me to make each novel distinct from the last. Even though The Harvest Cycle is a post-apocalyptic romp like Empire, it’s a very different kind of ride; where Empire was a haunted house, THC is the Tilt-a-Whirl.

I’m not claiming to be reinventing horror, but I’m not ready to start a novel until I’ve thought of an angle that makes me go, “How did I think of that?” That’s when it starts to feel like a new world is forming.

RCT: What planet would you like to live on? (feel free to tell us about planets we don’t know about yet).

DD: Any planet where a green-skinned vixen says “What is this…‘love’ you speak of?” She doesn’t actually have to be green, but I’m trying to be realistic.

RCT: Finally, what are you working on now and what do you have planned for the future?

DD: I’m all about short stories at the moment. I have a novel cooling off, waiting to be revised, and in the hopper is the aforementioned Harvest Cycle. It’s an apocalyptic story combining the Cthulhu Mythos with robot death squads, lobotomized cops and cannibals who use Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as their Bible. I had great fun writing it and I hope readers will have the same experience.

Thanks, Ryan!

 

RCT: Thank you, BEE MAN!