Closed Captioned Video and Full Transcript for David Morrell Talks Creepers

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<Music: Tense spy music fade in>

ERIC HARPER: Welcome to Episode 5 of Neighborhood Bookstore, an author interview podcast. Each episode we take a book from an author’s back catalog and chat with them about its creation. On this episode: best-selling author David Morrell.

DAVID MORRELL [excerpt]: There's something about the past that intrigues me. And if I, if we could have a time travel machine, I’d do it, except I'd make sure I had plenty of inoculations for every kind of disease you could imagine.

ERIC HARPER: <laughing>

<Music: Tense spy music fade out>

ERIC HARPER: Hello, everybody and welcome to Neighborhood Bookstore, an author interview podcast. With me today hosting is Craig Duster. Hi, Craig.

CRAIG DUSTER: Hi, how you doing?

ERIC HARPER: I'm doing well. As always, I'm Eric Harper, your host. And our guest today is David Morell. Welcome, David.

DAVID MORRELL: Hi.

ERIC HARPER: Well, David, by way of introduction, we're going to embarrass you a little bit, alright?

DAVID MORRELL: Go ahead. <laughing>

ERIC HARPER: Craig, would you do the honors?

CRAIG DUSTER: Absolutely. Today's guest is bestselling author, David Morell, whose novel, First Blood introduced Rambo to the world. The character became a cultural touchstone.

His spy thriller, The Brotherhood of the Rose, was made into a television miniseries and likely contributed DNA to such successors as the John Wick films. His novel Creepers, which we're discussing today, is currently in production as an independent feature film.

Throughout his career he has written everything from horror to adventure fiction, Westerns, and Victorian mysteries. Welcome to the bookstore, David.

DAVID MORRELL: That's a heck of a list when you put it that way.

CRAIG DUSTER: <laughing>

DAVID MORRELL: It’s no wonder my agent wonders who's gonna be calling from year to year.

ERIC HARPER: <laughing> Well, David, I wanna just extend an extra thank you for being here because you are in some part an inspiration for this podcast. Back when I was in high school, I was driving to class one day and I heard you on the radio interviewed by Gordon Elliot about your novel, The Fifth Profession, when it came out.

And that was the first time I had ever heard an author, you know, interviewed on the radio. And it kind of lit a fire in me. I just thought, Well, why can't I talk to authors and find out what they're thinking and how their trade works.

DAVID MORRELL: Yes.

ERIC HARPER: So, thank you for being here.

DAVID MORRELL: Oh, you're very welcome and we did a little conversation before the show, and one of the things we were talking about was that authors often, when they're talking about what they're writing, they resort to plot summary. And I think that's not what listeners want to hear. And then I have a theory that every book has a non-fiction subject behind the fiction.

In the case of Fifth Profession it was executive protectors, and so we, I could talk for a long time about my training with executive protectors. And the whole philosophy, it's almost it's almost Japanese in which you are protecting somebody you might not know, and you might not even care about, but your profession is the protection itself. And I thought that was, when I wrote three protective agent novels, and that was what was in the back of my mind that, that ethic that goes beyond the personal connection.

ERIC HARPER: You're kind of a famous researcher of your books. And I don't just mean in the intellectual sense. I mean, I know that you have studied executive protection. I know you’ve studied, like, wilderness survival and mountaineering, firearms, defensive driving, and the like. So since Creepers, which I have right here, is a book, a thriller centered around urban exploration, I guess I'm wondering: How did, how did UrbEx cross your radar? And what kind of research did you have to do?

DAVID MORRELL: Well, I'd always been interested in old buildings. I've often said – my wife and I joke about this – that I have much less means at my disposal, but if I had another choice as a career, I would buy wonderful old houses that I, that, that really appealed to me, that had a character, and return them to what they were and then sell them. I don't think I, you know, what kind of career can you have doing that, at least with my personality.

But I'd always been interested in old buildings and where I lived when I was young there were many old buildings that I was able to get into. And I remember on one occasion getting, it was an old apartment building, and what people don't understand is when, often when these buildings are closed, they remain as they were. And I was, I went in and the kitchen table was there, and the old refrigerator unplugged was there.

And what interested me was that there were some old wind up, there was an old wind up record player with 78 RPM discs. And I still remember I played one, and I still remember the song that, that, about how romance is breaking up that old gang of mine!

ERIC HARPER: Oh! <chuckles>

DAVID MORRELL: I, anyhow, I, this was in the back of my mind when in the local newspaper, we have a wonderful independent newspaper called the Santa Fe New Mexican. And it's not affiliated with any of the larger chains, which dictate what can go in it, or the length of the articles. And so our, the newspaper, well, that handles some international and national stories, is a lot of local stuff.

And anyhow, they did a piece about something I didn't know about called urban explorers. And I thought when I learned about it, that these were clubs. Then I went online to see how popular it was and I found a quarter of a million websites.

I couldn't believe this. In fact, the quarter of a million websites was part of the pitch I made to my publisher. How can you go wrong publishing a book where you have a quarter of a million sites? Never mind the members . . .

CRAIG DUSTER: <chuckles>

DAVID MORRELL: . . . who are interested in this topic.

ERIC HARPER: Right.

DAVID MORRELL: And so I, you know, I did my customary intellectual research in this case, and went to the websites and saw what they were doing. And, in fact, interviewed a couple of urban explorers who were well known within that group. And I got more and more fascinated.

And also because it's the way I think, you know, going back in time, which is sometime, which has on occasion been a theme in my books. I did a novel called Testament, where it starts now and somebody's on the run and he winds up in an old ruin of the ghost town from the 1800s.

And as he keeps running now he's living in a cave. It's as if he regressed in human evolution. And the same thing I thought with, you know, going back in time or going deeper into the psyche at the same time. So those were the metaphors that I was playing with as I was putting the book together.

And it appealed to me in a way that you, seldom you get a plot that allows you to go in so many subtextual, I'm really talking like an author now, subtextual directions.

ERIC HARPER: <chuckles> Well, for people who haven't read the book could you just give us a very simple description of the plot?

DAVID MORRELL: It is set in – and I said I wouldn't do this, but because you asked me I’m going to do it.

ERIC HARPER: I appreciate it.

DAVID MORRELL: It’s set in Atlantic, in um, not Atlantic City, in in. Come on, where's it set? No, it's been so long ago.

ERIC HARPER: Asbury Park.

DAVID MORRELL: Asbury Park. At the time when I wrote the book, Asbury Park was a war zone, in effect. It was a lot of ruined buildings, and it's main theme, main claim to fame was that it had a music scene.

So the thing that interested me was that the whole town's in ruin. Now that has changed. If you went to Asbury Park today, it was, since I, since that book was published in 2005, the town has been rejuvenated. And what I was gonna say earlier is, Bruce Springsteen is noted for Asbury Park.

But so, but at the time it was a wreck. So, you know, the building and the town itself, it had been a glory day at one time, it had been a magnificent beach resort.

And so I thought, all right, we're gonna, I'm gonna pick a building there. It's a fictional one, but it's based on a number of old hotels that were there, and it's going to have been closed since the mid-1960s. And it will have been built at the turn of the century. So there's a lot of history. And as with so many of these buildings, when it was closed, mysteriously, it was all left inside the way it had been.

ERIC HARPER: Yeah it is something of a time capsule.

DAVID MORRELL: Exactly, which became the subject of the next novel that I wrote, Scavenger, that you know these topics really, really interested me. And so it's about a team that goes into, that one’s a professor and he has some students. And there's a mysterious man named Ballinger, who claims to be a reporter, but is something else. And then we find out he's something else yet again.

I love the idea of a man changing three times in the course of the story. And they they go into, they have to do it through, as it were, the sewers because the place is boarded up. And these places are patrolled because they're unsafe.

ERIC HARPER: Mm, hmm.

DAVID MORRELL: So, a true urban explorer crew will have, you know, thick-soled construction boots. They'll be wearing construction equipment. They'll have utility belts and all that. And they will have with them methane detectors and carbon monoxide detectors and things of that sort.

And so, you know, they're like urban guerillas in a way. And so they go in through the tunnels to the hotel. And then the plot is basically what happens in that night.

And one of the things that occurred to me, I love various challenges. And one of the things that occurred to me is that the book would occur within an 8-hour span. As it were, from dusk ‘til dawn.

And the novel would be divided into like 9:00 to 10:00, 10:00 to 11:00, 11:00 to 12:00, and so on. And as near as I could time it, that it would take, at a moderate pace, an hour to read each section. And the time would be continuous – it's a technique called real time. So that every instant of every breath of 8 hours is on the page.

The standard way this is done is five minutes later he did whatever. But those five minutes are on the page. Every step that they go up on a staircase is on the page. If they have to relieve their bladder, that's in the book, too.

ERIC HARPER: I was gonna comment on that, that a lot of, like, when I think of real time, I think of movies and television. I haven't really encountered that concept used in a book before. But one of the elements that stood out to me is the fact that, you know, characters do have to stop and use the bathroom.

DAVID MORRELL: Yeah.

ERIC HARPER: It really does account for every one of their actions.

DAVID MORRELL: Yes, and quite a challenge, and I was very gratified. Brilliance Audio did the audiobook and the running time for the audiobook is almost 8 hours.

ERIC HARPER: <laughing>

DAVID MORRELL: So, it takes 8 hours to read the book out loud.

ERIC HARPER: It works.

DAVID MOREELL: And here's a, this is for any writers listening. I was always impressed by Edgar Allan Poe's theory of the philosophy of composition. It's an essay that he's well known for. And he had a theory that the short story in fiction was the more authentic, more reliable form of fiction than the novel because the short story could be appreciated, could be experienced in an hour, let us say, whereas the novel couldn't be. And he had a theory that 1 hour was more or less the duration of the average person's attention span.

ERIC HARPER: Oh, wow.

DAVID MORRELL: So that, and if you think about it in terms of the novel, so you're reading along. And you know the novelist might have, as I, as I try, might have tried for all this unity and all this cascading, you know, building and cascading of effects.

But you can't tell when the phone's going to ring. You can't tell when somebody's gonna knock on the door or when you have to get in the car to go somewhere. You're reading at night and you fall asleep. There's no way to measure the pace of reading a novel. And that's why sometimes if we reread a novel, it can be a different experience because the chunks that we appreciate it in are different. And it has a different pace.

ERIC HARPER: Oh, how interesting!

DAVID MORRELL: And so all that stuff was going on in my mind. So I thought, all right, the advantage of Creepers – with its 8 hours of 1-hour sections – is that I can sort of dictate the degree of attention that the reader is going to give to the sections of the book.

And you, I'm sure you, everybody does this that I know of: You're reading along and you feel a little tired. How much is left in the section?

ERIC HARPER: Yep.

DAVID MORRELL: So, you pay <to have it?>. Now I tend to do, to write, cause I've written film scripts as well, I tend. I don't. Film scripts relied on sight and books should rely on multi-senses. So, they're different.

ERIC HARPER: Mm, hmm.

DAVID MORRELL: But scenically, I like the idea that if the scene is occurring and they say, “let's go and talk about this some more,” that there's a break and a new section begins, as when they're outdoors, as you would in a film script.

ERIC HARPER: Mm, hmm.

DAVID MORRELL: So, I tend to have sections of a book which are no longer, say, than 2 or 3 pages, which would be an enormous amount in a film script. But there are only 2 or 3 pages and then there's a break, and then there might be 2 or 3 pages and then a break, and then there's the hour section.

So that in a way I could control the pace with which people read the book. And if I did it right, I could more or less depend upon them to finish 9:00 to 10:00 before they shut the lights off.

ERIC HARPER: Wow! That's not the kind of attention that I typically think of being brought to a book.

DAVID MORRELL: Well . . .

ERIC HARPER: That’s impressive.

DAVID MORRELL: You have to remember I was a professor. I, you know, I taught American literature at the University of Iowa. Not in the workshop, I didn't teach fiction. I taught literature. And this is sort of the way I think. That when I'm working on a book . . .

I did my PhD dissertation on a contemporary American author named John Barth, who is extremely intellectual in his approach. But I learned an enormous amount from him, and a lot of the principles that he applied to the way he writes, I applied, too. And this is just the way I think of it.

I say, all right. Here's the idea. Now, what can I do with it? Not just plot-wise, but what can I do, like we alluded earlier to a book called Scavenger. We didn't mention the title, I don't think, but with Scavenger, which is the sequel to Creepers and is about a time capsule.

And in it I thought that I would use video games as the metaphor for the structure. So there are 9 levels to the novel imitating 9 levels of the video game and to move from one level to the other in the plot each character, the characters have to solve a riddle and overcome a physical obstacle.

ERIC HARPER: Wow.

DAVID MORRELL: And so, and that became the structural point for that novel. So in each of the books that I write I have this little thing in my head. Part of it keeps me interested. ‘Cause if I know the story, you know, there's an organizing principle so it isn't just one damn thing after another.

ERIC HARPER: Right. Well, you know, regarding Creepers, I'm curious as to whether you view it as a thriller, a mystery, a horror novel, or what? Because I would describe it as Straw Dogs if it was written by Agatha Christie or Alistair MacLean.

DAVID MORRELL: Yeah, that's cool. And Sam Peckinpah’s, you know, at the top of my favorite directors. I, when I wrote First Blood, I'd seen The Wild Bunch. I never got over The Wild Bunch and Peckinpah’s approach to writing action is very much in First Blood.

Maybe it's the way my mind works, but I tend to try to bring a lot of elements together. And if you had to say to me, What is it? You know, pick one category. It's non-supernatural horror. But it's also a mystery. And it's also a thriller.

But you know, if we have a hierarchy, the top would have to be that it's a horror novel. And the Horror Writers of America or, uh, Horror Writers Association. That's what they used to be called – “of America.” They, the Horror Writers [Association] gave me a Bram Stoker Award for Creepers.

ERIC HARPER: Oh, wow!

DAVID MORRELL: So, I'm very, I've 3 awards from Horror Writers [Association].

ERIC HARPER: Well, the Paragon Hotel in Creepers is probably, it's as ominous and foreboding . . .

DAVID MORRELL: Yes

ERIC HARPER: . . . a building in a book I've read. I mean, it's right up there with the Overlook Hotel in The Shining.

DAVID MORRELL: Oh, thank you.

ERIC HARPER: Is it, is it based on a real building?

DAVID MORRELL: It is not. It, there were, doing the research and looking at Asbury Park at the time – because it's all different now, like, you know, I mean, if you went there, you’d have a very satisfying experience.

But at the time there was in fact, though, a building that was an apartment building that was never completed. And it had a steel girder hanging down its side, which in a wind would cause it to clang against the side of the building. And you'll recall from reading Creepers that this is, it's like the tolling of doom in the background. They keep hearing this clang, this clang, but that, that was a real, real building.

And that's the only, you know, ‘cause it was new. Whereas the Paragon Hotel, as I said, was built in the turn of the century. And that building with the hanging girder was eventually blown up. They just . . .

ERIC HARPER: Oh boy!

DAVID MORRELL: That was the end of that. But, so that was as close as I had to a real building, and I had, I did, you know, a survey looking at other buildings in Asbury Park, but nothing, nothing equal what this was.

The age and the feeling of the, reminds me, I was, you know, you have to go out and promote books and demean yourself by, you know, “Buy my book, buy my book.”

CRAIG DUSTER: <laughing>

DAVID MORRELL: And I was somewhere, I don’t know where it was, and guy came up to me. It was in an airport, I remember, I was doing a signing at an airport.

And you know guy comes up and says, “I've got a plane to catch. Why should I buy this book?” Well, you know, I said, “Do you like furniture?” I don't know why I said this . . .

ERIC HARPER: <laughing>

DAVID MORRELL: . . . and he said, “I love furniture.” I, you know, must have been mind-melding, and I said, “Well, Art Deco furniture is all through this novel. So if you want to learn a little bit about Art Deco.” He says, “I love Art Deco. Where do I buy the book?” And off he ran to the plane.

DAVID MORRELL: I thought okay, that was . . .

ERIC HARPER: <laughing>

DAVID MORRELL: . . . talk about coincidental. I don't know even why I mentioned furniture.

ERIC HARPER: It seems like in reading your books many of them have some . . . many of them have some combination of suspense, horror, mystery . . .

DAVID MORRELL: Mm, hmm.

ERIC HARPER: . . . and history, you know?

DAVID MORRELL: Yes.

ERIC HARPER: The Brotherhood of the Rose goes back centuries to establish its theme before you get into the to the spy fiction portion. What is it about those themes that that speak to you so much.

DAVID MORRELL: Well, again, it's probably the way my mind works, but I tend to, if there's proof of reincarnation, I must be your reincarnated soul because I just I can't get enough of the past. And, in fact, when Ballinger, in Creepers, has been traumatized and his psychiatrist told him that he had to erase the modern world from him, so that the only things he was . . . only films, only books, only music he was allowed to experience were pre-Second World War.

And I thought, you know, how fascinating. And I wound up in later . . . When I did my Victorian mystery thrillers – Murder As a Fine Art, Inspector of the Dead, and Ruler of the Night – because I wanted to make people feel they were, in fact, there, I did a . . . there's a Richard Matheson film called Somewhere in Time, which is based upon a novel called Time and Again. And in it a character concentrates so hard that he goes back to the turn of the century. And I was doing the same thing when I did, when I did the Victorian books.

For 2 years, the only books I read were related to 1850s London and my real main character, a man named Thomas de Quincey, who invented the concept of the subconscious.

And I read all of his works (and there's a ton of them) several times, because I wanted to use his writing in the dialogue. So, when he speaks in the books that is, in fact, what he said, so to speak, in print. And also, you know the Victorian mood, and all. So, I felt I was there. So, while I've traveled far from creepers here, there's something about the past that that intrigues me. And if I – if we – could have a time travel machine, I’d do it—except I'd make sure I had plenty of inoculations for every kind of disease you could imagine.

ERIC HARPER: <Laughing> Is there a hidden meaning in the fact that the characters in Creepers start basically underground, and their journey is up, up, up through the building?

DAVID MORRELL: Yeah. Yeah. And again, this is, you know, how do you . . . And you know, in terms of films, it'd be the same way. How do you structure a book so that you go through different levels of interest, that Act 1, Act 2, Act 3 is an obvious one. And so that's the place to go. You start underground and then move up. And as you move higher, revelations begin to occur. So, I think of . . . I think of . . . I'm a thriller writer, but I'm very . . . I'm very aware of metaphors. And when I'm working out a structure for a book, I think of it in terms of its metaphoric values. And I think also that even though a reader might not be aware of it they would, readers would, feel it. That the going higher becomes more intense and that, and then, you know, in the climax, of course, down they go again. Because that's the way the way life is, so to speak.

ERIC HARPER: Oh, yeah. Well, and it is part of the tension in Creepers, because in the hotel, the way it's constructed, each floor is smaller than the one below it.

DAVID MORRELL: Yes, yes.

ERIC HARPER: They’re literally getting squeezed as they go.

DAVID MORRELL: Isn’t that wonderful? I mean, it's so much fun to, you know. It's a pyramid, you know, and as they get higher, yes, it gets that way, and there's another element to the book. Most of the book, except for the first hour, is in the dark. They have lanterns, they have flashlights, and things of that nature.

So, the task becomes that you cannot rely on a sense of sight. And that you then, as the book gets more dark, so to speak, you have to rely on the other senses. And I'd go back to John Barth, who was not only a great novelist – He's still alive. I shouldn't use the past tense – but was a great teacher. And he had a theory, which I adhere to, which is about using senses in a form of what he called “Triangulation.”

So that if you're looking for a radio signal, one direction won't do it. You need another one over here to intercept, to know where the sound is coming from. So. And he said that you should have in your scenes – you don't want to do it heavily. It has to be so the reader is not aware of it, but it is there – to use 3 senses in every scene

So, when I get to Creepers, I can't use sight any longer, except for the flashing lights. So, sound and touch . . . touch being the most powerful and sound being a form of touch, and then the rest of them that, that in effect, the whole book is “triangulated” for a multi-sensory experience, not using sight.

And so that it's an odd book in a number of ways: that it is strictly 8 hours with no interruptions. And that it's 4 senses, not 5 senses.

ERIC HARPER: Wow.

DAVID MORRELL: And I mean again, it's very interesting to write a book like that, as you're following a very different path.

And I, when I teach writing . . . I go to conferences, and I teach writing periodically . . . and people get very upset with me when I say that the first-person, (which Creepers is not) is a trap for the unwary.

Because it feels so natural, so to speak, that the narrator is just as the author. So, yadda yadda yadda yadda. First of all, it's very . . . first-person novels by untrained writers tend to be very wordy. But beyond that, and I don't know why this is, but most, even by professional writers, most first-person novels rely almost entirely on the sense of sight.

And to the degree that you do that, to that degree you have a one-dimensional novel. So that's why most first-persons feel thin, because they're all sight.

ERIC HARPER: Oh, that is a fascinating take that I had not considered. It really reduces it more like to the experience of watching a TV show.

DAVID MORRELL: Yes, exactly. And as we see it, you know, people are describing what they're seeing. Not what they're experiencing. And I mean, you wouldn't believe that. I mean, people get furious at me when I talk this way, because, of course, it's so easy to write first person.

But it isn't, if you know what you're doing, you know. There! Oh, boy, this is fun writing. I mean, what? There's no problem with writing. Well, there is. If you're writing bad first-persons and all. They get absolutely incensed. So, I say, “Okay, you know? Do what you want.”

ERIC HARPER: This is like, I'm fascinated because this is not a topic I've really ever heard addressed by an author, and I'll be very curious to see how an audience of readers reacts to this episode because what you're describing is the kind of literary criticism that's supposed to be invisible to the reader.

DAVID MORRELL: Yeah. Well, that's right. You don't wanna tip your hand so. And you wouldn't. You know my descriptions? I very seldom have overt descriptions. You know? Not block paragraphs about . . . I mean occasionally, if it's necessary, if I have no other choice, I surrender to my weakness. But otherwise, when I do the triangulation –and I try to do it. Never seen, and it's not heavy. But you did put it in a proper place – the reader will feel so people often say to me: “Oh, I'm reading. Your prose is just like watching a movie.” And you know, I don't say anything, but the fact is: no. Because movies are sight and sound.

And what you're doing is, you're feeling the story. And it is because of that triangulation, that multi dimension, multi-sense, that there's a feeling of extra reality that a book normally doesn't have. Especially when you have an all-sight, first-person narrative.

ERIC HantARPER: Sure. You know, to let me ask you this, though: to what degree do you think a reader might find that additional immersion in the senses overwhelming? Just so like, for example, you know you, you've written the Victorian Mysteries, right? So, like, obviously, you know, there's sight, there's touch. There's things like that. But historical settings are full of other things that modern people don't have to deal with. Like feces in the street. You know, sickness, and putrification, and the constant aroma of animals. How do you think people react to that?

DAVID MORRELL: Well, you have to, I mean, when once . . . one doesn’t want to disgust the reader. So right? So, you have to be delicate about that. But I mean some of the scenes in the first de Quincy book, the first Victorian book, Murder As a Fine Art, what isn't widely known, but I learned because I was doing so much research, is that part of the garbage pick-up in Victorian London was with wild pigs. And they ate all the garbage, and all the offal, and everything. And they roamed. So, if you were in the wrong part of town at the wrong time at night, you might be encounter, you might encounter, some wild pigs that thought you might be supper. And there's a scene at the start of the novel, after they find that this is . . .

That novel is based upon a real series of mass murders in 1811 in London, which are recreated in the novel, and those mass murders were so shocking that they literally paralyzed London. And in fact paralyzed all of England because, for the first time with the mail coach system, you could have newspapers and magazines all through the British, the UK, within 36 hours. And it just shut down everything. It was so shocking.

And anyhow, the two Scotland Yard detectives—Scotland Yard just recently having been organized to deal with the attempts to assassinate Queen Victoria. That's why it was established—they arrived, and they have footprints that they need to analyze. And they think they're so wonderful because they have a plaster cast that they're gonna put in. But when, of course, de Quincy comes along and begins talking to them about the chasms of the human mind, and they don't know what the hell he's talking about, but they soon will.

In any case, they pour the plaster. And now it’s midnight, and you know there's no lights, and one of the Scotland Yard detectives has to make sure that nobody messes with the plastic casts. And here come the pigs.

ERIC HARPER: Oh no!

DAVID MORRELL: And he is all by himself. He's got two chores. One is to stay alive, and the other is: keep the damn pigs away from the [evidence].

So, I mean, here we have darkness. You know, we have the smell of the . . . it's, I don't know. This technique works in any situation. The advantage of writing the Victorian books was that that was so weird, back then, compared to what we understand. But none of the novelists at the time were aware of how weird it was. So, the really strange stuff, they didn't [record]. Dickens didn't put in his novels that arsenic was in the green dye in women's clothing, and they were wearing poison. And he didn't put in his books that the average woman in 1850, the well-to-do [woman] with her hoop dress and the garments and all that, her clothes weighed 43 pounds. And but he took this for granted. So, what I was doing was trying to get reading [material] – Oh, my heavens, I wrote on that over here. You can't see it but there’s whole shelf – to find out these weird things which nobody knew about except the Victorians back then, and to use them in the book to create a freshness.

For example, if you went into a doctor's office there would be a role of felt. The laundries took the felt that they made that resulted from laundering. You know, what we have in the dryer. We throw that felt out. But they had vast quantities of it, and they made rolls of it, which were used as towels in homes for disposing.

And those roles of felt would be in a doctor's office. And after he examined you, if he washed his hands he'd tear off some felt.

ERIC HARPER: So, like, what was essentially our dryer lint. They were taking it, and they were using it.

DAVID MORRELL: And they were using it! They were multi-purposing it! I mean, isn't that cool?

ERIC HARPER: It's very cool!

DAVID MORRELL: So now, if you set a novel today . . . That's one of the reasons why I had fun with Creepers, because [the hotel] had been boarded up since 1965.

So, you know, what do we take for granted? And then, what's more, the furnishings went back to the thirties, and the architecture went back too, so that everything was different then.

Now, if you set a novel today in a basic doctor's office, you go in and the first thing I do is comment on an odor. I try to find an odor of antiseptic or something. So, I try to go for odor first when somebody enters a room. And then I would, I go for the change in light, which is a touch because your eyes are affected and they dilate one way or the other. So, that's a touch, that's a way to use light as a touch. So, if you go into a doctor's examining room the light gets brighter, so a character will feel his eyes change or her eyes change, as entering the room. But apart from that, everybody knows what a doctor's office looks like and anybody who tries or decides to describe one is a fool.

ERIC HARPER: Well of course! There's only so much difference between all of them.

DAVID MORRELL: It's the same! So, you just basically say, you know, shiny glass, you know, on the windows of the cabinet. And you know. And okay, let's get on with it. But with Creepers, and with the Victorian books, or you know all the ones that deal with the history before the story occurs, that's a gold mine, because it's not only not commonly known but also it brings a different kind of senses. You know, a different quality of sensate, that the reader will . . . Hemingway had an expression that the reader would feel more than understanding. And that's what I tried to do, and it's very happy for me when readers – very gracious, kind readers – say, “I read your book a second time.” Oh, God bless you! “And it's a different book.”

It's like, “There's stuff in there I didn't notice. It's all different.” And I “yes, yes,” because once the plot is over, all this other stuff starts to come to the surface.

ERIC HARPER: Well, when you were writing Creepers, did, you know—What made me think of this is your discussion of your research of Victorian era England. When you were researching and writing Creepers, what did you learn that surprised you?

DAVID MORRELL: Well, primarily, that this was an international phenomenon. Next to the United States, next to English speaking countries, the country that went crazy over Creepers was Germany. Half a million copies were sold there. I mean, who could predict? And did that have something to do with the sense in Germany of that, you know, that latent history? You know, and all those old bunkers and, you know that some of them haven't even been discovered, you know? That they feel [a connection with]. So, this phenomenon existed, and that . . . When I wrote the book in 2004, for a 2005 publication, I was amazed. You know the riots in 1968, this was a big influence on my novel First Blood. The Rambo novel. 1968 was a year of in the United States of terror. There were, you know, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and there were several hundred serious riots.

I mean, it's hard to imagine. Almost every major city had its riot. And Detroit was especially hard hit. And, but and now we're talking 50 years later, when I'm writing Creepers and I'm looking around doing research, and there were still blocks of downtown Detroit that landlords had abandoned because of the riots and the damage, and still were there. They were still boarded up.

Now I'm sure that's different now, you know, all these years later, again, nearly 20 years later. And people and urban explorers who had gone into those buildings in 2005 were finding doctors’ offices with the patient files still there, were finding rotary phones, were finding television sets.

ERIC HARPER: Oh, my goodness.

DAVID MORRELL: Everything was the same.

ERIC HARPER: A literal time capsule.

DAVID MORRELL: With a lot of dust. And so that, those were some revelations that, you know, that the effects of that riot, how long it would have taken in order to revitalize some place that had been devastated.

ERIC HARPER: Sure. And well, and also Creepers makes reference to the race riot that happened in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Is that why you chose that? Why you chose Asbury Park is the setting?

DAVID MORRELL: What I was looking for . . . that was that was happenstance. I thought, oh, boy, this is wonderful, this extra. What I was looking for was a resort community on the east coast that had been, that had its glory days and then gradually had dwindled and dwindled and dwindled so that its reputation, you know, was a dim memory. And so, by process of elimination –I can't remember what other places I considered, or why Asbury Park began to nag at me, but – it was essentially it's history. And it's failure, as it were. Except that I have to emphasize: it's not like that anymore, you know. It came back again.

And it may have been because Bruce Springsteen, who came from the area, often talked about, you know, playing in these clubs that you know, that's all there was, was some of the clubs that there was, you know, it was in its own wreckage zone. And maybe because of my interest in Springsteen that I seized on Asbury Park.

ERIC HARPER: Interesting. Well, you're not the first author to speak with us about Springsteen either. We also recently spoke with James Grady. James is a huge, huge fan of Springsteen.

DAVID MORRELL: Yes, and I'm a fan of James. Six Days of the Condor, which became the film 3 Days of the Condor. And over the years we had a chance to get together periodically. You know, like minded authors. And so how thrilling for you to speak to him! Because, you know he's a, you know, a major talent.

ERIC HARPER: Oh, and he was a lovely resource, he was very generous with all of his experiences. As have you been! So do you . . . with urban exploration, a lot of what I know I learned from your book and from the curiosity that it fostered to my own Google search. They’re – the people who started it and are committed to it – they treat it the same thing as, say, going to a national park. Take nothing, leave nothing.

DAVID MORRELL: That's correct. Yes.

ERIC HARPER: Do you think that has in any way been diminished by the age of social media? Because I know that with TikTok there are now a lot of videos about urban exploration, and I'm just wondering if some of that attitude and some of those ethics were in any way diminished by becoming popular and prominent?

DAVID MORRELL: I don't know because the book Creepers was written just before the big Internet boom with social media. I mean there was email, but things that we, you know, Facebook and Twitter, which were the traditional ones and then have been eclipsed. So, it wasn't on my mind when I wrote the book.

ERIC HARPER: Sure, of course.

DAVID MORRELL: But I don't think there's anybody who doesn't understand that social media is not a positive social direction. It has encouraged the worst of us to feel entitled. And so, you have some crazy, crazy guy, you know, wearing a Nazi hat in the basement, you know, torturing cats, who's putting his opinions out on various social media sites, and they get the same attention in theory as other people who are in their right minds. And so, small segments of people with extreme ideas learn to manipulate social media in order to, you know, I think, devastate our culture. And, but you know, end of the homily, right? But since you mentioned it, that's my view of it, and you know, and I'm sticking with it too.

ERIC HARPER: Well, when the book was written, UrbEx—you know, the people who did the infiltrations that you described in the book—were anonymous. How did you find people that were willing to talk with you? Because, you know, that

exploration is essentially a crime.

DAVID MORRELL: Yes.

ERIC HARPER: I mean, there’s nothing malevolent about it, or there's no ill intent, but it is illegal to go into a building that doesn't belong to you.

DAVID MORRELL: It's trespassing. Moreover, it's dangerous. These places are boarded up, and a lot of the really clever urban explorers seek out city planning, you know, go to the planning department and get the original plans, and learn where there might be underground access, and things like that. And I tried to make clear, you know, that this was not something to be done lightly, and you could in fact have some serious legal consequences to it.

But in terms of the Urban Exploration, I went to the [web] sites and I simply explained, you know, what I do. And that I wanted to portray them in a way that I felt was responsible and that had, you know, their rules and talk about the way they did things that they thought were the right way to do things. And they were very available. For the larger sites—I think it's been a while now but—I did an interview for at least one site. I wrote an article for another site. We had book giveaways. You know, you have to do so, to promote.

ERIC HARPER: Well, and they were your built-in audience, at least in part.

DAVID MORRELL: Yes. Exactly. And – but they were offended by the term “creepers,” which is a nickname that they don't care for but which exists. And so there was a problem there, and I don't know to the degree that I was able to overcome it. But in any case I, you know, I got the initial cooperation.

ERIC HARPER: Very cool.

DAVID MORRELL: I'm curious about your co-host! Do you have any questions?

CRAIG DUSTER: Yeah! Yeah!

DAVID MORRELL: You're listening, Craig. You’re very patient!

CRAIG DUSTER: Well, thank you. I was really fascinated. So, I did listen to the book on audio, it didn't occur to me, though, while I was reading it that it was in real time. I mean, I just didn't. It had that feel to it. I mean, I'm not acquainted with any other novels that do that kind of real, that had done that real time kind of work.

What inspired you to do that? And do you feel like there were drawbacks to it? Or was it, did you feel like it was just a real positive experiment?

DAVID MORRELL: Well, it was a challenge. You know, with each book . . . I've been doing this a long time. My first novel, First Blood, was published in ‘72 and the average – it’s changed a little bit, but for a long time – the average length of a career was 20 years.

So why is that? Because the authors tended, having found something that worked, to repeat it again and again and again and again – the same, only different. And then all about the 20-year range, they got tired about the same time as their readers got tired. And I determined . . . and it's partly my nature, because I keep thinking, “well, what about this, and what about that?” So, my career, so to speak, divides into decades.

The first 10 years were essentially outdoor adventure novels: the Rambo novel [and] Testament. I did an outdoor horror novel called The Totem, which was a lot of fun.

In the 80s, I wrote spy novels. And there again, you know, I've always been like: what? How do I make this different? How can I advance the idea? So, at the time in the 80s there were two traditions. There was the UK spy novel typified by John Le Carre, who had been a professional intelligence operative and who wrote novels – Tinker Tailer Soldier Spy which is my favorite of them – in which the spy craft, as it's called, was absolutely authentic.

But you will look a long time to find any action sequence in a John Le Carre novel, because that's not the way the business works. It's people in shadowy rooms, plotting. Whereas the American spy novel typified by Robert Ludlum had all kinds of action, guys in trench coats running down corridors, but shit intelligence techniques. I mean, laughable. So, I thought, “how do we blend these?” Because I was known as an action writer. How can I then blend [both types]?

And it took a long time because, there, this stuff wasn't written down. But, as it happens, former elite military operators tend often to become contract workers in the intelligence world. And so, I had a lot of Rambo fans who were that sort of veteran. And so they would teach me the operate . . . the techniques that they learned, at what the CIA calls The Farm outside Langley, Virginia. And I didn't learn anything, you know, that's gonna topple governments. All I learned was about, you know, traditional intelligence techniques.

But at the time in 1984, with Brotherhood of the Rose, this had never been done before. So, you know, that you would have all the running around, and then they talk seriously about, you know, the way espionage works. And then I did that a second time, only for religious espionage, a book called The Fraternity of the Stone. And if you look at Dan Brown's work 20 years later, particularly a book called Angels and Demons, and you look at The Fraternity of the Stone, you will see some amazing parallels.

ERIC HARPER: Yeah, I recall that Opus Dei played a significant, nefarious role in your novel, and in his decades later.

DAVID MORRELL: And then it was decades later that that he was using it again. And I'm not suggesting he was stealing from me, but there was certainly an influence there.

And then in the 90s, I did a different kind of [book] because that market collapsed with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Intelligence market. So, I was thinking of what else? What other way I could do it? And I started writing a couple of books, I did some in some protective agent books that, which is another way to do espionage. And then I did two books in which a photographer and an artist, a painter, in which they are involved in thrillers. And it, one was my version of Rear Window, or of a lot of Hitchcock things, of Vertigo especially, and the other . . . Well, I don't go down that rabbit hole, but it was very, it was a lot of fun to do them, and then in, the turn of the century, then I was doing non-supernatural horror. And then, later on, I was doing the Victorian books.

And somehow, my readers followed me. And I'm not sure in today's world, where attention spans are closer, are narrower, and where people . . . I don't know. If you look at the miracle that was supposed to be Streaming, where all these adventurous series would be available to . . . It's all the same! It's even lit the same! I mean you, and they're all bloated in the middle. They're longer than they should be. And where did we go?

In fact, there's a book recently called Pandora's Box by Peter Biskind, about how network TV became cable TV became streaming, and how streaming is now a combination of network and cable.

And that the adventurous meetings that you would have at the beginning of streaming now sounds like you're dealing with a network back in the 1980s. And it's a wonderful book, Pandora's box. And it's very revealing about all this.

So, I'm not even sure how I got on that tangent, but it was interesting. So, I hope that's interesting.

CRAIG DUSTER: It was interesting!

I'm always interested about writers processes. So, do you, I mean, is your, do you write specific times of day or in specific places? Or is it more organic than that?

DAVID MORRELL: What I what I do, everybody's, if this were a question in a writing class: everybody's different. So, one of my mentors, the great crime writer Donald E. Westlake, he wrote at night. When the news went off at like 11PM or midnight, he wrote until dawn, at least for a time.

And everybody's got their own, you know, own rhythm, and his was related to family and things he had to do during the day with the family and things like that. So, you know, day, night, whatever works for you. What works for me is, because I'm primarily a day person is, I get up and I love to read newspapers. I don't like to read digital newspapers because they select for me. And a real newspaper, it's a whole bunch of stuff that I might not ever look at and as I go across the pages I learn a lot of interesting things.

And then, you know, my wife and I, we chat for a bit, and then I go into my office. And the way my standard day is, I'm hoping to write 5 readable pages. Now that's a lot, but that's my profession, and if I devote a day to it I can do it. And it's not automatic writing, and what I say to people who are starting and have families, you can't do 5 pages a day, but if you really want to be a writer you can do one page a day, and you can religiously set aside a portion of that day.

Mary Higgins Clark was known to get up at 5 in the morning and write before her kids got up and before she went to work. I forget what her day job was for a time. And there's no . . . if you're, if it's meant to be, if you are meant to be a writer, you can do one page a day.

So, it's all a question of arranging your schedule, and mine tends to be 5 pages a day. And at the end of the day, I print out, and in the morning I revise the analog version of the story of whatever I'm working on. Not heavily, but you see things differently on in print than you do on a screen. And I revise analog, and I do it in a, at a table that is not where I write—

CRAIG DUSTER: Ok.

DAVID MORRELl: —because you have to change your perspective. And then I type the revisions into the digital version. And I go on like that. And you know, and then at the end of a draft, I change the font. If I was writing in times New Roman, it now becomes Calibri.

ERIC HARPER: Why do you do that?

DAVID MORRELL: Again, to see it differently.

ERIC HARPER: Interesting.

DAVID MORRELL: Because the page starts to look the same. We have these mental photographs of the pages, and you know what? That's fine, you know, cause it's always that way. But as soon as you see it differently, with a different font, it's like a different book. And you say, well what a minute, this whole page, every paragraph, begins with the same word: however.

Well, that isn't right, but you know it was invisible. Plus, you don't see the whole page on a screen.

So there are things like that, you know, just little tricks I have.

ERIC HARPER: Fascinating. Well, they don't that little. It seems like, you know, like that seems like neuroscience to me.

DAVID MORRELL: What? How is that?

ERIC HARPER: Well, just in the sense like the way you're always trying to activate a different part of your brain.

DAVID MORRELL: Yeah. Exactly. Yes, exactly so. And I was going back to the, you know, the end of the 20-year thing – 25 years now maybe – for careers. But I, you know, I kept my . . . a bestselling author I know who writes the same book with each book, and we know each other, and he said, “What are you doing?” And I told him, and he said, “You son of a bitch, you reinvented yourself again.”

And you know, as I joked earlier about my wonderful agents, you know, they never know. You know, I say, well I think I'm gonna do Victorian mystery thriller.

“Oooh, okay.” Cause you know, it's just the way I am.

ERIC HARPER: Craig, I think that you had one more question.

DAVID MORRELL: Yes, you did. You were saying something.

ERIC HARPER: Yeah.

CRAIG DUSTER: Oh sure. I’m just curious. So from the first draft of your novel to the last draft of your novel, how much do those two drafts resemble each other?

DAVID MORRELL: There are generally three novels, three drafts. I tend to . . . I had a friend who was a film editor, and what he loved was coverage. He loved it if the director could give him angles and extra stuff. You know, he'd complain he was doing a car chase, and he didn't have enough coverage on the car chase. So, he had to, you know, zoom, magnify some images, and resort to photographs of tires spinning and screeching, which weren't in the coverage either. So I try, in the first draft I tend to have more that I know I'll need and this can be frustrating, because I know it's out of control.

But you know, but I'm trying to put down while I have it. And then the second draft, with a suitable break and a different font, abreak in time, I'll usually find that, oh, there's too much. And I'll cut back, and I'll cut back, and almost always it's wrong. Almost always I've cut too much because a book has to breathe.

And so, we get into the third draft, which tends to be a happy medium between the you know the overwritten one and the one that is too edited. And usually that's the case. I mean, there are exceptions. That were, you know, there were more drafts, because the book was more difficult. But that's generally the pattern that I follow.

CRAIG DUSTER: Hmm, interesting.

ERIC HARPER: Interesting. Well, David, what do you have coming up next?

DAVID MORRELL: Well, what we should talk about the movie, about Creepers. I don't, I don't know . . . The movie was optioned, to start with, in 2006 and the company that owned it just had it in option for a while. It's a wonderful thing, the options, you know. They pay you every 18 months or so, sometimes every year. But they decided they didn't know what to do with it. So, they handed it off to another company. So now I had a second run with them, and that company handed it off to a third person company, and that company, the third one, is called Sure Tone. And that is a company that is directed by a man named Jordan Schur.

And Jordan was in the music business for a long time, and so he's bringing his expertise in the music business over. And he tends to use directors of music videos. For example, Marc Klasfeld. I'll say that again, Mark Klasfeld is the director of Creepers, and he has done all kinds of music videos for very, very distinguished, you know, famous artists. And so I'm, I have not seen any footage from the film. It's done. It's been completed, and it was finished, I gather, at the end of November, and Lionsgate, along with Sure Tone, is the producer. So, we're waiting now for a release date. And that can depend upon a lot of things. And one advantage here is that during COVID, not as many films were made. So that we have a completed film at a time when, you know, the films are needed for the schedule. So, we'll see one of these days. I try not to be a [nuisance].

At the start, when a production begins, producers are very, you know, they're interested in the author. But once they have the book, and once life goes on, you don't hear from them as much. I don't mean that as a knock. It's just the nature of the business.

And I try not to be a nuisance, so I haven't got in touch with Jordan in a while. And I thought maybe I'll text him one of these days and say, you know, what do we know? And how is this going? And it's possible, someone pointed out to me that, on IMDB that the title for the film is not Creepers. It's called Do Not Enter.

And I remember Jordan talking to me about this because they had, there have been a lot of discussions about a previous film called Jeepers Creepers which is fairly well known, and—

ERIC HARPER: Yeah, that's a supernatural horror film.

DAVID MORRELL: Yes, and would Creepers then be, you know, mistaken for a re-release of the other movie? I mean, you know, how do you balance all this? So, there's a chance that it will have a title change. And I do know that with an echo to the [novel] sequel, Scavenger, there's that one group of people who are in that old building, as it were, the antagonist to our group of urban explorers, our creepers, they call themselves The Scavengers. So, there's you know, there's some playfulness going on here. But I'm looking forward to seeing where Marc took this.

I know they shot it in Romania, which has ruins galore, so that, so I gathered they used a lot of buildings that, you know, real life buildings that could stand in for the Paragon Hotel. So, you know, I'm looking forward to it. It's, you know, it's cool to have movies made.

Eric Harper: Yeah, of course. Hmm. Well, before we go, I heard a rumor that your next book is a Western. Is that true?

DAVID MORRELL: Yes and no. I, in my urge to explore genres . . . And I have one Western already called Last Reveille, about the Mexican bandit Pancho Villa’s raid on a New Mexican border town called Columbus in 1916. And this is hard to believe but it happened, he’d raided, and there was a military base there, a cavalry [base], and in those days it was just switching over. And then Villa went back into Mexico, and the First World War was going on, and there were some people who thought that Villa might have been a German agent. That this might in fact have been an attack, surreptitiously, by the Germans, including encouraging the bandit.

So, the United States government met and decided that Pershing of, you know, of military fame would lead what was called a punitive expedition, which was the original title of the novel, into Mexico, pursuing him. Now, this was an invasion of Mexico. And there were pitched battles with Mexican troops as they tried to figure out . . . and they never did find him. I think they were very close, from other, you know, people later on talking about where Villa had been hiding. And I thought, this is too good to be true.

And I modeled, you know, the last cavalry scout, so to speak, who'd been there for the Indian Wars and all the rest of it, and I saw him as a John Wayne figure, and I model the character [after John Wayne]. And his name was Miles Calendar. Space and Time. Miles Calendar.

ERIC HARPER: Oh wow.

DAVID MORRELL: And that, you know, and that he would be looking back over his career with a young recruit whom he was trying to teach to pass it on, even though all that world was ending. And it was a lot of fun. And so, anyway, yes, I started working after the Victorian books on a Western. And the trouble is, everybody thought it was gonna be like the Gregory Peck movie The Bravados where there's a bank robbery, the sheriff, the marshal’s wife is killed and he mosses a posse, and he's going after him. I mean, they thought in the most, as I spoke to people about this, to readers in general. And you know what I wanted to do was something a little more real along the lines of True Grit, or something like that, and I could not—I might go back to it, but—I could not make it work the way I wanted to. And at the same time, in today's world, make people appreciate it the way I wanted it to. So it's, you know, it's just something that I come back to with regret periodically

Eric Harper: I see. Okay. Well, if you ever finish it, I'm definitely interested.

DAVID MORRELL: One day I might be able to figure out how to do it. but I did find the research was a lot of fun. I'll give you an example: the frontier ended in 1890. That's according to the US government, which stated that the frontier was over on the basis that there were no more homesteads to be given out. And every state or territory had at least a million people living in it. Okay?

So, think of this in terms of the way Westerns in the 1880s are portrayed. Dodge City had a telephone system. Deadwood had a telephone system. Cheyenne, Wyoming had its own electrical system. These towns had generators outside, and they you know . . . So how do you deal with the real West in the 1880s which was becoming modern so fast that, you know, and try to burst that bubble, so to speak, and then at the same time have an authentic Western?

And I’ll show you how difficult it is. I'm a great fan of Taylor Sheridan. Alright. So, he's got, he edited a TV thing, what was it? Yellowstone: 1883. Was that what it was called? Alright. In it, in Texas a group of people decide they don't want to live there anymore, and they're gonna go to Wyoming or Montana. Okay? And they decided to do it by wagon train. And they're going to encounter all the traditional problems that, say, are in Red River.

It's impossible for that to have happened! Every 100 acres they would have had to ask the homeowners if they could take down the barbed wire for the wagon trains to go through.

I mean, there were 10,000 miles of railroad tracks in the West at that time. Why didn't they just get on the train?

ERIC HARPER: Yup! I had a similar complaint with the . . . There’s a Christian Bale film called Savages.

DAVID MORRELL: Same thing!

ERIC HARPER: The cavalry trying to return an important chief to his home territory. Literally, they could have put him on a train.

DAVID MORRELL: And this was the late 1880s, or even, I think, after 1890!

ERIC HARPER: I think that was set in the 1890s, yeah!

DAVID MORRELL: I mean, and there they are, you know, with their little tents and all, and they're riding, and I mean—the barbed wire would have been every 100 acres. It wasn't possible. And people talked about how authentic it felt. Nonsense.

And you know, I mean, I don't wanna take away from the skill with which these things are made. But there's a flaw in the research for the concept. Now, for 1883, it might have worked in the 1870s, but the fact was the Wagon Train era was before the Civil War.

ERIC HARPER: I was going to say, they had an 1880s story but it was really set in the 1850s.

DAVID MORRELL: Yeah, exactly so. And this is, I mean, it is impossible. The trouble is, then you don't get modern weapons in the 1850s. You don’t get repeating rifles and handguns. And now it's all, you know, who wants to see somebody, you know, fooling around with all the powder and all that? I mean, talk about boring.

ERIC HARPER: I mean, I wanna see it. But I'm probably a niche market.

CRAIG DUSTER: <laughing>

DAVID MORRELL: Yeah. But yeah, I mean, the wagon train era was before the Civil War. The railroad era was after. And the same thing with the Pony Express. That lasted one year. I think it was an 1861, and it simply wasn't viable. You needed stations every what 20 miles minimum. And you needed all the remounts going this way and that way. There's, I mean, if you look at it, it's like a massive undertaking to have all those stations and all of those horses, and it's no wonder it didn’t work. Plus, the telegraph existed—

ERIC HARPER: Right!

DAVID MORRELL: —and the trains existed. Put the damn mail on the train, and you know it'll get there.

ERIC HARPER: Yeah.

DAVID MORRELL: Big fun.

ERIC HARPER: <laughing>

Well, David. Thank you so much for being here, I really appreciate you taking time out of your schedule to talk to us about Creepers.

DAVID MORRELL: Oh, I had fun! It was fun to, you know, go through all these other things. We’ve ranged far afield. But you know it’s still . . . I guess, you know, when I taught literature I used to tell my students, I said, I don't expect you to remember everything I said because that would be impossible. But I do hope that you will remember my attitude. You know, my enthusiasm for what I do, and enthusiasm other people should have, and the sense of inventiveness and looking for new ways, you know, that it’s all, there's an openness ahead of us. And so, you know, [I hope] people go away from our conversation with a kind of increased enthusiasm for their reading – or their writing, because I know authors visit you – or, you know, what they do in in life.

But, as we're all aware, there are a lot of people who are dead, and they just don't know it. They're walking around. They died about 10 years ago, and you know they somehow, you know, they're like walking rocks. They've been so ossified. And we have to, you know, not have that happen. We have to find ways to keep limber.

Eric Harper: Oh, yeah. Well, I can't think of a better description to end a discussion of Creepers on.

DAVID MORELL: <laughing> Being Dead for 10 years? Yeah.

CRAIG DUSTER: <laughing>

ERIC HARPER: Well, thank you, everyone, for listening. As always, support your local use bookstore. As always, read books.

DAVID MORRELL: Yes, yes!

ERIC HARPER: And read David Morrell's books.

DAVID MORRELL: Oh, by all means! And my website is davidmorrell.net, as in the network of readers. And there’s a lot of lot of stuff on it.

ERIC HARPER: Lovely. Well, thank you very much, David.

DAVID MORRELL: Thank you. Nice to meet you both.

ERIC HARPER: And that’s our show. Two pieces of housekeeping. First, this is the penultimate episode of season one. So, this is the second-to-the-last episode. We’ll have one more coming up, and then I’m going to take a short hiatus to plan some more episodes and read more books. Also, since we talked with David Morrell, John Barth actually did pass away. So, if you’re not familiar with his work or career, I encourage you to consult Google.

Thanks for listening!

<Music: Tense spy music fade in>

NARRATOR: Neighborhood Bookstore was created and hosted by Eric Harper. Visit us at EricHarperPresents.Substack.Com for free episodes, transcripts, and all the latest news.

You can also find us on YouTube and anywhere fine audio podcasts are published.

Today’s guest host was Craig Duster, owner and head ne’er do well at POP Art Books Culture. When in Boardman, Ohio visit POP Art Books Culture at:

6949 Market Street

Boardman, OH 44512

www.popabcstore.com

This episode was produced by Eliza Osborn and Eric Harper.

Executive Producer: Julie Cancio Harper.

Narration by Adam Federman.