By Paula Haifley, werewolf fanatic
Kelley Armstrong looks incredibly normal for the woman who has written the best panicked-crowd-at-a-rave-stampedes-and-slips-in-blood-and-entrails-while-a-werewolf-plays-with-a-severed-head scene in American literature. Armstrong was one of the best cases of “horror authors look just like the rest of us, they’re just more interesting.”
"When asked, 'what do I call this genre?', I say 'paranormal suspense'." - Kelley Armstrong
Bitten, Armstrong’s debut novel and the one that includes the famous entrail-slipping scene, was about Elena, the only female werewolf in existence. Elena was a woman caught between two worlds, supernatural and normal, and two men, her average human boyfriend, and Clay, the love of her life and the one who betrayed her by turning her into what she is.
Armstrong created a world of werewolves that was as realistic as shape shifting could possibly be. “For me the criterion was, what’s the easiest thing for me to believe?” Armstrong said when she sat down for an exclusive interview with Pretty/Scary between panels at San Diego’s Comic Con. “I want to put it in a contemporary society, and I wanted to make it so once you got past the whole ‘person changes into a wolf,’ it seemed realistic.” Armstrong was quick to dismiss the mythological one way to kill a werewolf. “The whole thing about the silver bullet, you get run over by a Mack truck and you still live? Doesn’t quite work.” She sited The Howling as one influence on making werewolves that aren’t your mythological half-man, half-beast. “I read The Howling at far to young an age, and that’s what got me thinking that were wolves should always be wolves.”
The success of Bitten, which was written as a stand-alone werewolves-only novel, prompted her publishers to start thinking series. “I love my werewolves. I cannot imagine writing umpteen werewolf books. How many threats can they possibly face… I’d get really tired of writing sex in the woods scenes.” So Armstrong decided that Elena would discover that there are all sorts of other supernatural creatures in the world around her. And Armstrong did something unusual for a dark fiction series: she switched narrators.
All of her heroines were strong, supernatural women, her tales told alternately by werewolf Elena, young witch Paige, deceased witch Eve, necromancer Jaime Vegas, and chaos demon spy girl Hope. Armstrong used her wolf world as a jumping off point for all of her other supernatural creatures. She went through all of the mythology of these creatures, asking, “What’s realistic to me?” She found many witch stories as impractical as the silver bullet myth. “I can’t imagine that you can twitch your nose and make a cake appear. But I can imagine you being able to summon elemental forces and create a fireball.”
One of the things that made Armstrong’s work really stand out from the supernatural fiction crowd was her wonderfully cinematic gore scenes. “I come from a horror background,” Armstrong said, “so I do incorporate the gore… With the first novel Bitten, when it went to my UK editor, they said, ‘Can you maybe add a little more gore?’ So I did, I finessed it up a little bit. And then my US editor read it and said, ‘Oh, I’m glad you didn’t take that suggestion to add more gore.’
Armstrong started writing supernatural stories as a kid, but really got into horror in her teens, with “that whole teen angsty thing, when you start exploring the real horror. In today’s world, if I had been writing those stores and somebody found out, that’s the kind of thing you can get expelled for… because people, they don’t understand that its not coming from any deep-rooted desire to do horrible things, you’re just exploring horror.” Armstrong was in her twenties before she realized that she wanted to be an author. “All through my twenties I was taking workshops, joining writing groups, writing writing writing, and trying different genres, trying to find the right story.” It took her about eight years to finish Bitten. “Anyone that I told about it said, ‘You won’t get that published. If you have to write this stuff, at least write about vampires. People buy books on vampires.’ But when it came time, the book that sold was the one that I loved.“ Now Armstrong averages a book a year.
Armstrong is currently working on book ten of the Otherworld series, which returns to werewolves Elena and Clay, and book two of her new young adult series Darkest Powers, which takes place in the same world with teenage characters. Armstrong says that she gets many requests from fans for new books featuring their favorite character. “For recurring characters… I need to find the right plot. I may get readers who say, oh I really want another Elena book, that’s wonderful to know, but unless I have the right plot for her, I don’t want to bring her back.”
Armstrong is a stand-out talent in a subgenre of fiction that has as many authors as it does classifications. "When asked, 'what do I call this genre?', I say 'paranormal suspense'." The suspense “adds that touch of danger to it, and it adds a depth of character too.” When asked why she is drawn to the paranormal character, Armstrong sites not only her love of horror but that extra twist they bring to a suspense plot. “Paranormal characters, they’re working on real life issues, jobs, relationships, plus the whole ‘I’m a werewolf.’”
Visit Kelley at www.kelleyarmstrong.com to keep track of her latest releases, read her blog, and join her newsletter.
