Wolf's Gambit by W.D. Gagliani

What about your formative years influenced your choice in fiction genre? Movies? Books? Your hometown? Family? And, how did you launch your career? Where did you begin and why?  (I decided to keep it simple!)

I come from a family of readers. I started early, at the age of four, reading Italian because I grew up in the port city of Genova, the birthplace of Columbus. I got my start with Disney comics which, in Italy, were somewhat advanced for their time. A bit more like graphic novels, laid out in books. I loved the blending of genres: adventure, science fiction and fantasy, mystery and crime, in which all the favorite Disney characters appeared. I was an early fan of Jules Verne, one of my dad's favorites. My parents - and my dad especially - greatly encouraged my reading, until years later when, now in the US, I settled on the Hardy Boys for a phase that was to last a couple years. Suddenly my dad decided I was limiting my reading to the Hardy Boys and banned them, for a period. I read them anyway, thanks to an illicit trafficking of books with a sympathetic cousin. I also avidly read other great kids' series such as the very midwestern Brains Benton mysteries (6 novels I still cherish), The Three Investigators, and various others such as the Rick Brant Scientific Adventures, and some of the Tom Swifts.

Through grade and middle school I read from the adult stacks of the library: Ian Fleming, Alistair MacLean, Duncan Kyle, Harry Patterson (Jack Higgins), Desmond Bagley, and many other (mostly British) thriller writers. I read Harold Robbins and Frank Yerby potboilers, Leon Uris, Trevanian, Brian Garfield, James Grady, David Morrell, Martin Caidin, discovered Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Richard Matheson, then Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, other crime writers. In school, reading Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and William Faulkner widened my horizons. On the SF side, the New Wave made the biggest impact on me, especially the darker work of Harlan Ellison and Philip K. Dick.

My tastes were in general beginning to head toward the Dark Side thanks to movies and television, where I was an early fan of Rod Sterling's shows, various other horror-themed shows and movies, Hammer films, and of course "The Omen" and "The Exorcist." Creature Features on Chicago's WGN grounded me in horror classics. But in 1976 I read Salem's Lot by a newcomer named Stephen King and I never looked back. I wanted to be Stephen King. I had already enjoyed plenty of earlier horror fiction, but it was only a part of the smorgasbord. King made me deviate course and head into horror full-tilt. Brian De Palma's great Carrie really did the trick - the blending of high school and horror made an impact on this high school student, pretty much a loner and a bookworm!

Throughout high school and college, I read in huge phases: books on UFOs, war and combat, guns, the Mafia and other true crime, and lots of varied military history. By 1981 I'd already been sending short stories out to impossibly ridiculous markets like Playboy, Oui, Penthouse, Cavalier, and other men's magazines for five years, since high school, with no success (but I treasure those rejection slips). These weren't sex stories, they were mysteries and SF and crime, aping the kinds of things these markets chose to place between the sexy pictorials.

But also in 1981 I entered the first Twilight Zone Magazine contest, for which Harlan Ellison was a judge, and had my first personalized, hand-written rejection slip. I was hooked! I switched my major from Geology to English (actually added it as a minor, but took almost exclusively English and literature courses and writing workshops) for the rest of my undergraduate career. I began collecting rejection slips from all the best genre markets of the time, but they became increasingly complimentary enough to keep me going. In workshops, I suffered through the "literary writing vs. genre writing" effect and developed the kind of thick skin that serves writers well. Eventually I submitted a fiction collection for my Master's thesis. I also taught composition and creative writing as a TA and then as a lecturer. By the mid to late 80s, I'd managed to get my name on the list of freelance book reviewers for The Milwaukee Journal, where I published numerous reviews over the next two decades. I parlayed that legitimate and paid work into more and more genre reviewing for numerous venues.

The so-called Splatterpunks hit me pretty hard in the 80s - I was reading The Twilight Zone Magazine and The Horror Show and they pointed me to these fearless risk-takers: Joe Lansdale, Richard Laymon, Edward Lee, Ray Garton, Skipp & Spector, Robert McCammon, and later the quieter stylists Charles Grant, F. Paul Wilson, Robert Bloch, and two masters of the short story, Brian Hodge and Gary Braunbeck. Concurrently, Tim Powers, James Blaylock, and Charles de Lint forever changed my view of fantasy with their secret histories, Steampunk, North American magic realism, and urban fantasy - all still favorites.

In 1991 I found the Horror Writers Association (then Horror Writers of America). I recommitted myself to write in and promote the genre I'd loved so long. I'd already begun various novels since grade school, but started Wolf's Trap in 1993, endlessly tried to sell it unfinished to publishers and agents, finally found a small press that was interested, and Yard Dog Press published it in 2003. It earned a Bram Stoker Award nomination in 2004, which led to a mass market deal with Leisure Books, a relationship that has continued happily since 2005. I describe Wolf's Trap in movie pitch-style as "The Wolf Man" meets "No Way to Treat a Lady" by way of "Deliverance" and with a nod to "Body Double."

Tell me about your current release, Wolf's Gambit, and what you're working on next?

Wolf's Gambit, is the sequel to Trap, and next year Leisure will publish Wolf's Bluff, the third book in the series. I'm currently plotting the fourth book, Wolf's Edge. While working on Trap I had sold a number of stories to various anthologies - in fact, many of those early stories, greatly revised, were published twenty years later! - and after Trap I wrote an unsold straight thriller, Savage Nights, which shares similarities with (but predated) the movie "Taken." I still have high hopes for that one. I'm now working on a Young Adult humorous horror/adventure series with friend and collaborator David Benton, a fellow horror writer also interested in stretching out.

People sometimes ask, "Why werewolves?" Well, watching those classic Universal movies, I always felt a connection to the Wolf Man. Talbot was a tragic figure who didn't want to be a monster. It wasn't his choice. Dracula, certainly as played by Bela Lugosi, may not have chosen vampirism, but by the time we caught up with him he was sure enjoying it. Talbot's plight struck me as sad but challenging, too, and caused me to see that perhaps we all have darkness inside that we can't quite control and might explain some of the evil humans perpetrate on others. That duality interested me greatly. With Wolf's Trap, I found the opportunity to sneak in some autobiography about growing up in an Italian-American household and feeling that darkness within trying to erupt into the world. There was already a sort of duality in my life, with the clash of the "old country" and modern society, the dual languages, the public and private. I seeded the plot of Trap with all sorts of duality and dual-nature characters. And all those thrillers and mysteries and crime I'd read had to come out somehow, so my novel became what I dubbed North Woods noir. Wolf's Gambit follows the same protagonists, albeit with a whole new enemy - the evil military contractor Wolfpaw Security Services - which will occupy them for three books. After that, who knows?

Do you get those emails/letters from fans who want to know "Who thinks like this?"

So far, I've been lucky. All my mail has been unfailingly positive! Some readers have written to express joy that a sequel is finally coming (God love'em!). But this has just ratcheted up pressure on me - hoping they'll find the new book as engaging, as horrifying, and as thrilling as the first one. I've had some nasty reviews here and there (one even picked on my name), but that thick skin I developed early on did the trick..

What do you do for pleasure/relaxation when not creating chilling stories?

I feel I've benefited by growing up bilingual and bicultural, and having spent the first eight years of my life in Italy. I think it has kept my horizons wide, and my mind open. I feel connected to both the old world and the new world. Besides still reading in those previously-mentioned areas, writing and reviewing, I listen to old and new progressive rock, classic rock, classical, new age and electronic, and increasingly to stuff I passed on when I was a kid, like the Rat Pack and Leonard Cohen. I research and collect strange weaponry. I used to shoot black powder guns, though not so much any more. I've panned for gold and hiked the mountains of Idaho, and other foolhardy acts. I collect lots of books in the genres I love and by authors I admire, some of whom I'm proud to call my friends. And I keep my day job because all things are fleeting. Occasionally, I sleep - whether I want to or not.

 

Debra Webb wrote her first story at age nine and her first romance at thirteen. It wasn't until she spent three years working for the military behind the Iron Curtain and within the confining political Walls of Berlin, Germany, that she realized her true calling. A five-year stint with NASA on the Space Shuttle Program reinforced her love of the endless possibilities within her grasp as a storyteller. A collision course between suspense and romance was set. Debra has been writing romantic suspense and action packed romantic thrillers since.