Anton Strout Interview

SciFiChick.com recently interviewed Anton Strout, author of Dead To Me (2008) and Deader Still, coming February 24th.

Can you tell us a bit about Simon Canderous?

Anton Strout: I could, but then the Department of Extraordinary Affairs might send someone after me. Let’s see.. he’s just this guy with a retractable steel bat who wants to do good. Oh, and when he touches things, he can read the history of them. It’s called psychometry, and in Deader Still, he’s a bit better at it than he had been in the previous book. He was a psychometric hot mess in that one.

Where do you get your ideas for your characters?

AS: I think most are an amalgam of various traits I pick up from everything I read, watch or do. For instance, there are elements of the Simonverse that are very much inspired by Joss Whedon and his characters. I like that level of humor laughing in the face of danger simply because the only other path would lead to madness. Bits of people I know, things that I find fascinating in them, get fed into my characters and their personalities. To be particular, Simon comes from a story within John Irving’s The World According to Garp. It’s about a man who has magic gloves that let him fix the world, but he can’t feel anything. Something about that was so bitter and poetic, I had to explore the idea myself and what came out of that was Simon.

Who would you choose to play your characters in a film version of your novels?

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