Cavallaro's Cavalcade of Carnage
Critically acclaimed author, and all-around nice guy CHAD LUTZKE has agreed to have a chat with us about his new book THE PALE WHITE, amongst other things. Some of the questions are dumb, but that's my fault, not his.

HDI: Chad, it's great to finally have a chat with you. I've read all of your books (including the forthcoming THE PALE WHITE, which is stellar by the way) so I feel like I halfway know you already.

CL: Wow! Thanks for reading them all. When I hear of people doing that I'm always afraid the next one might let them down. I suppose that's a feeling that will never go away.

HDI: You should write a terrible one on purpose. It'll take some pressure off of you.

CL: Ha! I'm far too paranoid to do that. I'd be afraid it'd be the first one a new reader would grab and I'd lose potential readership, like if someone's first time hearing Metallica is St. Anger.

HDI: Jack Ketchum praised your work very early in your career. Stephen Graham Jones, James Newman, Cemetery Dance, John Boden, and Dan Padavona have also endorsed your work. Despite all of that, have you ever struggled with imposter syndrome?

CL: Constantly. It's easy to convince yourself people are just being nice, but my wife helps me feel a bit more worthy of the praise. She sets me straight. I was recently invited to a few anthologies with some big names in them as well as being a part of the Joe Lansdale documentary ALL HAIL THE POPCORN KING and I just kind of shake my head, thinking there must be some mistake.

HDI: Brian Keene has stated before (and I'm paraphrasing here) that he can write without both hands or eyes, but he cannot write without music. Being a musician, that notion has always intrigued me. Some of your books, especially SKULLFACE BOY and THE SAME DEEP WATER AS YOU, lead me to believe that you may agree with Brian on this.

CL: Actually, not really. I think because I am a musician it can be harder. I'm super tuned in to whatever's playing. I'm listening to the groove, the riff, the production, the lyrics. I'm listening to every instrument. It's like this: Your average person who listens to something like Sabbath's WAR PIGS marvels at Ozzy's voice and Iommi's solos, but they're missing Geezer's playing buried in there. He's all over the place in that song. They're missing Ward's playing. They don't realize half that song is an impressive drum fill. But I hear all of it, so when I'm writing and music is on I can get easily distracted. I connect to it on a pretty deep level. That being said, I do often listen to some instrumental music while writing, particularly synthwave, horror film soundtracks, or light jazz. And to completely contradict everything I just said, I have listened to certain music to find a mood or tone. When I wrote THE SAME DEEP WATER AS YOU I listened to The Cure's DISINTEGRATION. Most of that had to do with how autobiographical DEEP WATER is and that album was the soundtrack. For SKULLFACE BOY I listened to nothing but synthwave and early KISS. And for THE PALE WHITE I listened to a lot of dreary stuff like MAZZY STAR, COWBOY JUNKIES, WARPAINT and some of DANZIG'S slower stuff. How's that for a convoluted answer?

HDI: I think I get what you're saying. While music is important to get you into the appropriate frame of mind to create a story, it isn't necessarily intrinsic in the actual physical WRITING of it?

CL: Right. I write all the time without it. It's just not an essential tool for me, which almost hurts to say considering how much I love music and can't live without it.

HDI: By the way, I totally agree with your assessment of Ward's drumming in WAR PIGS. It's one of the rare heavy metal songs that truly has the spirit of jazz drumming in it. To drummers, some of those licks are just as iconic as Iommi's riffs. (this question added just for my sheer enjoyment. I've always felt this way about Ward's performance of this song)

CL: It's too bad it takes a drummer to recognize that. I know he's not under appreciated in the drumming world, but he's often overlooked by your casual Ozzy fan for sure. He's easily in my top 3.

HDI: Ok, back on topic: By my count, THE PALE WHITE is your 7th novella. Tell us why you hate novels!

CL: I've tried to figure that out for a few years now, and I think what it boils down to is a couple of things. One being that I don't pad anything. I don't wander off into some really long section to tell a character's background, and I'm not big on description. I think description can sometimes pull a reader right out of the story. By default, our minds are already giving a scene it's color and shape as we read or a new character their eye and hair color. When we're forced to back up and go a different route using this wordy description it can sometimes kill the moment. Some writers make padding work very well, others don't. I prefer to write as lean as I can, and my main concern is to have every page be entertaining. I want the reader to enjoy the entire ride, not just when things finally pick up halfway through the book. Another reason why I write novellas, I think, is because I normally have a fairly small cast of characters, with the exception of SKULLFACE BOY, which is less than 1,000 words shy of being a novel.

HDI: In my opinion, one hallmark of a Lutzke book is that you seem to jump into the second act pretty quickly and then you infuse backstory later, which is somewhat atypical. Is this a consequence of your slush pile reading at Shock Totem?

CL: Good question. My top priority when I started writing was to immediately give a person a reason to turn to page 2. Force them to ask questions they need to know the answers to, then fill in the blanks organically, which includes backstory. Reading slush for Shock Totem didn't influence this decision but it certainly solidified it. If you don't hook an editor within those first few pages, you've got little chance of the rest of your story being read. Editors show varying degrees of mercy, from 1 page to 3+, but when you're staring at 800+ stories to get through, you don't have the time to invest in page after page of nonsense just to get to something that may or may not be any good.

HDI: This reminds me of a story I've heard about the music producer, Ross Robinson. After releasing KORN's highly successful debut album, he started receiving a 50-gallon trash bag's worth of demos from unsigned bands, EVERY DAY. He would listen to all of them, but only for 30 seconds. So maybe an editor with a 3 page limit isn't so uncharitable.

CL: Wow, that's rough, considering how often bands use a lengthy intro in their first song, an intro that often doesn't represent the rest of the album.

HDI: Ok, lets talk about THE PALE WHITE. The story deals with sex trafficking. In the hands of most writers, they would use the abduction, violence and escape as main plot points and it would be turned into a pseudo-horror/thriller. But you have chosen to focus on the emotional impact of those events instead. Was this a deliberate decision?

CL: For the most part, yes. The book was to start at the escape and only reflect on the abduction and life at the house; however, when I'd written about a third of it, it was initially a vampire book where "Doc" was this good vampire who saved three girls from a sex trafficking house and kind of took them under his wing and turned them...but without them really knowing. Then one day he kills himself, leaving behind instructions on who they are, where they came from and contact information for everyone who wronged them. The rest of the book was going to be this bloody road trip filled with revenge. Doc was initially based on the character in my short story SELF-IMMOLATION (found in NIGHT AS A CATALYST) about a vampire who is fed up with what the world has become and kills himself so he can see a sunrise one more time. But as you can see, the book ended up completely different, and I like it much more than my original idea, though it still has its fair share of blood.

HDI: Also different for you was dealing with writing three female protagonists. Was this difficult?

CL: Very. Not only writing in first person as a female but one who has been through sexual trauma. I'm not an extreme writer, and unless I'm invited to write such a story for an anthology, I'm not out to shock anyone to the level of just being disgusting, so it needed to be done with tact. Sex trafficking is a serious issue, and whether there is actual trafficking involved or not, being sexually assaulted or molested in any manner is traumatic. I've seen the aftermath first hand in several people I've known over the years, and it's horribly sad. This book was meant to tell a story within that realm but without being unnecessarily distasteful..

HDI: This is absolutely one of your best books, and I highly recommend it. Is there anything else you'd like to say about it?

CL: Thanks a lot, Jason! Other than THE PALE WHITE coming out September 27th, Poltergeist Press is releasing a hardcover version of OF FOSTER HOMES & FLIES on September 20th. Also, I wished you lived closer so we could jam. We could nab Jeremy Wagner and maybe teach John Boden to play bass.

HDI: Lets jam at Jeremy's place. I need to check if he has an alarm system for those nice guitars he's got...John Boden is a good choice too, but he has to bring cookies.

CL: Dibs on the sticker-covered Hanneman!

BIO:

Chad has written for Famous Monsters of Filmland, Rue Morgue, Cemetery Dance, and Scream magazine. He's had a few dozen short stories published, and some of his books include: OF FOSTER HOMES & FLIES, WALLFLOWER, STIRRING THE SHEETS, SKULLFACE BOY, THE SAME DEEP WATER AS YOU, and THE PALE WHITE. Lutzke's work has been praised by authors Jack Ketchum, Stephen Graham Jones, James Newman, Elizabeth Massie, Cemetery Dance, and his own mother. He can be found lurking the internet at www.chadlutzke.com

Interview by Jason Cavallaro
jcavallaro42@gmail.com
twitter: @pinheadspawn


278 Comments

Linear

Add Comment

Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA