Nancy Collins: Hard-headed horror with a Southern accent

Mention Southern writers and vampires in the same sentence, and the first thing most people think of is the works of Anne Rice. But Rice’s New Orleans’ Garden District full of homoerotic, chatty immortals isn’t the beginning and end of Southern horror.

Nancy Collins’ corner of the world of Southern horror is considerably more grungy, much more punk than gothic. The world of the Sonja Blue vampire novels and comics, and her take on DC/Vertigo Comics‘ venerable “Swamp Thing” comic and her abortive “Dhampire” series for the same have a hard-headed sense of a not-always-pretty reality about them, even when filled with plant gods or human-vampire hybrids.

Sonja Blue’s story, in the novel “Sunglasses After Dark,” begins in a mental hospital, the cast of “Swamp Thing” were the outcasts that exist on the fringes of Southern life, and the cast of “Dhampire” were more horrifying for their desperation than their supernatural powers.

Collins’ world begins in rural Arkansas, where she was born and raised, and Louisiana, where she lived for 10 years, and even though she now lives in Pennsylvania, she still retains a rural Southern twang to her speech.

The vampire Sonja Blue has been a part of her life for a long time now.

“Basically, I created the character of Sonja Blue back when I was in junior high or high school. And I basically kept tinkering with it and tinkering with it, knowing the character exceptionally well,” she said by telephone from her Pennsylvania home. “When the black-and-white boom in the early ’80s happened in comics, I tried finding an artist to do the comic book. I couldn’t find an artist. But I had the comic book script all written out. … So, it was a bunch of short stories that got turned into a comic script that got turned into a novel, that got turned into a comic book.”

Her vampire, who has appeared in gone from starring in her own novels to her own comics, to crossing-over with the worlds of the White Wolf games and the Crow, with more to come.

“It’s nothing I would think to do,” she says of the crossovers. “If someone asks me, I’ll do it.”

Even with the success in comics, Sonja Blue is still who Collins is most closely identified with. She takes a pragmatic view of the situation.

“I still enjoy the character, although it’s definitely part of my career, whether I like it or not or accept it or not,” she says. “If the character is popular and people want to read about her, I’ll continue to write about her. I don’t feel like I have another novel about her in my right now.”

Recently, though, she has written Sonja Blue short stories, but would really like to do a comic book series about Sonja Blue.

“And, of course, there’s a movie coming out.” The project is still in the final negotiations, but Collins feels confident that there’ll be a Sonja Blue movie early in the 21st century. “Being in comics has actually made this easier for me: ‘I can’t draw, so whatever you guys do is OK with me!’ … ‘And make sure you pay me.'”

And Sonja’s trek from middle school notebook to comic scripts to novels opened the doors to the comic-writing career Collins had sought.

“Before ‘Sunglasses After Dark,’ I didn’t really exist as a writer,” having only had some small press short story publications. “I didn’t exist as a professional until 1989. And within a year and a half, I was on ‘Swamp Thing’ as the writer.

“I’d been doing very well with ‘Sunglasses,'” her first novel, “And about the same time [editor] Stuart Martin had gotten hired by DC, and he wanted to bring in some honest-to-goodness prose writers and scrap some of the more comic booky elements of the series. So Stuart contacted me, and lo and behold, I happened to be a ‘Swamp Thing’ fan from the get-go and he didn’t have to bring me up to speed.” She submitted a year’s worth of synopses, filled with her local Louisiana flavor, as the Swamp Thing lives in the swamps, unsurprisingly. “I was basically on it for two-and-a-half years.”

“I enjoyed working on it. I left it largely because I was more used to work on my own projects, and I had the chance to go work on a creator-owned project. And I found that with someone that powerful, it’s hard to find something he can’t accomplish in a panel. … I liked to focus on the lives that are satellite to him. … Basically, trying to make it more realistic about relationships. Which the fans don’t always love …”

Of course, bringing any sort of realism to the title about the plant god means rocking the boat some:

“He disappears for months on end, and very few women would put up with that!” Collins laughed. “I tried to move away from his narrative, because at some point we don’t need to know what he thinks anymore, and at some point we can’t know what he thinks with it anymore,” as part of the character’s evolution is his continuing detachment from his own humanity and that of his wife and friends. But, again, the fan reaction wasn’t uniformly positive.

“It kind of broke down into two camps: The people who had relationships and children and liked it. The unattached, teenage kids just wanted more monsters and cool stuff going on.”

“I do think, especially when it comes to comics, how I see things, and how things are portrayed in my books, are influenced by being a woman.” And she believes she’s very different from “male writers whose sexual psychoses were formed by comics.”

“I’m really offended by the guys who create bad girls and claim they’re ‘strong women.'” “Black Widow is a strong woman,” not the bimbos so many comic books are now populated with. “You can’t pick up a comic book with a woman in it and not see that.”

“I deliberately made a point of doing an arc in ‘Swamp Thing’ where I had Swamp Thing and Abby to relate to each other in a sexual way. Not in a prurient way, but in the way married people really relate to each other: touching her arm all the time and all that.”

She also drew a lot of heat for having homosexuals in the story.

“It’s OK to have gay people in a comic book if they’re there to die of AIDS,” she said wryly. But she defends her choices on the series. “None of the people Abby and Swamp Thing would know would be normal.”

Collins played up the alien nature of some of the “Swamp Thing” characters, including the demi-plant goddess Tefe, the daughter of the Swamp Thing (via the surrogate fatherhood of antihero sorcerer John Constantine) and his wife, Abby Arcane, the daughter of his greatest enemy.

“We basically have mixed Constantine and Arcane blood. That should be like mixing nitroglycerin in a bumpy truck. And this is supposed to be the child who is supposed to be the future of nature,” she laughed.

She also created a female predecessor to the Swamp Thing, who also served as a nanny to Tefe.

“Most fans seemed to find Lady Jane an intriguing character. I set her up to be played with writers on down the line. … If I had stayed on, she would have melded with Abby.”

Instead, after Collins left, Lady Jane was burned to a crisp soon after. She doesn’t take it personally.

“I try not to feel proprietary towards stuff I don’t own.”

Her next project with DC’s Vertigo imprint (where the publisher of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, et al. lets its dark side out) was to be “Dhampire,” the saga of a half-human, half-vampiric original character. But only the dark and moody introductory story, “Dhampire: Stillborn,” actually made it to the stands, though, as the editor Collins had been working with died suddenly.

“The book was at least supposed to run for two more years.” While she’d like to publish more of the series, “DC is like the co-owner of the copyright. In order to do that, I’d have to pay DC everything they’ve already spent on it.”

As for the future, Collins has just finished her next novel, “Angels of Fire,” to be published by White Wolf Books later this year.

“It’s something of a standalone, an attempt at a breakout book. Nonseries, commercially viable,” she says. “The closest thing I can compare it to is ‘City of Angels,’ only a lot stranger. Sort of like ‘City of Angels,’ only heretical. But it’s a romantic fantasy. Or a romantic dark fantasy, I guess that’s its subtitle.”

“The only other thing I’m working on is a novella called ‘Lynch: A Gothik Western.’ It’s basically a combination of ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘Hang ’em High.'”

Since the, well, stillborn death of “Dhampire,” Collins hasn’t had a regular comic writing gig, but she’s kept busy:

“I’ve done a lot of work-for-hire stuff, which I call pinch-hitting.”

They haven’t always been glamorous gigs: One was Topps Comics’ “Jason vs. Leatherface,” starring the villains/stars of the “Friday the Thirteenth” and “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” slasher movies.

“The one review I got I’ll treasure forever: ‘This is much better than it has any right to be!'”

Collins wrote the final issues of Marvel Comics‘ “2099 Unlimited,” at the end of one of their more ambitious experiments of recent years, featuring a possible Marvel Universe of a century hence.

She wrote “Magic: The Gathering” comics based on the collectible trading card game for Acclaim Comics.

She wrote an installment in one of Dark Horse’s successful movie monster franchises, “Predator: Hell Come A’Walkin’,” featuring the alien hunters running loose during the Civil War.

“I’ve got a couple of series I’ve been all signed-up to do, then the publishers have yanked the carpet out from under me.”

She’s also adapting her own works of fiction for Verotika.

“I try to keep my hand in, but that’s hard to do nowadays. … It’s like a sphincter-clenching right now in the industry. They seem to prefer guys who can both draw and write,” she said, noting that “there’s very few people who can do both well.”

This might seem like butting one’s head against a wall to some people, but Collins doesn’t see it that way.

“I have a genuine fondness for comics,” she said, “And there’s only so many markets for a writer to work in, in this country, and comics is one of them.”

In other words, beggars – even beggars with successful novels and comics under their belt – can’t be choosers.

“Being a writer for a living is one of the most stressful things you can do for a living, except maybe defuse bombs,” she laughed. “Being a writer is a very stressful thing to be, since I don’t have another job.”

“At one point there were upwards of 40 or 50 magazines publishing fiction on a monthly or bimonthly basis … but there’s only a handful left,” she said. And magazines like “The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction” and “Asimov’s Science Fiction” are now filled with higher-profile authors. “If they’re gonna pick between me and Stephen King, they’re gonna pick Stephen King.”

Quite simply, Collins said, “I’m not in the business to starve.”

All this pinch-hitting is leading somewhere:

“What I’ve basically been hoping to do is set enough money aside to take year off and not feel like I’m starving and do some Southern gothic like Flannery O’Connor. There’s not that much room in horror and fantasy, and that’s where I’d like to spread my wings. I have a body of Southern Gothic in short fiction that I feel is the best things I have ever done.”

But Collins is no fool: She’ll be paying the rent before she takes off time to do work without an immediate commercial market apparent.

“Whenever anyone talks about ‘art for art sake,’ you know they’re living at home.”