Strange Tales

Author D.L. Russel’s Dream is to Give You Nightmares

By Michael Summers

David Russell made a promise to himself many years ago when he served in the military during the first Iraq war: if he made it out of that experience, he was going to pursue his dream of becoming a horror writer.

“During Desert Storm, me and a bunch of guys in my unit were all sitting around talking about what we were going to do when we got out of the army,” he recalls. “For some reason, I just said if I survive this, I’m going to be a writer. If I can make it out of here, I’m going to do it.”

And he did. After he got out of the military, Russell, a graduate of Wayne High School, began the long and sometimes painstaking process of writing stories, honing his craft, and submitting his work to magazines that specialized in the horror/thriller genre.

“I write weird tales,” Russell says of his apprenticeship. “Everything I write is out there and ridiculous. It could never happen. But when you write something like that, you still have to pull the reader in, you still have to make them care about who you’re writing about, and you have to make it believable. If you develop your characters and bring your reader along, you can make anything believable.”

He says he submitted hundreds of stories, and even got a few bites. A horror magazine based in California called Aberrations accepted one of his stories and sent him a contract, but that’s when Russell ran into one of the problems plaguing the fiction magazine market — the magazine folded before his story could appear.

“The smaller ones come and go by the month,” Russell says. “You have to get lucky to find a publisher that’s actually going to make it.”

Of course, the magazine business isn’t what it used to be, so Russell began looking at other venues to place his work, and got lucky several years ago when Eternal Press, an Australia-based e-publisher specializing in genre fiction, took a liking to his stories and included a couple in an anthology they were publishing. Founded by Julie D’Arcy and K. Celeste Bryan, two novelists in their own right, Eternal Press is part of a burgeoning industry of online publishing companies, letting readers download books and stories directly to their computer or hand-held device. Bryan says that the demand for e-publishing comes from younger readers looking for an alternative to “the cookie-cutter template stories (offered by) New York mass market publishers.” Bryan says many of their customers read while commuting or traveling, and find an iPOD, say, a less bulky alternative to a typical print book.

Two of his short stories (he writes under the name D.L. Russell) were accepted for an anthology called Paranormal Bedtime Stories.

Eternal Press later released Russell’s novella called Maxwell: the Last Vampire. The publishers asked their authors for a “fresh take” on a vampire story, and Russell happened to have written one earlier that year. Russell calls it an action adventure story where the Maxwell of the title is trying to outwit the other “creatures of the night” intent on killing him and ridding the world of vampires once and for all.

“The big trend in vampire stories right now seems to be romance, and I didn’t want to write that,” Russell says, adding that he tried to create a more barren vampire myth for Maxwell. “The way I figure, vampires living for hundreds or thousands of years… it’s got to get old. Maxwell is really tired of being around.”

“To me, every horror writer should write their own version of a vampire story, or werewolf story, or whatever classic horror subject,” Russell continues. “That’s the basics of horror. Everything is tied into one of those, and most of it has been done to death to be honest with you. But if you can take that subject and put your own twist on it and come up with something new, readers will go for that.”

But Russell says Eternal Press’s primary focus is “paranormal romance,” which didn’t sit well with his style.

“That’s just not my cup of tea,” he says. “I’m not downing it or anything, but that’s just not what I write. The paranormal romance writers got more of the billing.”

After doing his research, Russell found Wildcat Books, an independent publisher based in Winchester, Virginia that he thought matched his sensibilities much better. Russell submitted a synopsis and some samples, and Wildcat Books liked what they read.

“The publisher really likes the ‘pulp fiction’ era,” Russell says. “Pulp fiction is kind of old school, and I think I write some old school, kind of Weird Tales and Amazing Stories kind of things. That’s the way I see my fiction, and I just thought it might be a good match with the pulp idea that they had.”

But now, as Russell’s first short story collection Hell Is An Awfully Big City is just coming out in print from Wildcat Books, he’s discovering that the actual writing process might be the easiest part of being a published author. When I reach Russell on his cell phone, he’s in a branch of one of the big chain bookstores in Fort Wayne, trying to find out if they stock books by local writers.

“I’m learning that when you’re in this business, you’re on your own,” he says. “I can’t stress that enough. Every writer out there is trying to push their work, and you’ve got to really, really promote your own book.”

So Russell has been doing the rounds. As it happens, this particular bookstore does not stock books by local authors, but he’s found plenty of others, here and in other cities, that do, so Russell has been calling and e-mailing as many places and people that he can, trying to set up book signings or anything else that can help promote Hell Is An Awfully Big City.

Among the nine stories in Hell Is An Awfully Big City include “Dreams Still On You,” about a bookstore owner who falls in love with the ghost living in his house. That was the story that first brought him to the attention of his old publisher, Eternal Press, who liked the “romantic” aspect of the piece enough to include it (and another story called “Raymond Doesn’t Remember”) in the anthology Paranormal Bedtime Stories.

Indeed, Russell’s take on the horror/supernatural genre is a little old school. The tales in Hell Is An Awfully Big City are modern stories in contemporary settings, but there’s sort of a Twilight Zone feel to many of them, where something that appears normal or average proves itself to be exactly the opposite.

“I like the old guys,” Russell says, explaining his literary influences. “Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch… I still love guys like Stephen King and Dean Koontz, but the older guys, the guys who used to get published in regular magazines when it seemed every single magazine used to run least one piece of fiction, those are the stories I really, really like.”

“The Old Men of McDonald’s” — the most recent story in the collection — takes its premise from a sight that’s familiar to many of us: the small groups of older men that can be found sipping coffee and holding forth in practically any franchise in the country. But Russell’s story gives these groups of seniors a deeper, stranger purpose. There’s also “That Ain’t No Chicken,” a funny story about an egg farm told, partially, from the point of view of the animals.

The title story is a “deal with the devil” story, where the main character Rufus is approached during the last days of his life by the Devil.

“I kind of feel that every horror writer needs to put their stamp on one of the basics, the classics, and the ‘deal with the devil’ story is one of those,” Russell says.

In addition to his own writing, Russell also publishes and edits the e-zine Strange, Weird and Wonderful.

“We believe there’s talent everywhere, and with the ‘zine, our goal was to give new writers a way to showcase their work,” he says. “I still get a rush when somebody sends in a good story and says they haven’t been published before.”

As with any fiction, the horror/supernatural genre has its share of conventions that have just been seen so many times that readers lose patience. As an author and an editor in the genre, Russell says that what counts is originality, the author’s own, unique take on a tale.

“Predictability is predictability,” he explains. “Readers can tell when something has been done before. There are stories that I’ve half-written that I’ve stopped because I’ve thought ‘I’ve seen this before.’ And it’ll just sit on the shelf if I can’t come up with something original.”

Russell points out that the old vampire story got an update several years ago, after Laurell K. Hamilton took up the baton from Anne Rice, revved up the sex and romance for her Anita Blake series, and sort of started the current “vampire romance” craze (see Stephanie Meyer).

“Even though I’m not a big fan of the whole ‘paranormal romance’ thing, when it started out it was pretty original,” Russell says. “Now, everyone is copying it, so it’s becoming cliché, but in the beginning, when Hamilton first started doing that, no one else was doing it, and it took the genre by storm.”

“There are only so many stories to be told, but there are a thousand ways to tell those stories, and when you can get a reader to forget that they might have seen the this or that before, and just get into the story you’re telling… then you’ve really got something.”

Visit  www.dlrussellsworld.com & www.strangeweirdandwonderful.com