Born in Detroit, writer Peter O'Keefe now lives in one of Chicago’s neighbors to the north, Racine. Through the years he's written for everything from “word processing temp jobs” to scripts for German TV movies and director George Romero’s 1980s TV series Tales from the Darkside. Dabbling in short films and plays along the way, O’Keefe worked on his novel, Counted with the Dead, for a long time. He describes his first book as “a horror/crime hybrid that reimagines the Frankenstein myth set in the racial cauldron of late 90s Detroit.” We “spoke” by email about the book, what brought him to horror, and the effects of growing up Catholic.
What’s your earliest memory of wanting to be a writer, and how have you evolved since then?
As a kid, I really wanted to be an artist, or an archeologist. That was before I learned you needed to study subjects like statistics and biology to follow in the footsteps of Indiana Jones. I was an art major in college but took a couple of creative writing classes and really enjoyed them. While creating posters for a Detroit dance company (the Clifford Fears Dance Company) the artistic director/choreographer mentioned that he wished someone would write a libretto for him to choreograph. I piped up that I was also a writer and got the assignment. I ran to the library to figure out what a libretto was and wrote one based on Greek mythology for this African American, Dunham-based dance company. Dance for a Minotaur premiered at the Detroit Institute of Arts and I was hooked.
What first drew you to horror?
Growing up Catholic it's hard to imagine not being drawn to horror. The elderly nun teaching my second-grade class had horrific images pressed beneath the glass that covered her desk, depicting Christian martyrs being flayed, boiled in oil, burned in bonfires, buried alive, and disemboweled. We were constantly regaled with tales of the ancient martyrs and the horrific tortures and butchery they endured. I was fascinated by those stories. Then, there was that guy nailed to a cross at the front of every classroom and in the church each Sunday. It was body horror at every turn.
As a kid, I was a voracious reader of science fiction. Then I attended a Jesuit high school in Detroit and was introduced to Greek mythology and other ancient classics such as Gilgamesh. I was intrigued by all these stories of heroes and monsters, human sacrifices, mortals battling gods, and heroic treks into the underworld. Then, I discovered Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It blew my mind. I was hooked.
What inspired your latest book, Counted with the Dead? It seems to be a genre-blender of horror, noir, and a few other things besides.
Counted With the Dead was originally written as a screenplay during a very dark time in my life. One of my older brothers—a gay man and the closest to me of my seven siblings—was dying of AIDS. At the time I was playing around with the concept of a reformed Mafia hitman forced to confront a Frankenstein-like beast created from the bodies of his victims. Having spent my share of time squirming inside dark confessionals, I was intrigued by the idea of just how far a person can go and still be capable of achieving some sort of forgiveness for their crimes. I attempted to deal with my brother's illness by immersing myself in this fictional world. When I finally raised my head from my computer screen a few months after my brother's passing I had completed Counted With the Dead almost in a haze.
The original screenplay earned me writing assignments and was optioned numerous times but was never made. And that's a good thing. I never felt that I could capture the complexities of the characters, much less the complex organism that is the city of Detroit, in a screenplay—so I reimagined the story as a novel. That was clearly the right decision.
What’s next for you and what are you working on (if you’d like to share any info at this point)?
I'm currently shopping a horror novella. White Flight is a haunted house story—The Haunting of Hill House meets Get Out. Joel and Willow Ward are white. Their teenage daughter D, adopted at birth, was Black. D just died at the hands of the police. The Ward's home in a slowly gentrifying historic Black neighborhood has always been haunted. When D was alive it was more of an inconvenience than a threat. Now that she's dead, the house has turned deadly and her grieving parents are struggling to understand why. And to survive the night. Beyond White Flight, I've just completed the first draft of a horror/crime novel along the lines of Counted With the Dead.
Peter O'Keefe's website may be found here.
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