An Interview With Mike Carey, Author of The Devil You Know - Part One - Page 3

More to the point, it was my dream job.  I was such a hard-core Sandman fan, and there I was writing a book centered on one of the iconic Sandman characters.  There was no living with me. More recently, both having a novel published and co-writing a book with my daughter were spectacular highs.

What made you decide to write a novel? 

It was something I'd always wanted to do. It was also something I'd tried and failed to do a long time ago, back when I was still teaching. I didn't have any grasp of story structure back then, and I'd never learned the discipline of planning, so I wrote these things that were not so much novels as big, shapeless, bulgy bags of events. 

But comics teaches you to plan scenes and story beats like a miser working out his monthly outgoings. "If I cut the exposition here I can have a splash page there..."  I knew that after ten years writing comics in a dozen or more different formats, I could write a novel and make it work. And beyond that, the Castor books revolve around the use of music in an exorcism ritual. They'd make really rotten comics because music isn't visual and you pretty much can't make it visual.  I needed Castor to be a novel or a movie. 

Now here's the part I find confusing – this book is being marketed in the United States as your first novel, which it is, but Wikipedia says your second book is already out in Europe and you're working on your third novel. Do I have that straight? Are we a year behind in the United States or something? As if it's not bad enough that you guys in Britain have better chocolate - now this? 

Nah, I'm working on the fourth now! The gap is widening... The truth is, Warner got the U.S. rights very early on in the process, but they wanted to do their own promotion and marketing for the series and so they cut themselves loose from the U.K. publishing schedule and did things in their own way. That's opened up a gap, but I think the plan is to have shorter intervals between releases so that the U.K. and U.S. schedules eventually dovetail. You're right about the chocolate, though.  Cadbury Whole Nut is the best there is... 

Article Author: Scott Butki

Scott Butki was a newspaper reporter for more than 10 years before making a career change into education.

He is an in-house media critic, a recovering Tetris addict and a proud uncle.

Visit Scott Butki's author page — Scott Butki's Blog