Turning Primitive

My latest novel, Primitive, sees publication July 15 in trade paperback from Delirium Books (a 150 copy signed limited edition hardcover sold out many months ago). It's roots, however, go back at least seven years.

Like many writers, most of the ideas I get for novels and short stories start with a simple 'what if?' notion. This particular 'what if?' crossed my mind on my commute home from work one late summer afternoon in 2002. I was at a stop light, the radio playing Linkin Park or some other Nu Metal band, and as I sat in my car simply watching traffic and pedestrian patterns I suddenly thought, what if out of all these hundreds of people going about their way in a very civilized fashion, there was maybe two people running around like wild monkeys? I mean, literally wild...unclothed, uncouth, relieving themselves at will, maybe stopping to engage in copulation in the middle of the street or attacking random pedestrians...whatever...

It's a ridiculous notion, to be sure, but many ideas start with something totally ridiculous. To wit: what if the world's population was wiped out by the flu? (The Stand by Stephen King); what if there was only one man left on earth to battle vampires? (I Am Legend, Richard Matheson); what if books were illegal and firefighters were no longer responsible for putting out fires, but are now charged with the task of burning books whenever an illegal cache of them was found? (Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury). You get the idea.

The image stuck with me and remained with me for five years. In the beginning that's all it was; a simple image without a narrative focus, lacking any direction whatsoever. I had numerous questions about this simple scenario: how could such a thing happen? How would everybody react? Are there more wild people lurking about? These questions and more would come to the surface, but I couldn't answer them, at least not at the time. I was writing other novels and short stories (The Beloved, Bully, many of the stories in When the Darkness Falls, Clickers II, Hero, and the forthcoming The Corporation, among other things). My focus was on them, not this half-baked idea that I would occasionally revisit while at this same stop-light where the inspiration first occurred to me.

But at some point I started sketching out the scenario in my common-place book of ideas, elaborating on it, coming up with possible scenarios as to why this could happen. The first scenario, and the most obvious, was that it was caused by a virus. Something was introduced to the atmosphere or the food supply chain that affected the central nervous system, effectively eliminating the part of our brain that has become 'civilized'. It was at that point that I started researching brain and nervous disorders, everything from rabies to schizophrenia. The idea at this point was still in the back of my mind. I was still working on other projects, but by this time (mid 2006, perhaps), a more or less linear plot-line was beginning to develop--a handful of survivors trying to live in a world suddenly gone mad. It was a plot device that had been tackled numerous times before, by writers I admire very much. The film 28 Days Later and the novel Blood Crazy by Simon Clark came to mind (for the record, I have never read Blood Crazy, but I was familiar with the plot). However, I felt my idea had a more unique take on the theme of survival in a post apocalyptic world, essentially the supernatural elements that were beginning to develop, so one day in the Spring of 2006, I decided to tackle it.

The result was a novella called "The Power of the Primitive".

Why a novella? The most obvious reason was the idea did not originally lend itself to novel-length. The original ending in the novella was rather ambiguous; I wanted to end it on a sense of uncertainty, and that fit the novella perfectly. I also had an interested publisher who was very eager to read the piece and publish the novella when it was completed, and since I was motivated by that dangling carrot of a home for the piece (and the paycheck that went with it), I set forth to complete it.

This point in my career was rather interesting. My novel Bully had been published in February of 2006 and became quickly overshadowed by a reprinting of Survivor by Leisure Books. I was working on Clickers II with Brian Keene, was starting a collaboration with Wrath James White on Hero, and had finished The Corporation some months before. I was also tinkering with two other novel-length ideas, one which eventually became Back From the Dead (now finished and simply waiting for me to send to my publisher), the second which I hope to revisit at a later time (this one is currently untitled but I call it my El Paso, Texas novel, which friend and proof-reader, Tod Clark, an El Paso resident, keeps pestering me to finish for obvious reasons). Due to the high visibility of Survivor, I had gained many new readers who were clamoring for more books exactly like Survivor, something I found frustrating since I normally don't write what is called "extreme horror" (or the literary version of 'torture porn', whatever that is). I like to explore different genres and sub-genres, and while I certainly won't shy away from gore or extreme subject matter, I typically don't seek it out in order to build a story around it. Regardless, new readers wanted more of the same (and others were probably turned off by Survivor; many of them found Leisure's follow-up, The Beloved, much more to their liking) and I was already exploring new territories. So what to do?

I finished the novella and began to wonder what would happen to the characters. David Spires was a writer, the third character cursed with that particular occupation in my canon of work (Rick Sycheck from Clickers and Elizabeth Baker from The Beloved being the other two). Their home in the hills overlooking Pasadena was familiar territory for me, as I used to live in that city (and still miss it). I had come to like the supporting characters very much; David's wife Tracy, Lori West, the African-American businesswoman, and Martin Hernandez, the gay fifty-something man who could very well have taken over the story had I not already established David Spires as the main character; James Goodman, History Professor at the local college; Wesley Smitts, the ex-Military man they meet up with. I even liked the very flawed, very screwed up, Heather Young, for the very reason that she was flawed and screwed up. These characters had come alive for me in such a big way that I wanted to see what happened to them in this dark world. The ending of "The Power of the Primitives" ends with the narrator, David Spires, opining that they would have to hide from the unnamed force they all feel is influencing and "powering" the primitives. This unnamed force had no name yet, but its visual representation was carved on tree bark, written on rock walls, and had become familiar to them all. I felt this supernatural presence (which I still had no idea would be rooted in standard Christian-Judea mythos or not) would only become more powerful as the primitive's collective belief structure became grew stronger. So not having much else to do but see what would happen next, I began tentatively writing again, starting at the point where David and his clan entered Montana and found the cabin.

In the meantime, the aforementioned publisher that was so gung-ho about the project, who liked the initial pitch and outline, who liked the first thirty pages of the novella, was no longer enthusiastic. "The Power of the Primitives" was rejected with an excuse that still puzzles me, which I won't go into here (to do so would spoil an important plot point). Needless to say, it was the first time I'd ever received a rejection based off a character's motivations and personality. The editor was very "bothered" by this character and "really loved" the novella as a whole, but ultimately decided he had to pass on it because, well, this character simply made him feel uneasy.

This editor apparently had no problem with Survivor and the characters of Animal and Tim Murray, two of the most evil, soulless men I've ever made up.

Naturally, I was a little disappointed at this decision. I didn't agree with it, but the unnamed editor had a right to his opinion and how to run his press, so there was no need for me to argue the point. By then, I'd expanded the original novella to the point where I felt a good full-length novel could come out of it. There was no reason to continue trying to market the novella version when the novel was coming along so strongly.

With that, the novella-length version was left in the dust and I continued work on the novel. The Neanderthal-genome that was hinted at in the novella was further developed, and with it came a speculation on primitive man's belief systems, which are largely unknown. What better way for a writer of fiction to use what scant information we have from the archaeological record and make stuff up? I took advantage of this and speculated away. This helped me develop the supernatural presence, which was now not only stronger than ever, but had a purpose and a name - Hanbi, an ancient Sumerian demon said (according to some ancient Sumerian texts) to be the father of Satan.

Anthropologists have many theories on primitive man's spiritual beliefs, largely based on the scant archaeological record. Neanderthals, in particular, were said to posses some form of spiritual belief as evidence by remains found that indicate burial ceremeonies were conducted. Naturally, this leads many anthropologists to speculate Neanderthals held some form of belief in an afterlife. What kind of afterlife, though? And if they believed in an afterlife, what kind of gods did they believe in? Did their spiritual pantheon include various totem gods (god of air, fire, and water, which were common beliefs)? Did they have an evil god? If so, what was it? Suppose it was more than a god, but an actual supernatural being that really existed but then later died out when Neanderthals became extinct?

These questions and more swirled in my head as I wrote the last part of Primitive. While I unearthed many answers to these questions while writing the novel, I wanted much of them to be left as vague as possible due to my character's predicament. All four of the adult main characters are, for the most part, well-educated people, but they're hardly experts on the subject of ancient man's spiritual beliefs. They do learn about it, though, and it is through this sense of trying to find out what they're up against that the reader learns a little more too. This gave me the opportunity to mix the scant information available on Hanbi with fiction and explore the theme of belief in a higher power -- that age-old proverb that states that faith can move mountains. Only in this case, faith in something, in this case an evil supernatural devil, can have dire consequences.

Likewise, I used the hotly debated topic of the Neanderthal genome in this story. In July 2006, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and 454 Life Sciences in the United States announced that they would be sequencing the Neanderthal genome over the next several years. At roughly 3.2 billion base pairs, the Neanderthal genome is about the size of the modern human genome. Modern human and Neanderthal DNA appear to be 99.5% identical (compared to humans sharing around 95% of their genes with the chimpanzee). Later that year, two research teams working on the same Neanderthal sample published their results, which were received with some criticism, mainly surrounding the issue of a possible admixture of Neanderthals into the modern human genome. The speech-related gene FOXP2 with the same mutations as in modern humans was discovered in ancient DNA in the El Sidron 1253 and 1351c specimens, suggesting Neanderthals might have shared some basic language capabilities with modern humans. This led some in the scientific community to hypothesize there might have been some inter-breeding between Neanderthals and early homo sapiens. Others found no evidence of this, but scientists agree that the data set is just not large enough to give a definitive answer (recent evidence suggests homo sapiens may have eaten Neanderthals for dinner rather than cross-bred with them), I wanted to use the idea of a possible inter-breeding between Neanderthals and homo sapiens as just another way for the characters to try to attempt to understand why this was happening to them.

Astute readers will recognize the name of a minor character in this novel as bearing the same name as former Whispers editor Stuart David Schiff. Nine years ago, Stuart had won an auction hosted by Shocklines.com to have his name and likeness appear in Clickers II, which at the time was in the planning stages. Stuart was to have been killed in Clickers II. However, due to a glitch in how the auction was run, Stuart never appeared in Clickers II. His name (but not his likeness...as far as I know) appears as a character in Primitive, though, and I hope he enjoys his fate in this book a great deal more (he was to have been devoured by monsters in Clickers II!).

Knowing that Primitive had a mix of thriller, horror, and SF elements, I felt it would be my most accessible and, thus, my most commercial novel ever. I was proud of the finished product. Unfortunately, my mass market paperback publisher felt otherwise -- they liked it a lot, mind you, but it was not straight horror fiction, which is what they wanted from me. Befuddled by this response (straight up horror fiction does not sell as well as thrillers with a slight SF/horror undertone), I took the novel elsewhere, to Delirium Books, specifically, because I had a long relationship with Shane Ryan Staley going back to 1998 and felt he could give the book justice. He snapped it up immediately, and here it is.