Author Interview with Robert Van Dusen

Welcome, Robert, to Spotlight on Indie! You have a few books listed. For readers, that profile can be found at spotlightonindie.com/authors/robert-van-dusen.

SPOTLIGHT:  Let's get into some background as an introduction. Tell us something about yourself with any particular details related to your story, other hobbies, special knowledge, etc.

Robert: I grew up in a little town in Upstate New York. I just moved to West Virginia this summer and it's great. I felt more at home in West Virginia in the first five days than I had in the last five years back in New York. I grew up hunting and fishing and such. I loved to read from an early age.

My grandma used to bring me plastic shopping bags full of Louis L'Amour cowboy books and paperbacks. I also read all the Horror novels I could lay my hands on. Also, I'd stay up way too late watching MonsterVision with Joe Bob Briggs. Still kind of proud of myself that I managed to trick my parents into letting me watch Predator when it first aired on basic cable in my area. I was allowed to watch all the Action movies I wanted, but I generally had to sneak Horror movies. So I told my mom that Predator was an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie (it wasn't a total lie...).

I joined the Army straight out of high school, serving a total of six years all told between Active Duty and later in the Reserves. I was in the Artillery first and later a Lateral Engineer (pouring concrete). I ended up getting messed up pretty good in a training accident and just general doing Army stuff. I still like to shoot when I can (yay for moving to West Virginia!).

I also like history, especially Ancient Rome and Medieval Europe. I've also been slowly rebuilding my collection of physical media over recent years. Hopefully someday I'll have physical copies of all seventy-two of the infamous 'Video Nasties', horror movies deemed so 'blasphemous and/or damaging to public morals' that owning or distributing them was against the law in the United Kingdom.

SPOTLIGHT:  It's Interesting that you grew up reading Louis L'Amour westerns yet write horror. Did L'Amour have any influence on your writing?

Robert: I grew up reading just about anything and everything I could get my hands on, including the Louis L'Amour cowboy books and other serial Westerns my grandmother would bring me. I used to love Stephen King, at least until the end of his Dark Tower series. Let's just say that reading the afterword on that made me decide that I was never going to buy another one of his books or watch one of his movies ever again. It also taught me how not to treat my readers. Basically see what he did there? Don't do that. Ever. At least not on purpose.

SPOTLIGHT: How long have you been writing and publishing and what inspired you to start?

Robert: I think I've been writing for probably close to sixteen years now.

My first book, Outbreak: Boston, started out as a D20 Modern game that a friend of mine was running. Unfortunately, the game kind of fell apart after a few months and I wanted to see where the story was going so I picked it up and ran with it.

SPOTLIGHT: Tell us about your writing and publishing journey once you started.

Robert: There really isn't all that much to tell. I wrote my first book. Self-published it. Come to think of it, that was probably the smartest decision given what I found out about the publishing industry (and the entertainment industry in general) later.

SPOTLIGHT: Do you write one book at a time or switch between stories?

Robert: I try to stick to one story at a time. It's just easier to keep track of things that way.

SPOTLIGHT:  Now that we know a bit about you, introduce us to your books and some of the characters that readers can find in them.

Robert: My last book is called Hell At Dawn. It was inspired by my love for the unhinged 70s and 80s Italian horror and action flicks by directors like Bruno Mattei, Joe D'Amato, and Lucio Fulci. Perhaps the most direct influences are the movies called Cannibal Apocalypse (which I covered in this year's 31 Days of Halloween special) and Black Hawk Down. I actually saved the draft of it on my computer as Black Hawk Apocalypse. It's a fairly straightforward plot: I never mention the specific date, but it's 2021. The story follows a group of American soldiers deployed to a war torn West African nation to protect UN aid convoys. Shenanigans ensue when something makes the locals get more violent than usual. The main cast of characters are Sergeant Zachery Cole, Specialist Vinnie “Doc” Costello, and Private Emily "Beans" Woods.

There's a couple other people in their squad: Second Lieutenant John Rippert, Specialist Micheal Forrester and Private First Class Molly Porter. There's an embedded journalist attached to their squad named Peter Ramsey. They generally get along, if nothing else because they're united in their hatred of their Platoon Sergeant, Staff Sergeant Wilkerson. Unfortunately for them, they're saddled with one of the worst sorts of NCOs: a bully with rank.

Sergeant Cole's kind of a good ol' boy from Tennessee. He's the real leader of the group, though he's quietly becoming burned out and not just because he's forced to do his job and most of Wilkerson's on this deployment. Specialist Costello is the combat medic attached to their squad. He's a card-carrying member of the E4 Mafia...if it existed. Which it doesn't. Private Woods is a recent immigrant, having moved with her parents from the UK a few years before the story starts (hence the nickname Beans, shortened from Beans on Toast). She loves her new country. It's the first time she'd felt safe in years, but she still can't quite think of American as her home.

I've written a handful of other books, mainly zombie fiction (my Outbreak and Get Out Alive series) with a few other stories. I also wrote The Night Shift, a vampire story, as well as The Bastard Knight, a fantasy novella that I had plans on turning into a series but we'll see how that goes. As it stands right this red-hot minute, I might as well say that I've been working on something completely different. It's a sort of spin-off of Hell At Dawn. I got sort of tired of writing

Horror and stuff… So I thought I'd try a sort of Slice of Life sort of thing. It's set about a year and a half after Hell At Dawn, and follows Private Woods as she finishes up the last eight months of her enlistment at the recruiting office she enlisted out of near her parents' house. I don't want to go into too much detail because, well, spoilers for the last book and all. However, it all started actually as a joke I made on Twitter after publishing Hell At Dawn. I'm thinking of a sequel where one of my characters experiences true horror: APPLYING FOR VA DISABILITY!

SPOTLIGHT: After all those books and characters described, I see a pattern, but tell us what your favorite types of characters to write are.

Robert: They say 'write what you know', so I tend to like writing military characters. I like writing good characters, too. In addition to Horror, I grew up watching John Wayne movies so I guess that kind of rubbed off on me too.

SPOTLIGHT: From all your books presently available, who is your favorite character and why?

Robert: Gee, I don't know... That's a tough one. Probably Senior Airman Amy Frays from my Outbreak series. She was just a nineteen-year-old kid who kind of looked around, found herself in a really bad spot and said to herself 'Looks like I'm in charge here...' then slowly realized 'Oh, God! I'm in charge!'. She had little to no idea what was going on or what she was doing, but held her little group going even as she was quietly breaking down on the inside. If that makes sense.

SPOTLIGHT: It looks like you mostly write zombie fiction. What about that appeals to you to write so much of it?

Robert: I suppose it all goes back to the first time I saw Night of the Living Dead when I was a kid. I actually think it was on MonsterVision with Joe Bob Briggs. You see, there was a cemetery across the road from the house I grew up in. Nine-year-old me sat there, watching the movie at like eleven at night. Pretty soon, I started looking out the corner of my eye at the graveyard across the road.

And then I started thinking “What if that actually happened?” I mean, I didn't know about the concrete vaults they have to bury people in back then. Until I saw one. Turns out, at least in the state I grew up in, they buried people in concrete to keep the formaldehyde and stuff from leaking into the ground water. Or maybe it was just because that particular graveyard happened to be right next to a creek that ran into Lake Ontario. I guess the fact that it keeps zombies and vampires trapped is just a pleasant side effect.

SPOTLIGHT: Have you written other types of horror stories? If so, what other types of horror do you like to write?

Robert: I wrote one vampire story called The Night Shift. I keep thinking that one day I should write another story with that character and setting. A small town sheriff's deputy gets mixed up in supernatural shenanigans while stuck on the night shift.

SPOTLIGHT: What do you think makes a good horror novel?

Robert: There's a couple things. I'm a big proponent of what Joe Bob Briggs refers to as the Three Bs: Blood, Breasts, and Beasts. That said, it's also important that the audience also has time to get to know the characters and care about them so it matters when something terrible happens to them.

SPOTLIGHT: How many books/stories have you published?

Robert: I've published eight books. I have more short stories and some interactive fiction on my Substack. I also recently did a series of articles recommending a different horror movie every day during the month of October.

SPOTLIGHT: How many more stories do you think you'll write? Do you have a backlog of ideas or do you write what comes when you have the time available?

Robert: I don't know how many stories I'm going to write. I think I may be kinda working against a clock here. Turns out having my head three feet from six to twenty pounds of gunpowder going off for years probably isn't great for the cognitive functions. That said, yeah. I do have a pretty big stack of ideas stored up. Plus, at least one of my books that I can think of off the top of my head ends on sequel bait. So, there's that.

SPOTLIGHT: What would you advise other writers to know about writing horror before they get started?

Robert: Just write. That's the hard part. Sit down. And just write. Your first draft is going to suck. Your second draft is probably going to suck, too. You're going to get bad reviews. So when you get thrown off the horse you get back up AND EAT. THAT. HORSE.

SPOTLIGHT: Leave it to a zombie/horror writer to say that!

Thanks, Robert, for taking the time to answer some questions. Readers can find more about Robert van Dusen and his works in his Spotlight profile at spotlightonindie.com/authors/robert-van-dusen and at his main social media at x.com/RealRVanDusen, where you can find his Amazon author page linked.

One final note from Robert:

I also have a Substack - robertvandusen.substack.com/

In the month of October I was running a special (primarily special because I actually post on a regular schedule...) called 31 Days of Halloween where I troll the depths of the Internet and my movie collection to recommend a different Horror movie each day through the entire month. There's also some sample chapters and other articles I've written there.

Be sure to check out his books listed on Spotlight on Indie for some Halloween (or any season) horror!