Alexandra Sokoloff is a Bram Stoker-award nominee with three novels of psychological horror: The Harrowing, The Price, and The Unseen, all from St. Martin's Press. With a background in screen-writing, Sokoloff has created a name for herself as a creator of gripping page-turners. She is also an in-demand writing instructor. Her blog, thedarksalon.blogspot.com, was recently named by Write It Sideways as one of the top 23 online resources for writers. Ms. Sokoloff divides her time between Southern California and North Carolina.
Q & A with Alexandra Sokoloff
By Little Miss ZomCon
HorrorWeb: Let's start easy. Do you have a favorite scary movie?
AlexandraSokoloff: I think that would be a toss-up between Silence of the Lambs and Rosemary’s Baby. As far as I’m concerned those are two of the best horror novels and two of the best novel-to-film adaptations of all time, as well.
HW: Your books combine a lot of mystery and romance elements with the paranormal. Do you have a particular genre that you read? Any favorite authors?
AS: I’ll pick up anything with a spooky cover. Growing up I read all of - in no particular order -Agatha Christie, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Daphne DuMaurier, Shirley Jackson, Ira Levin, Richard Matheson, Shakespeare, Tom Stoppard, Lillian Hellman, Madeleine L’Engle, the Brontes, Jane Austen. So I tend toward the dark, psychological and supernatural, with strong Gothic and mystery and sometimes mystical elements. No real in-your-face horror, you’ll notice – even with King I read around anything gruesome.
HW: You've been up for a number of awards the past few years--an ITW Thriller Award win for your story "The Edge of Seventeen," and both an Anthony & a Bram Stoker nod for The Harrowing. What do you think of awards? Have they helped your career?
AS: I think awards make the writing community, including publishers, pay more attention to you, yes. I was surprised at how much attention I got for the Thriller award, actually. It’s a strange piece to have won that particular award – very supernatural and feminine, compared to the testosterone-driven thrillers that usually make up that list. I was deeply touched and honored.
HW: Recently, the British Fantasy Society issued an apology for including no women writers when they created a book of interviews with important horror writers. Do you feel women are underrepresented in our genre?
AS: For my money the very best horror writers out there are women: from the classics: Shirley Jackson, Mary Shelley, Daphne DuMaurier, Anne Rice – to newer brilliant authors like Mo Hayder, Sarah Langan, Elizabeth Hand, Sarah Pinborough, Rhodi Hawk. Yes, certainly, the percentage of women writing horror is very small – women have made better careers in paranormal, which is not horror at all (but arguably pays better!). But women know horror on a day-to-day basis – we have a very intimate relationship with it, and when we write it, we write the hell out of it, without being exploitive about it. Maybe female writers get shut out because we’re just too scary for some people.
HW: Your first book features a spooky college dormitory; the second one, a creepy old hospital; and the third, an eerie mansion. What are a few places that have influenced these settings?
AS: I combined several colleges and universities to create the school in The Harrowing – my own alma mater, Berkeley; Duke University, Baird College, Columbia, others. I wanted to create a college that would feel like anyone’s school, and from the reader response I’ve gotten, it worked. I think any college campus is spooky, a prime environment for a haunting: you have brilliant and often troubled minds, raging hormones, rampant pursuit of altered states, a pressure-cooker atmosphere. And most of all, students at an age that they are wide open to anything. If I were a supernatural entity, that’s where I’d hang out, too.
I went back to Duke for The Unseen (out in the UK in June) since that’s where the Rhine parapsychology experiments took place in real life, and Duke is so wonderfully Gothic. The haunted mansion in that book is also a real place, a Southern mansion of the kind they called “Yankee Playtime Plantations”, which was a party house for Roaring Twenties literati like Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Max Perkins and James Boyd. The mansion is reputedly very haunted and I was able to spend several weeks there, soaking up atmosphere and yes, some creepy experiences.
The Price features a real hospital complex in Boston, which is really six hospitals which have grown into each other, shooting out glass bridges and underground tunnels and walkways like some alien parasite. You can walk in this place for miles and miles, passing through different hospitals, without ever getting to the outside. It is truly one of the most trippy places I have ever been. And Boston itself is a very haunted place – layers of history, including the witch trials in the general area. I revisit that city, and Salem, in my fourth thriller – Book of Shadows (out from St. Martin’s Press in June).
HW: A lot of writers--from Stephen King to Stephenie Meyers--talk about their use of music while they're writing, and how different musical works have supported their creative process. Do you have any go-to playlists while you're writing?
AS: It’s funny – for some books or scripts I have to have music while I’m writing, for others I can’t have music at all. I’m a dancer and I also sing, so I’m always hyper-aware of music and that can detract from the writing. But when I do music, it’s dark, dark, dark – and usually classics like Sting, the Stones, the Cure, U-2. Todd Rundgren and the Psychedelic Furs show up a lot. I like major 7ths.
HW: You teach a lot. How do you balance your writing and teaching schedules?
AS: That isn’t much of a problem, because I mostly teach at conferences, where as an author you want to be up in front of the public, speaking, anyway. Most authors gladly do it for free, but now I’m lucky enough to get paid for it, so I think of it as multitasking with benefits. And then I’m asked to do these intensive one or two day workshops on story structure, so as long as I just keep those to one or maybe two a month, it’s a nice extra income, and a nice break from writing but doesn’t conflict with my writing schedule at all. Writing for my blog is a bigger distraction, actually.
Novel writing (as opposed to screenwriting!) is so solitary – I really crave the teaching just for the community of it, being able to talk film and books and story with other writers who are hungry to learn. It’s always inspiring.
HW: Your blog is very popular with writing students, and you teach a structured, make-a-lot-of-index-cards approach to writing a novel. That makes me wonder: what kind of student were you? Have you always been this organized?
AS: If you only knew how funny that is. Um… no. Index cards are survival for the terminally unorganized. Actually it’s a very right-brained way to work, I think.
I was a fantastic student, though. I think I wrote so well, whether or not I knew what I was talking about, that no one seemed to notice I was hopeless at math, science, any of those left-brained things.
HW: Of the characters you've created so far, do you have a favorite?
AS: Not really – I love most of them. I think I admire Joanna in The Price the most, though.
HW: Tell us about the Killer Thriller band. I've seen pictures of you playing a tambourine with that group. Do you have a musical background?
AS: You don’t really play a tambourine, do you? I played some piano as a kid, but mostly dance and musical theater. Lots of singing, even more dance. Many authors have musical backgrounds and theater backgrounds, and for several years now a loose group of us have been playing and performing at conferences. It’s an unbelievable pleasure to be able to perform with pros like Heather Graham, F. Paul Wilson, Harley Jane Kozak, Michael Palmer, John Lescroat, David Morrell… literally, unbelievable. A dream.
HW: One last thing. Your next book is due out soon (June 2010). Anything we should know about it?
AS: Book of Shadows is definitely my favorite book so far, about a very male, very rational (he thinks) Boston homicide detective who catches a case that looks like a Satanic killing, and reluctantly must team up with an irrational, very female, and completely untrustworthy witch from Salem who insists that there are previous murders and more to come and that the killer is trying to summon a real demon. Another is-it-or-is-it-not supernatural thriller, and lots of chemistry in this one.
You can learn more about Ms. Sokoloff and her work on her webpage:
http://www.alexandrasokoloff.com
Photo by Lawrence Smith
Interview conducted by Little Miss ZomCon exclusively for HorrorWeb
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