Eventually the paramedics showed up and shocked him with their defibrillator, put a breathing tube down his throat, gave him a shot of adrenaline. None of it worked. I’m not sure if the man was dead or alive when they finally took him out to the ambulance. The saddest thing was that nobody seemed to know his name. Apparently he’d just joined the gym, another fat New Orleanian determined to finally get in shape, but unable to pace himself. I saw them on my table all the time. People kept asking each other who he was, but no one knew. I hated the idea that he might have died in a place where not only did no one love him, but no one even knew him.
From the moment I realized I couldn’t help him to the moment they strapped him to the stretcher and carried him out, I felt that I shouldn’t be watching. It felt wrong somehow to be looking at him, even though I was holding my St. Joseph medal and praying for him. When I performed autopsies, I didn’t feel this way at all. I knew those people were dead and didn’t give a damn who looked at them, and in many cases I was performing one of the last kind (if brutal) acts anyone was ever going to do for them. But this man was not alive, not dead, not yet ready for my table, no longer a part of the laughing, eating, living world. He was in the borderlands, and it seemed a very personal moment that all of us strangers shouldn’t be looking at…but we all did, as if he might give us the answer to the question we’d been yearning for ever since we were old enough to conceive of our own deaths.
There is no profession, no occupation, no state of jadedness that confers immunity from fear of death. The taboo is too strong; we can lessen it through exposure but never eliminate it entirely. The horror movies are riveting, but, I think, wrong: we do not believe the dead will come back to life and hurt us. Rather, we fear them because they will never come back to life, and because we can never know where they have gone. In that way, we are the ones wandering the borderlands. We are lost and they are found. They know a terrible secret, and they will never share it with us.
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Fiction: Surveillance by Joe R. Lansdale
When Johnson arose from bed he was careful to not scratch himself, and when he went to the bathroom to do his business, he sat on the toilet with his pajama pants down and a towel across his lap. Finally, however, modesty had to be discarded. He finished up on the toilet and undressed quickly and jumped in the shower and pulled the curtain, knowing full well that he could be seen by the overhead camera, but at least the one over the door was not directed at him, and sometimes, he felt that if he could minimize the number of cameras on him, he could count it as some sort of victory.
He toweled off quickly, wrapped the towel around his waist, and then he dressed even more quickly, and went down and had his breakfast. He wanted to have two eggs instead of the one allotted, but the cameras were there, and if he had two, there would be the ticket from headquarters, and the fine. He had the one, and the one cup of coffee allotted, went out to this car and pushed the button that turned it on. It went along the route it was supposed to go, and he could hear the almost silent twisting of the little cameras on their cables as they turned in the ceiling and dash and armrests of the car to get a full view of his face, which he tried to keep neutral.
When the car parked him in the company parking lot, he got out and looked at the cameras in the parking garage, sighed, went to the elevator that took him down to the street. In the elevator he looked at the red eye of the camera there. He didn’t even feel comfortable picking his nose, and he needed to.
He could remember before everything was so secure and so safe, when you could do that and not end up as an electrical charge on billions of little chips funneled through billions of little wires, or for that matter, thrown wireless across the voids, to have the impulses collected like puzzle pieces and thrown together in your image, showing all that you did from morning to night.
The only place he had found any privacy was under the covers. He could pick his nose there. He could masturbate there, but he knew the cameras would pick up his moves beneath the covers, and certainly plenty of people had no problem picking their nose or showing their dicks or grunting at stool, knowing full well that eventually some human eye would look at it all and smack its lips over certain things, or laugh at this or that, but he was not amongst them.
He arrived at the street level and stepped off the elevator. All along the street the cameras on the wire snakes moved and twisted every which way. He walked along until he was a block from his office, and he noticed an old building off to the side. He passed it every day, but today he looked at it, and saw there was a doorway set back deep. When he came to it he looked in and saw that it had a little squeeze space inside, a place that had been made to get out of the rain or to place your umbrella.
He looked at the cameras on the street, and they looked at him. He stepped into the alcove and turned so that he was in the little nook and cranny. He stood there for a while, and then he sat down in the space, and knew for the first time in a long time, no camera could see him. The camera knew he had gone there, but it couldn’t see him, and that gave him a great moment of peace, and soon he found he didn’t want to leave, and he watched as the sunlight changed and moved and people walked by, not noticing. He couldn’t see them, but he could hear them and he could see their shadows. He picked his nose and flicked the boogers, and took deep breaths and enjoyed the coolness of the stone on his back.
Come nightfall he was still there, and he felt content. He was hungry, but still he didn’t leave. He sat there and enjoyed it. When the lights of the city came on, he still sat there, and wouldn’t move, and finally two police officers came. They had seen the cameras, the film, and they had seen where he had gone and that he had not come out. They arrested him and took him downtown and put him in the jail where the cameras worked night and day from every angle in the cell, and when they put him there, he began to scream, and he screamed all night, and into the morning, when they finally came for him and gave him a sedative and put him in a ward with others who had tried to hide from the cameras. The shots they gave him made him sleep, and in his sleep the cameras whirled and twisted on cables throughout the place and took his image and shot it across wireless space and tucked it away on little cells smaller than atoms.
In the next week, the old building was torn down and a new one was put up and the cameras were installed. Everything worked nicely. No one could hide from the cameras. Everyone’s mail was read before they read it, and their phone calls were monitored, and to be safe they made sure no one had the chance to use lawyers or complain, and the world was nice and easy and oh so safe, now that there was nothing left to fear.
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Interview:David Morrell
A name familiar to both horror and thriller fans, David Morrell, author of such classic suspense novels as First Blood, Testament, The Brotherhood of the Rose, The Covenant of the Flame, and Assumed Identity, to name a few, continues to push the envelope with his latest, Scavenger, a thrill-a-minute pulse-pounding adventure story about time capsules, “letterboxing”, video games, and egomaniacal psychopaths.
SP: Creepers has a lot in common with Scavenger. Aside from the presence of two of the main characters from the first novel, and a narrative that plays out in real-time, Scavenger also expands on the theme of the first book, that of obsession with the past. In this novel, our heroes discover a man not only obsessed with the past, but with the present and future as well. What for you is the appeal of this theme, and do you think it’s an inescapable preoccupation as we get older?
DM: The theme of an obsession with the past lurked in earlier books, also. Double Image comes to mind. It’s about photography and how a man falls in love with the image of a woman in a photograph taken in 1933. At one point, the main character decides to replicate a series of famous photographs that depict Los Angeles in the 1920s and 1930s. He goes to the original sites and uses the same camera that the original photographer used, trying to take new photographs from the exact sam
e angle that the original photographer used, so that the new images can be positioned over the old ones in the manner of a double exposure. Photographs, in general, are eerie. They stop time. Meanwhile, the world moves forward, but particular moments are frozen. Many of the people we look at in photographs are dead, and yet they still seem alive on film. Obviously, there’s some psychological factor that drives me to write about this theme. Perhaps it’s inevitable as someone gets older, or perhaps it has something to do with my son’s death from cancer in 1987. I spend a lot of my time thinking about him and going into the past.
SP:Would you agree that another link between both books is that while Scavenger involves people hunting for time-capsules, The Paragon Hotel, (from Creepers) was itself a time capsule, in essence making the practice of “creeping” and “scavenging” very similar? And of course, books themselves are time capsules of a sort.
DM: Exactly. The Paragon Hotel was sealed and abandoned since 1971. It still has its original furniture, the old phones, the old TV sets, the business documents. Exploring it is like going into a time warp, or if you like, a time capsule. In SCAVENGER, the characters get drawn back into the past—the ghost town and the Sepulcher of Worldly Desires. In each case, the characters learn that the past is buried for a reason. But at the same time, Balenger is drawn to the past because of his post-traumatic stress disorder. He was in the First Gulf War as an Army Ranger. In the Second Gulf War, the current one, he was a civilian security contractor who got captured by insurgents and nearly had his head chopped off. His nightmares drove him to a psychiatrist, who fashioned a therapy for him in which the only books he reads are from a hundred years ago and more. The only television programs he watches are on the History Channel. He avoids the present by retreating into the past. The only “modern” novels he has read are Jack Finney’s Time and Again and Richard Matheson’s Bid Time Return, which was filmed as Somewhere in Time. The main characters of those books concentrate on the past with so much intensity that they transport themselves to an earlier time. That is Balenger’s goal.
SP:Both Creepers and Scavenger feature action told in “real time” – what additional challenges does this method present to you as a writer?
DM: Creepers is told in strict real time. The action of the book takes eight hours, and the book takes eight hours to read out loud (as exemplified by the Brilliance unabridged audio). There aren’t any cuts, summaries, or leaps forward, as in “Five minutes later, he reached the second floor.” Every instant of every breath is on the page. Scavenger is somewhat different. Although each individual section is written in real time, there are leaps in time between each section. Otherwise, the forty hours of the plot would have required a massive book. I chose forty hours because the average video game takes that long to play.
SP: In Scavenger, you’ve brought Balenger and Amanda back for another run through the wringer. What about these particular characters appeals to you?
DM: I enjoy writing about Balenger’s compulsion to retreat into the past. And I’m fascinated by the resemblance between Amanda and Balenger’s dead wife. The first sentence of Scavenger immediately addresses that theme: “He no longer called her by his dead wife’s name.” When he rescued Amanda from the Paragon Hotel, he literally thought he was rescuing his wife. Now he must make a huge adjustment in his emotions. As for Amanda, she’s amazingly strong: a survivor. That’s why they’re in the novel. I didn’t intend SCAVENGER as a follow-up book to Creepers. But the plot brings together a group of characters who are experts in survival—two mountain climbers who endured a harrowing incident on Mt. Everest, a woman who drifted for two weeks in a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean, a Marine aviator who was shot down in Iraq and hunted by insurgents for ten days. What Balenger and Amanda did to survive in the Paragon Hotel puts them in that category, so in a way the book demanded that they be included.
SP:Can readers expect to see them in further adventures, or do you think their run of bad luck has come to an end?
DM: Next year’s book is an espionage novel, the first spy book I’ve written since Extreme Denial in 1996. But after that, I’m going to do another “eerie” thriller, and there’s a chance I’ll bring back Amanda and Balenger. It all depends if the plot requires them. There’s no point in repeating characters unless they bring something necessary and useful to the story.
SP: Scavenger reads as if it required a ton of research. How hands-on did you get with scavenging, “geocaching”, and video gaming?
DM: I started with a lot of on-line research. Then I got a hand-held GPS receiver and learned how to use it to follow a course to a specific destination. The interesting thing about geocaching is that it sounds simple—“follow the needle to the destination.” But objects such as rivers and cliffs keep getting in the way and demand a lot of problem solving. It’s very challenging and interesting. As for video games, I remember being addicted when the first versions came out. I got so obsessed and physical as I played the games that I caused the chair I was on to disintegrate. I almost knocked myself out when I fell on the floor. Since then, I’ve been cautious about them. But as I note in Scavenger, I was heavily influenced by the video-game theories in Stephen Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good for You. Johnson argues that the speed and complex decision making in video games teaches players to be capable of parallel thinking and multi-tasking. In effect, new ways of thinking are being developed. We may be seeing a radical change in the way our brains process information. I couldn’t wait to explore these ideas in Scavenger and to deal with the difference between time in virtual reality as opposed to clock time.
SP: You have launched a massive promotional effort for Scavenger, including, but not limited to: video and online interviews, a website for the book (http://www.scavengerthebook.com), MySpace pages for both yourself (http://www.myspace.com/davidmorrell) and Frank Balenger (http://www.myspace.com/frankbalenger), and even an excellently produced online game (which I completed, by the way, but not without much cursing and hair-pulling). After a similar campaign for Creepers, how effective has this kind of promotion been for you? And after so many years in the business, do you find it’s gotten tougher to raise awareness of your books?
DM: For writers who follow a traditional publicity model, it’s more difficult to get attention for a book. Fewer newspapers and magazines are doing book reviews, for example, and more books are being published. The consequence is that authors need to find newer, fresher ways of promoting a novel. For starters, I don’t talk about the plots of my recent books. Creepers is about urban exploration: history and architecture enthusiasts who infiltrate old buildings that have been sealed and abandoned for decades. Scavenger is about a desperate high-tech scavenger hunt to find a lost 100-year-old time capsule. When I do interviews for these books, I talk about those non-fiction topics: urban explorers and time capsules. Those subjects fascinate me, and I love talking about them. I enjoy seeing the looks on faces when I tell people about the Westinghouse time capsule that was buried at the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York. The capstone is still there, but the torpedo-shaped capsule won’t be opened until 5,000 years from now. Meanwhile, the chillingly named Crypt of Civilization at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta won’t be opened for 6,000 years. I love talking about the ten most-wanted time capsules. Reporters and media interviewers don’t like authors who emphasize plot. They want a non-fiction subject that can be approached as a news story. That’s one new approach to publicizing a book. The other is to use the Internet and provide intriguing electronic ways of telling readers about a book. On scavengerthebook.com, there’s a five minute video interview that I did with a supporting cast member of the TV show, Friends. There’s a one-minute animated trailer with sound, like a movie trailer. There’s a podcast with images. It’s all a lot of fun and only the beginning of how the Internet can make readers aware of books.
SP: When we last spoke, you were embarking on some pretty exciting comic book work, but couldn’t say much about it. Can you tell us
a little more about the project now?
DM: It’s called CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE END, a six-part comic-book series scheduled to start appearing in September. I’m very excited by this journey into a new way of telling a story, which is basically stop-action images similar to those in a storyboard for a film. The story takes place in Afghanistan, and I had several goals. First, to make the reader believe there’s a Captain America. Second, to make the narrative as emotional as it’s action-packed. Third, to explore the theme of the burden of being a superhero in today’s troubled world, especially a superhero named after the United States.
SP:Lastly, rumor has it your next book will be entitled The Spy Who Came for Christmas (a wonderful Le Carre-like title). Can you tell us a bit about the book, and when we should look for it?
DM: The Spy Who Came for Christmas is the espionage novel I mentioned earlier. It’s a modern action thriller that takes place on Christmas Eve in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I live. We have a mile-long street of art galleries that are so spectacular when lit on Christmas Eve that Santa Fe qualifies as a world holiday destination. People come from everywhere to be here on Christmas Eve. During the course of the story’s action, the main character is trapped with a family that he didn’t mean to endanger. To try to calm them, he tells them the spy’s version of the Nativity story. His historical espionage tale makes the traditional Biblical testaments more vivid and dramatic. Those couple of paragraphs in the Bible are more complicated than is generally realized. All the elements of the novel have a strong basis in history. It was great fun to do research on Christmas Eve on the fabulously lit street, Canyon Road, where the story takes place.
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