Famous Monsters: Hi Gord, first I just wanted to thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to do this interview with Famous Monsters Of Filmland.
Gord Rollo: No problem, my friend. Thanks for asking me. I’m a fan of Famous Monsters so this is a bit of a thrill for me. When I was growing up, I never had a subscription to the magazine, but I’d pick one up whenever I could. Never thought I’d get a chance to be a part of things though, so this is very cool.
Famous Monsters: I was first introduced to your writing with Jigsaw Man published by Dorchester Publishing. I hate to admit I didn’t really enjoy the book, not that the writing and story were bad. They weren’t, it was just much too visceral for my tastes. But in an email you sent you alluded to a back story while writing Jigsaw Man. Can you share that with us? And also along this line, how do you feel when someone doesn’t like something you wrote. I know that I don’t feel comfortable saying that to you or any other writer, after all you put a lot of blood and sweat into creating it.
Gord Rollo: No one should feel bad about not liking something we’ve read. We all have different tastes and no writer can please everyone no matter how hard they try. I think most writers understand that and I personally have never taken offense to anyone who takes the time to read something of mine and discovered it wasn’t for them. I think writers just hate when someone says “This Rollo dude’s book sucks!!!!!!!” but doesn’t give a reason why. As writers we all want to get better and improve our problem areas but that is impossible unless the reader lets us know what it was that didn’t appeal to them. If the dialogue was unrealistic, that is great feedback to receive. It’s something a writer can use to work on next time out. You thought Jigsaw was too visceral for you and that is perfectly fine with me. It is a bit of a nasty book at times. It’s not a happy storyline and I can totally understand how some readers that enjoy more supernatural or quieter horror might not think it is their cup of tea. That’s cool. Like I said, we all have different tastes.
As for the back story on The Jigsaw Man, it involves my daughter. She was born with a fatal liver disease called Biliaria Atresia. It’s a fancy name that means the bile ducts in her liver didn’t form correctly and the corrosive bile inside her couldn’t escape her liver to get into her stomach where it usually helps us digest food. Instead, the bile was eating away her liver and her only chance at life was to have a liver transplant operation. To make a long story short, she spent most of her first year of life at Sick Kid’s Hospital in Toronto and ended up having to have three transplants. She is 13 years old now and doing great, but that first year was a nightmare of epic proportions for her and for my wife and I. I don’t want to get into it too much but the main point is that it was awful to sit there day after helpless day, frustrated and angry at the world. That stress and pain can really weigh on a person, and people are trained (especially guys) to internalize their suffering and not let their emotions show. For me, writing is the way I’ve always dealt with things that are hurting or confusing me, so years later when I was ready, I sat down to write a short story about transplants, just to clear my head a little. All the darkness I’d been storing up inside me just started pouring out of me and I just let it flow. For that reason alone, it’s no surprise to me the book came out as you’ve said, very visceral. It was written by an angry, frustrated father trying to deal with the fear and helplessness of his little girl’s suffering. I’m not angry, mind you, but my pent-up emotions were. I hope that makes some sense.
Famous Monsters: Now that I have heard that, I can certainly appreciate the book more now. It must have been tough on you and your family and I am very glad everything worked out. You had also told me that your new book Crimson, which I loved by the way (Erin from Dorchester Publishing sent me an advanced readers copy and I also put my review up on our site) also has a back story.
Gord Rollo: Certainly does, yes. Most books probably do, I suppose. Crimson is about four childhood friends who release a seven foot tall creature with glowing eyes from an icy well that has been its prison for a long time. This creature is the guy I used to have recurring nightmares about as a kid. He lived in my closet and was the classic Boogieman type monster, I suppose, but as a kid and then a teen all I ever remember calling him was The Creature. No idea why, that’s just who he was. I eventually stopped dreaming about him and then years later, when I was in college, he came back to me and I was shocked to realize I was just as scared of the Creature then as when I was a boy. That’s what got me thinking about this book. It’s about childhood fears and how sometimes they don’t always get better as we get older and supposedly mature. That’s basically a crock, anyway. I’m a firm believer that we never grow out of the things we were scared of as kids. If you hated spiders, you still do. If you couldn’t sleep with the closet door open, you still make sure it’s closed. We get better at hiding our fears and acting all macho, but you can’t fool your subconscious mind. It knows what scares you and that is what I tried to capture with my Crimson novel. I’ve had emails from readers tell me my novel caused them to start dreaming about the things they were scared of as kids, even things they’d thought long forgotten. I’m not sure if they are mad at me, but I think that is pretty cool! For me, I’ve never dreamt about the Creature since I wrote about him but like the four friends in my novel I know he is still out there, biding his time. He’ll visit me again some day. I’m sure of itJ
Famous Monsters: I see a pattern developing here. You really put a lot of yourself into your books. Is that a conscious effort or just something that takes over when you sit down to write?
Gord Rollo: Both, I think. Writing is very cathartic for me and I enjoy the fact that I can make myself feel better by exploring things that are on my mind through fiction. That said, I try not to get too self involved or autobiographical with my work. After all, it’s supposed to be entertainment, not therapy, but in a way it can be both. As I explained above, The Jigsaw Man was a way for me to finally work though some of the things I’d internalized through my daughter’s illness and subsequent years of recovery. Now if you pick that book up (and I hope you do) you quickly see that the plot has nothing to with liver transplants or sick little girls but in reality it has EVERYTHING to do with those dark days in my life. You just have to read between the lines I guess.
That’s how it works for me. I sit down and want to write about some topic that interests me, but I’m perfectly happy to let my imagination take over and change anything it wants. I do like to outline my plots, especially with novels, but I keep them to a minimal point form format that isn’t very rigid. I like to know where my destination is, but be free to let my muse roam around on the way there.
Famous Monsters: Both books though completely different in my opinion were very detailed in their subject matter. How much research do you do for the projects you are working on?
Gord Rollo: Totally depends on the project. In general, I don’t go too crazy on research. I definitely like to know what I’m talking about, but I’m not a huge fan of getting too technical. Most readers, in my opinion, don’t want or need to know how to perform open heart surgery. If I was writing about that, I’d research it, but the finished story would never contain all the intricate details that you might find in a medical journal. It’s not important usually, and just drags a story down. Pace and keeping a plot moving forward are important to me and I’m very aware when I’m writing to not get bogged down trying to look smarter than I really am. With Crimson, I didn’t have to research very much at all, but I spent a lot more time researching for The Jigsaw Man. Seeing that it is a modern day Frankenstein novel, of sorts, I wanted to know what modern science was capable of these days. I had a pretty good feel for organ transplantation but I did a lot of reading on what was going on in the world of body part transplantation. I was floored when I read an article about how scientists had actually switched the heads of two monkeys and both monkeys had survived. They couldn’t sever the spinal column or the monkeys would have been paralyzed of course, so what they did was slice open the back and removed the head along with a large portion of the spinal column. They ended up with very little ability to move, but there was some. In Jigsaw, I take it several steps further of course, but that’s what makes fiction so much fun.
Famous Monsters: I know that when I read a book, I try to give each one a concerted effort and every opportunity to win me over but some books just don’t click for me. With that in mind do you have a target audience in mind for each book or do you write whatever story is clamoring to get out?
Gord Rollo: Idea-wide, no. I don’t have any target audience in mind. I write about whatever excites me, but once I have decided on a topic I do start to consider the audience. I’m proud to be writing for Leisure Books at the moment, and hope to continue doing that for a long time to come. Don D’Auria, my editor there, doesn’t put any chains on me at all, but I also have to be aware of what I’m writing because I do have to stick to word limits and keep in mind that they have a particular customer base that expect certain things in the books they buy. All that means is that if I’m trying to build a fan base with Leisure’s help, I’d be silly to write a 200,000 word historical comedy novel. Even within the horror genre, I try to keep in mind what I think my fans and my publisher would most like to see. I don’t think that makes things too restrictive, it just keeps me focused and in tune with the readers who have liked my work in the past.
Famous Monsters: One thing I found fascinating between the two books is how different they are from one another, it is almost as if two different writers wrote them. Was that a conscious decision or just the way the stories developed?
Gord Rollo: Just the way things developed. Crimson is a supernatural horror novel, more of a classic old school horror book than Jigsaw. The Jigsaw Man doesn’t have any monsters in it at all. Well… human monsters sure, but nothing like the Creature, or King Spider, or Rodney the Scarecrow that are in Crimson. With such widely different plots, it’s inevitable for them to be vastly different. Even though both are horror novels, they don’t fall in the same sub-genre. One is a creature-feature and one is a mad scientist book. I kind of like it that way, changing things up. It helps keep things more interesting for me and hopefully for the readers too. I don’t think people want to read the same book over and over. Variety is the spice of life, right, so I enjoy working within the wide open boundaries of the horror genre. My next book will be a combination of supernatural forces and real world maniacs. It’s tentatively called STRANGE MAGIC, but I’ll tell you more about that later. Suffice to say though, it is vastly different than both my first two novels.
Famous Monsters: When did you start writing and how long and tough has the journey been to get to this point?
Gord Rollo: It’s been long and hard, but when you are writer you never realize it at the time. I think all writers hear the big success stories and think it will happen to them, but as you plug along year after year reality starts to creep up on you. Very few writers ever hit it big and it can be a frustrating, financially brutal career to choose. You can make more money working at Wal-Mart I think. For me, I’ve always been a writer. My father, James Rollo, is a wonderful poet and fiction writer (mostly unpublished although he does have a fantastic Western novel submitted with Leisure Books right now) and he passed on his love of reading and writing to me. I’ve written stories since I was a young boy, and can remember writing a school play that we performed in front of the town back in grade 6. It was a Christmas play but I wrote that Santa fell and broke both his legs and had to call his buddy, the Easter Bunny in to save Christmas. I wrote my first movie script that summer too, called Weekend of Terror. It was a total rip off of a lot of slasher films I’d seen, but I still have it and it really isn’t all that bad. I’d watch it.
I made a few bucks during the 1980’s writing short stories for classmates in high school and college and nearly got expelled for selling stories about a secret serial killer lurking the halls of the college I went to. Apparently it wasn’t the sort of publicity the school was looking for. Oh well, I tried. It was in college that I first tried to write a novel. I tried several times in fact, and none of them were any good. One attempt though, in fact my very first attempt, was for a book about magicians. It was terrible, but I loved the first chapter enough that I held onto it all these years and after playing with it a little (maybe a lot – lol) it is now the opening chapter for my Strange Magic novel.
Most people know this, but I actually wrote Crimson before I wrote The Jigsaw Man, even though Leisure released Jigsaw first. Crimson was originally far too long for mass market guidelines so I rewrote it and tightened it up considerably. It’s a much better novel now, after the edit and I can’t wait to hear what people think of it. So yes, success was a long time coming and it still isn’t here yet. I’m hoping to one day soon be able to write full time. At the moment I still sell real estate part time for Century 21. Anyone want to buy a house?
Famous Monsters: Why horror? Were you drawn to the darker things as a child or maybe a specific incident that lead you to this?
Gord Rollo: I think it was because I was the last of four sons. My brothers are 6, 7, and 8 years older then I am, and they were into horror movies big time from the time I was about 10 and up. I don’t remember any of them being big readers, but I definitely fondly remember sneaking down to watch all those fabulously bad late 70’s and early 80’s slasher flicks like Halloween, Terror Train, My Bloody Valentine, and Maniac Cop. I remember being scared but not all that much. I was really only scared of the Creature in my closet back then (remember him?). The movie monsters and crazed killers just made me giggle and want more. I was always a reader and could read before I even stepped foot in Kindergarten, so with my interest in my big brothers’ horror flicks, I naturally started to read horror novels. King and Koontz mostly, like everyone, but I read pretty much anything I could get my hands on at the local library. I’ve never seen horror as a bad thing or a dirty thing and my parents never really tried to steer me clear of it. My dad was just happy I was reading, and my mom, well she was probably already a bit worn down from dealing with my three brothers – lol! To me, horror is a primal thing, just like breathing and eating. We are all scared of things, and that raw emotion is about as honest of a feeling as anyone can ever have. That’s why I have a hard time understanding why some parents or teachers are so against kids reading and watching horror. Hell, there is nothing they will read that could possibly be worse then what they see and hear on the news every night. At least in books and movies, the good guys usually win in the end. Unfortunately, real life’s not always that cut and dried.
Famous Monsters: I see on your website that you have quite a few projects coming up that really caught my attention. Can you tell us a little about them?
Gord Rollo: Sure. First and foremost, my agent Lauren Abramo (Dystel &Goderich Literary Management) just worked out another 2 book mass market paperback deal with Don D’Auria for Leisure Books to continue publishing my novels at least through 2011. I’m thrilled they got the deal done just before the holidays and it was a cool Christmas present for me. The two books will be Strange Magic, which is already finished, and Valley Of The Scarecrow, which I just got started on at the beginning of the year. I’ll paste you in a little synopsis of each below:
Strange Magic – Wilson Kemp is a man living a lie in Billington, Pennsylvania. He’s been in hiding for a long time, running from a terrible secret that has forced him to change his name, move to this secluded town and abandon what had once been a stellar career. Once, he’d been a highly talented escape artist on the brink of fame and fortune, but now he’s a broken down alcoholic scared of his own shadow. Mind you, he has good reason to be scared because his worst fear has finally caught up with him, and the sleepy little town of Billington is about to be declared a war zone.
With the aid of a malevolent evil entity trapped within an old wooden trunk, a stranger from Wilson’s past has hunted him down; an insane fellow magician who will stop at nothing to get his twisted, bloody revenge. To survive, Wilson will have to conquer his own inner demons and fight his old enemy in a battle that will lead to the gates of death and beyond. To live, Wilson will have to accomplish the greatest magic trick of all time: escaping from the dark pit of Hell…
Valley Of The Scarecrow - During the great depression, a small backwoods community in Iowa face even more difficult times than most, having to endure the slowly fading sanity of their town’s leader, the Reverend Joshua Miller. When it is clear the once holy man has slipped beyond the edge of reason and perhaps signed a deal with the devil, the citizens unite to stop him any way they can, breaking into the church to lash the reverend to his wooden cross on the alter, then boarding up the church’s windows and doors to leave him to fate and God’s judgment. The people of Oak Valley then abandoned their town to the cornfields and woods, ending the madness for what they hoped was forever.
They were wrong!
Nearly seventy-five years later, the corn and trees have taken back the area, and not much is left of the once thriving little community but Joshua Miller’s desecrated church still stands, and within it’s boarded up and sun-baked walls something that used to be a holy man waits for whoever is unfortunate enough to release it from it’s cross…
Besides those two novels, I’m expanding an apocalyptic novella of mine called Lost In Translation into novel length, and working on several brand new novellas and short stories. Hopefully some of those will be ready to submit soon.
Famous Monsters: Also on your site you state that screenwriting is something you are getting more involved in. How is that different than writing novels?
Gord Rollo: It’s all visual. You don’t have to worry about explaining to a reader how one of your characters might have a bad headache or any type of internal thing like that. You only have to describe what the camera sees. Dialogue and action, basically. There’s more to it obviously, but that’s what it boils down to. I’m always getting told my writing is very visual anyway, so scripts are a natural fit for me. I really enjoy writing them, but they are a whole new animal and are very difficult to sell. Hopefully I get lucky sometime in the future.
Famous Monsters: When you’re not writing what do you do in your down time?
Gord Rollo: Try selling real estate, watch my kids, and read. I’m not a huge TV guy. I love to watch sports but I can’t be bothered with sitcoms or all the dreadful reality shows that seem to always be on. I’ve never seen survivor and never plan to. Give me a hockey game or a good book any day.
Famous Monsters: What are your three favorite horror books (stories)?
Gord Rollo:
Pet Sematary – Stephen King
Boy’s Life – Robert R. McCammon
The Bad Place – Dean Koontz
Famous Monsters: What are your three favorite horror movies?
Gord Rollo:
Halloween (the original)
My Bloody Valentine (the original)
The Mothman Prophecies (definitely horror, in my opinion)
Famous Monsters: Do you get a chance to do much reading yourself and who are your favorite authors?
Gord Rollo: Yes, I try to at least. I still love King and Koontz and McCammon and probably always will. I’m also a big fan of more recent writers like Brian Keene, Gene O’Neill, Tim Lebbon, James Moore, Michael Slade, and Tom Piccirilli. I read a lot outside the genre as well, and my favorites there would be Donald E. Westlake, Lawrence Block, Clive Cussler, and Tom Sharpe.
Famous Monsters: What authors would you say influenced you most?
Gord Rollo: Definitely King and Koontz. Richard Laymon too. Growing up I devoured every book from those three I could get my hands on. I read anything and everything, but those were my big three. Eventually I discovered McCammon and Clive Barker and I was off to the races.
Famous Monsters: Have you always wanted to be a writer and what was your major influence for writing?
Gord Rollo: I’ve written for as long as I can remember, but it wasn’t until I read Stephen King’s Pet Sematary that I wanted to be a writer. It so overwhelmed me that I just had to figure out a way to send a chill down someone’s back the way he had done to me. I’ve never met Mr. King though, so he wasn’t the person who influenced me the most to want to write. That would be my father, James Rollo. My dad grew up poor and was forced to quit school at the age of 13 to take a job in a coal mine in Scotland, working all day on his knees in a 4 foot high shaft. When he got home, they had no hot running water and had to boil water on a fire to make a bath. It must have been horrible, but through all of that he still self-educated himself by reading everything he could get his hands on. Today he is a great poet and western writer and it was him that gave me my love for books and my drive to succeed in this crazy business.
Famous Monsters: In closing what do you see in the future for Gord Rollo?
Gord Rollo: Mountains of money, a harem of beautiful woman, and a garage filled with fancy cars. Yeah, right!!!! No, I’m a pretty realistic guy actually. All I want is to write full time and make enough money to keep food on the table. I believe we all are good at something, and whatever that something is, we should do it. That’s all I’m trying to do. When I try to look 5 years down the line, or 10, I have no idea how successful I will be because so much of that stuff is out of the writer’s hands. Regardless if I’m writing full time or not, or cashing big advance checks or not, I know I’ll be writing. No idea what or where, but I’ll be writing. You can count on that. For me, that is all I can ask. Well… that, and a multi-million dollar movie deal. That’s not asking too much, is it?
Famous Monsters: Thanks you so much Gord for taking the time to answer my questions and for a fascinating look behind the scenes of one of Horror’s new rising stars.
I would also like to thank Erin Galloway of Dorchester Publishing for helping setting up this interview.
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