Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Graham Masterton
Graham Masterton was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1946. He is mainly recognized for his horror novels, but he has also been a prolific writer of thrillers, disaster novels, and historical epics, as well as one of the world’s most influential series of sex instruction books. He became a newspaper reporter at the age of 17 and was appointed editor of Penthouse magazine at only 24. His first horror novel, The Manitou, was filmed with Tony Curtis playing the lead, and three of his short horror stories were filmed by Tony Scott for The Hunger TV series. Ten years ago, Graham turned his hand to crime novels, and White Bones, set in Ireland, was a Kindle phenomenon, selling over 100,000 copies in a month. This has been followed by eleven more bestselling crime novels featuring Detective Superintendent Katie Maguire, the latest of which is The Last Drop of Blood. In 2019, Graham was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Horror Writers Association. The Prix Graham Masterton for the best horror fiction in French has been awarded annually for the past ten years, and four years ago he established an award for short stories written by inmates in Polish prisons, Nagroda Grahama Mastertona “W Więzieniu Pisane.” He is currently working on new horror and crime novels. Visit www.grahammasterton.co.uk. And his Polish website, grahammasterton.pl.
Also Wikipedia, Facebook and https://www.bookseriesinorder.com/graham-masterton.
Did you start out writing or working in the horror field, and if so, why? If not, what were you writing initially and what compelled you to move into horror?
I started writing horror stories when I was 10 years old, mainly influenced by the Brothers Grimm and then Edgar Allan Poe. I used to read out my scary stories to my school friends during break time, and years later I met one of my school friends who said he hated me because he had not slept for a fortnight after I had read a story about a decapitated man still walking around singing Tiptoe Through The Tulips out of his severed neck.
I was not ‘compelled’ to write horror. What I enjoyed about it — and still find satisfying — is that I can write about the nightmarish things and situations that scare people the most, giving them a rush of adrenaline and a feeling that somebody understands their worst fears, but in the end leaving them unharmed.
After editing the UK edition of Penthouse magazine for three years, I started to make a good living writing sex instruction books. I wrote 29 altogether, but eventually, the bottom fell out of the market, so to speak. Fortunately, I had written a horror novel for my own amusement in between sex books, inspired by my late wife Wiescka’s first pregnancy and an article I had read about Native American mythology in The Buffalo Bill Annual when I was about nine years old. This was The Manitou, which was filmed with Tony Curtis playing the lead role. It also was the first Western horror novel to be published in Poland after the collapse of Communism.
Who were your influences as a writer when you started out and who, if anyone, continues to influence you?
I continued to write prolifically in my teens, mostly poetry, and when he moved to London, I became friends with William Burroughs and other Beat writers like Alex Trocchi, Allen Ginsberg, and Brion Gysin. William and I put together a novella in his ‘cut-up’ technique. Rules of Duel, which was published about 20 years later by Telos Books and is still available on Amazon.
William and I spent many hours working out ways of writing so that readers would feel that they were actually living the story rather than reading it. ‘Let them feel the wind on the back of their neck,’ he used to say. ‘Let them hear a ship whistling in a distant harbor.’ We deconstructed language and put it back together again like a car engine, so that it would run smoothly and quietly.
Other influences in my early days were Nelson Algren, who wrote The Man With The Golden Arm and Herman Wouk, who wrote The Caine Mutiny. I admired Algren’s tough no-nonsense language and Wouk’s extraordinary characterization and plotting. I was also impressed by the utter candor of the Dutch writer and artist Jan Cremer and later – when I became editor of Penthouse–I was able to commission him to write articles for me.
I am not influenced by anybody now.
How have the changes in horror publishing over the past decades affected you?
In some ways, they have made horror more generally popular and acceptable, so sales are healthy, although in the early ‘90s, there was a dramatic dip in sales for some inexplicable reason. However, that led me to start writing a series of crime thrillers set in Cork, Ireland, featuring a feisty woman detective superintendent, Katie Maguire, and they have sold consistently well.
Do you think you’ve encountered ageism? If so, how do you counteract or deal with it?
No. I try to keep up with what’s going on in the world of music, fashion, and technology, and I am not yet ready for the pipe and slippers and nodding off in the afternoon.
What do you wish you knew when you were just getting into the field?
The Manitou and Salem’s Lot were published around the same time. Stephen King continued to write horror and steadily built up a tremendous following. I wrote one or two more horror novels, such as The Revenge of the Manitou and The Djinn, but then I wandered off and wrote political thrillers and hefty historical sagas such as Rich and Railroad. They sold very well, and some of them made the New York Times bestseller list, but I lost the momentum with my horror novels and when I eventually returned to them, I really had to start building up an audience from scratch, all over again.
Do you have any advice for writers just starting out?
Be totally original. The reason The Manitou sold so well (and is still selling) is because it was not about vampires or werewolves or zombies, but about a demonic threat from another culture. I have written only one vampire novel, Descendant, which set the record straight by featuring authentic strigoi from Romanian mythology rather than men in cloaks who flew in through the window and bit young women’s necks. Also, make your settings and your characters utterly believable, with problems of their own to deal with, quite apart from the supernatural threat. All of the locations in my novels are real, and you can even visit the same restaurants as my characters and order the same food.
Do you think older characters are represented fairly and honestly in horror fiction?
In all honesty, I have no idea since I read almost no horror fiction. I am so fiercely critical of my own work that I find it very difficult to read the horror fiction of anyone else.
What are some of your favorite portrayals of older characters?
Again, I can’t say.
Do you have anything you’d like to add that we haven’t asked?
One of the ways in which I keep my writing fresh and varied is to co-write horror stories with younger writers. I have published stories that I wrote with Dawn G. Harris in a recent collection Days Of Utter Dread and I helped Dawn to write her debut novel, Diviner, a supernatural story about a girl with an uncanny sixth sense. At the moment I am also writing stories with a young Polish psychiatrist Karolina Mogielska, and our first co-written story, Mr Nobody, featuring the frightening Polish goddess Dziewanna, was published in the latest edition of Phantasmagoria magazine. Karolina and I have already written more stories and plan to bring out a collection inspired by Slavic mythology early next year.
