| TIM CURRAN |
 |
| LB: Would you tell us about your book SKIN MEDICINE? TC: It’s about a bounty hunter in the old west who tracks a Jack the Ripper type of killer to a Utah mining town. Once there, this bounty hunter must face the demons of his own past and a nameless horror born during a New England witch trial…one so awful that it makes his killer seem pretty insignificant. It was a fun book to write and it’s been well-recieved. A lot of historical research was involved but as a sort of history buff, that didn’t bother me at all. The novel encompasses a pretty weird mix of elements: vigilantes and Mormon exterminators, shape-shifters and pagan devils, New England witch-trials and demonic possession, incarnate virgin births and hereditary degeneration…all of this mixed up with embittered Civil War vets, a seedy mining town, hillbillies, outlaws, and some pretty cool sidebars concerning cannibalism, war crimes, and ghoulism. I had fun with it. LB: Do you feel your ability to mix genres in your writing (horror, western, crime, science-fiction and mystery) allows you to overcome the genre hurdle and opens your work to a wider audience? TC: Well, I’m hoping so. My first love is horror and I love mixing up other genres with it, but I like writing straight crime or western fiction, too. I’m trying to keep my options open, I guess. I like to be comfortable enough so I can jump out in any direction and land on my feet, write any sort of genre I want or invent my own, if that’s possible. LB: Would you tell us a bit about your novella ONE DARK SEPTEMBER NIGHT? TC: Well, it’s basically about how the intervention of malign events in someone’s life can totally destroy them. Not just physically, but psychologically and spiritually. It’s also about friendship and the destruction of it. In the story, some kids out fooling around come upon a man burying the body of a woman he’s killed and he catches them at it, makes one of them do something very horrible to the others. The sort of thing that rips the kid’s mind and sense of self wide open. It’s a very dark story. LB: What makes a great horror tale, in your opinion? TC: Three things: atmosphere, interesting characters, and a horror that is not only scary, but has an impact on the characters and how they think. Realistically, if anyone was to go through some of the dire events in horror stories, they would either be insane or fundamentally changed somehow. Like a war, you can’t go through it without changing, without seeing the world differently afterwards. LB: What projects do you have planned for 2005? I’ll be in a book called Sisters in Evil from Hellbound Books. I’ll have a 50,000 word novella in it and so will James Cain. Walt Hicks is writing a wraparound story to encompass the two. They’re both about evil women of sorts. Mine concerns Lilith, the destroyer demon being reborn in contemporary Milwaukee amidst a string of crucifixion murders and sightings of what is thought to be the Virgin Mother. Other than that I’ll be doing a collection of stories with Tim Johnson. I have several novels out there looking for good homes and I’m hunting for an agent currently. LB: What are your writing habits like? TC: I generally write two to three hours a day. I like to put out about 2,000 words at a sitting. Sometimes it’s less and sometimes it’s more. But I’m very disciplined about it. You have to be. |