Any description of Wrath James White makes him sound like a character from one of his own thrillers: He's a huge, tough-as-nails Ultimate Fighting Champion who writes supernatural thrillers heavy on religious themes, ultra-violence and erotica. Find two people like that.His new book, Succulent Prey (Leisure) hits bookstores in November and it isn't the kind of book you browse lightly. The book is as scary and complex as the author himself.
Contributing editor Jonathan Maberry chatted with the new tough guy of visceral horror.
Succulent Prey deals with a serial killer virus. Tell us about the book and its fascinating concept.
Succulent Prey is about a man who was attacked by a serial child murderer when he was just a boy. Now he's a college sophomore with an increasing appetite for human flesh that he can't control. He believes that the murderer who attacked him as a boy passed a virus on to him that is slowly turning him into a serial killer and that he must find a cure for the disease before he kills the woman he loves who is chained to a bed in his apartment.
I originally wanted to write a werewolf novel but I wanted something that would be believable based on real medical science. Once I started researching the brain and the amygdale in particular, the area of the brain that controls the rage and the sex drive, and realized how closely related they were, I saw that I could write something more than your typical werewolf novel and much more than a serial killer novel.
Talk about the religious themes that often appear in your stories.
I do write a lot about God and nature. As I mention in the book, I believe that the best way to know the creator is to look at the creation and when you examine nature you get a picture of a creator much different than the one most religions would have you believe in. Any objective study of nature would lead to the conclusion that God is either non-existent or a complete madman. I explore both possibilities in my stories.
Your writing is edgy, and even Jack Ketchum said that 'If Wrath doesn't make you cringe then you must be riding in the wrong end of a hearse."That was after a reading we did together along with Edward Lee at Horrorfind in Baltimore. That was back in 2003. Afterwards, someone remarked on Ketchum's message-board that he cringed a few times during the more graphic parts of my writing which led to that reply. I immediately asked him if I could quote him.
Among your literary influences you cite writers as disparate as Stephen King, Baudelaire, Ayn Rand and Shakespeare. How have these various literary figures touched you?
Stephen King was my motivation to write horror and I started by writing King imitations back in high school in the 80s. I think that's what most horror writers did at that time. King was sort of our symbol of excellence back then. Baudelaire, Shakespeare, and Comte de Lautremonte influenced my style later on when I was a philosophy major in college. Back then my writing was very lush and melodramatic, full of that very European angst and existential malaise. I guess you would call it purple prose. Ayn Rand, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Fyodor Dostoevsky influenced much of my philosophy on life which in turn influences my writing. As I've gotten older and developed my own voice it has no doubt gotten harder to spot these influences, which is probably a good thing. If my writing was as heavy as it used to be no one would read me.
You've had a wild career. Tell us some of the things you've done.
I was a concert promoter, a bouncer, a spoken-word performance artist, a Heavyweight Kickboxing Champion, I co-starred in a Chinese action film, I run marathons, train mixed-martial arts fighters, and now I write horror novels and psychological thrillers.
What draws you to the harder and sharper territories of horror?
I write what I like. I'm a pretty intense guy. My life is a model of extremes. I grew up in what was basically a ghetto and fought in the streets all through elementary school, junior high and high school. Once I was older and moved to the West Coast to a nice neighborhood where there was no need to fight everyday, I started fighting in the ring because I missed it so much. When I started running it wasn't enough to run a mile or two. I went from running 5ks right to running marathons. I'm the biggest guy on the marathon course but I don't care. I cross the finish line feeling like I'm about to die but I wouldn't have it any other way. You learn more about yourself when you push yourself to the limit. Well, when it comes to writing I do the same thing. I push myself beyond my own boundaries. That's why I try to avoid typical storylines. Succulent Prey could have been a typical serial killer novel or a typical werewolf novel or a typical vampire novel but it would have bored me to tears just writing it. I have to go to the extreme just to stay interested.
Take us through your process for conceiving, researching and writing a novel.
Most of my storylines come from arguments. They are all the things I wish I had been witty enough to say during the argument. They are hypotheticala designed to prove some point I am trying to make. I usually start with a basic plot like "a man has a disease that is compelling him to kill" then I start scouring the internet and calling places like the CDC, Poison Control, the local morgue, the zoo, emailing university professors and scientists at NASA, whatever it takes to get the answers I need. I fill up entire note pads full of notes and then I start writing. I'll write the first draft in four or five months and then spend a month or two rewriting it. Then I'll send it to my proofreaders who then rip it shreds (one of them even puts little sarcastic comments in the margins when she finds a particularly stupid screw up) and then I rewrite the whole thing.
Intensity is very hard to maintain. How do you sustain the tension and prolong the suspense in your writing?
The intensity is easy. I take the most intense episodes from my life and the lives of people I know and then exaggerate the hell out of them. I'll take things that happened to three or four friends and mix it together with something I read in the news and then make it all happen to one character. A good story has to be extraordinary. You think of the most messed up thing that's ever happened to you then add that with the most messed up thing that ever happened to your best friend and add that with the most messed up thing you've ever seen on the news and then imagine if that had all happened to one person. That would be one intense story. Then you take a writer's natural tendency toward exaggeration and hyperbole and you'll end up with something pretty close to what I write. The trick then is finding the motivations of each character and figuring out how each of them would feel about what's going on, how the antagonist would justify his actions even when those actions are completely deviant and amoral. And if you can describe it all in such a way that the reader believes all of it, describe it so vividly that they can taste, feel, and smell it like they were there, that's where the craft and the talent comes in.
For me, the intensity evolves from the story and the characters. If you have a character you don't know or care about diffusing a bomb and the bomb goes off and kills him, you may get a momentary shock but there's no suspense and no intensity. If you have an out of work father of three who was on his way to pick up medicine for his ailing child and he's got to hurry because he has a job interview in an hour and he might lose his kids if he doesn't get the job and he stops to diffuse a bomb and you see the timer on the bomb ticking slowly down as he tries to figure out how to diffuse it without blowing himself up, and he's thinking about what will happen to his kids if he doesn't make it and how he doesn't want them to grow up in an orphanage like he did, now you have the reader emotionally invested. When that timer starts ticking down the reader is on the edge of his seat. Now you've got suspense and intensity. Succulent Prey wouldn't be the same novel without the sympathetic characters and the love interest and the constant threat of violence due to this rapidly progressing disease. If you didn't sympathize with either of them there wouldn't be much of a story there no matter how many horrible things happened to the characters along the way.
What defines a 'thriller' for you?
The chase. To me a thriller should read like one long chase scene. Not literally as in a car chase. Although I think that's probably how Hollywood defines it. To me, the chase can be physical or mental. It can be someone desperately trying to figure out a puzzle, but there has to be an element of desperation to it. There has to be a time limit to add suspense. In Succulent Prey, Joseph Miles is racing against the disease that he believes is turning him into a killer.
How do you deal with critics who decry 'extreme horror'?
To each his own. I don't particularly like "quiet horror" but I wouldn't try to raise an army and start a war against it. Everyone has different tastes. I just hate it when certain critics make statements about extreme horror implying that it is all gore with no plot or characterization. If they are reading stories with no plot and no characterization then they are reading bad stories whether there's lots of sex and gore in them or not. If you take out the sex and gore that won't make the story any better. A traditional or "quiet" horror story or thriller with no plot and one-dimensional characters is just as bad as an extreme horror story with the same flaws. That has nothing to do with that particular sub-genre and everything to do with bad writing.
JONATHAN MABERRY is the multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning author of ZOMBIE CSU: The Forensics of the Living Dead (Citadel Press) and PATIENT ZERO (St. Martins Press, March 2009). Visit him at www.jonathanmaberry.com 
