John Saul

By Randy
Sluganski
November 7, 1998

John Saul, at the
age of 34, had his first bestseller in 1976. For the past 22 years he has not
looked back, as his name has deservedly graced the New York Times bestseller list
18 times. He is the undisputed master of psychological terror. Yet, for all the
fear he inspires in others, he is also a gentle man who is averse to reading the
more clinical horror of a Clive Barker. Now he has written his first game for
the computer, John Saul’s Blackstone Chronicles: An Adventure in Terror.

I
recently had the opportunity to spend an evening at a haunted house (where else!)
with Mr. Saul. The next morning, in the safety of daylight, we spoke about computer
games, technology, working with Mindscape and things that go bump in the night.

You’ve
been an adventure game player for a long time and you’ve been a horror author
for a long time. What took so long to combine the two?

Well,
a lot of it just had to do with the technology. For a long time, I just played
text-based games like everyone else did. Zork was it for a lot of us. A lot of
it just had to do with the space available for storage, speed of accessing data,
all the technical stuff. It’s only recently that we’ve had processors fast enough
to handle really great graphics and make the movement look truly real and store
all the data you need to be truly effective, because for me a lot of what makes
Blackstone effective is the setting is so detailed and so involving. The music
is wonderful, but wave files take up all kind of space. When you look at simply
the table of files that go into that game, it’s astonishing that it all fits on
a couple of CDs. So for me it was largely a matter of waiting until the technology
was there that I could suddenly say, okay the technology now is there to really
see and experience the inside of a very large building. It’s one thing to sit
and write a script and let everyone play out the scenes in their mind, which worked
wonderfully well with Zork. It still surprises me sometimes that Zork
was a text-based game because everything in it was so vivid in my mind that
they might as well have had graphics.

Everyone saw that
same white house–isn’t that amazing when you think about it?

Yes, yes it is. It’s only a matter of when technology got to the point where
I felt I could come up with a story that would be effectively told and I went
for it.

On the same subject, were there any limitations
imposed on you that you thought maybe technological limitations hindered things
you wanted to do in the game that was something that maybe years down the road
you might be able to do but could not do now?

I don’t know
because it’s so difficult to predict where technology is going, and it moves so
rapidly that my assumption is that in a few more years there will be some new
technology that makes things even more vivid and more real as they offer possibilities
for storage that no one has even thought of yet. Before the advent of computer
CD-ROM games, Blackstone could simply not have existed. There would be
no way to effectively write the story of Blackstone the game on paper–it
would not work.

Spinning off of Blackstone, before
the serialization, after the success of Stephen King’s Green Mile, you
have said that Blackstone was originally envisioned as a computer game.
Is it possible that the game itself could be put into book form?

No, absolutely not. The game is its own story, and that story only works for
me as a CD-ROM based game. It’s structured for media. The puzzle aspect of it,
the fact that you can explore from different sequences and in any direction. The
best way I can explain it is it makes no sense to start reading a book on page
1 and then skip to page 150 and then go back and read page 20 and then skip ahead
to page 35 and then go to page 2. It would make no sense whatsoever. But when
you begin Blackstone (the game), everyone starts at the foot of the stairs.
Now some people are going to go into the Dayroom first to look around and see
what’s there and possibly collect some trophies; some people are going to go upstairs
and wander into the elevator first; some people are going to step into Malcolm’s
office first, but it doesn’t matter which one you visit first.

So
instead of it being linear, you and Bob Bates have created an Infocom (text-based)
game with pictures.

Exactly, and that’s the great thing.
That is also why you have to come up with a special kind of story, you have to
come up with a tale that does make sense no matter what path you follow.

This
book started as a serialization and is broken into parts; will there be add-ons
for the game? Not a full-fledged Blackstone Chronicles 2 but an add-on
for unexplored rooms of the mansion priced at $19.95?

I
think that is a possibility. I have thought about it. It could be very interesting.
Because as far as we know there are only 19 rooms in the asylum that you can currently
access, but we know that the original house contained about 60 rooms, so there’s
got to be something going on in those other rooms.

One of the great things
for me because it is so personal is that when I first got the game as a beta,
I had not seen any of the art, so that I was poking around and I find this elevator
and I go in and I’m doing this major double-take because the elevator is almost
an exact duplicate of an elevator of a building in Chicago I lived in when I was
about 18 years old. And this is really eerie that this elevator looks like that
one and it sounds like that one; it’s got an awful cage in the door. I hadn’t
even known there would be an elevator in the game; I knew that there was this
grand staircase that went up and split in the book, but I hadn’t realized that
Malcolm had put an elevator in. So who knows what else he has caused to be constructed
somewhere in the house.

With people like yourself entering
the computer gaming world and Tom Clancy with the Rainbow Six game, there
is suddenly an air of legitimacy added to the computer gaming field. Who would
you like to see enter next, Stephen King, Clive Barker, Dean Koontz?

I don’t know what those guys’ interest in computers is. I think I came to it
with techno-lust. I was probably the first writer to pick up a word processor
years ago, and I thought it was fabulous because I could get an entire 15-page
chapter on one eight-inch disc, and the thing only cost $15,000 back in 1978!
In retrospect, it’s hard for me to believe how expensive that thing was because
it had a daisy wheel printer–there was no such thing as a laser printer then–the
daisy wheel printer was so noisy that in order to be in the same room with it
you had to have an acoustic cover for the thing. It was $800 just for the acoustic
cover for the printer. Who would pay $800 for a printer anymore, much less an
acoustic cover for it? That cover now belongs to another writer who is raising
African violets in it. It makes a great little mini greenhouse with its plexiglass
cover. I of course immediately got upgrade fever and have been upgrading ever
since. I have no idea how many computers I have gone through at this point. I
always say, “Oh, this is the computer I am never going to need to actually
replace until it wears out, and then about six months later I’m calling Dell again
ordering something new. I buy programs I have absolutely no use for just because
I want to play with them. But, I think you have to have that. Years ago I did
not want to be a novelist, I wanted to be a playwright. I did not go to school
to take play writing. I went to the theater school or took acting or stage craft.
I figured if I wanted to be a playwright, I needed to know what the actors are
going through, what you can actually do on a stage and help them to make it work.
So I think in order to write for computers, you have to be interested in them.

The
Blackstone Chronicle miniseries scheduled for ABC: when and where?

I don’t know when, they haven’t told me. You are probably very much aware of
what Hollywood thinks of writers. They really don’t want us messing around in
their business. I have seen the script and I like it a lot. Of course we’re dealing
with yet another medium there, so their part of Blackstone is actually
more closely based on the books than the game, but they have to do some restructuring
to fit the books into their format. They have done a very good job. When they
will actually show it, I don’t know.

When it is released,
any chance of rereleasing the Blackstone Chronicles game so that it could
ride on the coattails of the miniseries?

I would assume
so. The fact is the game may still be selling like hotcakes a year from now. A
guy can dream, can’t he?

Let’s play a little game. One word
association: Stephen King.

Friend.

Clive
Barker.

Horror–I’ve never read Clive; I don’t know.

Dean
Koontz.

Won’t fly. Dean won’t get on an airplane.

Anne
Rice.

Neat woman. Lunch is actually the word that came
to mind. Years ago before she became Anne Rice, I was having lunch with her. A
bunch of us were at a Waldenbooks lunch in San Francisco and Anne was still writing
under, I think, three names. “How do you sort these names out, Anne,”
I asked, and she said, “Well, when one of my personas takes off, I’ll just
drop the other two.” I think one of her names was Rampling. I’m not sure
if Anne remembers all those names.

The adventure genre today.

Searching.

You have said that it takes you a year to
do a book from start to finish. It took you three years, from the inception of
your original idea to finally getting into the stores, to do the Blackstone
Chronicles game. Why such a difference in time?

It
is much more involved producing a game than a book. With a book, I basically sit
down and I write it and I send it off to the publisher and my editor edits it
and they come up with some cover art and they send it to the printers and they
print it and out it goes. For a game, first a storyboard has to be created, all
the dialogue has to be created, you’ve got to find the actors to speak the dialogue,
the art has to be created–it’s not one book cover, it’s four walls of 20 rooms–that’s
a lot of art that has to be created. Music has to be composed to set the mood
and focus things. It’s a huge undertaking. When you look at the credits when you
finally get to the end of the game, it’s an astonishing number of people involved,
and it takes all those people all the time to do their job. What surprises me
is I had always assumed that a game was created in one building, and it’s not.
It’s all subcontracted out all over the country. It’s all over the place, and
it all has to come together, and someone has to sit and put all the pieces together
and make everything jive properly.

If a book is 100 percent
yourself, what percentage of a game is yourself?

Maybe
5 percent. The concept is definitely mine. The heart and soul of the game. Bob
Bates was wonderful about making sure that what he was designing was true to my
vision of what Blackstone should be. One of the reasons I got involved
in this is that I wanted a game that I would thoroughly enjoy playing. Finally,
at one point I told Bob that I did not want to know any more about what he was
doing, because if I knew everything about the game before I got to play it, then
it wasn’t going to be any fun for me.

A lot of your novels
seem to focus on evil that is either done to children or done by children. Any
specific reasons? Something subconscious here we should know or worry about?

No. It’s a couple of very practical things. When my career started, I was tired
of being a starving writer and my agent was tired of representing a starving writer.
Finally, my agent said, “John, there is no market for comedy murder mysteries,”
which is what I was writing. They were lots of fun, but frankly they were funnier
than they were scary. He said, “If you really want to get published, you
have to write something that is into the market,” so I went to the book supermarket
and did my market research and everything that was hot was some kind of thriller
involving children. So that’s what I started working on. As it turns out, I immediately
discovered the great thing about writing children is that children are not basically
held responsible. So what you can do is have a kid commit all kinds of mayhem,
but you never lose sympathy for him because you know deep down that it is not
his fault. But have a 21 or 30 year old out killing all their friends–you can’t
maintain sympathy for that character. At some point we all become responsible
for our own actions, but at 10 years old, we are not. So it is really great to
write a character that is both hero and villain at the same time and you’re watching
this kid commit mayhem but you know it’s forces beyond the kid’s control that
are making him do evil and you are rooting for him to get through it and survive.

Are
you happy writing horror novels?

Yes, I actually enjoy
it.

You’re not writing murder mysteries under a pseudonym?

Yes, I’ve done that (laughter).

Thank you for your time,
Mr. Saul. I hope The Blackstone Chronicles is a huge success for you. I
know the readers of Just Adventure are looking forward to it.

It was my pleasure. Now go buy the game! (laughter)