Robert Masello is an award-winning journalist and television writer, and the author of the bestsellers Bestiary, Vigil, and the recently-released Blood and Ice. He was kind enough to take time to chat with us about his writing, and his latest novel.
How would you describe Blood and Ice to a reader who is unfamiliar with your work?
It’s not an easy book to describe (which may be one reason, of many, I don’t have a movie sale!). I’d say it’s a big, supernatural thriller that spans three centuries, and five continents. It’s really two stories - one set in Victorian England and the Crimea, and the other in the present-day Antarctic. Eventually, the two stories come together, and we can see that they’re both really about the search for love, against impossible odds.
Would you agree that Blood and Ice is the “least dark” of your novels? Why or why not?
The funny thing is, I’m really not a dark guy at all, except when I write. Then I do go to a dark place, and I don’t know why. (Perhaps if I saw a therapist...) On some level, I guess I’m obsessed with questions of mortality, the meaning of life, etc., and I’m trying to work them out through these stories. To be honest, I keep trying to write something light and amusing. I do sort of manage it in my nonfiction books, like Robert’s Rules of Writing, but I can’t seem to get the hang of it in fiction.
Unlike many thrillers, there isn’t truly a “bad guy” in Blood and Ice. Did you find it challenging to craft your plot in this way?
Yes, and I wish to hell I could come up with more straightforward “bad guys” and simpler, more streamlined plots. But I tend to see things in shades of gray, and although a lot of times I start out writing a villain, over time I start to see him or her as a more complex creature and develop a kind of fondness.
I’m fascinated that you were able to take a setting that’s been done to death in the thriller genre (the Antarctic) and a heavily saturated genre (the vampire novel) and combine them into a positively original tale. How did you dream up that combination?
“Dream up” is a good way of putting it, because I am incapable of outlining or thinking through anything too much in advance. I have fragments, scenes, ideas, and gradually they coalesce. I had that idea for the opening, where the Victorian couple is bound and thrown over board, and I also knew I wanted to write something about the Charge of the Light Brigade. Somehow, that got coupled with this other notion I’d had about an Antarctic adventure, like the Howard Hawks’ movie of The Thing, that had made a big impression on me when I was a kid. Before you know it, I had this big soup on my hands that, frankly, I thought could never be sold. Fortunately, my agent thought otherwise.
Article comments