Interview with Doug Clegg

By: Melanie Billings

**EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared in 2003 on another web site. It is presented here in its entirety but since that time, Douglas Clegg has gone on to have several more novels published, including Afterlife, his Stoker-nominated collection The Machinery of Night and the newest Harrow novel: The Abandoned. He also has a new novel coming this fall (The Priest of Blood). Look for it in Penguin hardback in October 2005. **

Be forewarned. Writer Douglas Clegg has the distinct ability to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up, your arms break out in goosebumps and will probably cause you to check and double-check your windows and doors late at night after reading his books.

Winner of both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award, Clegg has penned several novels and short stories, including The Nightmare Chronicles, Halloween Man and Nightmare House. Some of his work is available online via his website, including the E-serial Watching the Nightingales.


Mel: On your website you state "I think if you really want to know who I am and what I'm about, you should read my fiction." How much of your life do you instill into your writing?

Douglas Clegg: I believe in the edict: write what you know. To me, what I know has to do with psychological insight as well as any intelligence I've gathered from life experience and research. My life is boring -- I write and I read. What I write and read has my lifeblood in it. That's where I am.

Mel: Is there any character or characters in your work that you closely identify with?

Douglas Clegg: All of them: the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful, the misfits, the norm, and the freaks. From the nastiest villain to the happiest hero, I identify with any of the people I bring into my novels and stories. In many ways, writing fiction is my way of seeking to understand what being human is.

Mel: Did you always aspire to be a writer?

Douglas Clegg: Since I was about nine years old, I knew I would be a writer. Before that, I sketched a lot and thought I might be an artist. Somewhere in my adolescence, I thought being an animator would be the thing to do, but books and writing gradually took me over completely. I was good for very little outside the realm of books and writing, and I still am. I love books, and my mission has been to get people reading -- whether my books or others' books, I don't care. A piece of writing is the most direct communication between two people. It is the shortest distance between human minds.

Mel: When you wrote your first novel, Goat Dance, did you have any inkling it would lead you to where you are now?

Douglas Clegg: When I wrote my first novel, Goat Dance, I had no idea that it would get published. Getting published and being a writer are two different things. There may be many writers who never get published, but who write. But I had some confidence that it would somehow all work out, and I still do. I just like writing fiction and telling tales.

Mel: You have also been quoted as saying that you never experience writer's block. What's your method for avoiding it?

Douglas Clegg: The world feeds me. Something inside me feeds me, too. Writing is a sacred space -- I know from past experience that if I can just start writing something -- anything -- it will lead to a story. My mind seems to work in that direction: making order out of chaos. Or, chaos out of order.

Mel: What do you enjoy most about the process of writing?

Douglas Clegg: Writing, despite my love for it, is a painful process, full of physical and emotional anguish. There's something therapeutic about it, because as I go through it, I know that if there's pain, somehow I'm on the right track. Somewhere in there, joy begins. Absolute joy. When I'm in the writing, I don't want to do anything else. I don't even want to acknowledge that I have physical needs (like eating, sleeping, or needing fresh air.) So, what do I enjoy most? Getting to the joy of it. When it flows, the problem of time disappears. There is no time. It's an area of physics that should be explored: psychologically, time is eradicated, and I go to a different place where I am living somewhere else without the constrictions of time or space.

Mel: Can you explain the "Dark Game" featured in The Hour Before Dark? Did you have a Dark Game as a child?

Douglas Clegg: The Dark Game is very simple. As children, I believe many of us -- particularly the creative types -- made up or adjusted basic childhood "secret" games in order to satisfy a psychological need. For me, personally, the game was simply one of mind projection. I'd sit in a class or outside at home and let my mind go all over the place, and have adventures. Or sometimes, I had games of imagination with friends that seemed real when they were finished. Only we knew they weren't.

From this, came a font of creativity. I was sketching and writing and, well, creating like crazy as a kid at times.

I've learned since, from talking to other kids, that they had these, as well, with minor or major variations. The Dark Game is "dark" because there's something about it that seems wrong or forbidden. And creativity is a close cousin to destruction as well. Those who have the power to create also have the power to destroy. At my website, www.douglasclegg.com, there's an area for people to post their own Dark Games from childhood. Some are creative and fascinating. Some are extremely destructive. A few of them, well, all I can say is I'm glad I wasn't around those folks as kids. One of the best is Tamara Thorne's. She played a game that involved setting up a fake crime-murder scene, and then freaking out the neighborhood kids. That's an extremely creative game, and reminds me why I like Thorne's storytelling abilities in her novels. Another good one was by a young writer named Gina Osnovich, whose family had come over to the U.S. from Russia when she was a baby. She and the other immigrant kids in Brooklyn would play a game that involved setting up Border Guards to stop the immigrant families from crossing to the U.S. The kids would play it, and it must've been both a fun and somewhat disturbing game for them.

Now, this magical thinking I had as a kid was good for me in kid-dom. It helped me through some rough spots of childhood. But when I grew to be an adult, that same way of thinking became dangerous and a form of denial of reality. I put myself in some dangerous situations as a newly-minted adult, and I believe the roots were in those childhood rituals I had.

So, creativity can be a double-edged sword. The Dark Game explores this.

In my novel, The Hour Before Dark, the Dark Game is similar. The adult siblings of the Raglan family gather after their father has been brutally murdered. But they had played their version of the Dark Game as children, and in doing so, lost a week in their memory as children. They now need to get that week back, somehow, in order to fix something that has never been quite right in their lives. Yet, the Raglans are all creative -- they compose and play music, they paint, they write. The same Dark Game that has somehow dogged them with a feeling of dread has also given them the joy of life. It really is a double-edge sword.

Mel: Your trilogy (Nightmare House, Mischief and The Infinite) tells three different stories about Harrow, a haunted house in New York. Each book can be read alone or as a companion to the others. How did you come up with the idea and what did you hope to accomplish with this unique approach to writing a series?

Douglas Clegg: Well, first off: I love haunted houses. And I love stories of hauntings. I wanted to create one place that could encompass an infinite number of hauntings. How to do this? Make a house with such vibrancy and occult possiblity, christened in the fires of Hell, as it were, a place of such evil and yet such fascination, that no matter who entered it -- so long as they had some small psychic ability -- the house would re-form itself to their worst nightmares.

There will be other Harrow stories in the future, too. I'll be finishing up one called The Necromancer this winter, I think, about the original owner of Harrow.

Mel: You have firmly embraced the concept of electronic publication of some of your work, starting with the release of Naomi as an e-book and continuing today with your e-serial Watching the Nightingales. Will you continue to use e-publishing as an outlet for your work? Do you feel it exposes new readers to your work that otherwise wouldn't read it?

Douglas Clegg: I believe in telling stories. I'll make use of whatever formats help me with that. Ebooks and email are one way. Print books are another way. Just telling stories at the corner store is another way.

Does it expose new readers to my work? Sometimes. But that's not my goal. My goal is to get people reading. If I didn't tell stories, I'd probably want to do something along the lines of what Suzanne Beecher does so successfully with her chapteraday.com website -- figure out ways to get people reading again.

One of the messages of Watching the Nightingales is that we're living in a world where we watch life rather than participate in it. Reading a story, you're not an observer. You're an active co-pilot with the writer. Your mind creates the movie in your head from the script of the book. And books get you to look at the world differently. Movies and tv, both of which I enjoy, tend to make us feel as if our lives aren't quite so interesting as those on the screen, and most of them take over the jobs of our minds -- they create the world at the helm of the filmmaker. Some movies are really good and get your mind going. But not so many as books. Books, I believe, get us back to living in the world. They're an escape and a return, in my opinion. The more I can get people to read, the happier I will be. The Internet is a wonderful tool for this.

Mel: What frightens you in real life?

Douglas Clegg: Depends on the day. Sometimes, everything, sometimes very little. Nothing specific. But sometimes, I love a good fear. Just not the ones that involve the annhilation of living creatures.

Mel: How would you describe your writing to someone who is not familiar with it?

Douglas Clegg: These are stories. That's the best I can offer as a description for my writing.

Please see Clegg's website at http://www.douglasclegg.com/.