A t 6:20 a.m., in a quiet house off East Pleasant Street in Amherst, the shaggy-haired Stefan Petrucha was up making breakfast for his high-school aged daughter. Then he fell asleep on the couch. After a while, he trudged upstairs to read emails, a cup of coffee in one hand and some allergy medicine in the other.
It’s been a low-key morning for the author of Wicked Dead , Ripper , and Blood Prophecy .
“I always hesitate when I describe the kind of writing that I do,” says Petrucha. “It’s been comics, it’s been books. It’s been paranormal genre fiction. It’s been young adult. I’m kind of all over the place.”
Petrucha, 55, has written more than 20 novels and hundreds of graphic novels and comics. He wrote the original X-Files comics for Topps in the mid-1990s, which sold, by his estimate, nearly 3 million copies. Some writing jobs, like the nearly 600 Mickey Mouse comics he wrote between 1993 and 2008, turned into long-term, bread-and-butter commitments. Others, like his online serialized zombie comic College of the Dead , are smaller-scale and more experimental in style.
The success of upcoming projects — Petrucha has just been contracted to write a novel for a major Marvel Comics character, and he’s working on a new steampunk novel set during the Napoleonic Wars — is yet to be measured.
“I’m very proud of my work,” he says. “I try not to plan too far ahead, which can be nerve-wracking. But the opportunities that fall in my lap always take me in new directions.”
Petrucha grew up in the Bronx. He studied literature at SUNY Purchase and, eight years ago, moved to Amherst because, he says, “I’ve always felt a sense of peace in college towns.” Seated in the morning sunlight at his dining room table, his hands clasped, Petrucha speaks softly but quickly, scanning the landscape of his writing life and smiling frequently.
“I’m a hired gun,” he says. “And I don’t find anything embarrassing about that. There are limits, I guess — I’m not going to write anything supporting the Taliban. But when I got the call recently to write some comics for Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, I started watching the show right away and figured out how to do it.”
“It’s nice to bounce between projects,” he adds. “Especially when they’re different. They strengthen each other.”
Petrucha says his grandfather taught him to read using comic books. In 1980, Marvel began to pay him for some plot writing, and in 1987 he published his first comic book: Squalor , in which a man discovers an alternate state that gives him a different perception of time.
Writing young adult fiction from time to time provides different challenges, he says. “Young adult is more restrictive in terms of language and graphic sex, but it’s less restrictive in terms of genre. The readership is much more tolerant of unexpected shifts in tone.” It’s got him dreaming up a new story, he says, about a luxury liner in the 1920s. “It gets trapped and all of the adults die, so it’s like Lord of the Flies meets Titanic . I don’t think I could sell that as an adult book, but I do think I could sell that as a young adult book.”
Then there are those little projects that Petrucha says he does “for my artistic soul.” One example: a horror comic called The Bandy Man, from 1996. “I got three X-Files artists to work on it: Charlie Adlard, who works on The Walking Dead now, Miran Kim, and Jill Thompson, who did the Sandman comics with Neil Gaiman. It’s probably one of my favorite things I’ve ever written, and it sold about 200 copies. Nobody knows about it.”
Horror, Halloween, and the paranormal hold a special place in Petrucha’s heart. “Reading Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury growing up, and moving from there into Lovecraft and Poe, Dickinson and Kafka … If I had to collapse those kinds of stories into one idea, I guess you could say that I’m fascinated by the difference between the map we have in our heads and the world. The paranormal, specifically, sits on this edge between what we believe and what we observe through science. There are rules to science, and there are advantages to faith, but when they collide, it’s often very difficult to separate them again.”
For many readers and writers, paranormal stories open up these questions. “It’s easier to discuss whether you think ghosts exist than to discuss whether you think God exists,” he says. “But some of those fears are the same.”
Petrucha can’t start writing his new Marvel novel until they approve the outline he’s submitted. Much of today, then, will go toward research for other writing projects. He expects to spend several hours with his nose in a history book about Napoleon’s military push into Egypt.
He’ll also be carving out some time to correspond with the students in three UMass online courses he currently teaches.
His courses “Writing the Graphic Novel” and “Paranormal Thinking” have their draws, but this morning Petrucha is thinking most about “Writing For A Living,” now in its third year. In that class, he teaches students how to write query letters and pitch them to editors at publishing houses.
“When you go out into the world as a writer, you need answers to practical questions,” he says. “What do I do with an agent? Who do I send my work to? What do I say to them? How do I deal with their responses?”
Petrucha then breaks his students up into pretend publishing groups. In these online discussions, each student takes the role of an editor, and must reject all but one of their classmates’ queries. At a certain point, everyone gets a rejection letter.
“I say at the outset that this is not a class about the care and feeding of the artistic soul,” he explains. “There’s nothing wrong with writing as a mode of self-expression. But there’s a business side to this, and you have to learn the details of how to conduct yourself. It impacts your business, but it also impacts the work you produce. That’s what I felt was missing for me when I was starting out.”•