Bad Hotel: Author Q&A

Bad Hotel, written by Dustin Reade, is quickly coming down the pipeline. The title is slated to be released by the end of February. Here’s a quick Q&A, followed by a look at the cover. Enjoy!

Rooster Republic Press: Tell us a little about yourself.

Dustin Reade: I am six-feet tall and fairly odd looking. Despite the fact that I was born in Eastern Washington, I pretty much always have a toothpick on my person, in case of emergencies.

RRP: Tell us a little about your new book.

D.R.: Well, it is quite good. In fact, it may be the best book ever written on the subject of multi-dimensional hubs and the consequences of having one of them rip our reality a new asshole. It’s like a haunted house story, only the entire world is the house, and it is haunted by everything anyone ever thought was scary. In this world, two best friends—each with a limited background in paranormal investigation—decide to figure out how and why the hauntings began. Armed with pornographic marijuana and a tape recorder, they embark on a cross-country road trip through this strange new world, in the hopes of exorcizing the world’s demons before reality completely falls apart.

I kinda wanted it to be a more adult Scooby Doo that didn’t suck and had more drugs and swearing.

RRP: And this is based on your researched theories of the paranormal?

D.R.: Yes. As I said, I was born in Eastern Washington, which some have called, “The Outlook Hotel Of Washington State, If It Was Actually A Town Instead Of A Hotel Like In The Book The Shining By Stephen King,” so of course, I’ve always had a love of the supernatural.

I know. I know. That was stupid. But there actually was a lot of neat stuff down there that at least seemed supernatural at the time. For instance: Gravity Hill. There are gravitational anomalies all over the world, though they are sometimes called “vortexes” by the less educated. The basic idea is that, if you park your car at the bottom of the hill, after a few minutes, for whatever reason, the car will slowly start crawling UP the hill. No shit. It’s true. I’ve done it a bunch of times. Mostly as a teenager but that hardly means anything.

Anyway, being surrounded by gravitational anomalies and other disturbances in this reality fostered in me a love of all things paranormal. I studied at the now defunct Miskatonic University from 1998 to 2001, until the University was razed after the destruction of the Two Pillars ushered in the Age of The Orange Army, which of course most of you have never heard of, thanks to the endless recitations of the Protector’s Spell by a small group of New England witches who shall remain nameless.

After that, I spent several months living in the Occult Section of your local library, reading everything I could get my hands on and surviving on a diet of book-bindings and cockroaches. The library itself was haunted, but the ghosts there were more or less completely uninteresting to me, save for their peculiar ability to alter the endings of well-known books.

I once read one of their altered versions of Moby Dick, in which Ahab and the whale become lovers. It would actually have been quite good, had it not been for all the gratuitous and explicit sex.

After the library was burned to the ground, I checked myself in to an abandoned mental institution and began compiling all of the notes and essays I had taken and accumulated over the course of my tenure as a student of the occult, and to my surprise, realized I had a cute little book on my hands! I chose to call the book Bad Hotel for absolutely no reason whatsoever, and in fact hate the title.

RRP: Are you afraid of no ghosts?

D.R.: I am going to take this as a literal question, and not as a Ghostbusters reference. So, instead of answering that I am, in fact, not afraid of any ghosts, I will instead answer that I am afraid of the idea of there actually being no ghosts anywhere. The idea of a world without ghosts is absolutely terrifying to me. Ghosts are fun. Ghosts somehow suggest both an unknowable future and a past that remains just beyond our reach. Have you seen those pictures of the abandoned Disney-esque theme park in North Korea? There was a series of foggy, black and white photos of it making the rounds on the internet a few years back. When I saw those, I lost my shit imagining ghosts behind every tilt-a-whirl. The person taking the photographs knew that’s what people would think when they saw the pictures, too. Deep down, we want to believe in ghosts, in something else. I do, too. Imagine those same pictures, taken with the same lens on the same day by the same guy, but in a world where absolutely no one believed in ghosts. How shitty would those pictures be then? Same with those fucking Chernobyl pictures that came out a while ago. Those wouldn’t be even half as cool if you didn’t wonder if maybe—just maybe—all that radiation is creating a hive of giant centipedes or something. Imagine it: all of them writhing around in the basement of some dilapidated apartment complex, growing ten, fifteen, twenty-feet long…it’s good stuff. So, yeah, I am afraid of “no ghosts” and no giant centipedes and no magic and no sea monsters and no colonies of Sasquatch meandering the wilderness of the West Coast in search of fresh blackberries and dead hummingbirds.

RRP: How does one go about becoming a ghost buster?

D.R.: Work hard and stay in school!

RRP: What’s next on the horizon?

D.R.: I got a lot of irons in the fire at the moment. I am working on something right now, called Tonight, You belong to me, about Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters trying to survive the end of the world in a giant snow globe made of “Sky Jelly” in the Swiss Alps. There are numerous short stories begging to be finished, and another book about the paranormal that I think I’m gonna call The Secret Sex Lives of Ghosts. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what that one’s about.