World Fantasy Award Winner Jeffrey Ford, Interviewing David Herter About October Dark
My friend Jeffrey Ford is an amazing fiction writer, so when he recommends a book, I tend to listen. The latest novel he's been talking about is October Dark by David Herter. Herter is the author of a number of novels including Evening's Empire, a contemporary fantasy involving an opera based on Jules Verne's 20,0000 Leagues Under the Sea, a community of cheese makers, and an arcane conspiracy. His Czech Trilogy, consisting of the novellas (from PS Publishing) On the Overgrown Path (2002), The Luminous Depths (2008), and One Who Disappeared (2009), dealing with the historical figures of composer Leos Janacek, writer Karel Capek, and composer Pavel Hass, respectively, are subtle and surreal, blending the fantastic with mystery, horror, and historical fact. The new novel, from Earthling Books is both a horror/mystery involving the history of the world of stop-motion animation and an evocation of late 1970's boyhood. Kong animator, Willis Obrien, Ray Harryhausen, writers Ray Bradbury and Tim Powers, are avowed influences on a complex tale that cuts back and forth in time as if edited together by a master of the cinema.
Ford likes this novel so much he was willing to do an exclusive interview with the author for Omnivoracious...
Jeffrey Ford for Amazon.com: What’s October Dark about?
David Herter: The novel offers up a secret history of the fantastic film, set in the summer of 1977 and the autumn of 1931. It’s the tale of a thirteen-year-old suburban kid named Will and his best friend Jim--rabid 8mm stop-motion animators and Famous Monsters fanatics. They get drawn into nefarious mysteries within and below the Dimension 150 Roadshow theater in the nearby metropolis of Grenton. It’s late May, shortly after Star Wars settles in for the long summer and sinister autumn.
October Dark is also the tale of Willis “Obie” O’Brien, the father of stop-motion animation. In 1931, at the site of what would become the Dimension 150 theater, Obie enters into a pact with Henri Mordaunt, an undying Phantasmagoria magician. Things end tragically, and the consequences ripple down through the decades. A battle is fought within the medium of cinema, waged by special effects technicians and Directors of Photography (and the composer Bernard Herrmann), all of whom rally around O’Brien. In 1977, Will and Jim are encountering its terminal convulsions. As Halloween approaches, they get pulled into dangerous currents and worlds on either side of the silver screen.
You might note the names and ages of my protagonists are identical to those in Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. With Mr. Bradbury’s permission, Something Wicked serves as the armature for October Dark. In my novel, he succeeded in making the 1957 movie Dark Carnival based on his short story “Black Ferris,” whereas in our world, the deal never quite gelled and Bradbury wrote Something Wicked instead.
The 1957 Dark Carnival movie serves as the nexus for Willis O’Brien’s vengeance against Henri Mordaunt. It carries a curse in its heart. And ever since its initial release, it’s been locked in lawsuits, shrouded in legend, unseen, unseeable. Only seven stills survive, published in a back-issue of Famous Monsters. But Jim and Will are fated to encounter the movie, rather forcefully, on Halloween.
Jeffrey Ford: It seems that a lot of research went into this book. What is the most amazing item of information you uncovered?
David Herter: Well, here’s the second most amazing item I uncovered. It’s widely believed that Father Athanasius Kircher invented the modern magic lantern in the seventeenth century, and thereby, motion pictures. I came across a great book called Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema by Laurent Mannoni (University of Exeter Press, 2000). Mannoni successfully argues that Kircher was only a boastful charlatan, and that the true inventor was the 17th century mathematician and astronomer Christiaan Huygens, most famous for discovering the rings of Saturn. Huygens came up with the magica lanterna on a lark (he called it simply a “lantern”), and was also responsible for producing the earliest known representation of a moving slide: ten macabre little pictures ‘for representation by means of convex glasses in a lantern’, of a skeleton removing its own head. In other words, Huygens was the first motion picture animator. I found it quite cool that the first animation was a portrayal of death, and one that suggests Ray Harryhausen’s famous skeleton from Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. All this I happily incorporated into my plot.
Jeffrey Ford: The work of Ray Harryhausen is an influence on and a presence in October Dark. What is it about Harryhausen’s monsters that makes them still fascinating to watch in an age of CGI. What is your favorite scene from one of his movies?
David Herter: Like Will, I was a rabid 8mm stop motion animator. Mr. Harryhausen was my hero (soon to be joined by John Dykstra, Douglas Trumbull, Dennis Muren, David Allen, Jim Danforth, Phil Tippett and others).
If you encounter Harryhausen’s work at a certain age, you’re captured for life. His creatures aren’t photo-realistic, of course, but that’s their strength. They rise up from a child’s dreams and nightmares, given weight by adult forefathers like Gustav Dore, the monolithic painters Charles Knight and Joseph Michael Gandy, and of course, and by Obie’s King Kong. And like Kong, Harryhausen’s creations possess a large personality and presence. Then there’s his vivid colors — for instance, the orange Cyclops in Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, and the aquamarine Dragon with its scarlet maw, as crucial as Bernard Herrmann’s eerie, thrilling music, a vivid color of its own.
Also, for me at least, Harryhausen’s creatures are forever linked with the consumption of large quantities of sugar. The sequences have a lucid dream buzz about them: it’s midnight, and you’ve just chewed ten sticks of Grape Bubs Daddy bubble gum and chugged an equal number of Cokes, and now you’re huddled a little too close to the color console TV in your basement.
Most amazing of all, unlike today’s CGI efforts -- where scenes are pre-visioned to within an inch of their life, and conjured by dozens or hundreds of artists at their keyboards -- Harryhausen’s monsters were the work of one man physically wrassling with inert ball socket joints and key stock. Like O’Brien, he created these spectacular scenes without a safety net, picturing the movements only in his head. And from the beginning, stop motion animation was a solitary, almost monastic, craft, begun independently by O’Brien and the amazing Russian Ladislaw Starewicz (who used not metal armatures but dead insects and animals; he was a re-animator) and carried forward by descendants like Danforth and Allen. Allen worked for many years on a project, The Primevals never to be completed. I’ve made it central to my plot.
My favorite Harryhausen scene? It might change tomorrow, but right now I’d choose the creation of the homunculus in Golden Voyage of Sinbad, when the evil magician Prince Koura cuts his palm and conjures a little winged demon with his blood. It’s not only hugely cool, it’s the ideal metaphor for the bond between animator and puppet.
But then again, how could I not choose the Cyclops or the Dragon sequences from Seventh Voyage of Sinbad? Or the duel with the skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts?
Jeffrey Ford: I believe you’ve written that there is an autobiographical aspect to the story. If so, what was it like looking back into your past as you were writing October Dark?
David Herter: The autobiography was the hardest part. Will Travers is much like me. Like Will (both in Something Wicked and October Dark) I was born on Halloween. I was thirteen in 1977 — Will’s age in Bradbury’s novel. And I had a best friend named Jim who shares many of the good aspects of Jim in October Dark (and with Jim in Something Wicked). But in the earlier versions of the book I tried to write something closer to autobiography, in a first-person voice. I could never find the groove. I had to distance myself, both in voice and incident. Most of October Dark is fiction, though there remain scenes that are almost factual, like the set-piece where Will and Jim travel into the big city on May 25, 1977 to see Star Wars. (Star Wars was the carnival that arrived and settled in at the domed cinema palace — the UA Cinema 150 in Seattle — for nearly a year).
I enjoyed placing the cherished details from that era, such as Wacky Packages trading cards, Bubs Daddy Gum, Lincoln Enterprises catalogs, copies of Famous Monsters and Mad and Cinefantastique, and 200’ super 8 reels of Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Golden Voyage of Sinbad. In fact, all these things comprise a sort of Kabbalistic magic system for the characters in October Dark.
Jeffrey Ford: What were you doing, where were you, what was happening, when you first had the notion to write this book?
David Herter: I had just graduated high school. In 1982 I wrote a feature length screenplay about a group of Star Wars fans, with three acts taking place on the opening days of the three films. This was between the release of The Empire Strikes Back and what was destined to become the ultimate movie of all time, Revenge of the Jedi. My screenplay didn’t turn out that well, but then again, neither did Jedi. (For awhile, I yearned to write a “novelization” of the Revenge of the Jedi I’d envisioned). After abandoning my filmmaking career, I always entertained the notion of one day writing a novel based on my screenplay. I knew I had to gain distance from the events. Every now and then I would try something, inspired by reading, say, Daniel Pinkwater’s Snark novels. Only when I recognized that I could use Something Wicked This Way Comes as an armature of sorts — and that I could fracture that narrative like Bradbury’s mirror maze, and twist the plot around on itself like a Moebius strip — did I feel ready to write it. Still, there were a lot of false starts. The project would have stayed dead if Paul Miller at Earthling Publications hadn’t pressed me to write a novel for his Halloween series. When I decided to add Willis O’Brien as a character, the work caught fire.
Jeffrey Ford: You cite Ray Bradbury as an influence on your writing of the novel. What short story of his would you recommend to someone who has never read his fiction? Why?
David Herter: Is there a reader who’s never read Bradbury? If so, I’d recommend “The Jar” and “The Third Expedition.” Then I’d shove The Stories of Ray Bradbury under their noses. The Martian Chronicles, too. I’m also fond of his novels Death is a Lonely Business and its sequel, A Graveyard for Lunatics, which features Bradbury’s own loving portrait of his friend Ray Harryhausen.
Jeffrey Ford: What’s next?
David Herter: One Who Disappeared, the last volume of my Czech trilogy, is due out shortly from P.S. Publishing. And I’m currently working on my five-volume space opera, The Wilderness of Ruin, of which Ceres Storm, my first published novel, was volume two. Yan Tan Tethera, a sort of sidequel to Ceres Storm, is complete, and a prequel, In the Photon Forests, is about sixty percent done. After writing four novels set in the real world, featuring real people and events, I’m happy to be able to make stuff up.
Mike Smith on March 17, 2010 at 09:47 AM
I really enjoyed 'Ceres Storm' when I read it a few years back--it reminded me a bit of Delany's 'Nova', literate and allusive. Looking forward to the prequels etc.
Jonathan on March 17, 2010 at 03:45 PM
Whenever I read interviews like this it reminds me how little I know about a lot of things. It also piques my curiosity. I need to get my hands on October Dark. Now. Thanks!
George on March 18, 2010 at 09:34 PM
Thanks for providing this most interesting interview.