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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 6, No. 39 |
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Master of the Thriller  |
His reviews are getting better all the time
of TheColumnists.com
This has to be a great time to be David Morrell. I mean, look at how this guy trashes the form sheets. Novelists usually don't talk about their careers in terms of multiple decades, but Morrell sure can. He's well into his fourth decade in a profession where today's best selling author is often doing book-signings at hick town retirement homes just 10 years later.
"I've been at it 37 years, if you want to count when I started writing 'First Blood,'" he told me over dinner before his book-signing in Bellingham, WA, earlier this month, "and I'm getting the best reviews I've ever had right now."
He sure ought to. His latest book, "Creepers" (CDS Books, $24.95), is a breathtaking thriller that has "hit movie" written all over it. It's all about the new phenomenon of "urban explorers," those risk-taking people who break into abandoned buildings in big cities in search of forgotten history. Though most of these "creepers" operate by the rule "take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints," Morrell works it out so his intrepid explorers are soon racing the clock and fighting for their lives.
Believe me, this is a roller coaster ride where the cars keep jumping the tracks and those tracks get so shaky that you expect the whole thing to come crashing down at any moment. On second thought, don't believe me. Go buy the book. I guarantee you will not regret it.
The longer you talk to Morrell, the more you think maybe he isn't doing this just for the money. In fact, I'm absolutely sure he's not. I think he's doing it because he loves each new challenge he sets for himself, like his decision to make "Creepers" all take place in real time, like the old western movie "High Noon."
"In eight hours, every second is accounted for," he said. "It's what I like to call 'a constantly ticking metronome of fear.' If you do something like that effectively enough, I think it becomes invisible and readers don't even know you're doing it."
Of course, any writer would know that's not easy. Remember, if you have to account for every minute, that also means you've got to make that minute sizzle with enough excitement to keep the reader panting for what's going to happen in the next minute.
Morrell is a master at such things. This time he does it by introducing us to all his characters--the professor; the reporter; the husband and wife who once were the professor's students; the other ex-student who has a crush on the other guy's wife, and so on. Then he gradually makes you realize you've got these people all figured out wrong and nobody's what he or she seems.
"This is a hybrid of a thriller and a non-supernatural horror story," he explained. "It's a mix and it's fun because people don't know what kind of book they're in until they're practically through with it. It throws people off."
For example, it's typical for somebody who's halfway through the book to ask him, "There's a ghost in this, right?" He just smiles benignly. One critic compared it to "Treasure of the Sierra Madre." The Chicago Sun-Times said it was as scary as anything Stephen King or Dean Koontz had written.
"The reviews have just been amazing," he said. "I couldn't be happier with the reaction."
Like both King and Koontz, Morrell had a tortured childhood. King and Koontz compensated by turning to the horror genre where they could exorcise their personal demons in print. King has said the homicidal father in his "The Shining" represents his own alcoholic father. Koontz has confessed that the childhood terror experienced by the heroine of "Intensity" at the hands of her father reflects the terror he felt as a little boy living with his own drunken, homicidal father.
Though Morrell has written horror novels, too, like "The Totem," "Testament" and "Long Lost," he opted instead to do most of his work in the field of the thriller.
"Someone once asked King why he wrote horror and he answered, 'What makes you think I have a choice?'" said Morrell. "I had a very unhappy childhood. I used thriller books and movies as a kind of antidote to how I was raised."
He decided early in life that he was destined to be a writer. Morrell began as an academic, earning a Ph.D. in American literature at Penn State, then teaching in the English department at the University of Iowa. But he always wanted to write and eventually looked the marketplace over and rationally concluded he was best-suited to write thrillers.
"I realized that, in the U.S. at least, the thriller was a wide open category. Most people weren't working at it in a serious fashion," he said.
His first effort, "First Blood," set the pattern for most of his books to come. He wrote a thriller about all the might of the police and the military trying to track down and stop one troubled Vietnam veteran, a highly-efficient soldier who was trained to be a killer: John Rambo. On one level, "First Blood" is a non-stop action story, but on another it's the sad tale of how America trains normal young men to become virtual killing machines, then returns them to society without any re-training and no mission in civilian life. Morrell is famous for his sub-text and his meticulous research.
"I've consciously worked with each book to explore what a thriller can be, to try and take it in a different direction," he said.
Sometimes his effort to give depth and resonance to his thrillers has confused and upset the critics. He recalls the example of his 1998 novel "Double Image." He wanted to use the subject of photography as a metaphor.
"The plot has a double exposure as in a double exposure photograph," he said. "The book has two plots that lie upon one another."
So, naturally, Morrell was confused when the Washington Post reviewer wrote, "You aren't allowed to do that in thrillers." That critic made the point that thrillers had to follow predictable rules and stay within those boundaries.
"Well, an author who does that is not an author I want to read," said Morrell.
Morrell's career started off like a skyrocket with "First Blood," a best seller that the critics loved. Then, a decade later, it was filmed and Rambo, played by Sylvester Stallone, became an American pop culture icon, producing two big box office sequels and a new one, "Rambo IV," set to start shooting early next year. After that experience, Morrell had to regroup to keep his career on the tracks. (See separate column today.)
Despite his many popular books since, only one other of his novels has been filmed--his 1984 best-seller, "The Brotherhood of the Rose," about two youngsters trained from childhood to be assassins. It was turned into a television miniseries in 1988 with Peter Strauss and David Morse as the two trained assassins and Robert Mitchum as their surrogate father.
The miniseries was produced by Oscar-winning screenwriter Stirling Silliphant ("In the Heat of the Night," 1967), a mentor-figure in Morrell's life. Morrell fell in love with the TV series "Route 66" as a young man and wrote to Silliphant, its creator. The veteran screenwriter responded to Morrell and they became fast friends.
Because the complex storyline was so hard to translate to the screen without gutting the book, "Brotherhood" almost didn't get filmed. Starting in 1984, Morrell wrote several drafts and Silliphant even wrote one. They finally turned to other writers, who turned in drafts, too. Silliphant told Morrell he thought NBC had spent so much money on it that it would have to be made or certain executives would probably lose their jobs. It was made, despite a long Hollywood writers' strike, and was put on right after the Super Bowl in 1988, a choice position. It was a ratings smash. Strangely, though, NBC didn't follow up with the sequel Morrell already had published in book form--"The Fraternity of the Stone" (1985).
Morrell thinks most people mistakenly believe all best sellers become movies. He said it's very rare for Hollywood to go after a book, but even rarer for them to be actually filmed.
"I've had a lot of books purchased for the movies," he explained. "'Fraternity of the Stone' has been optioned several times. Michael Douglas' production company has the rights to 'Extreme Denial'. MGM optioned 'Burnt Sienna' for Pierce Brosnan. None of them has been made. Then, if one is filmed, it's even rarer for it to be any good."
After publishing 28 books and putting more than 18 million copies in print, Morrell has no need to keep proving himself. He lives happily in Santa Fe, N.M., with his wife of 40 years. The great tragedy of his life was the death of their son, Matthew, from bone cancer. He wrote that heartbreaking story in his 1988 non-fiction book "Fireflies: A Father's Tale of Love and Loss." He has summed up his career already in his 2002 literary memoir, "Lessons From A Lifetime of Writing: A Novelist Looks At His Craft," although it's perfectly clear he'll have lots more to tell us as time goes by.
"Every career has peaks and valleys," Morrell told me somewhere during our long, rambling conversation that fine evening.
And I couldn't help thinking how nice it must be to reflect on such things when you're pretty darn sure you're back up on one of those peaks that have come along so frequently in Morrell's rich and creative career as a writer.
©2005 by Ron Miller. The photo of David Morrell is courtesy of his website, www.davidmorrell.net. This column first posted Friday, Sept. 30, 2005.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine
and teaches classes in mystery for the Academy of Lifelong Learning
at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.
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