The best books that inspire me as a storyteller and filmmaker

Being from MA, I’m naturally imbued with a highly attuned sense of sarcasm, and nobody taps into that for me more than Douglas Adams! The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy also holds the distinction of the book I’ve reread the most. A wonderful blend of sci-fi and whimsy, I love how it plays with genre tropes and tweaks them by the ear while still giving the reader gloriously compelling characters that you want to go on a journey with far past the fourth (and fifth!) books in the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy. As a storyteller it showed me how you can seamlessly combine disparate genres (like sci-fi and comedy) and still create stories that are perfectly cohesive and effective on a visual and an emotional level.

My first dive into the fantasy genre was through C.S. Lewis’ wardrobe, which transported me as a pre-teen into the magical realm of Narnia and all its denizens. What I learned from the series was that all things didn’t end up “happily ever after” in this genre. That there was dark magic that sometimes defeated the light and beloved characters could die! Even though I consider myself a sci-fi/horror writer, fantasy has been a subgenre to a lot of my stories, and these “Chronicles” were the books that spurred that interest.

When I was young, a had minor surgery which laid me up for a bit but gave me plenty of reading time. A family friend gave me Stephen King’s The Dead Zone and it was my first foray into horror fiction. Years later, I read an article in FANGORIA about a rising British author that King was a fan of (“I have seen the future of horror and his name in Clive Barker!”) So, I tracked down The Books of Blood and was instantly drawn into a dark fantastical world of horror! Barker’s writing became a huge influence on my writing, giving me the confidence to push boundaries. I would even go on as a screenwriter to develop reboots (that unfortunately didn’t get produced) of Hellraiser and Rawhead Rex.

I discovered Vonnegut in my early 20s and the first of his books I read was Slaughterhouse Five, which I quite enjoyed and still love to this day. But it was his fictional tale of American spy Howard W. Campbell that really captured my imagination. I consider myself a “thematically based writer” and I’m much more interested in exploring layers of challenging themes than I am actual plot. Mother Night had many themes, including the struggle with one’s conscience, freedom, and obsession but it was his central theme of “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be” that really grabbed me! Vonnegut expertly shows how theme infuses a story and solidified my obsession with exploring the story beneath the story.

When asked what my favorite book is, the answer is quite definitively Solaris as it exemplifies everything that great sci-fi can accomplish. Having seen Andrei Tarkovsky’s film and been intrigued by its premise of love, obsession, and guilt in the face of something beyond all human comprehension (a living planet!), I was inspired to explore its source material. I found Stanislaw Lem’s book enthralling and like Kris Kelvin’s obsession with his late wife, it’s a story that haunts me and keeps coming back to be relived again and again! The futility of trying to understand things beyond human comprehension and our penchant to anthropomorphize things we don’t understand are themes that I explore within my stories, and it was the biggest inspiration for my SATURN Award-winning film Encounter.