Hollister author Terry Butler has published a collection of his dark short stories, the first of three planned volumes. Described by publisher Hekate Publishing as “chilling and atmospheric,” Crooked Ladder, released Aug. 6, is available through Amazon.
Butler, an occasional community contributor to BenitoLink, spoke about his writing, his influences and the publication of his new book.
BENITOLINK: How long have you been writing?
BUTLER: All my life, though I have only been publishing for about 15 years. I am also a painter and photographer so I just didn’t have time to cover all three. I’m retired now and as I got older, I had more time to write.
Is this your first book?
Yes, it is. I have been publishing through online magazines, put together by editors in the crime and hard-boiled fiction field. These are mostly stories that have been published from my archives. I have enough for three books, and each will have things that have been published before and then some originals.
I did some work for a long-running online magazine called Yellow Mama [warning: contains explicit material] and the editor, Cindy Rosmus, said, “You need to put a couple collections together,” and she put me together with Hekate Publishing. The editors there told me to send in some samples and they liked it. I have a contract for two books now, but they were happy so I think at this point they would publish anything I send them.
What are some of the issues with being published now?
How it works nowadays is that the publisher won’t do any promotion at all unless you are already well known. The promotion is up to you. I thought about setting up something similar to Tumblr, but I am limited because I don’t do Facebook or Instagram. I am not a Flat Earther, I just don’t like social media.
That limits me, but I am not in this for fame and fortune. I am in this because I love to write and I wanted to leave something behind for family and friends, to show them all the typing I did was not for nothing. There are writers out there that say “I don’t care if anyone reads my stuff” and I say “baloney.” I do want people to read these.
How do you describe your work?
I give people a warning: I am not a violent person, but my fiction is. It is full of sex and violence and dirty words—and a lot of humor. You could call it crime, hard-boiled, and horror, though I am branching out into westerns. Westerns are not far from crime and noir—the characters can be drawn psychologically rather than from stereotypes of good guys with white hats and bad guys with black hats.
Do you have any particular influences?
This will date me, but John D. McDonald. Many of the young writers don’t even know who he is. Also Ross McDonald, Donald Westlake. Elmore Leonard—he crossed over from westerns to crime fiction. And my cousin, Ed Gorman—he published a lot and was a big influence on me. I dedicated my book to him.
How do you want people to approach your work?
Some people say “that’s too dark for me.” And I respect that. It’s not for everybody. But I get bugged when people treat genre fiction as if it is “less-than.” I think a writer like Elmore Leonard is the equal of Ernest Hemingway. Stephen King is a great writer—he knows how to tell a story intuitively.
Where do you get your inspiration?
Just various things I read. For example, I was following a case where a woman was on trial for murder. I was talking to Ed about it and he said, “You really sound interested in it. Why don’t you write it as a story.” I did and that was the first thing I published.
Sometimes the stories come in bits and pieces, and sometimes they come out whole. Stories also come out of my experience. I have hung around some bad people. I realized early on that police have a lot more power than criminals so I never got into the criminal life. But I have stories from those times as well.
You just have to work at it. There is a quote from an author who says, “Writing is easy. You just sit at a typewriter until blood pours from your forehead.”
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