Wayne Simmons: I'm absolutely delighted to get the chance to talk with a very fine horror writer, Mr. Wrath James White. This is a man not shy of unsettling a few vicars – he’s Wrath by name and Wrath by nature! Enjoy.
WS: Who are you and what contribution do you make to the sci-fi/ horror genre?
WJW: I am a recently retired kickboxer and mixed martial arts trainer who has been writing horror for more than a decade. I write stories to make you think, question your reality, make you cringe, and occasionally even gag. I write stories that terrify, titillate, arouse and unnerve. I write horror, pure undiluted horror at it’s most extreme.
WS: You’ve gained a reputation as being the man to go to if looking for uncompromising horror. Jack Ketchum, well known for a similar quality of storytelling, has praised your writing for being pretty much as viceral as it gets. Is this style of writing something you set out to create or is it just how each story tells itself?
WJW: I write the stories that I would want to read. I let the story take me where it will and I never put the brakes on. I don’t shy away from anything. I always hated watching those old horror movies from the fifties and sixties where they never showed you the monster until the end and sometimes not even then. And when they did finally show it to you they never showed it doing anything particularly horrific. They would show you a monster with big fangs and claws and then it would strangle someone or just toss them around. They never showed any blood. I always felt let down. I don’t do that. I show you the monster and the blood.
I hate reading writers who feel restrained. I don’t restrain or censor myself. I don’t believe in leaving anything to the reader’s imagination. It is my belief or perhaps my conceit, that the reader is paying me for my imagination. They want to see how I see things and so I show them. I show them all of it.
When I first began writing horror in the late nineties I hadn’t actually read a horror novel in nearly a decade. I just assumed that since music, movies, pornography and everything else had gotten more graphic and uncensored that surely horror must have followed suit. It wasn’t until I’d already published a few stories that I realized that I was writing something a bit more intense then what was being published. By then it was working so I saw no need to change.
WS: What attracts you to the horror genre?
WJW: Horror is all encompassing. It includes the full range of human emotion and crosses almost every other genre from Thrillers to Romance to Fantasy to Science Fiction. There are even horror Westerns. I like it because there are no limitations in horror and I have always lived my life free of restraints. The way I write (in its style not its subject matter) mirrors my life.
WS: Your most recent novel, The Resurrectionist, offers a celebration of sex and sexuality, within lead character Sarah, almost mirrored against the sexual violence of another character, Dale. Was it difficult, as the author, to write about such a wide spectrum of sexuality within the one novel?
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For more interviews and book reviews by Wayne Simmons, go to www.waynesimmons.org
Belfast born, Wayne Simmons, has been loitering with intent around the horror genre for some years. Having scribbled reviews and interviews for various zines, Wayne released his debut horror novel, DROP DEAD GORGEOUS, through PERMUTED PRESS. The book was received well by both fans of the genre and reviewers alike. In April 2010, the rights to DROP DEAD GORGEOUS reverted back to Wayne. An extended version of DDG will be released through SNOWBOOKS in 2011.
Wayne released the zombie apocalyptic horror novel, FLU, through SNOWBOOKS in April 2010.
In what little spare time he has left, Wayne enjoys running, getting tattooed and listening to all manner of unseemly screeches on his BOOM-BOOM Box…
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