Guest in SA: Hank Schwaeble

DAMNABLE author Hank Schwaeble. Photo by Sanford Allen.

HANK SCHWAEBLE, a Houston-based thriller writer and attorney, recently passed through San Antonio to promote his debut novel, DAMNABLE. Hank’s Berkley/Jove book walks the line between thriller and horror story, exploring the seductive nature of evil. Its protagonist, Jake Hatcher, is a morally ambiguous former military interrogator forced into a struggle to save humanity from eternal damnation.

A graduate of the University of Florida and Vanderbilt Law School, Hank is a former Air Force officer and a special agent for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. He’s also a Bram Stoker Award winner for the anthology Five Strokes to Midnight, which he co-edited.

This new Missions Unknown feature will feature conversations with sf/f/h professionals who are visiting San Antonio. Hank sat down to talk with us prior to his signing at The Twig Book Shop.

There seem to be some parallels between the central character and yourself — mainly the military background. Was that intentional or were you just writing what you know?

Well, a little bit of writing what I know and more of writing what interests me. I felt like I could lend some authenticity to the character by drawing on my background. I certainly wouldn’t claim to be as physically tough as Jake Hatcher, but I had a good feel for the military. I felt like I could bring some feel of realism to the character. In any good fiction you don’t necessarily want to recreate reality, you want to capture the essence of reality. That’s what readers relate to — just enough detail to orient them, just enough detail to give them a sense that this is similar to real life.

You described Valentine, the antagonist who wants to damn humanity to Hell, as being “ultra evil.” How do you create such a character and make him believable, not just a Snidely Whiplash sort of cliché?

Most bad guys don’t think of themselves as evil. They probably think of themselves as realists or being able to take advantage of things other people are unwilling to or as people who see things as they really are. They’re the stars in their own movies, their own stories, so you have to put yourself in their shoes. Not so much identifying with them as it is imagining what a character like this would think, what their thought process would be like, what motivates them. Having dealt with investigations and having interrogated lots of criminals, you get a sense as to how they think — some of them, anyway — and reading up on serial killers and sociopaths, you find certain commonalities. They’re usually very intelligent and they’re usually guided by a logic that you can recreate. It’s a very self-centered kind of logic that throws empathy out the window. Mostly what you do is come up with internal drives that readers will find intriguing. Valentine has a strong motivation, something you can kind of relate to, something readers might understand as being unsettling — his parents being in hell. But he takes it to an extreme and he comes up with a way to thwart God’s plan. He’s so ego-driven and powerful that he can do it.

Hank Schwaeble's Damnable.

The underground labyrinths beneath New York are a big player in the book. Did you do a lot of research on that, or is what we see straight from your imagination?

I did research into the early subway systems, into who designed them, what they were like. Details that would explain why this certain tunnel was where it was. One of the things that’s interesting about the New York City subway system is no one really knows where those old tunnels are. It’s fascinating to me that you can have something like that and then not have a reliable record of it. It’s not something that hasn’t been explored before, but I was intrigued enough to make it part of the book. It certainly allowed me to get out of the densely populated settings of New York into someplace more creepy and threatening and isolated.

A lot of the themes you explore seem like they could be used in a thriller, in a horror book or in an urban fantasy. When you were writing the book, did you have any sense which way it would be marketed?

That’s something the publisher decides. There’s two types of genre classifications. There’s one that involves conventions and motifs and certain types of plots – things that identify it from a critical perspective as being part of a certain genre. And then there’s marketing, which is what publishers care about. Because genre, to a publisher, is just shorthand for “this is something this group of readers will read.” When I sat down to write Damnable, I wanted to market it as a supernatural thriller because I thought that would be more palatable to the industry, where horror had kind of a bad name at the time. I sold it in the first round of submissions, and what did (the publisher) do but stamp “Horror” right on the spine? They thought that was the best way to market it. I didn’t sense it at the time, but horror is making a comeback. Right up until the time I sold the book, it didn’t have a very good reputation and didn’t sell very well. That’s not apparently the case right now, which was good. Actually what I wanted to do was mix a hard-boiled noir novel with horror. I thought that would be a natural marriage, and I hadn’t seen it done very often. I like hard-boiled detective stories and I like horror, I like thrillers. It seemed like the dark sides of humanity explored in noir novels lend themselves very much to a horror theme.

How far back do you go on the noir stuff? Hammett, Chandler, Spillane and all those guys?

Oh, yeah. Certainly. You can’t really mention noir without mentioning the Maltese Falcon. There’s some really good noir out there. It just doesn’t seem to cross-pollinate with horror that much. And I never understood that. Modern horror seems to focus a lot more on the surreal, on this fantasy aspect, which isn’t what I’m all that interested in. I’m more interested in the gritty realism of a noir novel. That would seem to be more creepy, more scary – something that sticks with you longer. I think the hardest part for a novel-length horror story is maintaining that tension. The more fantastic it is, the further it is outside the realms of normality, the harder it seems that would be – to maintain tension.

Are there some other folks working in the business right now that do a good job of blending horror and noir?

Supernatural, yes. Horror, hard to say. Certainly Tom Piccirilli, although he often tends to go a little more to the surreal. Dan Vining has written some supernatural noir. Is it horror? It’s close. They’re supernatural detective stories. But I don’t think it’s common right now. Hopefully it’s something that will catch on, because I’d like to write more of books like this one.

You’re working on a second book right now, but from what I understand it’s not a sequel to Damnable.

It’s a straight mainstream thriller called the Suicide Tourist. Then after that I’m going to start on the sequel to Damnable.

Do you see Damnable becoming a trilogy or a franchise, or do you think it’s something that should end after the second book?

I certainly see it as a trilogy. I guess it depends on how popular it becomes as to where it goes from there. I envisioned it either being a standalone or part of a trilogy. I knew if I did a sequel it would end up being a trilogy. Where it goes from there, the market’s going to dictate. But, sure, I’d love for it to become a series if there’s reader interest.

Did it help you sell the book that you had a background in military law enforcement?

It certainly didn’t hurt. I think it depends a lot more on what you’re writing as to what your background is. In non-fiction, it’s almost essential. Three or four years ago everybody wanted to know what your “platform” was – what’s your source of authority for writing about your subject? I think that’s died down considerably, but I still think it can help, especially when you’re finding an agent. I suppose it does lend some street cred, having a military background and writing about a military character. Being a lawyer, I’m not so sure. There are a ton of lawyers who write books.

Your blog has one of the coolest names of any author blogs I’ve encountered: These Boots are Made for Violence. How’d that come about?

I was working to get my website together and was using AuthorBytes, who do websites for a lot of other writers. I got a photographer to do a shoot so I could have some pictures to put on my website. As I was leaving for the shoot, I grabbed some clothes so I could try a few different looks. I had a pair of tennis shoes on, and on my way out the door I saw my (snakeskin cowboy) boots and said, “I may as well take these. Maybe the photographer will like them.” I showed the shoes and boots to the photographer and asked which I should wear. He immediately said, “The boots.” The people from AuthorBytes just loved the boots, thought they looked great in the photos. When the AuthorBytes people asked me to come up with a blog title, I sent them about 15, and we’d narrowed it down. I think one of the ones we both liked was something with “violence” in the title. They said, “But you’ve got to mention the boots in the title.” I was just joking and suggested “These Boots are Made for Violence.” They said, “That’s it. Perfect.”