by Jay Wilburn
I’ve been very excited to see the zombie novella Good Boy come out by Tom Clark. His seriousness about developing his craft as he prepared his first stories for publication told me that this was going to be good. He captures everything you could want from Watership Down meets zombies. I asked him about how important developing his writing skills was to him. He said, it was very important. You can’t go into something like this unprepared. He’d written for blog sites and other outlets for years, but fiction writing, world creating, is a different beast from journalism. Journalists know how to write, but often they don’t know how to craft a narrative, Clark says. His first published story for (the former) Strange Musings Press was one he had sitting around for 15 years, but the other 3 stories, he wrote for them came fresh after seeing their submission calls. The editor of the publisher, Giovanni Valentino, took the time to work with Tom Clark to make each story not only work, but to help him learn in the process. They spent one day alone on a single sentence to not only make it right, but make it right for the piece. The writing classes Clark has taken, in conjunction with mind-picking veteran peers, have been eye-opening and they’ve helped him write better. But it’s his editors, he says, he’s learned the most from. They’re the true superheroes for any good writer in his opinion.
Tom Clark has a wide range of media interests including writing, podcasting, production, journalism, songwriting, DJing Karaoke and more. He told me that’s a whole pile of disparate things, but they actually feed one another. Podcasting is him just being lazy, he says, and wanting to communicate his opinions about pop culture without having to write it down. However, it’s symbiotic with working the mic for any live event he may be emceeing. An editor in any journalism outlet wants you to say what you have to say in as few words, and as direct, as possible. That, in conjunction with writing classes, has helped him become a better self-editor. The Karaoke crowd, John Q. Public that goes out to enjoy themselves at a bar on any given night, they’re the food for his narratives. Most of my characters outside of Good Boy are people he knows from Karaoke after 10 years in the business.
Clark has a wide range of influences. Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard were his first loves. Of course, Stephen King and Clive Barker followed them. He hates sounding cliche with the latter, but it’s true. It was these four writers, primarily, that set him on his path. His desire to read more work like what they wrote, sent him on quests. He discovered Lovecraft through Howard, for example, after he learned the two played around in each other’s universes. He’d read anything that King blurbed. So, when people say “oh, blurbs don’t matter,” Tom Clark is here to tell you they fucking do. King and Barker were his gateway drugs to Skipp & Spector and Lansdale. Along the way, he picked up Nancy A. Collins. Collins showed him you didn’t have to write long, drawn out epics to tell a good story. When you look at the motion picture and television industry, without a doubt Rod Sterling is at the forefront for him. Watching The Twilight Zone is a required elective, he thinks, it’s Writing 101. For himself, regarding screenwriters, there is only one Dan O’Bannon and for directors there is only one John Carpenter. They’re his Bloch & Hitchcock. O’Bannon’s impact can still be felt today. He suggests we look at a small sample of what this man created or adapted: Alien. Outland. Lifeforce. Return of the Living Dead. And Carpenter? Does he really need to go into detail here, he asks. Music, too, is an influence. As a song writer, he’s borrowed from people like Pete Townsend, Steve Earle, and Ellis Paul to learn how to tell a story in sixteen lines or less.
Like any writer, Tom Clark has got a full pipeline. He’s working on his first full length novel; its working title is Whirlwind and It’s a monster story ala Frankenheimer & Seltzer’s Prophecy or Cruz Smith’s Nightwing. It’s about 1/3 of the way done and he expects to complete it sometime in 2018. He’s almost done with his next novella, Bella’s Boys, an extreme cosmic horror story taking place during the Blizzard of 1993. He just finished the plotting for both Good Girl and Good Dogs, the follow ups to Good Boy. He’s actually written Good Girl’s opening, and it makes him laugh so hard he had to put it aside. It’s quite different from Good Boy, but still captures the essence of what makes Good Boy work.
This is his first public announcement regarding a future project he’ll have, come July 2018. Inspired by the ‘Zines Scares That Care has produced the last two years, he’s reached out to a group of writers, 3 women and 3 men, who don’t have a lot of stuff to sell at a convention. They’re putting together a ‘zine, which will include contact information and publishing credentials for each author, and making them only available from the authors at events they attend. The collections WILL NOT be available in digital form, ever. He’s tentatively calling it NecroZINEicon in homage to his podcast. He’s assembled a diverse group of talent, including a fantasy author, a romance author, an urban fantasy author, an extreme horror writer, and a soft horror writer for the collection. He’ll be releasing the names of the contributors when it hits.
Keep an eye on Tom Clark and his work.
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