This week on Twisted Tales from Tornado Alley, I’m
interviewing J.G. Faherty, author of the immensely entertaining horror suspense
thriller The Cure.
SRW: Welcome, J.G! So…what’s J.G. stand for? Or will you
have to kill me if I find out?
J.G: No, I’m a relatively peaceful guy, as long as you don’t
try stealing food off my plate! I guard tacos religiously. JG stands for James
Gregory. When I first started writing, I didn’t want to use the same name as
what I use for business (Greg), so that when people search me they don’t get
confused.
SRW: I have to say I really enjoyed The Cure. Why don’t you start by telling the readers what the
tale’s about?
J.G: In The Cure,
Leah DeGarmo is a veterinarian with the ability to cure animals—or people—just
by laying hands on them. But there’s a twist. She only has a few hours to pass
on whatever illness or injury she’s taken in or she suffers it herself. Some
very bad people get wind of this and decide she’d make a great weapon, and she
ends up on the run from both criminals and the military. Along the way, she
discovers her powers are more complex than she ever realized.
SRW: Now, The Cure is being marketed as horror. While
there’re definitely some horrific elements to Leah’s predicament and curse, I
found it to be more of a suspenseful conspiracy thriller with light
science-fiction overtones. It reminded me of some of John Farris’s earlier
works (The Fury, etc.) and of Stephen
King’s Firestarter. Am I way off base
here? Is that what you were aiming for?
J.G: I never considered it horror. To me, it’s a
supernatural thriller, or maybe a paranormal thriller, whatever they’re calling
them these days. I think it got labeled horror by so many people because I’m
known more for that than anything else, and because it came out through a
publisher that does mostly horror (Samhain Publishing). I think Firestarter is an apt comparison; so is
F. Paul Wilson’s The Touch.
SRW: I’m a sucker for colorful villains. In The Cure, you’ve
created three: Tal, Del and Marsh. Bad guys every one of them. Not to take
anything away from your protagonist, Leah, but when the trio of villains took
center-stage, things become really interesting. Are you a villain fan? And
where did you dream these bad boys up?
J.G: You can’t have a great protagonist without an equally
strong villain. Yin and Yang. As for where they came from, Marsh was easy. I
needed a corporate bigwig. Del and Tal came about because they are again two side
of the same coin. Both evil, but Tal is stone cold and stubborn whereas Del is
more complex, he has a sense of humor and is very adaptable, yet he’s just as
nasty.
SRW: We share an affinity for four-legged pets (particularly
dogs in my case). In The Cure,
there’re a few scenes that made me cringe regarding animal cruelty.
(Movie-makers can kill off the entire boat-load of occupants of the Titanic and
I don’t shed a tear; put a dog in peril and I lose it). From your forward in
the book, I know you’re against cruel animal exploitation and experimentation.
Did you write this book in part as a pro-animal message?
J.G.: I don’t think I wrote it with that kind of message in
mind, although it does seem like it. I am a big animal rights person, though,
and for me nothing is worse than hurting an animal. I can’t even watch Will
Smith’s version of I Am Legend because the damn dog dies. So, for me, there
couldn’t be anything more evil than a villain who hurts animals, and nothing
more gut-twisting than a veterinarian who can only cure the sick if she hurts
another animal.
SRW: Furthermore, you’re pretty cruel to your heroine at
times (and the hero as well). Nature of the genre, I suppose. As a writer of
horror and suspense myself, at times I wonder if I’ve gone too far by torturing
my protagonists. But sometimes you have to “kill your darlings,” so to speak. Level
with me…did you want to pull back at all?
J.G: I don’t believe in pulling back, although I don’t
believe in going too far, either. Whatever is appropriate for the plot, both
from the writer’s standpoint and the reader’s. I’m cruel to the characters in
the book, but never gratuitous.
SRW: You paint a pretty negative image of today’s U.S.
military super-power. As a person (not a
writer), do you believe the military’s capable of kidnapping a civilian and
putting her through horrific scenarios as you’ve created?
J.G: Of course. I don’t think there’s anyone today who
doesn’t think that. Our military buys and sells cocaine, supplies anti-US
militants with weapons, and regularly co-opts academic research for weapons and
defense purposes. You’d have to be foolish not to think they’d want to study
the perfect assassin. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but my head’s not buried in
the sand, either.
SRW: Without giving anything away, you’ve left the book open
for a sequel. Hedging your bets, J.G? Or is one planned? If a sequel's forthcoming, what can you tell us about it (again without giving
any spoilers! A hard task, I know.)?
J.G: I’d like to do a sequel someday. I have some ideas. But
as of right now, it’s not in the works.
SRW: And here I thought I’ve been prolific! You’ve written a
volley of other works, J.G. Tell the readers a little about your work over-all.
And do it in iambic pentameter for fun! (Or anything else you can think of to
break up the monotony of listing a huge paragraph about your other books.)
J.G: I won’t do a huge paragraph, not my style! 5 novels, 9
novellas, more than 50 short stories. Compared to some of the other people who
started writing around the same time as me, I’m a turtle in a race with hares. If
you want to get an idea of what I write, start with Carnival of Fear, my first novel, or my book of short stories, The Monster Inside. If you’ve got a
tween or teen in the house, my Stoker-nominated YA novel Ghosts of Coronado Bay would be a good choice.
SRW: You have an interesting and varied background, J.G. How
has this played into your writing? How about your haunted upbringing?
J.G: Well, I personally wasn’t haunted. Not that I know of,
anyhow. But living in the Hudson Valley of New York, I grew up in an area known
for ghosts, hauntings, monsters in the woods, cursed lands and roads, and
Revolutionary War cemeteries. It’s also the UFO capital of the East Coast.
So... yeah, lots of fodder for stories!
SRW: What’s next on your laptop? What can readers look
forward to?
J.G: My next novella, Death
Do Us Part, comes out Jan. 5th. It’s an homage to the old Tales
from the Crypt stories, full of revenge, mayhem, and the living dead. After
that.... who knows?
SRW: There you have it, folks. Go get The Cure and check out J.G.’s other tales of horror and suspense
while you’re at it. J.G. can be found here:
www.twitter.com/jgfaherty
www.facebook.com/jgfaherty
www.jgfaherty.com
http://jgfaherty-blog.blogspot.com/
Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/jgfaherty
