Interview with J. David Core, author of Magnified and Sanctified

Today it gives the Speculative Fiction Showcase great pleasure to interview J. David Core, author of Magnified and Sanctified. 

Magnified and Sanctified, which debuts on December 31, is your first horror novel but not by any means your first novel. By way of an introduction, can you tell us something about your other books?

In my younger days, I wrote science fiction. Some of it was okay, some was even good, but most of it was pretty bad. However, my first published novel in the early days of ebooks was a science fiction story picked up by a small publishing house. It’s still available online, but it’s full of typos and has a terrible cover.

I periodically tried my hand at writing for a few years after that. I was a staff writer for an online newsletter publishing company. I wrote a western story for an ezine. I blogged. Then in the early part of the century, shortly after the passing of my father, I decided to read the books he’d loved so much, Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe series, and I got hooked. Then one morning I woke up from a dream where I was meeting with a priest in his office, and he’d been called from the room, and I was fidgeting with the things on his desk. When he came back into the room, I was about to open a small compact – kind of like a contact lens case – and he caught me with it and freaked out. He told me it contained poisoned anointing oil that he used to euthanize parishioners during last rites. Now remember, this was all a dream I had; but the story of it stuck with me. So I developed a detective character that was based on, but different from Nero Wolfe. Which, by the way, Wolfe was based on Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes was based on Edgar Allen Poe’s Auguste Dupin.

Since then, I’ve written four full length detective novels featuring my PI character, Lupa Schwartz, and three novellas.

Aside from those, I’ve written a graphic novel based on the legend of King Arthur that asks, “What if Arthur had been turned into a vampire by the fairies of Avalon?” I have also written a collection of noir crime stories and a thriller novel about a young woman who fixes problems for the mob.

So while Magnified and Sanctified is my first horror novel, I have written speculative fiction before.  

Turning to Magnified and Sanctified, is it safe to say that this is a novel about the zombie apocalypse with a twist?

That is exactly how I would describe it. In most contemporary zombie stories, the contagion is spread by contact with the blood or saliva of an infected creature. You could call it the Romero paradigm. Although, traditionally, zombiism was the result of a curse, and the afflicted were not necessarily reanimated corpses. That idea was present with vampirism, and Frankenstein’s monster both being tales of necromancy, but zombies were basically living people who had suffered the loss of agency by some manner of magic.

However, the Romero idea of zombies which was sort of solidified in the Walking Dead is what people tend to think of as zombies these days. There are different kinds of zombies in today’s zombie-fiction; shambling zombies, running zombies, super strong zombies, but they mostly tend to be infected humans reanimated and turned into mindless killing machines. The how of it is seldom pivotal to the story.

But I like stories where the how is the focus, and the best zombie stories to me are the ones where finding that answer is part of the focus or the theme. Pontypool Changes Everything, The Girl with All the Gifts, Les Affamés; zombie behavior and the reason for the infection are central and unique. I wanted to write something like that, and I wanted it to be scientifically realistic. So that’s how the idea of a non-contact-based zombiism came to me.

Is that the foundation of the idea of the “secret cord” that converts humans into zombies?

Exactly, that line is from the Leonard Cohen song Hallelujah, but the idea of a sound that controls an individual’s psyche is ancient: The Pied Piper, Ulysses’ sirens, etc. It’s also an idea related to the idea that a person has a “true name” that nobody knows, but if someone learned it they could manipulate you. Ra, the Egyptian sun god, had a secret name as does the God of the Israelites. Rumpelstiltskin had a secret name. And it’s a common theme in a lot of modern entertainment; Beetlejuice, Bloody Mary, Candyman, even Dr Bombay of the comedy series Bewitched. If you call them, they have to show up.

So I came up with the idea, that my zombies would make a sound that if you heard it, you would be irresistibly drawn to them, then as you got closer it would alter your genes, you’d die, and then you’d be one of them.

Your two protagonists, Andrew Moore and Mark Bell, have survived the apocalypse thus far. Moore is accompanied by his young daughter. Tell us something about these men and how they come to meet.

Andrew is a very young, successful, black man living in a gated community in Indiana. Mark is a middle-aged white man whose life has just fallen apart. Then just before the zombie apocalypse, Andrew’s wife declares that she’s leaving him for the neighbor, while Mark takes a job with a friend who owns a helicopter joy-riding service. Both of their lives are in flux before the world goes to hell, and then things just collapse into a new reality overnight.

The apocalypse begins in March. Andrew was about to take his family east because the government had ordered an evacuation. The government wasn’t sure why cities were going incommunicado, so they were trying to establish offshore safety regions while they attempted to solve the problem. Andrew has a daughter he has to keep alive, so he is trying to reach the coast, because that’s the last thing he knew to do.

Mark and his friend David were finishing up at a festival and were about to spend the night at a state park campground when David ends up “turned” and Mark escapes that fate, but winds up alone and trapped at the state park.

 Over the next months both men run into other survivors, but their experiences are very different. Everyone Andrew meets betrays him or puts him at risk. Everyone Mark meets either helps him or leaves him alone. Eventually, as Andrew and his daughter move east, they reach the state park where Mark has been thriving.

Moore and Bell decide to make a journey to Lake Erie, rather than travelling to one of the government's offshore sanctuaries. What inspires them to do this and who is the stranger they meet along the way?

The park where Mark has been living is on the eastern edge of Ohio. Mark has survived by scavenging, hunting, and foraging. The homes around the park were all abandoned as the residents fled during the evacuation. One of the homes was solar powered and there is an electric car in the garage. Andrew still wants to try to make his way to the coast, but winter is about to set in. Mark doesn’t think they can survive the trip, but Lake Erie is very close. They could take the car and be there in a few hours. The zombies control the roads, but the car runs silent. They decide to risk it.

However, as they reach the Lake Erie border-town, they run into a man who has no idea that there even was a zombie apocalypse months earlier. When we find out why he isn’t aware and what he’s been up to these past months, well…

The idea of a zombie apocalypse continues to have a powerful hold over the contemporary imagination. We can’t get enough of them! Why do you think this is?

I think zombies represent the basic fear of people that aren’t us. As Jean-Paul Sartre said, “Hell is other people.” There is an existential dread of the “other.” We never truly know their motives, their drivers, their fears, or their actual impressions of us. We form tribes, and we loath the outsiders. We’re suspicious of the other person’s motives because we know the truth of our own motives.  Zombies represent ourselves mirrored in basic instinctual others.

I have a scene after Andrew’ wife first tells him she’s leaving him for another man and he remembers a conversation they’d once had after he told her he loved her. She replied that it’s not the real her he loves. She says, “It’s an image of who I am to you that you created inside your head, and that is what you love, that image; but that isn’t me. It can’t be me, because you’ve never really known my darkness, and if you don’t know my worst side, then you can’t truly love me. You can only love the avatar of me you invented.”

That’s what zombies are. They are our own darkness, our own lust and hunger and will to continue and we hate it and we fear it.

In your bio, you mention your deep interest in religion (and liberal politics and humor). How far does religion inform what you write, or is it more in the background?

I’m not a religious person. Honestly, I don’t see the need for it, but other people seem to need it, and that’s what fascinates me. So while many of my characters are atheists or agnostics, I also write a lot of religious characters and I try to genuinely write from an informed religious POV when I write those characters.

While Andrew and Mark are the main characters of my novel, we don’t really explore their religious beliefs; however, there are also flashback scenes involving a pair of brothers who I follow from their boyhoods growing up as Jews in a Russian city to the time of the zombie apocalypse. Their side story begins with the death of their grandmother who is tutoring the younger brother for his bar mitzvah when she dies leaving them as orphans. Her Judaism is central to the role these young men play in possibly causing the zombie plague years later.

What is the importance of mythic and imaginary stories in times of crisis like the present, when we are facing a global pandemic?

You know, of all the themes in sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, the idea of a zombie apocalypse is probably the most analogous to the reality of pandemic. One of the things I’ve always liked best about sci-fi is the way it can serve as a buffer for telling morality tales or giving cogent societal warnings cloaked in fanciful tales.

Horror does that too. Vampires are all bout sexuality. Ghost stories can be parables about loneliness, or loss, or guilt. A zombie story can highlight selfishness or the social contract or conspiracy theorists, and those are all things we’ve come to recognize as important concepts to understand in the uncertain time of a pandemic.

You mention that you started writing as a child. What led you to pursue your diverse career paths as an adult, working as a photographer in the newspaper industry and as a contributor to several online journals in the publishing industry?

My dad was an avid reader. His father was a great raconteur, a gift my brother also manifests. I am terrible at telling a story, but I realized I could craft a tale at a young age even if I couldn’t spit it out in real time like my granddad and brother. But I was also good at drawing, or at least I was good in my small hometown’s estimation of good. I went to art school when I really wanted to go to school for journalism because everyone told me I had a talent for drawing. However, I quickly learned that while I was a hometown 9 I was a big city 3. I’m not that good an artist, or at least not good enough to make a mark. But I kept writing just for the love of it.

So here I was, a trained-ish artist who got jobs cartooning (which is humor writing at its heart) a newspaper photographer (which is story-telling) and in my spare time I was doing stand-up comedy and community theatre. Why? Because I wanted to be a storyteller like my grandfather and brother and to get the approval of my bibliophile father.

What do you like to read and which authors would you say had influenced you?

I used to read a lot of sci-fi. I loved Douglas Adams, Bradbury, Asimov, and others. Then as I got older my tastes shifted more toward crime and mystery stories: Chandler, Stout, Elmore Leonard, etc, and thrillers like Dan Brown, Grisham, Crichton. I also love the weird in-between stories that don’t fit one or the other genres, like Anthony Burgess, Tom Robbins, Vonnegut. I’ve read a lot of Poe, Twain, O. Henry. I’m sure they’ve all informed my writing in one way or another.

Will there be a sequel to Magnified and Sanctified?

As a matter of fact, I’m working on a reader magnet based on the M&S universe and I have a few ideas for stories that are set in the same world, but they would all be concurrent stories with different characters. But other than the reader magnet, I don’t know when I’ll get around to writing any of them.

How important is humor to your writing and do you still draw cartoons?

I don’t cartoon anymore. I do still write some humor into all of my stories though. I think it’s necessary and helps to give the serious parts more heft.

In the last few years, the world situation has often seemed to outrun satire and recall various dystopian fictions. What does the writer do then?

You know, I actually conceived of this novel before COVID was a thing, but it informed the story a lot. Even just my own personal experience during COVID. I spent a lot of time hiking alone at the local state park because I could easily social distance, and that experience absolutely was the foundation of Mark Bell’s isolation.

And the resurgence of racism and hate that we’ve all witnessed recently unleashed impacted my writing of Andrew’s experiences. One of my Lupa Schwartz novels is about conspiracy theories, and my crime stories are all influenced by the news. A lot of modern fiction is based on the new Internet-immersed society. Whole sub-genres of sci-fi are dedicated to it: LitRPG, cyberpunk, and stories focused on AI.

Society can never outpace satire though. Swift was writing satire in a satirical world. Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, Heller’s Catch 22, Irving’s The World According to Garp: there’s always a way to expose the wolf of truth in the sheep’s coat of satire.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m currently working on that reader magnet story for Magnified and Sanctified, It’s about a man trying to find his kidnapped niece during the zombie times. My next project is a cyberpunk story I’m calling Skullulpter. It’s about an alternate version of modern times where nano-tech in the 70’s led to the discovery of a way to replace our bodies a cell at a time with an artificial body. A skullulpter can create a surrogate body for you using the same tech, but it’s illegal, because the only way to transfer your consciousness involves dangerous surgery transferring the only part of the brain that is never altered, the amygdala. So both of my next two projects are a combination of my love for crime stories and horror and sci-fi combined.

Preorder Magnified and Sanctified

About J. David Core:

With a profound interest in religion, liberal politics and humor, Dave began writing in High School and has not given up on it since. His first professional writing jobs came while attending the Art Institute of Pittsburgh when he was hired to create political cartoons for The Pitt News & to write humor pieces for Smile Magazine. Dave has worked in the newspaper industry as a photographer, in the online publishing industry as a weekly contributor to Streetmail.com, and was a contributing writer to the Buzz On series of informational books and to the Western online anthology, Elbow Creek.

Dave’s science fiction novel, Synthetic Blood and Mixed Emotions, is available from writewordsinc.com. He has also written a mystery novel series, a crime thriller, a collection of crime noir, and a graphic novel.

Dave currently resides in his childhood home in Toronto, OH with his beautiful girlfriend and their blended family. He is an avid mushroom hunter who enjoys participating in local community events and visiting with his three adult children and his grandchildren.

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