Books to Die For

Sinister Seven: DAVID WELLINGTON on GRIMBLY HALL

Back at the beginning of October, author David Wellington made his return to online serials with , a clever horror-comedy throwback to pulp era stories, with chapter illustrations (pictured above) courtesy of Joel Carroll.

Two full chapters into the project - which stars a 4000-year-old mummy and his werewolf chauffeur - I caught up with Wellington to pick his brain about the strange Jazz Age stylings of his latest project and what it's like to embark on another web serial more than a decade after the format first helped launch his career.

What made you want to write a monster story set in the 1920s?

It's just such a classic horror setting — the world of Lovecraft and the pulps, right? Add to that the fact that my main character was a mummy, and the 1920s were the height of the fad for Egyptiana, after the discovery of King Tut's tomb. And the Jazz Age just felt right for the kind of stories I wanted to tell. It was a complicated period, especially in American history, a time full of optimism and incredible progress in the sciences, the arts — really, the start of the modern world.

How much research is involved in penning a period piece like this?

The hardest part is making sure every detail in the stories, every object the characters interact with, actually existed back then. It's been a real eye-opener. Penicillin? Nope. It had been discovered, but wasn't marketed until the '30s. The word "teenager" didn't exist in 1926. Neither did sliced bread! Luckily I love doing research — I'm a total nerd for it. I spent three hours one night trying to figure out what the electrical sockets in Grimbly Hall would look like (which is, believe it or not, important in Episode Four).

Why return to web serials after many years of publishing traditionally?

For fun, mostly. Much like with my fantasy novels (penned under the name David Chandler), this started out as a therapy project. I'd just had a major loss in my life and I needed something fun and light to work on, something nobody else would ever see but would keep me sane. Of course every time I tell myself something is "just for fun" it turns into a huge, sprawling project that eats my life. I showed the stories to some friends and they absolutely loved them. I'd never gotten such an immediate, excited reaction for anything I'd written before, and I decided I had to share Grimbly Hall with the world. I chose to serialize it, rather than trying to sell it as a paper book, for two reasons — one, I didn't want to wait a year to see it in print, and two, because I'd had so much fun with my early serials. I've always missed the immediacy and the feedback I got back then.

How is the world of serializing genre fiction online different now than when you began doing it all those years ago with Monster Island?

Well, when I started it was pretty much a brand new idea, and so it was easy to get a lot of attention very quickly. That worked out great for me — it got me my first book deal. That's changed. There are so many serials online right now, it's a lot harder to find an audience. Not that that's altogether a bad thing — more voices means more and different kinds of stories being told, which is always good. I don't recommend that people starting out as writers do serials now, though. Back when I started it was an experimental thing, which meant you could figure it out as you went along. Now you're kind of thrown into the deep end from day one, so it's a little daunting.

For GRIMBLY HALL, you've chosen a very conversational and almost quirky voice for your narrator. Why?

It's a voice that immediately puts you into the time period — I set out wanting to write like a pulp author, rather than using a modern horror voice that distances the author from the reader. Also, for this project I'm really wearing my influences on my sleeve. I'm drawing on some of my favourite books, from a long tradition including Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, and most recently Jonathan L. Howard, and I wanted to capture some of that deadpan voice. As the stories developed, however, I realized something really interesting was happening. The narrator of these stories was becoming a major character all their own, with their own opinions and thoughts and a very dry sense of humour. The voice was developing a personality. Maybe the stories are possessed? All I know is that when I sit down to write about these characters, that voice is waiting for me, and I just type what they tell me to type!

Among the characters in GRIMBLY HALL, you have a mummy, a werewolf and a monster hunter – all creatures that have figured into your previous, more serious horror novels. What was the appeal of returning to these archetypes for this story? Will it allow you to do something with these monsters that you haven't yet had the chance to do with your fiction?

I've always tried to play with tropes and old ideas in my books. My zombies were different from everybody else's zombies, my vampires were a reaction against the romantic vampires of the last decade. Here I'm using the reader's expectations of these monsters to generate humour. My mummy is four thousand years old but instead of being trapped in the past he's obsessed with all things modern. The werewolf is terrified of his dread curse, but can't get anyone to take him seriously. He's dangerous, really, look at those fangs and claws! But to everybody else he's just a loveable sad sack. The classic monsters are just perfect for this kind of humour. As the stories go on we'll see more of these kind of inversions — a vampire physics professor, a hard-drinking flapper mermaid — but also some new monsters I made up from whole cloth. The fact I'm giving away this story for free means I can take all kinds of chances, try out all kinds of ideas, basically anything that sounds fun at the time. It's enormously liberating.

​At the time of this interview, you are two complete chapters into GRIMBLY HALL, do you know how long the finished book will be? How strictly planned is the serial?

I had nine stories written when the website went live, and I've written a tenth (very long) one since, as well as about a dozen "short subjects," little stories about these characters that are just a few pages at most. All of that material was just in rough draft when I started posting, though, and I'm revising furiously as each chapter goes up on the site. I actually added a whole story in the middle of the continuity, to flesh out one of the main characters, so it's an ongoing process, definitely! As for how long this will go on, I really have no idea. I have ideas for dozens more of these stories, and the serial format means I'm not limited to thinking in terms of novel lengths or total word counts. As long as I keep having fun with these characters, I'll keep writing!

Read GRIMBLY HALL for free at http://www.grimblyhall.com. New installments are posted every weekday!