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Happy when all hell breaks loose
At home with Matthew and Deena Warner
by Meredith S. Wall, SevierCountyNews.Com
 Matthew Warner said he took one look at Deena Holland and got hit with the thunderbolt. Hard.
They met in North Carolina at NewmanCon in October 2002.
NewmanCon, in case you don’t know, was an all-weekend Halloween party hosted by horror writer James Newman.
"Discarded," by Deena Warner
Deena
Warner says for her it wasn’t exactly love at first sight, and in fact
thought Matt “acted a little like a used car salesman.”
“Well,
I knew that it was common for writers to market themselves, they have
to do that, but he kept telling me about his work and then later gave
me his business card,” she said. “I told him I thought he was hitting
on every girl at the party, but he said he wasn’t. After a while I left
and went back to my hotel room – I had to leave early the next day
– I do remember thinking that I felt very comfortable around him.
When I got back home, I waited a few days and then e-mailed him, and
that’s how it all started.”
 They
married in October of 2003, in a ceremony complete with scarecrows and
hay bales, a reading of Ray Bradbury’s work, pumpkin pies and a haunted
ghost walk. And they are now in the process of moving to Staunton,
Virginia, where they have a nice house not too far from the grave
of a purported descendant of Vlad the Impaler. Gotta love it when
they describe the vibe.
An exciting yet somehow comfy
kind of vibe no doubt comes in handy at the Warner house, where all
hell can break loose at any moment and often does.
Because it should.
Horror
writer Matthew Warner and illustrator Deena Warner take a scary thing
like the institution of marriage and make it even scarier by the work
they do. Cool thing is, they can both stand alone career-wise, without
all that pathetic clinging-for-dear-life-on-someone-else’s-goat-horns
kind of crap.
A couple of their latest credits? I’m so glad you asked.
 His:
“Eyes Everywhere,” Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2006
“Death Sentences: Tales of Punishment and Revenge,” Undaunted press, 2005 (with an intro by Gary A. Braunbeck);
“The
Organ Donor,” Double Dragon Publishing, 2003 ( A ‘Notable Novel of
2003’ in The Year’s best Fantasy and Horror, 17th ed.)
www.matthewwarner.com.
Hers:
September
2005: Cover and interior images for "Home Before Dark :The
Collected Cedar Hill Stories, Volume 2," by Gary A. Braunbeck,
published by Earthling Publications.
August 2005:
Cover and interior image for "Death Sentences: Tales of Punishment and
Revenge" by Matthew Warner, published by Undaunted Press.
June 2005: Interior images for Spokes magazine, published by Anglia Polytechnic University.
www.deenawarner.net.
 “Deena
doesn’t need me to help her get work,” Matt says. “She was already an
illustrator when I met her and it was one of the things that I loved
about her. She impressed me; she has great abilities, great talent. But
yes, we do help each other out, promote each other; of course we do.”
Deena says yeah. “We can snap our fingers and go into
professional mode,” she said. “When we do get to work together, like
when I did the cover for ‘Death Sentences,’ it’s great to be married
because you can get that instant feedback. I read ‘Death Sentences’
first – and loved the book – and then I told Matt, ‘The cover needs to
be dark, cold, and angry.’ And he agreed; he already had some ideas. We
went back and forth, trying different things, experimenting until we
finally came up with something we both felt good about.”
With
Matt’s first novel, “The Organ Donor,” readers get the feeling that
Matt really wants them to know something beyond the fiction, beyond the
Chinese meditation and philosophy of the Falun Gong, beyond the story
that serves up character development like a comic book superhero.
Yeah,
there’s a Chinese prisoner who comes back from the dead to claim his
kidneys, eyes, and some other stuff that got ripped out and off. There
was some skin missing, too, and an arm bone. What's that bone
called? Ulna? I also had to look up the word "palaver," but that's
another story.
See, in China, when a con gets capped, the
family gets an invoice for the bullets. No kidding. These are the
real-life issues of prison system abuses in China, upon which the book
is based.
“The really horrific thing is that those
abuses continue to this day,” Warner said. “It’s a miscarriage of
justice that organs are extracted from executed prisoners and sold to
the highest bidder; the hospital administrators obtain no permission;
they still deny what is going on.”
I think I should tell you at this point that Matthew Warner’s driver’s license shows he is willing to be an organ donor.
Deena’s work rubs that scritchy-slimy underbelly of society too.
“Bosch,
and Goya, I really admire their work,” she says. “Bosch was never
afraid to explore the dark side of human nature, and he certainly
wasn’t politically correct. I aim to do that in my work as well. But I
love Bosch, you know? He would have this great painting going that
would feature a monster coming out of someone’s butt. Weird things like
that.”
But it’s not all work is it? When Saturday
night is all right for frightening - can’t you just have a quiet
dinner at home, rent a movie, make popcorn, and ummm…snuggle?
 “We
were horror fans first, and then later got involved in the business,”
Deena says. “So now when we watch a horror movie, we still enjoy it as
fans, but we also always end up talking about how it relates to our
work. Matt does lectures about the horror genre at high schools, so he
has to keep up with all the latest horror movies. It wouldn’t be cool
for some kid to ask about a recent movie and then have Matt say he’d
never even seen it. So he watches them, and afterwards, he’ll analyze
it and talk about theme and plot. And then I’ll start talking about
‘and wasn’t that lighting great?’ We like to play off each other’s
creativity.”
So what’s up with the teaching thing,
since Matt says the life of a horror writer is one-third marketing,
one-third reading other people’s work, and one-third actually
writing?
“In a post-9/11 society, you have to come
to terms with terror or it will bite you in the ass,” Matt said. “The
horror genre gives people a way to deal with fears, and it offers
people a mental and emotional vocabulary, coping strategies. Who hasn’t
had an ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend that drained them like a vampire?
And zombies symbolize our fear of terrorists, where we are holed up and
dealing with something that can’t be reasoned with. What do we learn
from these stories? That in order to survive, we must rely on each
other. The intent of horror is to scare you, entertain you, and empower you.”
I think the horror genre at its best works the other way too, and empowers those who create within it.
Deena
says Eric Anderson, one of her art profs at UNC Charlotte taught her to
go beyond the ordinary, to see with new eyes, to know herself and be
confident in her style.
And Matt recently had to pay
$2,400 for car repairs at the real-life Texaco station that he used as
one of the settings in ‘The Organ Donor.’ I
think that Texaco shop owner read what happened to his station in
the book and felt like it was payback time.
Find out why.
www.amazon.com
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SevierCountyNews.Com is a regional, online
arts and entertainment news site serving the Great Smoky Mountains area
of East Tennessee. Copyrighted material. All rights reserved. For
permission to use photos or excerpts from stories, make request to the
publisher at publisher@seviercountynews.com.
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