Hands down one of the finest books I’ve read that’s come out
of the (late) Samhain Publishing stable is Q
Island by Russell James. Of course I
had to track Russell down and pester him.
SRW: Welcome Russell! Let’s get the boring writerly crap
outta the way first. Constantly I’m being told to watch my overuse of metaphors
and adverbs. In Q Island, you certainly don’t adhere to that rule. But you pull
it off beautifully. Your metaphors never get in the way of the story and
actually help to propel the narrative, a rare achievement. Have you ever had an
editor (or anyone) tell you to cool it?
RJ: I had a writing
coach circle a whole bunch of metaphors and ask how they fit into the story. I
didn’t have a good answer. They were just off the wall. So after that, it was
kind of a challenge to find ones that created the image I was looking for and
also stayed within the theme of the scene or fit the character’s point of view.
SRW: Give the Tornado Alley readers an idea what Q Island’s
about. But do it very melodramatically please (just because it amuses me).
RJ: A virus gets loose
on Long Island, New York that turns people into crazed killers. The government
blows the bridges and quarantines the island. Melanie Bailey has an autistic
son who gets infected, but does not get sick. In fact, his autism gets a bit
better. She realizes he may be the key to several cures, if she can get him off
the island. So she has to get him past the crazies, she has to get him past the
government soldiers, and she has to keep him out of the hands of a criminal
gang leader, who has his own ideas about what to do with a boy who might be a
cure.
SRW: Let’s talk about that bizarre first chapter. When I
started reading, I was like “What the hell? I didn’t sign on for a book told
from the viewpoint of a mastodon!” Defend yourself.
RJ: You wanted the
story from the beginning, right? The first chapter was a risk. I wanted the
reader to know the impact of the virus from the start and how it became
entombed. There’s no infected point of view scenes in the book, so all you’ll
see later is the crazies on the attack. This chapter was a chance to know how
messed up their world is. I was hesitant to keep it in, but the editor of
Samhain at the time, Don D’Auria said to keep it. The man is a horror editing
legend, so what Don said went. So it stayed.
SRW: It’s cool. In retrospect, I believe the opening chapter
helps ground the book in reality. Kinda.
Russell, the book’s very rough-going in parts. Not the
writing! It’s extremely well written. But you don’t shy away from the gore and ultra-violence. Do you intentionally try to push boundaries in your books?
RJ: Q Island is
without question the harshest horror I’ve ever written. The infected on the
rampage brought a lot of that out. There’s a scene of
cannibalism, and I worked really hard to capture the character’s simultaneous
psychological repulsion to the act juxtaposed with the overwhelming physical
craving to dive in. My wife is reading the manuscript in another room and calls
out “Okay, I’m skipping the brain eating.” And I yell back, “No! You can’t!
That’s the best scene!”
SRW: You certainly know your way around military grade guns,
weapons and artillery. Russell, are you a gun-toting, mountain-dwelling
survivalist or a heavy duty researcher?
RJ: I spent five years
in the U.S. Army as a Black Hawk helicopter pilot, so I picked up a lot of the
military stuff there.
SRW: I could tell there was a good deal of research done for
this book. Nice job. I enjoyed how we follow the paths of four very different people
until their journey dovetails in a solidly apocalyptic finale. Aiden, one of
your protagonists, is a young boy with autism. Not only did you mine his
illness to great suspenseful effect, I think you handled it with care and
sensitivity. Have you had any personal experience with anyone who suffers from
autism?
RJ: My wife is the
principal of a school for children with learning disabilities. She has many
autistic children there from all along the spectrum. Aiden’s character is at
the far end of that spectrum. My wife has lots of sad stories about how some of
the kids were treated before enrolling with her. She was the expert on Aiden. I
would ask her whether certain reactions were normal, and what accommodations
parents would have to make. That part of the story has brought me some
heartwarming fan mail from people much closer to the condition than I am, who
are so happy that the autistic child wasn’t the villain. I had one woman come
back the second day of a horror con in tears to tell me that her son was autistic,
she’d stayed up most of the night to finish the book, and Melanie’s life was
just like hers. My wife gets full credit for me nailing the character.
SRW: Melanie, Aiden’s mother, is a warrior, a fierce lioness
who’ll do anything to protect her cub. I have to say, though, I was a little
taken aback about how she was so willing to have her son studied by the
military. Surely she had to know that’d be a living hell for him.
RJ: Melanie also has
this naïve streak in her. She doesn’t realize what a total jerk her husband is,
early on she keeps thinking that society will maintain some normalcy. She loses
a lot of this as the book progresses, but in her desperation to save her son,
with escape from the island seemingly impossible, that naiveté peeks out just
one more time. Everyone needs a character flaw.
SRW: Jimmy Wade is a
particularly interesting character. Starting off as a weasel of a street hood,
he soon becomes a frightening Big Bad, a very King-like villain. Level with me,
Russell…did you have any empathy for Jimmy? Or did you hate him as much as
readers will? (I ask because oddly enough I find myself eventually empathizing
with a lot of my villains. Doesn’t say much for me.)
RJ: Someone said the
villain must be written as if he is the hero of his own story. I really focused
on that for Jimmy, how he thinks that none of the bad decisions he’s made put
him in the hole he starts the story in, just bad luck and people hating him.
Then he goes megalomaniac when finally he gets the power he thinks he’s deserved
his whole life. But nah, he’s a spittoon of a human being and I liked the
ending of the book.
SRW: Q Island is a zombie book, yet not. I think what makes
it more terrifying than your standard stalk and muncher is that the paleovirus
is all too real, a common fear these days.
Other than avoiding eating mammoth steaks, what would you advise people
to do in such a situation?
RJ: Everyone but my
friends and family should confront the infected with absolutely no weapons or
game plan. It will leave a lot more canned food and ammunition for the
important people. I’ll be living on a stolen thirty-foot sailboat with a lot of
fishing gear and spindle-mounted miniguns on the bow and stern. Please call
first before dropping by.
SRW: I'll bring mammoth steaks. Back to research, did you read up on the CDC and other
emergency plans? Your scenario smacks of reality. (And I read in your
afterword, that you don’t know anything about medical procedures and the likes.
But your research paid off).
RJ: I did some
research on CDC plans in the event of an emergency, then did some common sense
extrapolation to match the scenario. All the real medical science credit goes
to fellow author and nurse Rita Brandon, who seriously schooled me on
infectious disease, hospital protocols, and trauma injuries. She deserves major
props for keeping all that in the real world.
SRW: You don’t paint a very pretty picture of the government or humanity in general. (Of course there's Tamara and
Eddie, two very likeable, sacrificing characters but they seem to be the minority). Now, horror as a general rule, is a very cynical genre. Do you
consider yourself a cynic?
RJ: The inspiration
for this story hit after watching what happened in New Orleans when Hurricane
Katrina came ashore. People were isolated and short on supplies. Society broke
down in hours. There were stories of public bus drivers abandoning evacuation
routes to save themselves. Police opened fire without provocation. The
Superdome became a cesspool. And all this was in a situation where the water
was guaranteed to recede. I wondered what would happen if this was on a larger,
more permanent scale. Long Island fit the bill since it was just a few bridges,
a tunnel, and some ferries away from being cut off from the world. So is Q Island cynical
about the depths people might sink to in an emergency? I’m afraid it’s just
realistic.
SRW: What’s up next on your keyboard?
RJ: Well, plans went
awry after Samhain announced they were closing up shop. I had a novel under
contract for next month called The Portal, about the Devil returning to a
little island off Massachusetts to try again to open a portal between here and
Hell. So that needs a home. I also have a serial killer thriller novel finished
and a sequel to Q Island called Return to Q Island, where one man has to
smuggle himself back to the island to save his mother and sister. (The place
has gone seriously downhill since Melanie left.) So, I’m shopping all those
titles around.
I will have a new
collection of time travel stories called Forever Out of Time out on Kindle in
June. It will be joining several other short story collections that range from
horror to science fiction.
The easiest place to
see everything I’ve written is on my Amazon page here:
There’s also a
Facebook author page:
And my never-up-to-date
website:
