Seth Grahame-Smith interview by Alix Sharkey

Have I had any formal training in fiction writing?’ says Seth Grahame-Smith, repeating the question.

He adjusts his glasses and smiles, scanning the large crowd gathered for his reading and signing event at Borders bookstore in Los Angeles. ‘If you’ve read the book, then clearly the answer is no.’

Despite the deft line in self-deprecation, the 34-year-old author knows a thing or two about writing successful novels. Indeed, he is a bona-fide publishing sensation.

Just over a year ago his first work of fiction, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, was unleashed upon a sceptical world. But his ‘mash-up’ reimagining of Jane Austen, featuring Elizabeth Bennett battling the undead with muskets, entered the New York Times best-sellers’ list at number three, and has since sold more than a million copies and inspired dozens of copycat novels (including a sequel, Dawn of the Dreadfuls, and the Tolstoy-inspired Android Karenina).

Natalie Portman’s production company has acquired the film rights, and the actress will play Elizabeth Bennet. Last month, his follow-up,Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, debuted at number four and he is currently working on a movie version to be produced by Tim Burton.

Yet the idea that he’s an overnight sensation is one he’s quick to dismiss when we finally sit down to talk, after he’s finished signing title page dedications, shaking hands and posing for photographs with his fans.

‘I spent years trying to become a real writer,’ says this short, stocky young man with a shock of reddish-brown hair.

‘I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels… a Library of Congress worth of awful literature.’

Everything changed when Grahame-Smith finally found his natural genre – the literary mash-up. The term originated in the music industry earlier this decade, to describe the seamless remixing of two seemingly incompatible styles into a jarring but integrated whole. The technique soon spread to fiction writing.

‘The [mash-up] idea had already been around for a couple of years,’ Grahame-Smith says. ‘In fact, it’s already starting to get tired, there are so many examples on the shelves now.’

Before stumbling into the mash-up genre, Grahame-Smith still managed to get books published and the titles are indicative not just of his fascination with the lowbrow end of pop culture, but also his witty take on it.

Before Pride he authored four non-fiction works: The Big Book of Porn,The Spiderman Handbook, How to Survive A Horror Movie and Pardon My President, a book of ‘letters of apology to various people, institutions and ideals that I wrote on behalf of President Bush’.

But until the explosive publication of Pride his writing career had largely been a by-product of his day job, as one half of a television screenwriting and production team.

Grahame-Smith (which is a nom de plume, his real name is Seth Greenberg) could hardly have had a more fitting adolescence for his literary ambitions. Born and raised in Connecticut, he grew up in Bethel, about 60 miles north-east of New York City.

His stepfather, an avid collector of paperback science fiction, owned a bookstore and kept more than 5,000 horror and sci-fi titles in the basement of their house. His mother was, and still is, an editor with publishing house Marshall Cavendish.

‘So I grew up in a very book-friendly environment and my education as a writer was reading. I think that’s the best education. Reading, and taking from the people I admired.’

After moving to Los Angeles, Grahame-Smith worked on several non-fiction titles with small publisher Quirk, establishing a rapport with his editor, Jason Rekulak. So when Rekulak had an idea for a fictional mash-up – Jane Austen and zombies – he decided to run it past Grahame-Smith.

The idea was nothing more than the five-word title, but on hearing it he was ‘electrified’. Grahame-Smith put down the phone and started outlining the novel immediately. ‘That phone call clearly changed my life.’

While some critics dismissed it as a feeble joke, those who bothered to read the book found that Grahame-Smith knew his stuff.

‘It is a truth universally acknowledged,’ declared the opening paragraph, ‘that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. Never was this truth more plain than during the recent attacks at Netherfield Park, in which a household of 18 was slaughtered and consumed by a horde of the living dead.’

This meticulous mimicry was clear evidence of his reverence for the source material and reviewers hailed a new form of pulp. ‘Has there ever been a work of literature that couldn’t be improved by adding zombies?’ gushed Time magazine.

The book’s unexpected success, Grahame-Smith says, was due to ‘the buzz, the ever-elusive buzz’. As soon as the cover – showing a ‘zombified’ portrait by Regency painter William Beechey – appeared online, there was a reaction.

‘It was: “Oh my God, can you believe they’re actually doing this?”’ he says. Without reading a word, people were hooked. Grahame-Smith doesn’t claim to have invented mash-up fiction, but as he puts it, this was ‘the right idea at the right time’.

Perhaps the most pleasant surprise, he says, was the reaction of Jane Austen fans. ‘I expected to be burnt at the stake; even to me it seemed slightly sacrilegious to rework one of the English language’s greatest authors, but Austen lovers seem to have embraced it.

' I’ve had a lot of them tell me it’s a great way to bring people into the Austen tent.’ Teachers and college professors have told Grahame-Smith that they use his book to ‘trick’ their students into reading Austen’s work.

The offers for a follow-up started flooding in. Eventually he signed a two-book deal reportedly worth around £400,000 with US publishing house Grand Central. The first of these is Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter.

As the title suggests, the novel follows the adventures of the US president as he struggles to end slavery, defeat the Confederate army and rid the young nation of its greatest menace – the vampires who lurk on every corner.

This, the sombre politician does with his trusty axe, decapitating the undead with panache and splattering gore over every few pages.

The idea for the story came to him as he was browsing in this very bookshop.

‘I live nearby, so I often come here for an hour to pull things off the shelves, see what’s on the tables, check what people are buying. About 18 months ago, when we were leading up to the 2009 bicentennial, the 200th anniversary of his birth, I kept noticing that every bookstore I walked into had a big Lincoln table, full of books about him.

'Now, it so happened that this was also the point where the Twilight phenomenon was reaching critical mass. So next to every Lincoln table there would be a vampire table. Lincoln table, vampire table. Vampire table, Lincoln table…’ All he had to do was combine ‘these two great flavours’.

After delivering the manuscript for Pride, he started reading Lincoln biographies to explore the potential for a vampire rewrite.

‘I had this cursory, superficial knowledge of Lincoln, like just about everyone in this country. You grow up here, you know Abe: the top hat, the beard, “Four-score and seven years ago…” There are things you just absorb.

‘But when I read more deeply about him – I read his letters, his speeches and Wikipedia’d the hell out of him – I totally fell in love with this guy. He was the most tragic figure I’d ever read about.

'Almost from the day he was born there was a storm cloud over his head and he never escapes it until he dies. He buries his little brother and his mother, he buries his first love, his sister and two of his sons. He has no money, no name to trade on, no education, no station in life. All he has is this incredible mind, and this amazing spirit. He repeatedly picks himself up, dusts himself off and moves forward.’

Grahame-Smith began to think that Lincoln could easily be thought of as a superhero, adding that the former president ‘didn't need vampires to make his life incredible, he was already an incredible guy. But if you add vampires, it’s exponentially cooler.’

Having finished and delivered the manuscript for Pride, Grahame-Smith – fully expecting the book to ‘barely break even’ – wrote a 50-page outline of Abraham Lincoln, a detailed breakdown of each chapter.

‘I had no idea that the Pride “thing” would happen,’ he says. But publishers were falling over themselves to learn if its author had another mash-up idea. ‘People were saying: “What else do you have?” Luckily, I had this outline.’

With hindsight, he says, he was almost fated to write a Lincoln mash-up; despite being a lifelong horror fan, his preferred reading has always been presidential biographies and non-fiction history – particularly the work of Doris Kearns Goodwin, Pulitzer-winning author of Team Of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.

While his literary star has risen, Grahame-Smith has maintained a day job as one half of the writer-producer team for a new comedy series for MTV. The Hard Times of RJ Berger is, according to Grahame-Smith, ‘a kind of dirtier, updated Wonder Years’.

Which means that for four months last year, Smith was writing Abraham Lincoln every evening, while driving to his office every morning to work on the show; by day trying to ‘out raunch’ his fellow writers, by night immersing himself in American history.

‘I started to go a little schizo at times,’ he says.

As with the Austen camp, he says, fans of Lincoln have embraced his work, explaining how more than 500 people turned up for his reading at the Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, Illinois, the Great Emancipator’s hometown.

‘Afterwards, the state historian of Illinois took me down into a temperature-controlled vault, gave me a pair of white gloves, and let me hold Lincoln’s handwritten manuscript of the Gettysburg Address.

'And institutions like the Smithsonian, they are all inviting me to come speak. Maybe it’s because people have realised we’re broadening the appeal of history.

'Like: “Hey, read my book, then think back and erase the vampires, and you’re a Lincoln expert.”’

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14