An interview with Preston Fassel, author of "Our Lady of the Inferno" from Fangoria Presents!

This October, Fangoria is returning to stands, revamped and beefed up with 100 pages of ooey gooey horror content. But before that, September will see the launching of the new Fangoria Presents line, beginning with Fangoria contributor Preston Fassel's novel, Our Lady of the Inferno​...

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...Our Lady of the Inferno is a disturbing allegory of two women on a fateful collision course wrought with blood-shed and sheer terror. Taking place in the seedy streets of 1983, New York, we find Ginny, the “bottom girl” for a pimp and his prostitution ring. Not at all what you’d expect, she’s a tough, intelligent leader with a poetic soul who treats the girls that work under her like sisters. She makes it her duty to protect them, no matter what the cost. It’s that very leadership that attracts the attention of Nicolette, a ruthless killer who believes herself to be merely a vessel for a much darker, powerful force. Ginny becomes the ultimate prize for Nicolette, the buck that she must mount on her wall, so to speak. Ginny just doesn’t know it yet.

Here's what Preston had to say about his neon-tinged nightmare:

KHC: How did you get started with Fangoria? How did that lead to Our Lady of the Inferno being first in line for the Fangoria Presents line?
 
PF: I was a writer for Rue Morgue magazine and a couple of years ago when…Cinestate was shooting the new Puppet Master film here in Dallas, Puppet Master Littlest Reich, a friend of mine got a hold of me…saying they’re shooting this movie near where you live and they needed some extras and it might be cool for you to go and apply to be an extra…I signed up and got chosen as an extra and got to hang out at the Ambassador hotel in Dallas for about a week or so doing background stuff…got introduced to about fifty people at once my first day on set, everybody had no idea who the hell anybody was…
 
…Around the same time, I had sold a manuscript for Our Lady of the Inferno to this independent press in South Georgia and they were called Fear Front publishing…it was in print for a couple of months and then bam they go out of business…I was at least able to get some attention to the book and I was invited to host a writing panel at Texas Frightmare weekend in Dallas…I’m ready to go into the room and I hear somebody yell hey Preston, is that you, and its one of the people from the Puppet Master set. He comes up to me and he says hey what are you doing here, I say well I wrote this book and I’m going to host a horror writing panel and he takes a look at it and says well this sounds really cool, I’m going to be here tomorrow as part of the Puppet Master panel, will you bring me a copy? I say sure, so I go, I host my panel, next day I show up at the Puppet Master panel…that’s when I realize that this guy who I met on the first day and confused with everybody else is Dallas Sonnier, the CEO of Cinestate, producer of Puppet Master, and this is my oh shit moment, so I give him a copy of my book, he says I read about it on Amazon last night and it sounds really cool, I’m looking forward to it…I’m thinking to myself either he’s curious or he’s just being nice, either way this is cool to have that experience.
 
Couple of months go by and I get an email from a woman named Amanda Presmyk from Cinestate and she says hey Preston, believe it or not we have been reading and loving Our Lady of the Inferno and we would like you to come down to our offices and we’d like to talk to you about it. And so I come down to the Cinestate offices and they say hey, would you be interested in selling the film rights to Our Lady of the Inferno…I say hey, matter of fact my publisher went out of business, do you want the publishing rights too? And they say you know what, yeah, we’re interested in publishing, we’re interested in film, and I say hey as long as you’re picking up my book and as long as you’re picking up the film rights how about you hire me to work at Cinestate, and I pitch myself right there in the meeting as a Cinestate employee, and I said do you have anything that I would be helpful with and Dallas exchanges this look with Amanda and he says you know what we just might…(later) I’m in the lobby of this Texas theater ready to go in to see Event Horizon in 35mm and I get a phone call from Dallas and he says I see you signed the last NDAs and I’m really excited about that, I’m really excited we’re gonna be publishing Our Lady of the Inferno and now that you have signed off on these NDAs I can tell you why I was interested in acquiring this…I bought Fangoria magazine. That was my second big real oh shit moment happening…and so that is how I found out that I was going to be working for the new iteration of Fangoria and that Our Lady of the Inferno was going to be Fangoria Presents number one novel.
 
KHC: While reading Our Lady of the Inferno, I felt that it theoretically could have taken place during any decade. What was it about the neon-lit 80s period that you found so alluring for this story?
 
PF: I’ve always wanted to write my own 1980s horror story. I grew up renting all of these old 1980s movies in VHS from Hollywood video every Friday. I was religiously at the Hollywood video…I was forever hunting down and seeking out new 80s horror films that I had never seen before…I was born in 1985, so I have some vague memories of the end of the decade…I guess because I have these pleasant childhood memories of the 80s, the decade itself was always this very kind of safe ceiling era for me and the contemporary world was brutal and nasty.  9/11 was my sixteenth birthday so I came of age in the era of the war on terror and I knew guys at school who were gonna enlist in the army after they graduated and thankfully, all of them came back, but those were my teenage years so it was very tempting to look back on my childhood and see the 1980s as this very safe era where I could go and encapsulate myself in pastel and neon. It was an escape. I also love the John Hughes movies, just about any 80s pop culture. Any 80s cinema was a huge escape for me in high school and all these Friday nights sitting in my room watching these 80s horror movies I would dream about creating my own and what would be my perfect 80s horror movie, so going into the book I knew that it was going to be in the 80s because I had always wanted to do that. 1983 specifically, that came about later when I first started writing the book. Probably for about the first twenty percent of the book there wasn’t a concrete year, I just knew that it was going to be set after Flashdance came out because Flashdance to me is such a quintessentially 80s film I wanted to have that referenced in there. I wanted to capture some of the essence of that movie so I knew that the story was taking place in a post Flashdance world. There’s a point where Ginny is talking to another one of her girls and she’s talking to her about female role models and I was trying to think to myself all right, who would a girl in the 1980s look up to as a female role model? I remembered Sally Ride. By this point in establishing Ginny’s character, I had already decided she was a big science geek, you’re going to look up to Sally Ride, and when I looked up to see what year Sally Ride went into outer space, I found out that it was 1983 and I said wait a minute, Sally Ride goes into outer space in 1983, Flashdance comes out and becomes this big cultural phenomena in 1983 and so it just seemed perfect and appropriate to make that specific year that the book was set and when I realized that I decided to actually work Sally Ride’s space flight into the story itself and so that gave me the specific date and week of the year that it was going to be taking place in.
 
KHC: What made you want to write Ginny the way that she is, being that she is so different than a person would typically be in her role? Did you ever worry that the audience would be too conflicted with her in the sense that she says she cares so much about her girls, but often manipulates them?
 
PF: It was important to me to do a couple of different things with the story, one of those was to do the opposite of what readers were going to expect because I thought if I’m going to do the same thing that so many other stories have done before, that so many other books have done before, what’s the point? I wanted to give readers something that they’ve never experienced before, something that’s going to be brand new and give them things that they’re not going to expect, and with a lot of the characters in the story and a lot of things that happen in the story they are kind of the opposite of what you would expect from a story like this.
 
It was also important to me that if I was going to have a story that was nominally built around female characters that they were going to be complex and that they were going to be intelligent and articulate and that they were going to be these really fully realized characters. I have two nieces, one of them is sixteen now, and she is a huge horror junkie and I’m able to relate to her very easily because she is me at that age...my wife jokes that she is my mini-me. She has long complained, and this is not a unique complaint to my niece because my wife has said the same thing and people I’ve met at horror conventions have said the same thing and directors and writers that I met during my time at Rue Morgue said the same thing, there are not a lot of really good female horror characters and there are not a lot of really unique female horror characters. You’ve got the blond girl who is going to run and get killed, you’ve got the blond girl who’s going to kill the killer, but there’s not a lot of depth and complexity to these characters. You’ve got Laurie Strode, you’ve got Nancy from Nightmare on Elm Street, you’ve got Ripley from Alien, and you’d be hard pressed to name more than that, so I wanted to write a story that had a female character at its center who was going to be a memorable female character, and if she was going to be memorable then she had to be somebody who was fully realized and she had to have a past and she had to have interests and she had to have things she liked and didn’t like and hobbies and she has to be a fully realized human being.
 
Virginia Wolfe said something once about tunneling out behind your characters and having these tunnels of information and history and backstory behind them and that’s what I wanted to do with Ginny. At the same time, Ginny was interesting in her evolution because she began the story as much more of an anti-heroine than she turned out…I didn’t know a lot about her when I started writing her. I had this grain of an idea of who she was and knew that as I wrote the character I was going to discover things about her and realize things about her and that she would kind of grow with the story as I wrote it and in the very first scene she’s in in the book, she’s sitting down with her pimp and she’s going over this list of reasons why a girl might run away from their organization and why somebody might not come back and she’s numerating this list, well number one we’ve got rats in the motel and number two, and then she starts counting in German and this just seemed very organic to me. I went with it, okay she’s counting in German, and then she leaves the dining room where she’s having this meeting with her pimp and she’s going upstairs to her bedroom and I joked that on the way upstairs she gained about seventy-five IQ points.
 
I had never seen her as a dumb character. I had always seen her as a very savvy, very street smart character, but in that scene, I began thinking to myself well why does a twenty-one-year-old girl who is working as a prostitute in Times Square in the 1980s, why is she fluent in German? I started to formulate this entire backstory for her as she was going up to her room and as she got up to her room I just knew so much more about her. I wrote about a quarter of the book with her being more morally compromised and maybe even a little bit less sympathetic and two things were happening. One of them was I found myself getting won over by the character. I found myself falling in love with my own character. Now I understand what happens with people like David Chase and Vince Gilligan with Tony Soprano or Walter White, how these creators start to fall in love with their own bad guys and kind of come towards them with a softer approach because the same thing was happening to me with Ginny. I was just liking her too much in spite of the terrible things she was doing.
 
There is a scene in the book where she convinces one of the girls in her stable to help her accomplish this task. In the book now, the way that she goes about it is much softer than I originally have her doing, and they’re both emotional and psychological manipulations but the things I initially had Ginny say to her it was a point of no return for the character. If somebody is going to play these cards, if somebody is going to pull strings like this, they cannot be redeemed, and at that point I had decided that I wanted Ginny to be redeemed so I realized that there was a limit to what she was willing to say and there was a limit to what she was willing to do and that there were places she would not go that made me completely reassess the character up to that point. So, I went back and I softened a lot of things and I changed a lot of things because I wanted Ginny to be a challenge to the reader. I wanted her to do things that were bad and wrong and kind of made you feel a little bit icky but at the same time I wanted the reader to like her enough and to be enamored enough of her that they were maybe willing to forgive her of those things and I wanted to put the reader in the physical place of how do I forgive her?
 
KHC: Normally you would see a male character in the role of Nicolette. What inspired you to make Nicolette a woman, and what was it like stepping into her shoes?
 
PF: It kind of goes back to something I said a little bit earlier about wanting to do something that was unexpected and of course everybody’s going to expect if I say I’m writing a story about a serial killer in Times Square in the 1980s of course you’re automatically going to assume it’s going to be a man, and so by making her a woman I’m already completely subverting what the reader thinks they know about the serial killer literary sub-genre. At the same time, it also opened up all of these opportunities and avenues to do something completely new because okay, female prostitute vs male serial killer, woman vs man, it’s a dynamic we’ve all seen before. It’s a dynamic that we understand narratively, that we understand as part of real life. You don’t often to get to see this female vs female dynamic of a female protagonist vs female antagonist in something and so I wanted it to be something completely new and different and at the same time it was a similar reason to why I wanted to have Ginny as my protagonist. Even more so with villains in horror, you do not have a lot of female horror villains…Everybody’s got their favorite movie monster. I love Jason Voorhees, my wife loves Pinhead, another one of the women that works here in the office, she’s a big Ghostface fan, but if you’re a woman and you’re looking for a cool female slasher or monster to you know, be your monster, there’s not a lot of choices out there so I thought it would be cool if I could create this really scary, really intriguing, interesting female movie monster.
 
As for stepping into her shoes, that was a difficult task because the book alternates between Ginny and Nicolette’s viewpoints. I’d initially write a Ginny chapter, write a Nicolette chapter…but their minds are just so different. Ginny’s got this very poetic, very beautiful, scientifically minded mind. She, despite everything, sees the world in a very beautiful way, versus Nicolette, who sees the world in a very ugly, terrifying, nightmarish way, and I was having difficulty alternating between those viewpoints. I was having difficulty writing Ginny again after having been occupying Nicolette’s headspace. And so, at a certain point in the story, I completely stopped writing Nicolette. I would write in a Ginny scene, I would put in a placeholder, Nicolette goes to her office…and so what I ended up doing was from a certain point forward in the story, I wrote all the Ginny scenes up until she and Nicolette’s final confrontation and then when I was done writing Ginny, when I didn’t need to occupy her headspace anymore, then I went back and I wrote all of Nicolette’s scenes back to back and inserted them throughout the story where they needed to be, and then I was able to write that final confrontation.
 
KHC: The way you write Nicolette is very striking, especially in the sense that she has her own sort of language for the way she thinks about things.
 
PF: Actually, my background is I went to college and got a degree in psychology. I actually studied abnormal psychology in school and then I kind of burned out on that because I was occupying headspaces like Nicolette’s and when it came time to decide whether or not to pursue a master’s degree I said you know, maybe this isn’t what I want to do with my life. I at least now am armed with some degree of knowledge about abnormal psychology and I was able to apply a lot of what I learned in school to the way that I wrote Nicolette and the way that she perceives the world.
 
KHC: Where did the idea for the maze in the dump come from? What was the inspiration behind the various Greek mythology references?
 
PF: For years, I have been seeing television shows play with the idea of a serial killer who thinks they’re the Minotaur. I’ve always thought that the minotaur was a really scary figure from Greek myth. I studied Greek myth in school. In a lot of videogames growing up, there are a lot of minotaur monsters or minotaur bosses.  Final Fantasy immediately springs to mind. In a school play I got to play Theseus and actually kill the minotaur. And so, this idea of there being a serial killer or some kind of real world minotaur felt like this great narrative opportunity to me and all of these people just kept bungling it. There’s like two episodes of Dexter where there’s a minotaur killer and he just gets dispatched so easily and quickly…he’s like a sub plot in those two episodes…and its like wait a minute, you cannot have a serial killer who thinks they’re the minotaur and not only are they not the main character in that episode, they don’t even have a full season built around them. No, you should have an entire season built around that…I just was so frustrated that this idea was not being taken seriously…for years I had talked with my wife and my brother about this and finally said well hey, if you want to see it, why don’t you just write it?
 
From a narrative perspective, the labyrinth is such a part of the minotaur mythos that if you’re going to have a minotaur killer, there’s got to be a labyrinth and it just made the most sense to me. You’re going to have this Most Dangerous Game scenario where the minotaur serial killer is going to kidnap people and then confine them in some sort of maze and then hunt them down like the real minotaur of Geek myth. I knew that I wanted to set the story in New York because in addition to 1980s horror films, I also fell in love in high school with 1970s grindhouse cinema and all of these movies off 42nd street. For some reason, the Hollywood Video in Broken Arrow stocked all of these really grimy, sleazy underground 1970s 42nd street grindhouse movies….so I got this kind of second hand education of life on 42nd street in New York in the 1970s and figured if I’m going to be doing my big 80s story then I'll also make this my big 42nd street story, and those two go hand in hand perfectly.
 
At some point in reading about New York in the 1970s, I'd read about Fresh Kills landfill, which at the time was the biggest junkyard in the world. There were jokes about how you could see it from outer space. All the statistics that Nicolette gives in the book about the landfill are accurate, that the highest point of the landfill was I think eighty feet taller than the Statue of Liberty. And with the metaphorical filth and decay of 42nd street and then the filth and decay inside of Nicolette’s mind, it just made perfect sense for her maze to literally be set in the filth and decay of the world’s largest landfill. I thought hey, that’s a great makeshift maze for somebody who wants to hunt somebody down through a real-world labyrinth, this gigantic landfill.
 
KHC: At one point in the novel, you pretty heavily reference the fact that Nicolette has killed children, but never fully went there. What was the thought behind that?
 
PF: The idea that Nicolette had killed kids came to me as she’s conducting that tour. Early in the book we see her giving a tour of the landfill to a school group and she’s just thinking these insane, homicidal thoughts about the kids because she does not want to do this, and as she’s thinking these things it occurred to me that, well damn, she probably has killed kids before, and then I saw that out to its natural conclusion in her stream of consciousness. I didn’t meditate on it too much just because I didn’t want the story to be that dark. If I’m gonna be talking about someone that has murdered children then that kind of necessitates the story becoming that dark, so it’s something I just kind of wanted to dangle over the reader’s head to drive home just how depraved and dangerous Nicolette was without going too deeply into that territory.
 
KHC: What lessons have you learned from writing your first novel and do you have any regrets with it?
 
PF: No regrets. It’s something I can happily say about it is that I really had the opportunity to go back and edit and revise and take things out, put things back in, so the version of the book that you read and people are going to be able to read in September is my final cut. I’m very happy with that. I can happily say I have no regrets because I had the opportunity to do so much with it. What’s coming out is what I wanted to come out. It’s my perfect version of the story.
 
KHC: What’s next for you as a novelist?
 
PF: Putting the finishing touches on another story. This one is a spiritual prequel to Our Lady of the Inferno, it’s also set in New York on 42nd street. It takes place between the 1960s and the 1970s though, and if Our Lady of the Inferno is kind of about grindhouse culture and its absolute decline and the end of this lifestyle, then this is a story that’s set against the backdrop of Times Square at the height of its depravity.
 
KHC: Is there anything else you would like to mention about Our Lady of the Inferno or Fangoria?
 
PF: I’d like to say that Fangoria is currently accepting subscriptions. The first issue is scheduled to come out in October. We’ve got a lot of really great, really killer content for this. We’ve secured some articles for this that you are not going to believe we were able to get. You can sign up for that subscription at Fangoria.com. Pre-orders are also available for Our Lady of the Inferno on Amazon.com. It comes out September 11th. 

You can read my review of Our Lady of the Inferno ​here. 

By Matt Konopka