Macromere Press

Macromere: We’re just about done with these interviews illuminating He Who Shall Remain Shameless, aren’t we?

David: That we are. We’ve almost run out of spirits.

M: So “Kordula”, the twelfth episode in HWSRS, starts off with the sentence “I was hiding out somewhere in the Czech Republic”. We take it you spent time in the Czech Republic…

D: I did. Winters were just as cold as what’s described in “Kordula”. And there is a Lake Prigl in Brno, the second-largest city in the Czech Republic, where the story takes place. Much of what David sees I also saw to an extent.

M: You’re a believer in writing from experience.

D: I believe you have to. Even if you’re writing strictly genre fiction, pure sci-fi or fantasy, I think for the work to succeed the writer has to have at least some of her- or himself wrapped up in it. The personalization may be well-masked, but it’s gotta be there for the work to resonate.

M: Tell us about the title character.

D: By this time in the narrative David has encountered all sorts of ghosts, from the somewhat well-known like Harriet Quimby and Leo Ryan and Christine Chubbuck to the lesser known like Christopher Coe and Linda Gary, and finally to the very little known like Alice Scribner and the infant David Michael Ewald from Gladwin, Michigan. Kordula falls into that last category, the category of those who have pretty much nothing going for them on the Internet. Kordula in fact may be the lowest-ranked of them all, as she has not even a sentence about her on the Internet. She’s representative of the spirits who are most in danger from the Meritocrat’s decisions—those spirits who are most susceptible to being erased, forgotten. 

M: We find it interesting that Kordula does not want to be remembered.

D: She really doesn’t. She rejects the nature and purpose of David’s missions. And she puts our hero and narrator in grave danger.

M: The stakes are certainly high in this one.

D: The stakes are high in all the episodes, really, but in “Kordula” David has his sights set on the Meritocrat, and that ultimate confrontation is right around the corner….

M: If the Czech’s Saint Mikulos were to visit you today with an angel on one side and a devil on the other, which would side with you, the angel or the devil?

D: Let’s wait until we get to the conclusion of He Who Shall Remain Shameless before I answer that one.

Macromere: Why Andrew Kehoe, the seventh ghost encountered in He Who Shall Remain Shameless? 

David: This particular story went through a lot of changes. A whole slew of rewrites. Two things remained constant, though: the opening sentence—“I was on campus to stop a massacre”—and the fact that the story takes place at the end of September, “goodbye-to-Maggie-May time”. Other than that, the first draft of “Andrew” wasn’t called “Andrew” at all. It was entitled “Tuma”, a word or name I’d picked up while living overseas, and the first draft didn’t have a ghost but rather a real-life, flesh-and-blood active shooter on a college campus. This active shooter was unnamed and unidentifiable, a kind of EveryKiller. The title was a throwaway, indicative more of the idea propelling the piece than anything. But early on that was David’s mission—to stop this active shooter from shooting up the campus. In this early, very rough version I was going for satire bar-none, to the point where the narrator brings a cache of loaded guns onto campus and tries to distribute them to terrified students, urging them to take up arms and shoot the active shooter before they are shot. Did this version work? Absolutely not. It was all about the idea, and the idea was arch, overly political and, frankly, not very interesting. What I needed was a person, a ghost, an historical figure that would fit with the rest of HWSRS. I wanted to keep the campus setting and the premise, but I didn’t feel comfortable writing about Seung-Hui Cho [the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007], and no way was I going to touch Columbine. I decided to look back….

M: And you came up with Kehoe, who remains the worst campus mass murderer in American history.

D: I know what you’re getting at: The other spirits in He Who Shall Remain Shameless are more benign…or at the very least David is trying to save them, help them, whereas he’s not so much helping Andrew Kehoe as he is helping the people of Bath, Michigan. So “Andrew” remains a bit of an anomaly compared to the other stories in the novel…it was always going to stand apart somewhat. But it works—

M: It does work.

D: It really is a major turning point in the novel. In “Andrew” the reader meets David’s crucial companion, the All-In-One Ishmael, for the first time, and the forward momentum of the final showdown with the Meritocrat is fully realized.

M: How much research did you do, when you’d finally decided on Andrew Kehoe for your subject?

D: A substantial amount of research. I wanted to get it right, and above all I wanted to make the story about the victims, the citizens of Bath as well as Kehoe. A primary source was “The Bath School Disaster”, a book written shortly after the tragedy by MJ Ellsworth. One website in particular, run by a descendant of one of the victims of the May 18, 1927 school bombing, was a great help. Reading the names and bios of all the children and adults who had perished that day really took “Andrew” to the level it needed to reach….the story found an emotional core.