an interview with
Ronald Kelly
by
Ray Rexer
RAY: First off, did you know that you can rearrange the letters in your name to spell out "Narly Old Elk?" It's true, try it. Ronald Kelly/Narly Old Elk. Coincidence or hidden message?
RK: It could be a coincidence, but given my roots, who knows? It could be a mysterious anagram for a long dead Indian ancestor (I do have Cherokee blood on both sides of my family). Or it could possibly originate from my Irish heritage. Maybe it's derogatory in nature. You know, something like "Get out of me sight, ye narly old elk!"
RAY: So how did a narly old elk like yourself come to be a writer?
RK: I became interested in writing in high school. I read a lot of comic books and classic horror and science fiction, mostly Poe, Lovecraft, Bradbury, and early King. I also enjoyed the paperback reprints of Doc Savage and The Avenger. I tried every genre imaginable when I started out: science fiction, mystery, macho-adventure, and western. Then I tried my hand at the genre I've loved since I was knee-high to a grasshopper and it just sort of clicked.
RAY: Are there any other writers in the Kelly family?
RK: No other writers, but a lot of great storytellers. My late grandmother on my mother's side was a master when it came to telling creepy tall-tales and ghost stories. She could put goosebumps on the inside of you with some of those gruesome yarns she used to spin. And she claimed that all of them were absolutely true. After her death, her children and grandchildren just seemed to naturally take up the tradition. I'm the only one of the bunch who puts them down on paper, though.
RAY: The book you've got coming out in December (Moon of the Werewolf) will be your fourth published novel in just two years. I'm guessin' this is getting to be a full time job for you.
RK: Yes, I've been writing professionally for about two years now, thanks to Zebra. I used to go at it pretty fast, getting out about two novels and twenty or thirty short stories a year. But I just recently got married and I've decided to relax a little and start enjoying myself. I'll be doing one novel and about half as many short stories in '91.
RAY: What type of writing schedule do you keep... or does it keep you?
RK: I've become pretty disciplined as far as my writing is concerned. I used to write day or night, weekday or weekend. Now I write about eight hours a day and leave it at that, unless I have a deadline to meet.
RAY: What's the first thing you remember writing?
RK: I guess it would be a short story I wrote in Creative Writing class during my sophomore year. I can't recall the title of it, but it was a nasty little tale about an escaped convict who hides beneath a ramshackle house and gets bitten by dozens of poisonous blue-tailed lizards, which doesn't kill him, but turns him into some kind of paralyzed zombie; sort of a living dead man. Not much of a plot there, but it did give my teacher the creeps. I believe she gave me a B+ for that one.
RAY: How about the first thing you ever got published?
RK: I had a few non-fiction pieces published in my high school paper, but my first, honest-to-goodness published work appeared in TERROR TIME AGAIN #1. It was a story titled "Breakfast Serial" about a friendly serial killer who privately plots the massacre of a farm family over the breakfast table and ends up getting the wrong end of the knife when he tries to make his move.
RAY: What scares Ron Kelly?
RK: I'm petrified of heights; have been since I was a kid. I loath spiders and snakes intensely. And wasps... man, I hate wasps worse than anything, especially if they're inside the house. I've run into some walls trying to get away from angry wasps.
RAY: Have you ever written outside the horror genre? Maybe some sort of bizarre western, or something?
RK: It's funny you've mentioned that, because I'm working on a proposal for a series of horror/westerns titled DEAD-EYE right now. It's about a zombie gunfighter and a Cajun mojo man who pursue a dandified vampire and his outlaw band through the postwar South and the Old West. It's only in the planning stages now, but I hope to get a publisher interested in it eventually. I also have a straight-forward western novel that my agent is attempting to market for me.
RAY: What do you do when you're not writing? What's a typical day for Ron Kelly?
RK: I spend my spare time reading and watching movies, and visiting some of the Civil War battlefields and historical sites around Tennessee when I get the chance. I reckon a typical day for me would be something like this: I eat breakfast, take my wife to work, write from nine to one, eat lunch and watch Andy Griffith on cable, write three or four hours more, then go pick up the little lady around five.
RAY: Someone told me you used to draw...cartoons and sketches that would make Clive Barker blush with envy. Any truth to that, and if so, can we expect to see some original Kelly illustrations in a future book?
RK: As a matter of fact, I did have aspirations of being an artist before I set my sights on writing. I drew my own comic books in high school and gained a modest following among the students and teachers. I kind of drifted away from the artwork when my fiction began to sell, and I'm a little rusty now. But I'm toying with the idea of getting back to it soon. Maybe I'll illustrate a collection of my short fiction in a year or two, if one of the speciality presses shows some interest in such a book.
RAY: And speaking of books, what are you reading right now? If I were to get a peek at your shelves (nothing personal), what books would I see there?
RK: I'm halfway through Bently Little's The Mailman right now. Great stuff, very suspenseful. I'm planning on starting on Koontz's Cold Fire next. My shelves are full of King, Barker, Koontz, McCammon, and Lansdale, along with plenty of anthologies. I've also got slipcovered collections of the old EC horror reprints, like Tales From The Crypt and Vault of Horror.
RAY: Recommend a good movie for me, will you? And while we're at it, point me to a good restaurant and, what the hell, how about lending me twenty bucks?"
RK: Good movie? The Silence of the Lambs; Hopkins was brilliantly horrifying. Good restaurant? The Perfect Pig Barbecue and Grill in White Bluff, Tennessee. And will I lend you twenty bucks? Fat chance.
RAY: In Pitfall (page 87) there's a small homage to a certain east Texas writer. I'm guessin' he's someone you admire and he's been something of an influence on you right? Name some other authors you've grown to know and love.
RK: Yes, Mr. Lansdale has made quite a lasting impression on this Southern boy. Joe is a fantastically diverse and powerful writer, and a helluva nice guy to boot. Did you know that he sounds just like Charlie Daniels over the phone? I think Joe has done a great service for writers of Southern horror. In a way he's told us that, yes, it is okay to write about the gritty, dark side of Dixie and that we can draw on our Southern heritage without guilt. Other writers that I admire, both professionally and personally, are Chet Williamson, Charlie Grant, and Karl Ed(ward) Wagner.
RAY: What less-than-well-known writers are Americans missing out on?
RK: I think Bentley Little is going to make a huge splash in the near future. His fiction has a nasty and disturbing twist to it; just read his novels or his stories in The Horror Show or Cemetery Dance and you'll find out. I think talents like Wayne Sallee, Jeff Osier, and Sidney Williams are overlooked, but hopefully not for long. There are a couple of Tennessee writers whose work I really enjoy -- Jack Hunter Daves and Jeremy Forsyth. I just wish that they would write more frequently than they do.
RAY: What do you write on... no. forget that, just describe the top of your work desk to me in all of its gory detail. I'm told someone once found an entire family of ground squirrels nesting within the clutter. Could this be true, and if so, wouldn't it make a great horror story?
RK: My work area looks like a cross between a CPA's desk and a mad scientist's lab table. On the very top shelf, there is a glow-in-the-dark model of a human skull, a baby rattlesnake (taxidermied of course), collector's editions of horror books, and copies of my own novels. The rest of my desk sports my word processor, writing supplies, a small, stone gargoyle, a genuine Texas scorpion suspended in plastic, an Amazon piranha fish (also quite dead), and a very realistic-looking severed finger in a pool of blood. I got rid of the family of ground squirrels when they finally died and decomposed. Dry fur and dusty bones can play havoc with computer equipment, you know.
RAY: If
you could collaborate on a story with any writer in the world, who'd it be?
RK: Stephen King would be the obvious answer of course, so I won't say that. I'd have to say either Joe Lansdale or Rick McCammon,, since their styles of storytelling are so similar to mine. If I had a time machine to travel in, I'd probably say Poe, Lovecraft, or Manly Wade Wellman.
RAY: I thought your first book, Hindsight, was a lot of fun. You once said it was written on a whim (in lieu of a typewriter?). What did you mean by that?
RK: I guess you could say that Hindsight was a turning point for me, mainly because it renewed my interest in writing and kept me afloat after ten years of failure and disappointment. I'd tried my hand at other genres, but when I decided to explore the horror field, I was at a loss at what sort of theme to pursue. Then my mother told me about a grisly mass murder that took place in a farming community only a hoot and a holler away. Surprisingly enough, I also found out that some of my distant relatives were both victims and perpetrators of the crime. That opening of the family skeleton closet got my imagination rolling and I combined that mass murder with my mother's psychic experiences as a child create Hindsight. I put a lot of my heart and soul into that book; the type of personal insight and gut emotion that I probably won't ever quite duplicate again.
RAY: Some authors seem to fall into a rut, simply rewriting their own books, just changing the titles and boring the hell out of their readers. It looks to me like you're consciously avoiding this trap. Hindsight is about a young girl with terrifying visions, Pitfall is about some vicious little furry sharp-toothed creatures and the havoc they reap on a small town, and Something out There involves a whole bunch of strange albinos --from monster bats to naked women.
RK: Yes, I consciously try to vary the type of subjects I explore from one novel to the next. I do this for myself, as much as I do it for my readers. I'd be bored to tears if I had to write seven or eight "evil children" books in a row. I owe a debt of gratitude to Wendy McCurdy at Zebra for allowing me the freedom to write anything that I want to. I try to do the same with my short fiction. Horror readers want variety; they don't want to be spoon-fed the same sort of crap time after time. That sort of fiction only stagnates the genre and perpetuates those annoying rumors of the "forthcoming death of horror".
RAY: I know you attended the World Horror Convention in your home state of Tennessee this past February and you met some crazy people there (yeah, I'm talking about Hinchberger). Was this your first convention; What do you think of these things?
RK: World Horror was my first convention and I had a blast! I went with a feeling of suspicion and guarded expectation. I'd heard about some of these horror/fantasy conventions with their Spock-eared geeks and Beauty and Beast fanatics. But I was pleasantly pleased. Everyone was incredibly nice and I ended up having a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to next year.
RAY: Before we go, tell me a bit about your next book, Undertaker's Moon, (the title is now Moon of the Werewolf) and anything else you've get coming up.
RK: Undertaker's Moon is about a clan of Irish werewolves who move to a rural Tennessee town and use their undertaking business as an inconspicuous front for acquiring fodder for their nocturnal feasts. I'm currently working on my fifth novel, tentatively titled Twelve Gauge. It will be a horror/suspense book about a disturbed teenager who is initiated into the ways of murder by the spectre of his recently executed father, a mass murderer who killed a dozen people in a Tennessee church house on Christmas morning. And I'll have short stories appearing in upcoming anthologies like Shock Rock, Dark at Heart, and Borderlands III.
RAY: One final question, if I read a Ron Kelly book backwards, what sort of strange message will I get?
RK: Probably, "The South is gonna rise again?" Either that or a recipe for collard greens, black-eyed peas, and chitlins'. Ya'll know what chitlins' are, don't you? Well, you see, you slit open a hog's belly, yank out the innards, and... what's the matter, bubba? You know, I've never quite seen that shade of grayish-green before, except maybe in one of those George Romero zombie movies. Anyway, you cook them buddies up nice and crispy and add a dash of Louisiana hot sauce and ...
THE END
(Maybe)
| The Overlook Connection Summer 1991 #15, pp. 23-25 |
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