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Horror Author Roundtable
11.
AOTW: What do you love about your fans? Tell us about a memorable encounter with one of your readers while on tour, or via your website or email.
Fred Saberhagen: The best fan reaction I've ever had, or expect to have, is when now and then someone comes up and tells me of being in a tight spot of some kind --- like a tank in the wartime desert, or worse ---and of having found something in one of my books --- maybe only a brief escape --- that helped them get through the problem.
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro: I love that my fans like my work, and I find that my website allows my readers to get answers to their questions, either from the material on it, or through e-mail. Encounters with fans run from the sublime to the ridiculous, and after three decades, I'm used to the whole range, except for the fellow who wanted to shoot me --- that was a bit much.
Michael Norman: I am particularly pleased when young people --- often "nonreaders" --- say they discovered one of my books, then read the others and are continuing to read. I am always amazed when readers say my books are among their favorites. I think they're light entertainment and nothing more.
Geoffrey Huntington: So many of my readers write to me to say they're imaginations have been inspired by the Nightwing stories. That's so rewarding --- especially when they're young readers, and they say they want to be writers when they get older. It reminds me of myself at their age. I tell them to keep writing --- it can happen!
Suzy McKee Charnas: I love readers who dive deep into a book and find treasures of their own there, things I may not even be aware that I had included. The most striking incident, though, concerns a book called Dorothea Dreams, which is a ghost story but not horror. In it, a major character is dying of cancer, and I had a letter from a reader describing to me how exactly a particular scene with Ricky at its core mirrored a scene from the death, from cancer, of her brother, some years previously. I was really rocked back by that: the sense that although the scene described was entirely imaginary, it had somehow come out of the shared mental soup we all live and dream in, and had spoken to this person so strongly.
F. Paul Wilson: Once a year, usually in October, the repairmanjack.com message-board stalwarts gather for a weekend get-together and I show up Saturday night to have dinner with them. This past October 19th (in Atlanta) was the most recent "Grand Unification" (as they've come to cal it). Really, really nice people. No fawners, no know-it-all jerks. And I'm amazed at how they've bonded.
I've had a number of readers tell me that An Enemy of the State changed their lives. Now that's scary. If you change someone's life, aren't you somehow responsible for it?
Gregory Maguire: Some fans open up their book and request me to sign on a certain favorite page. It always tells me a lot (sometimes more than I want to know) about their interests....
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