Bryan Smith, Putting the Splatter into Splatterpunk by Lionel Ray Green
Bryan Smith is one of the modern masters of extreme horror, writing some of the best novels in the subgenre like Depraved and The Killing Kind.
Since the inception of the Splatterpunk Awards seven years ago, Smith’s works have been nominated eight times, including two wins for his 2019 collection Dirty Rotten Hippies and Other Stories and his 2018 novella Kill For Satan!
This year, Smith was one of two multiple nominees at the 2024 Splatterpunk Awards with Dead End House earning a Best Novel nomination and “The Night People” receiving a Best Short Story nom.
One of the author’s biggest career highlights, however, happened on the silver screen when the movie adaptation of his 2013 crime thriller 68 Kill won the Midnighters Audience Award at the 2017 SXSW Film Festival. 68 Kill was directed by Trent Haaga and starred Matthew Gray Gubler (Criminal Minds).
Smith agreed to an exclusive interview for Ginger Nuts of Horror, where he talks about his favorite character creations and about his upcoming novel Depraved Halloween, the fifth entry in his Depraved series.
Bryan Smith, Putting the Splatter in Splatterpunk
GREEN: Your Splatterpunk Award-nominated novel Dead End House introduces us to Crazy Calvin and his lunatic sister. You have a knack for writing depraved characters with depth. What’s been your favorite character creation so far?
SMITH: Jessica Sloan from the Depraved series is probably my favorite character I’ve created. Writing about her always comes so easily. It always happens in so automatic a fashion that it’s as if I’m tapping into a world where she actually exists and I’m just describing what I see. However, Jessica herself is not actually depraved, although depraved things happen in her vicinity with an alarming regularity. As far as actually depraved characters go, I guess Roxie from The Killing Kind series is the obvious answer. Writing about her comes just as easily.
Jessica is a profoundly pragmatic character who will do terrible things when necessary, but it’s always purely in the interest of survival. She doesn’t enjoy doing those things. Roxie is the opposite. She revels in depravity, bloodshed, and cruelty, and she does so with a twisted delight rather than detached coldness. I enjoy her sneering “Who gives a fuck?” attitude.
GREEN: Your Splatterpunk Award-nominated short story “The Night People” is at the end of your novella The Gauntlet. It’s a bleak tale about a man named Andy who lost the love of his life after an unexpected breakup and finds himself among the destitute and homeless during a walk to clear his head. The story wasn’t what I expected, which leads to my next question: What makes a story a “splatterpunk” story in your opinion?
SMITH: Firstly, nothing Andy experiences in that story is delusion or hallucination. There may be times when I have characters uncertain of their perception of reality for one reason or another, but I never play coy about that with the reader. If that’s happening, I’m usually pretty clear about it. What I’m getting at in this story is more about the character’s depressed mental state and heightened emotions opening a pathway to perception not normally available to well-adjusted people. The imagery in that story strikes me as Lucio Fulci-influenced, by which I mean it’s invested with a strange form of nightmare logic. Things don’t have to totally make sense. They just are, regardless of how weird and surreal they might be.
To get back to the main point of your question, there’s a divergence between what I think of as splatterpunk and the work of the latest wave of writers who identify as splatterpunk authors. This is because I am older than most of them and was around to experience the original splatterpunk movement, which was an effort to write horror of a more modern sort that wasn’t quite as rooted in gothic tropes. It was bloodier and more blunt, more visceral in general, but it seems to me those OG splatterpunk writers were also just as interested in saying real things about the world they lived in, not just being gross for the sake of it.
Today you have a lot of books primarily concerned with rolling around in as much shit and vomit as possible from page one until the last page, and that’s the whole point, full stop. I’m not saying this is bad necessarily, just trying to draw a line of delineation. Real splatterpunk, to my mind, is still the former, what arose in the 80s, while most of the books being called splatterpunk now would more accurately be called extreme horror. Truthfully, when you get right down to it, I believe the main reason a new generation of writers and readers has latched on to “splatterpunk” as their preferred genre name is simply that it sounds cooler. And that’s fine. That’s just the nature of things. Terminology evolves, mutates, changes. Old words take on new or somewhat altered meanings.
GREEN: Kill For Satan! won you your first Splatterpunk Award for Best Novella in 2019. After reading it, I felt like you had to have a ton of fun writing it. I mean Satan worshipers killing virgins in small-town America on Halloween during a horror movie marathon. That’s like a horror fan’s dream. What do you remember about that writing experience and what did winning that first Splatterpunk Award mean to you?
SMITH: What I remember mostly about Kill For Satan was that it was written in a hurry. I believe I was concerned with letting too much time go by between releases and was motivated to crank something out as fast as I could possibly manage. My intent was to write a novella in ten days, which was going to be incredibly fast even by my standards of the time, when I was always trying to write books as fast as possible. In the end, I believe it took thirteen days from the time I started writing KFS until it was completely done, editing and all.
I guess there were points where it was fun, certainly the Halloween angle and the stuff with the horror host was, but mostly it was an exercise in trying to stay focused on relentless pursuit of a goal. I hardly remember spending much time contemplating plot details or pondering what any of it meant. My mindset was basically, “All right, here’s the basic concept, let’s go.” And then it was off to the races. All the scenes were like different little stories that happened to be strung together. At each turn, I was basically just seizing on whatever came to mind and running with it. The fact that it came together as well as it did in the end is kind of a small miracle.
As for what it meant to me, well, quite a lot, actually. Before Brian Keene and Wrath James White created the Splatterpunk Awards, I was resigned to receiving no formal recognition for my work at all. I was only ever a member of HWA for a very brief time in the 2000s, for just part of one year, and I never became part of that particular circle of things in the community. This wasn’t something I concerned myself with much, as I understood that most of what I’ve written isn’t the type of material that garners Stoker consideration. I was fine with that, but when I won the Splatterpunk for Kill For Satan, I was surprised by how much it did mean to me. There was a degree of validation there that I hadn’t realized a part of me wanted or needed.
GREEN: In 2020, your collection Dirty Rotten Hippies and Other Stories won you a second Splatterpunk Award. Of the 17 stories in the book, could you please share one or two of your personal favorites?
SMITH: Probably the title story. That one was fun and was written in a similar manner to Kill For Satan. It’s a short novella of some 25,000 words and with just a little extra padding could probably have been published as a stand-alone book rather than as the anchor story in a collection. If I had to pick one more, I’d probably go with “The Thing In The Woods.” It’s something I wrote some years back that was originally meant to be the opening chapter of a novel, then years later got repurposed into a short story. Also, aside from the monster angle at the end, it’s almost completely true, with the names changed to protect the guilty.
GREEN: For me one of the most exciting pieces of horror book news in 2024 is the release of Depraved Halloween in October because the original Depraved remains one of my all-time favorite novels. It’s the fifth book in your Depraved series, and you say it’s a direct “sequel in spirit” to the original. What do you mean by that, and what keeps you returning to the Depraved universe and Jessica Sloan?
SMITH: What I mean by sequel in spirit is simply that it returns Jessica to a rural backwoods setting akin to the setting of the first book. Calling it a “sequel in spirit” is also a way of emphasizing that it isn’t necessary to have read the other sequels to enjoy Depraved Halloween. The new entry isn’t a reboot. All the events from Depraved 2 through 4 still happened. They’re just not referenced at all in this one. A reader can easily go from the original to Depraved Halloween without feeling like they’ve missed anything. This is simply to make it a more attractive reading prospect for newer readers who might not necessarily want to wade through four whole books prior to getting to this new one. Then, of course, if they enjoy it, they can easily backtrack and read the others.
As for why I keep returning to Jessica and her fictional universe, there’s really two answers to this. The first and most obvious is that I’m motivated by commercial considerations. Depraved is far and away my most popular book, and all the sequels have done pretty well, too. The other reason, one I alluded to earlier, is just that I genuinely enjoy writing about Jessica. She’s lived in my head for so long at this point that she feels almost real to me.
Her will to fight and survive no matter what inspires me. This new story was originally only supposed to be a quick novelette, bonus material in a forthcoming new release of an old book. As soon as I started writing it, though, I knew it had to be a novel instead. Even after a layoff of nearly four years, that old electricity I always feel when writing about Jessica was still there, as fresh and vibrant and as deeply fucked-up as ever.
LINKS:
Home | Bryan Smith Horror (bigcartel.com)
Amazon.com: Bryan Smith: books, biography, latest update
Depraved Halloween by Bryan Smith
JESSICA SLOAN RETURNS IN AN ALL-NEW INSTALLMENT IN THE DEPRAVED SERIES BY BRYAN SMITH.
It’s time to go back to the backwoods with Jessica Sloan. After lying low for years, a stirring of wanderlust compels the former professional assassin to hit the road. On the day before Halloween, she starts driving south with no particular destination in mind. Low on gas, she stops in Montclair, a small town deep in the heart of rural Alabama that conjures uncomfortable memories of Hopkins Bend, the depraved backwater burg where her life changed forever years ago.
At first Jessica chalks these feelings up to paranoia, but before long it becomes clear that all her worst fears are justified. The deranged denizens of Montclair are, if anything, even more sick and twisted than all her previous adversaries.
The dead will rise. Copious quantities of blood will be spilled. Minds and…things…will be altered. Because in Montclair, especially on Halloween, depravity is a way of life.
Bryan Smith, Putting the Splatter into Splatterpunk
Further Reading
Candace Nola, Putting the Splatter into Splatterpunk By Lionel Ray Green
Lucas Mangum, Putting the Splatter into Splatterpunk
