avid Morrell, once called "the mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions," was born in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, in 1943. Since then, he has given us First Blood, which birthed the saga of John Rambo, an ongoing tale that may soon see a fourth installment with Sylvester Stallone reprising the role.
He is the author of 28 books, including Testament, The Totem, The Brotherhood of The Rose, The Fifth Profession, Long Lost and Assumed Identity. With more than 18 million copies of his books in print, his fiction has been translated into 26 languages.
His latest chilling novel, Creepers, is about a group of urban explorers who investigate the abandoned Paragon Hotel, built in the glory days of Asbury Park by a reclusive millionaire.
For years, Morrell taught American literature at the English department at the University of Iowa, beginning there in 1970 and continuing on the faculty until 1986. When his son Matthew, then 15, died of cancer in 1987, David and his wife Donna relocated to Santa Fe, N.M., where he continues to write exciting action thrillers. He wrote of his son's ordeal in the thoughtful book Fireflies.
David Morrell's Web site is www.davidmorrell.com and the Web site for Creepers is www.theparagonhotel.com.
The first three Rambo films grossed a combined $614 million worldwide—
Morrell: That's in 1980s dollars. These days, with the higher admission fee, it would be more. They were very successful films.
This is quite a tribute to the enduring popularity of John Rambo, whom you created. What do you think is the key to the character's popularity?
Morrell: I understand the character. I compare it a little bit to the retired gunfighter who comes to town, trying to set up a normal way of life, then is bullied and bullied and bullied and bullied—until finally he straps his guns back on. Against everything inside of him that says, "No, you've got to be peaceful." Straps those guns on and goes after the bullies. That is essentially what the Rambo stories and movies are all about.
The reluctant warrior, who hates what he is, knows what he can do, wants nothing but a life of peace, but he is pushed and pushed, usually on a very personal basis, until finally he erupts and turns into the thing he most hates. There are internal conflicts here and archetypes which are very powerful to the degree that [they inform] the kind of basic plot I believe audiences are willing to go along with.
Rambo died at the end of your book First Blood—but in the movie he lived. Did the filmmakers change this so they could make sequels?
Morrell: The character died at [the end of] the film as well. In a different circumstance, he committed suicide. They had that as the ending when they went to Las Vegas to test it on an audience—and the audience was exceedingly angry at the ending. They were even reportedly yelling, "Where's the director? Where can I get my hands on him?"
The producers had a long conversation and decided they didn't see any alternative except to film the new ending. They went back to British Columbia in a town called Hope, and they filmed the ending in which now Sylvester Stallone and Richard Crenna walk through the streets lined with soldiers and they are going to take him to jail.
It was really just a response to what the audience wanted, and then the film was so successful that they realized [that] unwillingly and unknowingly they had made it possible to do sequels.
There have been a lot of versions of First Blood on DVD. My favorite, needless to say, the one I did an audio commentary for, is the 1992 edition by Artisan. A subsequent edition by Lions Gate which got rid of my audio commentary and used one by Sylvester Stallone—in that particular edition, they have a piece of the scene in which Rambo dies.
It's kind of interesting.
It really speaks to a larger issue: the difference between the movie and the book. The story is sort of the same in both versions—The interruption is dramatic, different, particularly to do with the two main characters. In my novel, Rambo is a very angry person. He doesn't like what happened to him in Vietnam, he doesn't like what happened to him when he got back to the United States, he is clearly suffering from what we now call post-traumatic stress syndrome. Basically, he is an explosive that is about ready to erupt. In the movie, his acts of violence are mostly against private property. The body count is very, very low in the movie, contrary to what popular opinion has said.
The big change in the book is the police officer [Wilfred Teasle], who was a very complicated character in the book. He is a war hero, from the 1950s, from Korea, from the very central engagement in that conflict—in which the Marines behaved in ways the hero can't even describe while retreating. The police officer was a part of that retreat; he received a very high medal. He's a kind of Eisenhower Republican, and he is old enough to be Rambo's father.
Rambo I always thought of as having been radicalized by the war. He was sort of an equivalent of the Weathermen, the radical group which existed in the late 1960s. It's a big difference.
The film, by basically softening the characters and a few other things in the story, became less threatening to people. I must say, Ted Kotcheff did one heck of a good job directing it—it looked good.
Stephen King said to me once, if it had been his work, he wouldn't complain too much about it, because he still recognized the story in the film.
"I guess I'm still marching against the rules, wanting to raise hell while I'm still able" (spoken by Professor Robert Conklin in Creepers). This attitude seems to run through many of your characters ... John Rambo ... Malone in Burnt Sienna. ... How much of that person is you?
Morrell: Probably a lot! [Laughs.] I am slow to anger—I am so forgiving. I have taken offenses and offenses and offenses—because I know if I say, "All right, you went too far," it will be too far. I will give you an example.
I have a very good friend I've known since 1968; we were exceedingly close, close as brothers. As our relationship moved along, I began to notice, he would constantly take jabs at me in order to push himself yet a little higher. It wasn't that it was so often, but I noticed it. I noticed it over and over and over.
One day—this is two years ago; I've known him a long time (35 years)—then one day I said, "This relationship is not worth what I am going through, and I don't want to talk to you again." I haven't talked to him since.
As we get older, I believe we have the wisdom not to put up with needless distractions, as a younger person would. At a certain point you say, "This relationship isn't working. Why bother?"
There is a phrase I have—my wife rolls her eyes every time I say it—I ran across it when I was doing some research that involves the military people: "In this life, surround yourself with people of quality and substance." That has become a meaningful term to me. I don't have time for people who don't have that substantial character. That is the kind of thing I write about.
You dedicated Creepers to Jack Finney and Richard Matheson. Have you ever met them? What are some of your favorite books by them?
Morrell: I met Richard; Jack is dead. Jack's book Time and Again is just an extraordinary piece of work about the past and the present. Richard Matheson's book Bid Time Return, which was filmed as Somewhere in Time—these two books had a major effect on me. If I had to think of the authors who really, really influenced me, it would be these two.
I've had the chance to meet Richard once or twice. I had the chance to talk to him on the telephone. Gauntlet Press did a re-release of one of his novels, called The Shrinking Man. I did the afterword to that. I rolled up my sleeves and brought back the professor in me, wrote a very scholarly—not dull, I hope, very informative, I hope—essay about him. I sent it to him and, I am told, he found it really interesting. It was really an homage to him.
Would you say that Fireflies is about why destiny can't be changed?
Morrell: Hmmm—yeah, I know what you are saying.
Fireflies, which a dramatization, is about what it feels like to have a child die. I wanted to write a book about my son and what he went through. He said, "Nobody will remember me." I wanted to write a book in which he is on the page and he'd be remembered by people who had never met him. I didn't want to do the standard "Oh what a good kid he was" thing. That wouldn't be interesting to anybody who wasn't part of the family.
I constructed the book as a work of fiction, although it was all real. I framed it with myself, as an old person, being able, on his deathbed, to go back in time, the week before the crisis that killed his son in the hospital.
That character—me—knows everything that is going to happen and is rushing into trying to show doctors, "If you do this—maybe this wouldn't happen and maybe he'll live." Because it wasn't cancer that did him in, it was a lot of other things, mostly to do with his immune system. Of course, in real life, a physician would think you are out of your mind—if you claimed to have foresight into the future. This was, in a way, a Twilight Zone approach.
My view is, yeah, a lot of stuff is inevitable. Matthew died a second time in the book, as he did in real life. Nothing I, even as the character with the foresight to try to prevent it, nothing I could do to save him. I believe there is a kind of determination, if you like. The point is the dignity with which we conduct ourselves, the strength and the determination with which we lead our lives, is an effort to be as productive and as good-natured as we can be. That is the way I've conducted my life, and when I can, I assert those values into my fiction.
You mention that Edgar Allan Poe expressed concern about his readers' attention span, and you say that, when you were writing The Brotherhood of the Rose, you decided that 50 pages an hour was about right for the average reader ... with "breaks" within that. Do you still feel that that page amount is "about right" for the reader of today?
Morrell: That is what I did in Creepers. It's 9 o'clock, 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock, midnight and so on. Each chunk of manuscript ran about 50 to 60 pages. I believe the task for a novelist is how to account for retaining the reader's attention span in a world where there are too many interruptions.
Poe thought one hour was the most you could count on. That's probably not it these days, probably more like a half an hour or 15 minutes. I still rely on the one hour as do-able. It gives me room, at least. I tend to write in arcs for readers—where they can go with me for an hour, and I signal it is clearly time to stop. I don't want people starting a new section, then getting in a situation where they get tired and they lose the forward momentum. On the structure, I am very, very careful how I manipulate the reader's attention.
You are going to write the Marvel comic book Captain America: The End. Will you have to change your style or tone down the violence to write for a comic book?
Morrell: Marvel has hired me to write a six-part Captain America series. It's going to be a major, major assignment. It's done—I had a number of goals, one of which, just because it was a comic book—didn't mean I would look at it as a schlocky, campy thing. The approach is very serious. My intention was to make sure that the reader believes that this character is possible, and then to look at the character from the viewpoint of what I consider to be the major theme: the nature of a hero in today's troubled world. There was a third thing: I wanted to have plenty of emotion, and there are parts of the story that are extremely moving.
But as far as the treatment of violence, you'd be surprised at the violence in comic books. I had to do a lot of research on the Captain America character, to make sure I was up to speed about him and his background. Some of the stories are very graphic—plenty of blood flying, very violent. For me, the action or violence has never been gratuitous; it has always been a character revealing a part of the action, which happens here. And there is certainly plenty of action.
The first issue of Captain America: The End should be out in May 2006. We have selected an artist. I am not allowed to talk about that. He's working on the first segment now. All six of them will eventually be collected in a book, and I'll write an introduction for it and try to explain the history of how this came about and what I wanted to do. I think people will find it very interesting.
You wrote two great horror novels, Testament and The Totem. Do you plan to write another horror novel in the future?
Morrell: Creepers, I believe, is a horror novel. It's eight hours in that abandoned hotel. One of the things I really enjoyed about the book is that it is written in real time. Every instance of the eight hours is dramatized. There are no cuts, no summaries, no leaps forward. Every breath, every word, every step is on the page. I don't know of another book which is that relentless in its determination to have a documentary approach.
When the brilliant, unabridged audio came out, I burst out laughing, because it is eight hours long.
Real time in real time.
Morrell: [Laughing.] Yes, real time in real time. My view is a lot of my stuff is blatant horror without anybody knowing it. I believe Long Lost is a horror novel, for an example. Besides Testament, The Totem, Creepers, and I have two collections of short stories, Black Evening and Nightscape.
All my awards have been from the horror community. I have two [Bram] Stokers from the Horror Writers Association, and I have two nominations for other things. I have two World Fantasy nominations.
In a way, it is where I feel most at home. When writing an action book, one has to be very careful to make sure that it feels rooted in real feeling experience. In the novels, a lot of time I have been disguising the horror.
I was very pleased that The Totem was chosen as one of the entries for Horror's 100 Best Novels. When I did Creepers, it was deliberately a mixed-genre story, thriller with horror overtones. There is nothing supernatural in it, but it feels supernatural. That, in turn, makes people uncertain how I want to develop the story. A lot of readers told me they felt as if their legs were rubbery as they read the story. They couldn't tell what conventions I was following. I threw them all out, trying to invent something brand-new. It was a lot of fun to do that.
There is a feeling of claustrophobia with Creepers.
Morrell: Yes—both in time and in space.
Last words?
Morrell: Remember, I was a professor of American Literature. My goal has been to approach the thriller or the horror field as a wide-open type of fiction that most writers have not treated seriously. It is a total joy for me to explore these genres and take them in directions they hopefully haven't been taken before and treat them with a seriousness that I believe they deserve. That is the secret to my career and why I write like I do and why each book has been slightly different.
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