Monster Island is the story of struggling survivors in the deep aftermath of a zombie apocalypse that has rocked the entire world. Everything has changed, the chips have all fallen, and they're dealing with it. Sort of. The action all takes place in Manhattan, hence the title.
Monster Nation takes a step back to the beginning for a broader view, and chronicles the outbreak from its first days through its ruinous course until that awful tipping point is reached when everyone knows things will never be the same. As with the first novel, this prequel unfolds to a significant extent from a zombie's point of view--this time, a woman's. Again, too, we get a hapless human face on our crumbling institutions--this time not a U.N. official, but the National Guard officer initially assigned the task of containing whatever the fuck it is that's happening. He actually does do a heckuva job, but all for naught. Even if this weren't a prequel, the sense of inexorable doom weighs heavily, and seems preordained.
Monster Nation maintains a good continuity with
Island while delivering quite a different reading experience. The tone, characters, scale, and action are distinct, but in complementary ways that enrich the trilogy as a whole. Wellington doesn't just hash out more of the same, but if that's what you want, this book still scratches the itch. No "sophomore slump" here! I highly recommend it, and look forward to the third. All three novels are
available online, but the first two are also available in much more readable, sharply packaged paperbacks, with the added benefit if you buy them of supporting a writer we
really want to keep writing.
Tomb It May Concern's DaveZ especially recommends snagging a copy from
Shocklines (so you'll be supporting not only a groovy author but a groovy online bookstore), and be sure to take advantage of this offer:
If you buy this from us, you can send an email to contactmonster@hotmail.com with your Shocklines order number and then you'll be emailed a free PDF chapbook by the author of other tales that take place on Monster Island.
Wellington adds:
Shocklines has been good to me, but the offer stands for anyone who buys the books, regardless of how or where. There are in fact two "chapbooks", one for Monster Island and one for Monster Nation. To qualify people just have to email me, tell me which book they bought (or both) and request the chapbook. They must SPECIFICALLY request the chapbook in their email. The chapbooks take the form of PDF files that I attach to a reply to their email, and each contains half a dozen or so short stories and four illustrations by Joel Carroll.
PLEASE be straight-up about this and only e-mail him for the PDFs if you've truly purchased the books. Please do purchase them in any case. Like I said, let's keep this guy writing!
My first interview with Wellington turned out so well, I asked for another, and he graciously obliged (there
may be spoilers, for those who are hypersensitive about that sort of thing):
1. Your winning formula so far seems to be posting these serials online as you write them, leaving them there, but also publishing print versions. Could you say a little about how much the feedback for the earlier posts influences your writing of the later posts? When it comes so immediately, is it harder not to anticipate it or second-guess yourself--and is that good or bad? Have you ever felt that the instant feedback pulled you off course? What kind of feedback have you found most helpful, that actually led you to make improvements you otherwise wouldn't have known to make? Also, what's your revision process like? Do you go back and revise things you've posted online? Do you do any specific revision for print publication?
The feedback I get is great, but I don't want to give the impression that I write by committee. I have the books planned out in advance and they remain my books. Sometimes when I get positive feedback about a given character, I'll give them an extra scene or a better line of dialogue. It's very rare that I'll go farther than that. The worst thing that can happen did happen with one book. An online reader guessed who the mysterious villain was within the first ten chapters. Then said reader posted the identity of the villain online, literally spoiling the book. It was very, very tempting to change the ending in response, but that would have been a mistake. It would have ruined the book just for the sake of not wanting to be shown up.
As for revision; I make it a policy never to revise while I'm serializing a book. Other than minor typos I won't make any changes to a given chapter as it goes online, because then the readers would have to go back and re-read the chapter, and maybe suggest more changes. It would quickly get out of hand. I do revise heavily between the online versions and the print versions. I take into account the feedback I received as well as my own thoughts on how the book went. I add material where it's needed to make things more clear and I usually spiff up the endings. That was definitely the case with Monster Nation--the ending has been expanded considerably from the online version.
2. How were you different, as a writer and a person, when you came to
Monster Nation, as opposed to
Monster Island? Did you do any special research, or expose yourself to any particular new influences, or anything else, to get ready to write
Monster Nation?
It was a very rough time for my wife and her family. My mother-in-law developed leukemia while I was writing Monster Island. The hospital scenes in that book come out of that experience. By the time I wrote Monster Nation she was dying, and she passed on right in the middle of the serialization. I had to actually take two weeks off at the time because my wife needed me a lot more than my readers did. I told them what was going on and they were extremely supportive--and they were waiting for me when I came back. There's a real fear of death in Monster Island, a sense that life has to be clutched to at all costs. Monster Nation is about inevitability. You know from the very beginning that the world is going to end by chapter sixty. It could have been a much quieter, sadder book but honestly the emotions we all went through in that bad time were anger and explosive grief, and defiance in the face of that which could not be denied. I've been told that Monster Nation is the funniest of the books. I think it certainly has the most attitude.
3. Your zombie apocalypse hits George W. Bush's America. Granting that you weren't out to write a partisan screed or be overtly political, I was a bit surprised how little you made of that. Something like this would have been bitterly politicized in 2005, and I believe that even after a total collapse of infrastructure and society, people of whatever persuasion would harbor very strong and very hard political feelings about it. Were you ever tempted to make this more political? What choices on this point confronted you most insistently, how did you weigh the alternatives, and what ultimately led to your decisions?
I held back on the politics, at every turn. There's a scathing portrait of a civilian official from the Pentagon in the book. Originally he was much worse, much more evil than he is now. While I was writing it the country was holding its breath, waiting to hear who would win the presidential election. Then we found out and it was like the world really had ended. Like they had counted up all the zombies and all the living survivors and there were more of them than us. I had readers in blue states and readers in red states and I wanted to entertain them all--that's my role, to tell stories that entertain people. Some of my friends were actually angry at me because I had this supposed forum for spreading my own beliefs and I wasn't using it the way they would have, to proselytize. If I had done that, I think I would have just turned off everyone who disagreed with me--that's how it was at the time. You stopped reading blogs because the blogger had the wrong politics. Only half the channels on tv could ever be watched. By keeping the politics light and impartial, I kept all my readers talking to me--and to each other. Of course then 2005 did come along, and Hurricane Katrina. I had written a parody of FEMA and other civilian disaster relief agencies being unable to help in the face of a massive cataclysm, and I thought I was being too hard on the powers that be. They proved to be so much more incompetent than I would ever have dreamed of making them.
4. Considering the religious climate in America and indeed in the rest of the world, I could ask the same about religious aspects you didn't explore. The notion of a zombie plays directly on some of the deepest human anxieties about the afterlife. Imagine an evangelical Christian, with every expectation of being raptured, rising instead as a shambling, brains-devouring zombie--and then encountering the weird spiritual presence of the Druid! Anything you'd like to say on this score?
Zombies are anti-religious by nature. They're human beings who have been stripped of whatever makes them individuals, whatever makes them persons. They have no minds, nor any souls. They can't be saved but they don't go to hell either--they just walk the earth, as they did before, without moral compunctions or inner lives of any kinds. Vampires could be turned away by a crucifix, but zombies will eat a televangelist as quickly as they will Richard Dawkins. The story was about the end of the world, but a very secular end of the world, so I didn't want to add invisible, intangible things to the mix. Mael Mag Och's faith is alien to that environment--you're supposed to think he's just delusional to impose that kind of magical thinking on a very real world.
5. Beyond the political aspects, the implications for our military commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, both here in America and overseas, would be tremendous, I'd think. How would troops abroad respond to news of such a meltdown at home, what kind of debate would ensue about bringing them back, and when the zombie plague caught up with them, how would it affect active war zones?
The Epidemic in my books was an accelerating phenomenon. By the time anyone knew what was going on it would already have been too late to call back any troops. I don't really know what the soldiers would have felt, watching their hometowns be devoured on CNN in real-time, because I've never served in the armed forces myself. I do know that every soldier I've ever met has believed that their job is to protect Americans. I imagine they would be sickened to the heart knowing they were stuck so far away from a country that needed them. The soldiers and sailors I've known have also been very disciplined people. They would have waited for their orders and they would have performed them as best they could. On the homefront, I think any large scale disaster would get people talking about bringing the troops home. I don't think that even the most hardcore Republicans believe that democratizing Iraq is worth leaving Los Angeles defenseless.
6. Katrina hit several months after you designated
Monster Nation as finished and closed to comments. Surely some part of you watched that debacle unfold with
Monster Nation in mind. Could you say a bit about any Katrina-inspired reactions or reflections as they pertain to
Monster Nation? Would you have written it any differently, if Katrina had been available as a point of reference?
[I think I covered this pretty well in the above question. Curt--let me know if you want more on this subject.]
I guess I was hoping for something juicier and more concrete--more "showing" than "telling," as they say--a particular moment, image or statement that made the association click between what was happening and what you'd written, and made you slap your forehead and go back and review the relevant scenes in MN for comparison--that sort of thing.
Unfortunately there was no "slap to the head" moment. I really didn't make the connection until later.
7. I don't see Charles as the kind of guy who'd pass up any opportunity to get laid. You could have given us a great, wildly original, graphic, truly horrific scene of zombie sex from the zombie's point of view. You didn't. What do you have to say for yourself?
There are writers who get excited thinking about such things; I'm not one of them. It was far more real to me to have that scene play out the way it did. Nilla just wants to be human, and Charles truly loves Shar. He likes to tell himself he's a hard man and a dog but honestly he's just as scared as anyone else and he wants to curl up with Shar's warmth and pretend the end of the world isn't happening. What Nilla was offering him was too real and therefore too dangerous.
8. Considering the writing/posting schedule you keep, I'm sure you've found yourself forced to make decisions about plot and character off the cuff, without being able to see as far ahead as you'd like what ramifications they might have. Of those decisions, which have turned out brilliantly, and which really make you cringe in hindsight?
The great thing about what I do is that I'm allowed to make good use of hindsight. The ending of Monster Nation was too skimpy online. The book had to be exactly sixty chapters (so it would take exactly five months to serialize) and I rushed the ending and shoved too much into a couple of chapters. In the print version I was allowed to take my time and it really shows. As for brilliant accidents of timing, Monster Island is the perfect example. Gary was supposed to die at the end of Part One. He wasn't supposed to come back. The readers loved him, though--they responded to him far more than they did to Dekalb. So he became a much more fleshed-out and central character. Without him, there would have been no sequels, so you could say the entire series was based on an off the cuff decision.
9. I'm sure you get this all the time, but . . . Max Brooks?
I love his work. I don't agree with all his choices or his prognostications, but he's a hell of a storyteller. I read World War Z in a couple of days without putting it down.
What commercial impact, if any, have your books have had on each other? Is your impression that you're selling more books or fewer because his are out there, and/or vice versa? Do you feel or sense any kind of rivalry or synergy or anything like that?
He and I are in completely different leagues. I don't think there's any real competition between us--he and I do dramatically different kinds of work. Certainly his success has helped me sell books, as a lot of people who picked up World War Z wanted more zombies... and I was there to give them what they wanted.
Well, for the record, I'll be checking out his books thanks to yours.
10. Since wrapping up the zombie trilogy, you've since moved on to
vampires, and now
werewolves. I take it these most recent two novels occupy quite different worlds than the world of the first three? Was it immediately clear to you that you wanted to jump right into those other monsters, or did you have to do some soul-searching about how to follow up the zombies? What are the most significant differences for you, as a writer, between these various monsters? Are any more trilogies or series in the offing here?
You're giving me too much credit for planning these things out. The stories come to me and I write them down as fast as I can. I sold the book rights to the Monster Island trilogy all in one go. It was a solid year between when I stopped serializing and when the first book came out. I was used to the internet where everything happens instantly, so waiting that long drove me a little batshit insane. To soothe my fevered brow I did what I've always done before: I started a new writing project. I wrote a short story about a vampire, mostly just as a writing exercize, and it turned out to be one of the best, fastest, most well-paced and high-energy things I'd ever written. With a little prodding it easily expanded to a novel-length project, called 13 Bullets, which is set in a very different "universe" from the Monster Island trilogy. I put it online and sold that book, too--as well as two sequels I have yet to write. Finally, and currently, I started Frostbite, my werewolf book, because I wanted to do an experiment. I'd been watching a lot of Hitchcock and Tarantino movies and I was excited by the way the two directors played with audience expectations of time and character. I wanted to try my hand at something similar in book form. The thing of it, I can't stop writing. I try every now and again but I just get weird dreams--my subconscious starts writing in my sleep.
As for monsters, you might have guessed that I dig 'em. I've been a huge fan ever since the first time I read Dracula and Frankenstein, the first time I ever saw a George Romero movie (which was at a pretty young age. I was born in Pittsburgh, where he's a local hero, and they used to show Night of the Living Dead uncut on prime time tv). Monsters were so much more interesting than the heroes and villains on the cop shows. Monsters weren't despicably evil, but they didn't act like good guys with sterling moral codes, either. They had their own agendas and they weren't bound by what other people thought were the rules. In terms of how they differ, they demand completely different kinds of stories. Zombies are a natural disaster--the heroes in a zombie story win if they just survive. The main character in a vampire story is a mouse in a world that also has cats. They get to feel what it's like to be preyed on by something stronger and maybe smarter. They only win if they turn the tables and destroy the oppressor. Finally, werewolves are probably the most intimate monsters. The main character in a werewolf story has to be the werewolf. They're living with a horrible curse. A werewolf doesn't ever win--they just pray they won't hurt anybody and trust their luck. Werewolf stories are therefore inherently sad, and even bitter.
As for what comes next--I don't want to give anything away. I'll just say I have plenty of ideas for more stories!
Thanks for another great novel, and for taking the time to answer these questions!
Thanks, Curt!
