PW Talks with Robert McCammon
By Stefan Dziemianowicz
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PW: Speaks the Nightbird is your first novel in 10 years. Why the long
silence?
RM: I wrote Speaks the Nightbird about three or four years
after I wrote Gone South [1992], but when I handed it in, I had some
difficulty with an editor and the situation just exploded. I don't think
the person understood the book or really liked it, and that was very
frustrating. I wrote another book after this and also had trouble placing
it. So I said, "Well, I think my time has passed. I'm going to put it on
the shelf and just retire." Then one of the editors from River City
Publishing heard me read a chapter from Speaks the Nightbird at a
local college. He liked it, they made an offer for it, and that's how it
got published.
PW: This is the first pure historical novel you've written. What was
the inspiration for it?
RM: I've always been interested in history, and colonial America in
particular. I don't really know where the idea came from, but I started
thinking about it during the O.J. Simpson trial. Here was a celebrity on
trial, and there was so much furor circulating around the trial. That got
me wondering what it would be like to take that kind of notoriety back in
time, with people trying to make money off a trial for witchcraft and the
proceedings.
PW: Do you consider this book a departure from your previous novels?
RM: I think it's a departure in terms of the setting, but I don't
know if it's a departure in terms of theme. My books always begin with the
characters. It's always a struggle for the lead character to break out of a
situation he or she finds himself or herself in. It's always a growth
situation. Certainly that's what Matthew does in the novel. It isn't easy
for him to buck the hundreds of years of medieval knowledge built into the
legal system at the time. But he does, and he breaks through to a new level
of understanding, of himself and the world.
PW: This book is similar to Gone South in that it uses the
grotesque and the suggestion of the supernatural to move out of the horror
genre. Was this deliberate on your part?
RM: It was. I really enjoyed writing strictly horror and
supernatural novels, but for me it was like being a magician: after you
learn to do the trick, you feel the need to do something different. After
you're successful in a certain genre—and I think this may be one of the
problems I had getting the book published—you run into the problem of
changing from something you do well to something different. But an artist
wants to do something different, something that stirs the juices.
PW: Do you anticipate any problems with the novel's reception now
that your name is less familiar in the bookstores?
RM: That actually works to my advantage. I was trapped in the genre;
people thought of me as a horror writer. I was moving away from
supernatural horror in my last few books, but it became difficult to do
that because my supernatural books sold very well. When you sell very well
there are a lot of machines and powers that say "we want you to keep
doing the same thing, we don't want you to do something different." I
told my wife that we might need 10 years for my name to be forgotten so
that I can be born again, at least in the sense necessary for publishing
Speaks the Nightbird.
© 2001 Cahners Business Information. Reprinted here without
permission from the Publishers Weekly web site.
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