Laurell K. Hamilton | Author

Laurell K. Hamilton is a Best-Selling author known for both her Meredith Gentry and Guilty Pleasures dark fantasy series. Laurell is the recipient of a P.E.R.L. award for dark fantasy. Caitlyn Darr, producer of Illusion’s Top 20, talks with laurell about her life and work.

CD: You have a reputation for churning out full length novels very quickly; how long does it usually take you to write one novel?

LKH: It depends on the length of the novel and how inspired my muse and I are. Anywhere between six months and four years. Average is probably eight to nine months.

CD: I’ve noticed women seem to be more attracted to horror novels than books in science fiction genre. Any ideas why?

LKH: Do you mean as authors, or readers? If you mean as authors, then, I suppose that’s true. Not sure why. I have a background in science and a degree in biology, as well as English, so I guess I could have just as easily written something more science fiction. But, honestly, the harder SF ideas just don’t appeal to my imagination as much. Again, don’t know why.

CD: You’ve said in other interviews that many of your male fans have backgrounds in the military or police force. What is it about your work that speaks to them?

LKH: Not just the male fans, but female fans as well. We’re hearing from more and more of our men and women in uniform. Why do I have so many fans in the military and police? One, I’ve done my research. My fiction with its
vampires, zombies, and fairies, has some of the best police work out there. I’ve gone over the top maybe three times in sixteen books. Three times when I know that it was a little too much for real police work. Other than that the police tell me I’m pretty close. High praise, indeed. I’ve read what I could and interviewed actual police and ex-military. Any mistakes are mine and mine alone. But, so far, so good. I do my best to interact with most of the weapons used in the books. I think that shows in the writing. I’ve had the high praise of being told by several military personal that I’d make a good officer, but a bad enlisted. Police have told me that I’d make a good detective, but a bad uniform. For someone who has never served in any uniform, I think like a cop, or so I’m told by those who would know. Sometimes I think I’ve been writing about crime a little too long.

CD: When we were filming Top Twenty Scariest Tales, you gave Stephen King credit for making horror novels more mainstream. Are there any other writers you feel have helped popularize the genre for the general public?

LKH: Clive Barker. Dean Koontz, in his early books, though many of his later books are more strongly mystery.

CD: One of the ways the world in your novels differ from that of most horror books, is that you have supernatural beings -vampire, werewolves , etc-living out in the open with humans instead of hiding in the shadows. Was this a conscious effort on your part to separate yourself from other genre writers, or did the world just naturally evolve that way?

LKH: One of the things that intrigued me from the very beginning was the concept of the monsters of folklore being thrown into the real world, not as monsters, but as every day people. I wanted to see what our world would be
like if we all woke up tomorrow and suddenly vampires, werewolves, and the rest of the movie monsters, were real, and everyone knew it. What would we do as a society? How would the modern world cope? It was such a fun idea,
and interested me so much that I didn’t even realize I was the first writer to come up with the idea to mainstream the monsters. It seemed so obvious to me, and so terribly fun.

CD: Sexuality plays a very important role in your novels; so much so that your books are sometimes categorized as erotica. Why do you think horror and erotica go so well together?

LKH: I’m not sure horror and erotica do go well together. Before my books popularized the concept of good sex in horror, most of the sex in horror was punishing sex. What I mean by that is that if you had sex in a slasher flick, you died. The virgin survived. Very often in a horror movie somewhere in the middle of sex something horrible would happen, like the
lover changing into a monster, or the idea that the lust changed them into something horrible. If you did manage to have good sex, there would still be terrible consequences later. Sex was punished severely in the horror genre. Violence was okay, but not sex. I just didn’t understand that, so I decided if I was going to write about sex that it would be good sex and that it would be about love, compassion, and that the sex wouldn’t be about punishment. I mean the Puritans are dead, and the Victorians, can’t we let them stay in their graves and carve out a new sexual identity for ourselves? Now, there is this tremendous numbers of books that are sometimes called horror, erotic, or even paranormal romance, but when I first started the Anita series I was the lone voice crying in the wilderness. Now so many people have jumped on my band wagon that everyone forgets how new a concept it was to have sex and horror as a friendly mix instead of a deadly one.

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