Dan Simmons is best known for his far-future science fiction series the Hyperion Cantos, but he’s also published popular books in a wide range of other genres, including horror, fantasy, and historicals. His 2007 bestseller The Terror, which explores the disappearance of a real-life Arctic expedition, is currently in development at AMC, with Ridley Scott attached to direct. Simmons’ new book The Abominable also deals with the hazards that befall an expedition making their way across a frozen landscape, though in this case that landscape is the slopes of Mount Everest.
“When people ask if there’s a scary, hairy abominable snowman in the book, I tell them there’s something much worse,” says Dan Simmons in Episode 96 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.
Indeed, The Abominable contains enough mayhem and dread to satisfy any horror fan, though some of the book’s most macabre moments are drawn straight from real life, such as a climber whose body was so battered after falling thousands of feet that only his jawbone was ever found, or a Tibetan funeral in which the deceased is hacked apart with knives and fed to vultures. That dark edge combined with the book’s fine writing, well-drawn characters, and carefully researched historical detail make it a worthy successor to The Terror.
“Some reviewer — they could have been European — said this is Dan Simmons’ other ‘cold book,'” says Simmons. “I like that. ‘Cold book.’ So The Terror was first, and The Abominable is also pretty cold for much of the novel.”
Listen to our complete interview with Dan Simmons in Episode 96 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. Then stick around after the interview as guest geeks Grady Hendrix and Jaym Gates join host David Barr Kirtley to discuss “Sex in Horror.”
Dan Simmons on the reactions to his dystopian novel Flashback:
“Well, which part of the reactions? The death threats? The fatwa that was put out on me by a London imam? The hundreds of ‘I’d give this no stars if I could’ Amazon reviews? The personal letters saying ‘I used to read everything you wrote, but I’ll never read anything by you again’? … They read the wrong version of Flashback. I should just let them read the 1991 story that was published in Lovedeath, and because it was 1991 America went broke because of Ronald Reagan, and I have a young character — the same young character that’s in the novel — who says, ‘He acted like our grandfather but the mofo made us broke, he ruined our country.’ So I’d be a hero to all the progressives who say I’m not worth reading and a bastard and so on, if they read that version. I didn’t care how America went broke. I just needed it broke so I could … look at this idea of a nation turning its back on the future.”
Dan Simmons on researching Ernest Hemingway for The Crook Factory:
“With the Freedom of Information Act they were revealing how the FBI really was hovering over him and tapping his phone and following him, and in one case preparing to kill him if they had to, when he was doing this counter-espionage work on Cuba in 1942, which is what my novel’s about. And it was because of things that he uncovered just playing spy. We’ve all heard that in his last days Hemingway was paranoid because he was sure the FBI was following him, he was sure they were tapping his phone — this was in 1961 when he committed suicide — but they were following him … so his paranoia had real foundations, most of which have been classified until very recently.”
Grady Hendrix on slasher films and teen sex comedies:
“In horror movies people having sex are vulnerable to being killed because that’s how the movies started out, and the reason they started out that way was really practical … These independent producers were trying to replicate the success of teen sex comedies, which were cleaning up in regional circuits across the country — Swinging Cheerleaders, I think The Van was one of them — and so David Friedman and these other producers like Debra Hill had this idea of like, ‘If we can combine the jiggle factor from those movies … and then we have a killer … then we’re covering everything — the girls will come to see the romance, the boys will come to see the killing and the boobs’ … So it was almost an accident of production that that ended up being what was offered, and then people loved it.”
Grady Hendrix on the evolution of horror:
“Horror has become — rather than this conservative reaction, where the monster has to be eradicated and the status quo preserved — it’s now become this genre about the monster carrying this flag into the future and saying, ‘This way for your double genitals! This way for your horns! This way for your tail! This way to express your anger on the outside of your body!’ It’s an amazing thing that’s happened in horror, and I sometimes see horror writers who just aren’t getting it, and they’re angry about Twilight, and they’re angry about Laurell K. Hamilton, and they’re angry about these changes and they feel threatened by them, and it’s like, guys, you are over. You are the bones that this city is being built on.”
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