Category Archives: Author interview

Michael R. Collings is a Professor Emeritus of English from Pepperdine University. Since retiring a few years ago, he has republished all of his earlier books, plus seven novels, volumes of poetry (mainstream, science fiction, fantasy, and horror), and literary studies of writers from Milton to Clive Barker. In total, he has about 35 books currently in print with three publishers. In this great article written specially for alivewithwords.com, he tells us about his process for writing The Slab, and shares with us two rules for creative writing. Read on, it’s fun and interesting!

Rule 1: Write about what you know. A frequently quoted if rather basic rule almost every writer will encounter. And usually it works fairly well.

But what about those of us who write horror? There are few who claim to be on a first-name basis with the werewolf, or the vampire, or the zombie, or the ghost that figures so prominently in the story we want to tell. And those who do make the claim…well, perhaps the less said about them the better.

When I sat down to begin work on what would ultimately become The Slab, some twenty-odd years ago, I followed Rule #1 as closely as possible. I chose a subject I knew well—the house we had bought around 1980 (and lived in, however unhappily, for the next quarter century). We had not been the proud owners of our first home for more than six months when we began making discoveries.

First, the people who sold us the house had assiduously gone through it from top to bottom, spackling and repainting and touching up the ceilings to hide the fact that there were serious cracks in every room in the house. The back wall of the master bedroom dropped nearly two inches as the summer wore on and the soil dried out, until we could literally—and I mean literally—see daylight between the wall and the ceiling.

Then, when I had to peel the living room carpet away from the sliding patio doors for some reason, we discovered that there was a crack between the slab and the wall that extended from the corner of the kitchen through the living room and on through two bedrooms to the far rear corner. It was wide enough that I could put my hand in it, and deep enough that I could feel the damp dirt underneath the foundations. And it provided a handy highway-getaway for roaches and other vermin…including a rat that used it as a runway for a long while, until we were able to build concrete blocks between each room and finally capture the critter.

Then we found out the cause of all of our woes: the contractor who build the development some twenty years earlier had been a thief and a crook. He had the nasty habit of laying down rebar for foundation slabs, getting it approved by the city inspector…then pulling it up, pouring the concrete without any, and laying it in the next house, thereby saving a ton of money. He also skimped on the wiring, we found out many years later—there was no single piece of wiring anywhere in the house that was longer than three feet, and the scraps he had joined with plastic caps were of whatever gauge and material he happened to have handy. When he was found out shortly after the development was finished, he hanged himself. And by the time we bought the death-tr…the house, all of the insurance companies had ceased to honor any claims.

So we were stuck with it.

That might not have been so bad, except that a few years after we moved in, I developed severe tinnitus in both ears, along with incremental deafness, and—since I knew little or nothing about tinnitus at that time—I figured that I was merely going crazy. The sounds—hiss, crack, boom, ring-ring-ring, scrape—kept me awake day and night…and everywhere I looked there were cracks in the walls! When I went to someone to see if they could help me handle the constant ringing, I was sent to a psychiatrist…who diagnosed clinical depression. And everywhere I looked there were cracks in the walls!

And I won’t even mention the four years that the roof leaked despite efforts to patch and re-finish. We finally had to rip the entire roof off—discovering to no surprise that the plywood used was only ¼” thick instead of the requisite ¾” for our area—before the water stopped.

Now, when I was awake all night, all I could see were the cracks in the walls and all I could hear was the sound of water running running running.

So there I sat: clinically depressed, half-deaf but with extreme hypersensitivity to low, bass sounds, constantly distracted by internal sounds, living in a house that seemed about to fall apart at any moment (and knowing that I could never sell it because, after all, who would want to buy a place as badly constructed as that one was), struggling to keep up with my teaching assignments when I could no longer hear my students or concentrate enough to read and grade their papers.

And there was Rule #1: Write about what you know.

I wrote the novel in segments, out of chronological or narrative order. The first episode was the one with the roaches in the living room and kitchen. I think I wrote it the next day.

But then I was faced with a dilemma.

If this was going to be a  horror novel—and I knew it was—I would need more than just a few cockroaches.

That was when I remembered the next rule.

Rule #2: Put your character into true jeopardy and then, when it looks like he (or she) is about to escape…Make your character’s life a living hell!

That was also when writing The Slab became part-therapy, part-escapism, part-revenge.

We had found a handful of cockroaches in the living room…what if there were hundreds! Our roof leaked in drips and spurts into one of the bedrooms…what if the whole back yard flooded! Our house was badly constructed and—even though it had already stood for two decades and would probably stand for two or three more—looked like it was about to fall apart…what if the house itself were evil!

I didn’t finish the manuscript of the novel. Things became too difficult physically and mentally as my hearing deteriorated until I needed hearing aids in both ears. Then I developed cataracts in both eyes twenty years earlier than my doctor would have expected. And the depression deepened. And life at school became less and less bearable as I had to resign from committees that before I had enjoyed, endure hours-long faculty meetings without understanding anything anyone said, and refuse to even answer my telephone because I could not interpret what I might hear.

Finally, about five years ago, things reached a crisis point. I had a long discussion with the Dean of my college, and we decided to part company amicably. In fact, he went out of his way to make my retirement easy and the transition smooth. For which I am eternally grateful.

A couple of years after my wife and I moved to Idaho, I pulled out the ms. of The Slab—about 30,000 words.

And I remembered those two rules:

#1: Write about what you know; and

#2: When things start looking up, make your character’s life a living Hell.

Enough time had passed for me to be objective about the house. Mur daughter and son-in-law had purchased it, knowing full well what it was like (she had, after all, spent most of her life living there), raised it three feet, tore out the old foundations, and replaced it with a new slab…one with rebar. On top of it, they reconstructed the house, making it into a showplace.

My hearing and tinnitus were still problems, but the depression was under control. So in I jumped.

It was almost a pleasure destroying the contractor who build the house in my novel…almost. And giving the people who disguised all of the problems just to make a quick sale a truly terrible  time. And what to us had been minor irritations (I know realize) became to my characters life-threatening and sanity-threatening moments of true horror.

The Slab is doing fairly well. For a while last week, it broke into the top 1% of sales at the Kindle store, so apparently what I have to say about the potential horrors of homeownership has resonated with a few readers. And I know that the act of turning 30,000 words of disjointed episodes into a 90,000-word novel probably did me more good than all of the therapy combined.

So…my advice to anyone wanting to become a horror novelist?

Remember two rules:

#1: Write about what you know, and

#2: When things start looking up, make your character’s life a living Hell.

Oh, and one more rule I almost forgot….

#3: Have fun while you do it!