Made In SA: Joe McKinney

Joe McKinney

San Antonio-based writer JOE McKINNEY hit the literary scene in 2006 with DEAD CITY (Kensington, 2006), a zombie tale that moves with the speed of the super-fast reanimated corpses in the recent DAWN OF THE DEAD remake. His latest book, QUARANTINED (Lachesis Publishing, 2009), ventures into apocalyptic sf, and he’s also published about 30 short stories in anthologies and magazines. Joe works as an SAPD homicide detective when he’s not cranking out zombie prose.

Although you grew up in Houston and Boston, you went to college and grad school here in San Antonio. What made you decide to continue living, working and creating in San Antonio?

I came to San Antonio back in the summer of 1987, right before I started my freshman year at Trinity University, and I fell in love with the town right away. Houston was great while I was growing up, but it was already changing, growing denser and denser, and most of the marshlands I used to love exploring as a kid were filling up with housing developments and businesses. I had a sense that an important part of my childhood was being invaded, taken over, in a way, by people who would never get to see or appreciate it the way I had. Then I came to San Antonio. I had never seen so many hills, so many old neighborhoods, so much history. For me, it just clicked. This town’s got personality, character. One of my hobbies is Texas History, and frankly, I couldn’t be in a better place to indulge that passion. It was like I was a kid all over again, except this time I had a whole city to explore. That thrill has yet to fade.

You have a M.A. in English lit. Why did you decide to put it to use writing genre fiction instead of something folks view as more highbrow? Anyone give you flak for devoting your energy to such pulpy endeavors?

You know, I’ve never felt like I was slumming by doing genre work. I remember once I was at some writer’s conference in Austin, and what it amounted to was a lot of old ladies sitting around talking about writing memoirs and biographies of pioneer women and the histories of small Texas towns. Then they turned to me and asked me what I had written. I told them I write about zombies and plagues and seedy criminals and sometimes spaceships. I swear you should have seen the looks on their faces. It was like I had just handed them a dog turd. But I don’t take that stuff personally. What’s the point, right? I write what I’m passionate about, and that, by and large, is scary stuff. What’s the point in doing this mentally exhausting and sometimes demoralizing task of writing if you’re not enjoying it? So that’s my answer, basically. I write genre stuff because I care about it. That’s my thing. Perhaps one day I will write a deeply moving and profound exposition of the human condition, but I guarantee you it’ll still have a car chase in it.

"Dead City" by Joe McKinney

Your first book, DEAD CITY, is about San Antonio being overrun by a zombie horde. Your latest, QUARANTINED, is a sf murder mystery set in the Alamo City after the military walls it off to contain a killer virus. What’s the fixation with apocalyptic scenarios? And why do you keep devastating poor old San Antonio?

I really do love this city, I promise. I know I’ve leveled it to the ground on numerous occasions, but it’s nothing personal, I swear. Seriously, though, it’s like that old adage, “Write what you know.” I know a great deal about San Antonio’s civil engineering projects, its terrain, its susceptibility to particular types of disasters. I know how it responds to disasters in other nearby jurisdictions. A good deal of my police career has been spent training in disaster mitigation, and so I take advantage of that rather unique knowledge. And that’s why I tend to set stories in San Antonio.

But you asked about apocalyptic scenarios. Is there any way to explain why some people like this stuff and others don’t? My wife hates it, for example. Every time I sit down to watch one of those asteroid strikes the Earth documentaries or Life After People, she leaves the room. But I can’t get enough of it. I suppose, on some level, apocalyptic scenarios are an offshoot of my horror and science fiction interests. I suppose it’s also a little more general than that. Who hasn’t wondered what the end would be like, you know? But I think the apocalypse, and horror in general, gives me a great way to tell stories the way I want to tell them. You see, I think a story should not only attempt to reclaim a character’s past, but should carry his or her future forward from there as well. I point to Pat Frank’s ALAS, BABYLON, with its ending borrowed from PARADISE LOST, as a great example of this.

By day, you’re a SAPD Homicide detective. Has the department ever given you guff over your fiction-writing career or how you depict police officers and police procedure in your fiction?

A little bit. When I first starting spreading the word that I had a book coming out, I got approached by a supervisor who wanted to know if I was giving away police patrol or investigative strategies, or if my book would in some way compromise SAPD’s ability to respond to a disaster. I told him, “Well, my book is about a zombie apocalypse. So, if you’re planning on us having one of those sometime soon, then we may have an issue. Otherwise, I don’t think my book will be a problem.” That was me having fun with him, of course, but I understand where he was coming from. He was looking out for the officer on the street, the one out there wading into situations that could turn nasty or even fatal in no time flat. I get that. I’m a cop, too. My Department has very specific rules about writing for publication, and I’m not going to violate those rules. Most everyone in my Department has had a chance to realize that by now.

Being a homicide detective seems like it would be demanding, and I know you’re also a devoted husband and dad. How do you juggle all of that with a writing career?

Basically, it’s the same as any passion. If it’s important enough to you then you will find the time to do it. But unlike gardening, or rebuilding a ’72 Chevelle from the tires up, I was lucky enough to find a passion that is readily translatable into full time work. And really, it comes down to organization. I try to write every morning, and again at night. I set achievable goals of 1000 to 1500 words a day, and I keep at it until it’s done. Some nights I don’t get much sleep. But again, it’s important to me, so it does get done. Plus, I tend to write from outlines. In the same way that you plot out your directions before you take a road trip, I plot out the general shape of my story before I begin writing. Some people might think that compromises the creative flow of a story, but I find the reverse is true. The trick is to be willing to go off-map whenever the story or the characters demand it. I’m not afraid to do that, but I keep it under control, too.

As someone who writes zombie fiction, how do you keep the shambling undead hordes fresh and interesting when so many other writers are tapping the same vein? Are zombies in danger of overexposure in horror film and lit?

That is a challenge. Of course, the thing to remember about a zombie, or any monster for that matter, is that they are rarely just a zombie. Take Romero’s original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD as an example. That film not only established the zombie as the shambling undead (remember, before that, most zombies were portrayed as Haitian voodoo zombies, which are different), but it also set the standard for making your zombie story about something other than the shambling undead coming to feed on the living. In NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, for instance, you have an older white guy who spends most of the movie fighting with a young, angry black man for control of a house, and all the while this tightening ring of paranoia and hostility is closing in upon them. Remember that NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD was made in 1968. Now think what America was like in 1968, the race riots, the war, the dynamic shifts in our workforce and cultural values. Did anyone come up with a better metaphor for racial tension in America than Romero? It’s that kind of flexibility, I think, that keeps zombies as a viable horror trope. Really, the only restriction is on what you have to say, and not in the monster you choose to say it with.

You’ve dabbled in straight-ahead crime fiction as well. Any chance we’ll see you shift gears and focus more of your energy on that genre?

Very likely. I love crime fiction. And truth be told, a lot of today’s top crime writers have learned some valuable lessons from the horror genre. There is an exhumation scene in an abandoned graveyard in James Lee Burke’s SUNSET LIMITED, for example, that would make any horror writer proud. So I think it wouldn’t be a terribly big leap for me to make the transition. It worked for Martin Cruz Smith, for example. And I’ve already completed the first book in a new series I’m starting about an SAPD Internal Affairs sergeant who can’t seem to keep his fingers out of ongoing homicide cases, and I’m nearly done with a stand alone crime novel I’m doing for a start up publishing house called Gutter Books, which will be an updated and edgier version of the Hard Case Crime series. So, yeah, crime fiction I think will be a significant part of my future.

What one aspect of police procedure do writers consistently get wrong?

Most crime writers fail to appreciate the sheer volume of cases the police handle. Put another way, they don’t realize the amount of work that needs to be done versus the number of police officers assigned to do the job. Take that show COLD CASE. It’s a great show. They do a wonderful job of building dramatic stories and showing the dynamic between the cops in the unit and all that, but what they don’t show is that the detectives in that unit are actually working sixty other cases at the same time. You will rarely see a unit directing all its resources at one particular case, because there are usually three or four major cases working at any one given time. And that doesn’t say anything about the cases that carried over from the weekend before, or the weekend before that. It’s like standing in the middle of a river and being told you have to drink every drop of water that comes by. A real detective’s time is so fractured, so spread out over all the other cases he or she is working on, that it wouldn’t make for good TV. You would need a score card just to keep up. Even the more realistic cop shows, like THE WIRE, fail to capture the fractured nature of the job.

Name something you can only find in San Antonio and tell us why it’s special to you. (Could be a food, a location, an event, whatever.)

That would have to be our unique blend of cultures. We have cowboys. We have old world Mexico. We have poor, rich, German, Jalisco, English, Scottish, you name it. But they have all come together to form this wonderful pidgin culture that is puro San Antonio. That is the San Antonio I love.

Just the facts, man: McKinney’s faves…

Top 5 Books

1. Salem’s Lot by Stephen King
2. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, or The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty, or Ghost Story by Peter Straub, depending on my mood
3. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
4. The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury
5. Space Cadet by Robert A. Heinlein (Yeah, I know it’s not the best SF book ever written. Hell, it’s nowhere near the best SF book ever written. But it was the first book I ever read that made my eyes pop out of my head with wonder, so it has to go on this list.)

Top 5 Authors

1. Peter Straub
2. William Tenn, or CJ Cherryh, or James Tiptree, Jr. (aka Alice Sheldon), depending on my mood
3. Cordwainer Smith
4. Stephen King
5. Manly Wade Wellman