Here we go Boils & Ghouls, another entry in my Author Interview series. And this one, I’ll have to admit, I’m pretty excited for! Duncan Ralston is one of my favourite authors since I read his short story collection, Video Nasties. But, enough of me, on with the interview!
R.F. Blackstone: Thanks Duncan and welcome! Let’s start with something easy. Tell us about yourself.
Duncan Ralston: I’m a writer and TV professional, born and raised in Toronto and small-town Ontario, Canada. What got me into writing was reading Stephen King’s Night Shift and Clive Barker’s Books of Blood within the span of a few months. They really opened my mind to the kind of stories that could be told and I realized that was what I wanted to do with my life. I was fifteen.
RF: So, tell us about your latest release.
DR: Ghostland is my latest novel – it’s basically Jurassic Park with ghosts instead of dinosaurs.
RF: I’m sold already! (Buy the book it’s great!) What inspired you to write it?
DR: I wish I could remember! I know I’d been trying to come up with a great mashup concept for a while, and it seemed like this one hit me out of the blue. I was at work, and I may have been watching a ghost hunting show at the time. (I used to work in master control for Canada’s Discovery Channel.) So the idea probably came from there, and I’ve always been a huge lover of ghost fiction – Ghostland was the culmination of all of my research and appreciation of haunted house entertainment.
RF: And it shows! What did you enjoy most about writing Ghostland?
DR: I enjoyed pretty much everything in different amounts. I really love coming up with new characters and putting them in difficult situations. Actually, I should admit “inventing” the technology was harder than I would have liked. But once I figured that out the novel was much easier to write. Almost too easy.
RF: I bet it was hard. Now, one of the things about this release I really loved was this viral marketing campaign you did. Tell us about that.
DR: I remembered a horror author from the ’80s and ’90s named Rex Garrote, and in particular a book he wrote called The House Feeds, which was very influential on my early writing. Only nobody else remembered him. It was as if he didn’t exist. In August, I came across a Wikipedia page for him. I wrote a series of blog posts about it, and my experience with the Mandela Effect in regard to him. Then someone contacted me with photos of a copy of the book.
It was relatively elaborate. But it was all a hoax. And it was difficult to keep under wraps, particularly since I’d already started to work on the website for Ghostland. People searched for him and found the website even though it wasn’t supposed to be visible in Google. I had a lot of trouble with that. Then some redditor flagged the Wikipedia page.
How it tied to Ghostland was that Rex Garrote’s fortune was used to create the park. And his house is the main exhibit. He’s a dead semifamous horror author in the world of the book, and his AI hologram is the star of the show, acting as a tour guide.
RF: How did you come up with the character Rex Garrote (love the name) and the process of his entire creation?
DR: The Rex Garrote name has been around for a long time. I came up with it in the early 2000s for a screenplay I wrote called Garrote House. It was the first feature script I’d ever 
completed, basically Stephen King’s Rose Red but in addition to ghosts it featured an interdimensional portal that unleashed all kinds of nightmare creatures leaking into the old house. I think that element was influenced by (or stolen from) Clive Barker’s Undying, my favorite game at the time. It was a very flawed script but I had a lot of fun with it.
Almost fifteen years later, I’m rewriting a sort of terrible first draft of Ghostland. Garrote House is one of the main attractions. It’s the first haunted place we see in the book. But Rex Garrote isn’t in it. The bad guy in this draft is a silent film star the characters call the “Black-and-White Man.”
Once I realized Garrote should actually be in the book, and that he was a horror writer from the ’80s, all of the other pieces seemed to fall into place.
RF: You really did go all out with the campaign. One thing I love is the Ghostland website. how long did it take you to come up with it and then have it made? Or did you outsource it to someone else?
DR: Thank you! Nope, that was all me. Took for-damn-ever. I figured since the book features excerpts of a park guide, I should go all the way and build a website for the park, using those entries.
Then I realized I didn’t have the resources or the time to create a fully-functioning park website. So instead I decided it would be excerpts of the real website. Someone who was supposed to be there on opening day is trying to figure out what happened, why over two-thousand people died at Ghostland. She’s piecing together bits of the old website, photos from the day, interviews from people who were there and documenting it all in her blog.
So it works as a short story (her blog) and as a tie-in to the novel, providing more info on some missing exhibits and stories of other survivors.
RF: And it works! If Ghostland was made into a film, who would you like to play the lead?
DR: I don’t really have anyone in mind, but the kids who played Bill and Bev in IT would do nicely. Though I really liked the girl who played Abra in Doctor Sleep. I guess I’m torn. Fortunately it’s not something I have to worry about.
RF: How did you come up with the concept and characters for the book?
DR: The concept came first. Deciding who would be the main characters took a fair amount of brainstorming. There was a time when I thought it would be an X-Files-like book with two detectives trying to piece together what happened after the event. I wanted it to have a Silent Hill feel, I guess because I was playing the games a lot at the time. So, Scully and Mulder walking through a Silent Hill-esque theme park littered with dead bodies, piecing together clues to what happened and how.
Then I tried it with a family. Two kids and their parents. Never got far in that draft.
Next, I decided I wanted to do something really different. A new take on the typical haunted house book. Rather than have people approach the house like in every other book or movie, why not have the house come to them? It already had to be driven through town on its way to the Ghostland grounds – why couldn’t the main characters be watching as it passes? And maybe see a ghost in one of the windows?
It was obvious from there it had to be kids. Ben “the Dead Kid” Laramie and Lilian Roth popped into my head almost fully formed. Ben has a heart attack and “dies” after seeing the ghost in the window, and Lilian becomes traumatized over death. They’re horror video game junkies. In the first full draft they stay that age, around fourteen.
In the final draft, it’s several years later and Lilian has given up on gaming and horror. Ben – who’s homeschooled now – has become even more obsessed. Particularly with the man he saw in the window: Rex Garrote. He hasn’t spoken with Lilian in years. And now he wants her to come with him to Ghostland. Lilian’s psychologist goes with them, treating it as “exposure therapy.”
RF: Convince us why you feel your book is a must-read.
DR: Oh hell, I don’t know if it’s a must-read. People seem to be enjoying it, though. And if you like your books featuring some amount of interactivity, there’s the clickable guidebook, a whole damn website, a park map, and even an “AR experience” in the paperback.
RF: Is Ghostland your proudest achievement so far in your writing career? If not, what would you say has been?
DR: I don’t know if it’s my proudest achievement but it’s certainly the most ambitious thing I’ve ever worked on. Which is probably a good thing, because I plan to dip my toes back into that world at least a few more times over the next few years.
RF: Okay, so name your favourite author or book.
DR: Stephen King, hands down. I don’t always love his stuff but he’s written more of my favorite books than any other author. I’d say these days my favorite of his is The Shining but it seems to change on a whim.
RF: When did you first consider yourself a writer?
DR: Since I started writing at fifteen. I’ve never held to the somewhat elitist belief that you have to be getting paid to call yourself a writer. If you do it because you love it, if you spend most of your free time doing it, you’re a writer. You’re putting in the work. That’s all that matters. If people are reading your work, if you get paid for it, all the better.
RF: Wise words indeed. Do you prefer to write in silence or with noise? Why?
DR: I used to write to music, particularly soundtracks of movies and series that I enjoy. Now I prefer silence. I find the music often influences what I’m writing and I don’t want that. I want to let the story speak to me.
RF: What is your writing process? For instance do you do an outline first? Do you do the chapters first?
DR: I have outlined. But I don’t usually. I outlined my “first” novel (Salvage) and my first extreme horror novella (Woom). I do find it helpful but I feel it’s more like homework than the fun part, which is the writing. I always prefer the blank page to the roadmap. It’s all about surprising myself with the story. I’ll make a lot more wrong turns, but it’s more interesting that way, at least for me.
I don’t really have a process other than sitting my ass in the seat and pounding out words.
RF: What is your writing Kryptonite?
DR: As in, what makes me unable to write? I need to have a good amount of time. An hour or more. Anything less and I’m useless.
RF: And finally, what can we expect from you in the future?
DR: I’m planning to write a sequel to Video Nasties, the novella featured in the collection of the same name. A spiritual sequel to Woom, set in the same hotel. A sequel to Ghostland. A spinoff or two. And 2020 may or may not see a “rerelease” of Rex Garrote’s The House Feeds.
R.F. Blackstone 