Apex Book Company

Interviewed by Lucien Spelman

I caught up with bestselling author F. Paul Wilson in NYC for lunch recently, along with his pal (and four-time Bram Stoker Award winner) Thomas F. Monteleone.

For those of you that don’t know FPW, he is the author of more than thirty books: Six science fiction novels (Healer, Wheels Within Wheels, An Enemy Of The State, Dydeetown World, The Tery, Sims), eight horror thrillers (The Keep, The Tomb, The Touch, Reborn, Reprisal, Nightworld, Black Wind, Sibs), three contemporary thrillers (The Select, Implant, Deep As The Marrow) and a number of collaborations (some with the above mentioned Thomas F. Monteleone). He is perhaps best know for his popular antihero, Repairman Jack, and has chronicled his adventures in Legacies, Conspiracies, All The Rage, Hosts, The Haunted Air, Gateways, and Crisscross.

Repairman Jack has long been a cult favorite, and the RJ feature film has been in development hell for years and years. Much to the delight of many RJ fans (including yours truly, and Stephen King – who calls himself “The President of the Repairman Jack Fan Club”) it appears that finally it may be seeing the light of day. More on that below.

FPW is a prolific and talented writer of great imagination and wit. I highly recommend digging in to the first of the Repairman Jack books, and visiting FPW on the web at www.repairmanjack.com. If you’re not a rabid fan already, you may just find yourself joining The Grand Unification.

Lucien Spelman: So I heard you are in the pitching process for a graphic novel. Who are you talking to?

F. Paul Wilson: With The Dabel Brothers, with Vertigo, and with Warner Books. And it’s something that, you know, Tom (Thomas F. Monteleone) and I started pitching and spitballing, and things started sticking to the wall that we liked, and it’s really not the type of thing that we can do in novels. It’s going to need to be graphic. You kind of have to characterize everything, so maybe it’s a cross between Lost and Preacher. Basically it has a lot to do with the eternal tension between belief and knowledge, so it’s really about epistemology, but that’s an undercurrent.

Lucien: Is that where Preacher comes in?

FPW: Yeah, well it’s also about the world sort of becomes apocalyptically changed. It’s a trek to get to this place and we meet a lot of strange people along the way.

Lucien: Sounds very promising.

FPW: We think so.

Lucien: Are they biting right now? Have you had any hits?

FPW: Well, they’re in the reading the proposal stage, and stuff like that. Vertigo has had it the longest, and we can’t get an answer out of them - a yes or a no. I mean say yes or no!

Thomas F. Monteleone: They keep asking us for more, and we keep giving it to them.

FPW: Yeah. But we’ll take it elsewhere too. I don’t know if Karen Berger (Editor of DC’s Vertigo imprint) is too busy or what, but we’ve decided we would start spreading it around now.

Lucien: I’m always surprised, because they keep talking about how the comic industry is dying out, and yet new small-press comic companies are popping up all the time. It’s a hard industry to make work, yet it seems to me the reason people are willing to invest the time and money is the promise of a film deal. So many studios are turning to graphic novels for material now.

FPW: Yeah, like 30 Days of Night.

Lucien. Talk a little about Masters of Horror.

FPW: Well, for Masters of Horror, a screenwriter named Matt Venne (White Noise 2: The Light) came to me and asked if he could pitch my short story “Pelts” to (Masters of Horror co-executive producer) Mick Garris. I said “Sure, why not?” and he pitched it, Mick liked the idea, so they optioned it. With Masters of Horror, they commission more scripts than they use - and they know that. Because the thing is one of the directors has to pick up the script, and some of them like to bring in their own. I think (John) Landis and his son wrote there own – but Dario Argento (Suspiria, Door into Darkness) picked up Pelts, and immediately started changing things (laughs). I’m not unhappy with the outcome, I mean he turned it into soft-core porn, and made it a lot bloodier and gorier than I had it, but you know what? He did keep the core message. I also have to give credit to Matt, the screenwriter, for keeping that in there. There was…. Matt and I were arguing with him about…. One of the things in the story is that nobody gets what they want. Anybody who tries using pelts for money, or vanity, or sex, doesn’t get it. And in this version, the guy who was looking for sex, Meatloaf (The Rocky Horror Picture Show), who played him, got it. I said, “It would be so easy for him not to get it. He could just go soft. He’d been wanting this girl for years, and when he finally gets her, he just goes soft!” (laughs) I said, “You can still have all the nudity that way!” But no. Dario wanted him to get her. It’s not a Democracy. The director calls the shots. I’m not unhappy with it overall, though.

Lucien: That brings me to The Keep directed by Michael Mann (Manhunter, Ali, Miami Vice). What happened?

FPW: (laughs) Michael Mann happened! That was the problem. He had this glorious vision of what he wanted to do, and it wasn’t necessarily my book. I mean he used the characters names and some of the situations, but he just lost sight of what was going on and wound up with a three hour cut. I mean he’d run out of money….

Lucien: Oh, I didn’t know that.

FPW: Yeah. And Paramount wouldn’t give him any more. He had some FX scenes he needed at the end, and Paramount said, “No. You’ve gone over budget, you’ve gone over time, you’ve given us a three-hour movie which is not what the script was,” so they told him to cut it to under 100 minutes, so he had a 96 minute cut. And – it’s pretty incoherent.

Lucien: Makes you wonder if the three-hour cut might have been better.

FPW: It may have been. And you know I developed a little sympathy for him when I developed the graphic novel for IDW. They gave me 5 issues at 22 pages each, and I could have used a 6th issue. So I had a little sympathy for him trying to cram everything into 96 minutes.

Lucien: That’s the hard part of the process, right? As a novel, you have already pared it down to the necessary parts, and now you have to do so even further to make it work.

FPW: Yeah I had to leave out certain…. Well, there are certain elements of the plot that weren’t visual. That you could experience in prose, but there was no way of showing it rapidly without another issue. So I just cut that out. The influence…. As they started tearing out stones from the keep — searching for whatever was killing the men — sort of dismantling it from the inside out. And as the walls started coming down inside, the evil was spreading out to the village. The birds were being chased away and the birds were dying, and the villagers were becoming hostile and starting to beat up on each other and kill each other – that’s really hard to sort of do graphically – so that’s not in the graphic novel.

Lucien: The Keep is a great read! When did IDW release the graphic novel?

FPW: I did 5 issues from 2005 into 2006, and then In June of 2006 the graphic novel came out.

Lucien: I’d like to talk about Repairman Jack. He’s wonderfully devious. I wonder, as a writer, what inspires you in regard to his “repairs”?

FPW: Those are tough. I’m writing a young adult novel about him at 14 (Secret Histories, 2008, Gauntlet), I developed three of those. And it’s about how he realizes he has this talent. In a sense he’s playing tricks on people. So we see him do it with his family, and he’s being chased by someone and he gets them off his trail, but those gags – I call ‘em gags – are hard to come up with, y’know? I mean one of my favorites was in The Haunted Air, when he turned the tables on those two psychics. I really had fun with that. But I don’t have one in every novel because I don’t have a store that I can use and say “this one will work for this book.” Basically, it has to come out of the story. And sometimes it doesn’t come out of the story and you don’t get him playing tricks on people. Some are…. You know the ideal one is one where the villain is hoisted on his own petard in the sense that it takes what he’s doing and turns it around on him so it bites him in the ass. Those are the best. Those are the most satisfying.

Lucien: Yeah. I’ve always thought a lot of that stuff would translate well into film. This is something that is confusing to a lot of people: I know you have a huge following with Repairman Jack, but the timeline of those books – The Adversary Cycle – is confusing, simply stated, and I’m wondering if there is a release planned that is more linear or easily digestible for someone just coming in to the story?

FPW: You know there may be… but I have to finish the series. It’s not an open ended series, because I’ve already ended it with Nightworld, so I’m looking at maybe 4 or 5 novels, tops, to end the series. Then I can bring it to Nightworld and finally let it go. But, in the website I have a chronology. Basically it starts with Demonsong, which is like a prequel to The Keep, it goes all the books in the Adversary Cycle and in Repairman Jack’s. They are in a sense linear, but they aren’t being published linearly, so it makes it harder. Ideally, somewhere along the way, there will be a re-packaging where everything will be like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5….

Lucien: It’s really a marketing issue. It’s not a writing issue, it’s a packaging issue.

FPW: Yeah, it’s a packaging issue. I’m holding back some of the books in The Adversary Cycle from being re-printed in paperback because, if you just read Reborn – you know Reborn is back in the timeline and Reprisal is right before Nightworld, you know, so if I can, I don’t want Reprisal published because it’s sort of out of sync. So I’d like to have that re-printed right after the last Repairman Jack novel, and then come out with Nightworld, or bring that back, and then say goodbye. (laughs)

Lucien: It’s gonna be long, hard process. And it’s gonna be hard to say goodbye.

FPW: The thing is the movie is finally getting to the point where it looks like it’s going into production….

Lucien: I was going to ask….

FPW: ….Yeah, and they are looking at 2008 for that to come out (Beacon Pictures has it is currently creeping out of development hell and into the Real World, but has been slowed a bit by the recent writer strike – Lucien) and filming it in Australia.

Lucien: Casting talk?

FPW: Not yet. They are doing one last pass on the script to bring it…. Finally, after 11 years, they have brought me in on the process. They gave me what we all though was the best script — the third out of 11 or 12 — and they said “Take it and make notes,” and I went through it and re-wrote portions of it and made notes. The screenwriter Chris Morgan (Cellular, Wanted) is a Repairman Jack fan, so we sat down with the studio and we said we gotta bring this back to the book because it just wandered far away from the book. We gotta bring it back to the book, and not worry about having a really big budget and a really big star. Just get someone who is maybe well known on TV, and who can hang around and do three movies, and not get too old in the process. So we all came to an agreement that it was time to stop dickin’ around and get it done.

Lucien: That’s great! Who’s releasing it?

FPW: It’s Beacon. They make good films. They don’t make many, but when they do they make quality stuff.