RK: I’ve always been drawn to weird and bizarre things since I was a small child. The first actual monster movie I saw was Creature From the Black Lagoon at the age of six, which really kick-started my love for monsters and creature features. But if I really had to dig deep, I would say my first introduction to the sensation of unease and horror would be the cellar door in the old house we rented in Nashville when I was four or five years old. It was painted black and it was forbidden that I even went near it. That was probably because my parents were afraid I would open it and fall down the stairs, but in my young mind it was because something lurked down there that needed to remain hidden and unseen. My folks would tell me ghost stories back then, about the Bell Witch, or the Man with the Golden Arm, or Bloody Bones and I would imagine the unholy trio congregating in the darkness of the cellar, plotting to kidnap a little boy and drag him, kicking and screaming, to their shadowy lair. I remember lying in bed with the covers over my head, hearing the house settle or a mouse scratching in the wall and was positive the three were creeping up the stairs to my bedroom to steal me away. Even now, when I hear an unfamiliar sound in the night, I revert back to that five year old and get that adrenalin rush of raw fear, if only for a moment or two.
RK: After the horror implosion of ’96, I reckon I grew bitter and disillusioned by the whole publishing industry and, at that point in time, considered the loss of my horror writing career as a dismal failure on my part. So, I decided to stop writing horror and even reading horror. For ten years, I worked the factories and raise a family. Then in the summer of 2006, readers on the Robert McCammon discussion forum started talking about my books and wondering why I disappeared. It intrigued me that folks even remembered me after being gone for so long. After that, I read Brian Keene’s The Rising and James Newman’s Midnight Rain, and decided to give the horror genre another try. I’ve been writing and publishing ever since.
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RK: I’d have to say I have two go-two authors that I’ve always enjoyed and have always inspired me to do better at my craft. Joe R Lansdale and Brian Keene. Both have blue-collar roots similar to mine and I’ve always found their books and stories to be very relatable and grounded in the sort of prose I love the best. I’m a huge fan and supporter of newer writers in the genre, but there are a few who really stand out and deliver consistently; folks like Brennan LaFaro, Jeff Strand, Kristopher Triana, Daniel Volpe, Aron Beauregard, and Ruthann Jagge.
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RK: With longer novels, I do tend to use an outline to help the book remain evenly structured throughout. However, I’m always aware that anything in that outline can change or evolve at any time during the writing process. The Dead-Eye series has been loosely outlined so far, but once Dead-Eye and Job hit the trail, practically anything can happen from one chapter to the other. With short stories I usually get a germ of an idea and then just run with it. If anything remains concrete with the original idea, it’s usually the story’s ending, which more than likely is creepily ambiguous or has a twist to it.
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RK: I reckon I started drawing when I was three or four years old. My mother bought me a stand-up black board to practice writing my numbers and ABCs, and I started doodling on it a lot. It wasn’t long before I was drawing Saturday morning cartoon characters like Fred Flintstone, Bugs Bunny, or Huckleberry Hound. When I was in school, everyone knew me as “the little boy who drew things”. In high school, I became obsessed with becoming a comic book artist. As it turned out, I collaborated with a fellow student around my junior year named Lowell Cunningham (who, strangely enough, went on to create the Men in Black comic book in 1990). I then began to draw and write my own comics and, around the end of that year, began to gravitate toward strictly writing fiction.
For a long time, my desire to do artwork was overshadowed by my desire to simply write. It wasn’t until Crossroad Press and D&T Publishing began releasing paperbacks and hardcovers of my books that I decided to start drawing again, and what better place to do it than on the title pages beneath my autograph. It’s become customary now… if you buy a book directly from me, you’re definitely going to get some RK artwork with the inscription. I’ve also started including my own black and white artwork in some of my recent collections, like Mister Glow-Bones, Haunt of Southern-Fried Fear, and Tales From the Southern-Fried Crypt.
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