Exclusive: Author Gabriel Squailia Talks Dead Boys, Infant Corpses, What’s Next, and More!
In late February we told you about Dead Boys, the debut novel from Gabriel Squailia, and with its release just a day away, we thought we’d chat with the author to hear first-hand about his journey to getting the book published – it was a long time coming – and the horror elements included therein. Gabriel shared all of that and more so settle in for a bit, and dig in!
Rochester, NY, native Gabriel Squailia‘s Dead Boys arrives on March 3rd via Talos Press.
Q: First off, congratulations on the release of your first book! You’ve mentioned that it was a decade in the making – can you share some of the ups and downs of your journey to getting Dead Boys published? Was there ever a point where you thought about giving up and just sticking with your DJ job?
Gabriel Squailia: Thanks! It’s a beautiful feeling.
Dead Boys took a decade just to write, though I was hopping on and off of other projects in the meantime. The general concept hit me in 2000, and I started the current version in 2009, so there’s a long history of ups and downs in the conceptual stages alone. I remember the actual writing being a lot of fun, and I only thought I’d bitten off more than I could chew once or twice.
It was when I finished revising the book that things really got interesting. I contacted a number of agents, but I didn’t like the book’s chances at crawling out of the slush pile on the strength of a query letter. So when I learned that Pat Rothfuss’ incredible Worldbuilders fundraiser, which raises tons of money every year for Heifer International, had a read-and-critique auction that might let me get the manuscript in front of his agent, I was ecstatic. Matt Bialer had been on the top of my list of potential agents for a while.
Matt liked the book and offered to represent me, which was the highest high of the whole process. It did turn out to be a tough book to sell, though, mainly because of the cross-genre angle. “This is cool, but we don’t publish this kind of thing…” that was most of the feedback. And there were over three years of these mostly positive rejections.
By the end of that, yeah, my tank was empty. Between Matt’s submissions and mine, we’d clocked over thirty rejections. I wrote a second book somehow less marketable than the first, which makes me laugh now, but I took it very seriously at the time.
I thought I was done. It wasn’t like I was quitting writing — I’m a lifer, for better or worse — but I figured I’d do really weird, obscure stuff, like epic poetry. Stuff you couldn’t fail to publish because no one publishes it in the first place. “I’m gonna take my ball and go home.” I guess that’s where I was at. “Right after this last rejection comes in.”
But the last rejection, from Talos, turned out to be an acceptance! I still have a hard time getting my head around that. It’s an up, for sure; I’m just dazed.
Q: In your blog you credit the “Beats” – Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs – with igniting your teenage passion for writing, although you became somewhat disenchanted with them later on. Are there any horror authors who lit a similar fire for you and/or influenced Dead Boys‘ mix of the fantastic with the philosophical? Neil Gaiman has been cited as someone whose works are similar.
GS: Oh yeah. My horror kick came long before the Beats. All the short stories I wrote in middle school were horror. My first love was John Bellairs, who wrote creepy, neurotic books for kids. The House With a Clock in Its Walls was a big one. I read a lot of Poe in childhood, too, and EC horror comics. Then it was Stephen King by the barrow-load. Between the ages of twelve and fifteen, I devoured his bibliography, dozens of books. You can’t account for that kind of influence — he’s so deep in my DNA that I don’t bother analyzing it. I got into Dean Koontz at that time, too, and Dan Simmons and Clive Barker.
Neil Gaiman is probably the closest to what I was going for in Dead Boys, but I got into him later on, through Sandman, after I’d plotted out the current incarnation of the manuscript. It was a lovely shock of recognition — “Hey, look, someone’s getting away with this kind of thing!” I learned a lot from him about striking the right tone and incorporating classical influences without letting the seams show.
Q: The synopsis includes a “Land of the Dead” and a “Living Man” who is the only person to cross into the underworld without dying first. Already there seems to be a lot here for the horror crowd. Can you expand a bit on the horror elements and let Dread Central readers know what they especially might enjoy about Dead Boys?
GS: I’d describe Dead Boys as a classic adventure story set in a horrific world. The horror is in the texture of the Land of the Dead and in the nature of the characters, all of whom are corpses falling apart in different ways, trying to cover up their decay with a number of grotesque taxidermic innovations. Whether this comes across as amusing, like the ghosts in Beetlejuice, or as oppressively dark really depends on the reader. If you’re into deep horror, you’re probably not going to turn away from an eight-year-old bartender, flesh coated in mold, pouring booze from a gourd made of a human stomach, but that was the breaking point for my in-laws.
Related Story: Win a Copy of Gabriel Squailia’s Dead Boys
Ultimately, this is a book about people in a horrific situation who are striving to find a way to live heroically, which is how I see life on Earth. It’s not a thriller, but I’d recommend it to horror aficionados who are ready for something completely different.
Q: When we first heard about the book, a big part of the story was the amount of research that went into it. Can you elaborate on your late-night librarian stint at Simon’s Rock College of Bard? That must have been an interesting job with lots of fodder for an entire book itself! You’ve said that you read “everything you could find” on the physical processes of death and decomposition, the funerary and mourning rituals of various cultures, and underworld myths and folktales and then stylized it all for the novel. Would you say, then, that it’s more fantasy- or reality-based?
GS: Man, what a great gig. I worked from 10pm to 2am for a couple of years, surrounded by books and inter-library loan slips. I’d just pile up books about death and tear through them, scavenging for tidbits, taking notes. At that point I felt like I could write the story in earnest if I could just get the details right, whatever that meant.
In the end, I leaned into fantasy based on a framework of reality. There are plenty of references to real stuff for the dedicated thanatologist. Rotten Easter eggs.
But some of the most fascinating stuff was just too gross to spend a lot of time with. Bodies liquefy pretty quickly, and for a while there was a character who kept leaking innards through the rips in his skin, which he’d patch up with duct tape, but it threw off the tone. So I stuck with hanged men’s boners, rigor mortis, and infant corpses with skeletal feet thrashing out of ruined wombs. You know, the light stuff.
Q: Returning again to something you mentioned in your blog, you’re quite open about your previous doubts if you’d actually write books or would just keep “trying, failing, flailing — for the rest of time.” Obviously, you did succeed with Dead Boys; do you have any words of wisdom you can share with any of our readers who may also be struggling authors?
GS: However long you think it’ll take, either to write it the way you want it or to get it published once you do, double it. Quadruple it. It often takes a long time, and that is not a bad thing. You’ll be sharper when you get there and with fewer misconceptions.
I think you do have to get yourself to a point where you can write three or four or five books before you find one that someone wants to publish. That’s not an easy task, and there are people who were far, far more graceful about it than I was. You should probably listen to them instead of me: These are my words of wisdom.
Q: What’s next for you? Another horror tale? And between writing, DJing, spending quality time with your family, how do you squeeze it all in?
GS: I’m deep in a book right now that takes its cues from tournament-based manga like Naruto and from epic fantasy. It’s entirely too much fun, and I think the horror elements start with the villains and creep into the heroes over time.
As for squeezing it all in, I’m lucky enough to live in a city where I can afford an office. I get into that room, I close the door, I turn off the internet, and I write as hard as I can for however much time I’ve got. After five or six years of that, it becomes a habit, and you can get more done in less time. Parenthood helps with that, too — if I’ve got two hours before I pick up the kid from preschool, I’ve got that much more pressure to get the words out. And I thrive under pressure.
Q: Lastly, our typical closing question – what are some of your favorite horror movies and books? What types of stories scare you?
GS: The Exorcist is tops for movies. That new scene with the spider-walk freaks me out too damn much. Just thinking about it makes me all goose-pimply. I’m not sure if it’s horror to anyone else, but Tetsuo: The Iron Man scares the hell out of me for the same reason Cronenberg’s movies do. Body horror, people helplessly transforming, that stuff gets me right in the dreams.
For books, Stephen King’s It was so huge I just lived in there for years of re-reads. Fantasy stories with a lot of horror in their literary DNA do a lot for me, like Clive Barker’s Imajica. A number of the stories in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s massive collection The Weird scare me, especially “The Hell Screen” by Kutagawa and GRRM’s “Sandkings.” And Joe Hill’s NOS4A2 strikes me as one of the most complete horror stories I’ve ever read with such incredible attention to structural detail that I’ve been dying to read it again since I finished it.
I’m also big into the show “Hannibal.” Talk about horrific textures.
Q: Thanks for your time, Gabriel! Is there anything else you’d like to mention we might have left out?
GS: I’d love to give a shout out to Audible for letting me do the Dead Boys audiobook. It was a great time doing all those voices, and I hope it’s as much fun to listen to as it was to record.
Thanks for having me!
Dead Boys Synopsis:
A decade dead, Jacob Campbell is a preservationist, providing a kind of taxidermy to keep his clients looking lifelike for as long as the forces of entropy will allow. But in the Land of the Dead, where the currency is time itself and there is little for corpses to do but drink, thieve, and gamble eternity away, Jacob abandons his home and his fortune for an opportunity to meet the man who cheated the rules of life and death entirely.
According to legend, the Living Man is the only adventurer to ever cross into the underworld without dying first. It’s rumored he met his end somewhere in the labyrinth of pubs beneath Dead City’s streets, disappearing without a trace. Now Jacob’s vow to find the Living Man and follow him back to the land of the living sends him on a perilous journey through an underworld where the only certainty is decay.
Accompanying him are the boy Remington, an innocent with mysterious powers over the bones of the dead, and the hanged man Leopold l’Eclair, a flamboyant rogue whose criminal ambitions spark the undesired attention of the shadowy ruler known as the Magnate.
An ambitious debut that mingles the fantastic with the philosophical, Dead Boys twists the well-worn epic quest into a compelling, one-of-a-kind work of weird fiction that transcends genre, recalling the novels of China Miéville and Neil Gaiman.
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