Interview with Daryl Gregory – Author of THE ALBUM OF DR. MOREAU

Last week I reviewed The Album of Dr. Moreau—I’ll link my review at the end of this post—and today it’s out in the world! To celebrate, how about an interview with the author himself?

Welcome to the blog, Daryl! And congrats on your latest release, The Album of Dr. Moreau. To kick things off, what’s the story about?

Thanks for having me! This is the book that I imagined H.G. Wells and Agatha Christie would write together if they did a lot of cocaine while binge-watching the Monkees. It’s 2001, and WyldBoyZ are a boy band of five genetically engineered human-animal hybrids. When their producer, Dr. M is found clawed to death inside a locked penthouse suite, and Bobby O—the band’s “cute one,” who’s part ocelot and 100% adorable—is framed for the murder. But in true Christie fashion, no one’s above suspicion. Maybe it was Tusk the elephant boy (“the smart one”), Matt M. Bat (“the funny one”), Tim the pangolin (“the shy one”), or Devin the bonobo (“the romantic one”).

The story takes inspiration from the H.G. Wells classic, The Island of Doctor Moreau. How did you come up with the idea to do a horror classic/pop music/boy band mash-up?

Alcohol may have played a role. I can’t remember when the title came to me, but at some point I started riffing with a friend of mine about what animals would be in the band and the puns started flying. The idea that the WyldBoyZ would be a boy band specifically is the fault of my grown daughter. She was a huge Backstreet Boys fan, and the house was full of bubblegum pop for three years straight. “I Want it That Way” is now wired into my brain—and I still don’t know what “it” is or what way they’re talking about.

LOL. The story is so funny! I imagine it must have been a blast writing the dialog, especially among all the band members. Who was your favorite character to write and why?

Honestly, they’re the most fun to write when they’re in a group. I got to know them as characters by writing scenes with them arguing about their band name, or who had the worst habits on the tour bus. 

My favorite monologue, however, is one I didn’t write. I wanted Tim the pangolin to defend pop music and explain to my detective how sophisticated the music really is. I turned to my second-born kid, Ian Gregory, who’s a comics reviewer and pop culture critic who also writes music and has been in bands. Ian wrote me a two-page rant that’s both hilarious and highly technical. I basically copy and pasted it into Tim’s mouth.

I loved Tim’s monologue, very cool. Despite the humor, the story also touches on some serious themes, like immigration, race and human rights. How hard was it to get a good balance between these two completely opposite elements?

Are they that opposite? I always feel like the other side of the coin of any serious topic is some seriously dark comedy. And in a story, the humor works best when its rooted in character, and driven by what the characters are worried about. H.G. Wells original novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau is remembered for his vivid animal men, but he wrote the book because he was horrified by vivisection—the live dissection of animals—a huge scientific controversy at the time.

I found it ironic that despite how “monstrous” and strange the WyldBoyZ are, they come across as more or less human and completely normal. Was this a deliberate choice on your part or did their characters evolve naturally?

The book’s structured so each member of the band gets a chapter from their point of view. I definitely decided that even if they looked bizarre from the outside, once we saw the world through their eyes, the readers would recognize their humanity. It’s kind of a trick of the book—I want to lure you in with circus-like visuals, but then make you actually care about the band, and fear for their survival.

Congratulations, it worked:-) The Album of Dr. Moreau is a novella and only 176 pages long. I know you’ve written novellas before, and I’m curious what you enjoy about this shorter format. Are they easier to write than novels or harder?

I love this length. When I’m writing a novella, I feel like I’m writing a classic science fiction novel. There’s no room for windy tangents—it’s all about the story! There’s enough length to work through the ramifications of an idea, but it’s short enough to allow the reader to do much of the work to fill in the gaps. They’re easier to write than, say, a 500-page novel, but that’s only because I don’t need to take a year or two to write them. Page for page (pound for pound?) they’re harder than novels. Every scene has to do a lot of work, and you have to nail the ending.

OK now for a serious question. If you could be one of the WyldBoyZ (or any other hybrid creature), who would you choose and why?

Finally, a serious question.

Like everyone else I’ve been in lockdown for the past year. It would have been nice to have the immune system of a shark. Not a great white, just a gentle nurse shark would be fine. And now that I’ve reached the age where random stuff is going wrong with my body (I pulled a hamstring while walking last month), maybe I need some gecko DNA to regenerate my tired limbs. I could just break off a leg and start over. Also, I recently read that geckos can regenerate parts of their brains! I’d like to regrow the part of my brain that keeps track of where my phone is.

So, a gecko/shark. I love it! You have a new novel coming out this summer called Revelator. Can you tell us a little about it? And are there any other projects in the works that you can talk about?

I feel it’s my duty to say that if like your fictional murders to be banter-filled romps like the one in The Album of Dr. Moreau, you should probably stay away from Revelator. That book’s an Appalachian horror novel set in the 1930s and 40s, about a family that for generations has worshipped its own private god. But if you like monsters and moonshine, this book’s for you! Both sides of my family came out of the Great Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee, particularly an area called Cades Cove, and this is my horror-based love letter to the place, if that’s such a thing. 

Besides that, I’ve been working on a couple of short stories that I’ve promised to anthologies, and on some TV projects. I’d say more about those, but in Hollywood, if you stare at a project the wrong way it gets canceled and goes up in a puff of smoke. So more later!

I’ve found each of your books to be very different from each other, so I’m not surprised at all to hear about Revelator. Thank you so much for stopping by, Daryl!

---

DARYL GREGORY’s novels and short stories have been translated into a dozen languages and have won multiple awards, including the World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson awards, and have been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Lambda, and Sturgeon awards. His latest books are the novel Revelator (Knopf) and the novella The Album of Dr. Moreau (tor.com). His eight other books include Spoonbenders, We Are All Completely Fine, Afterparty, the Crawford-Award-winning novel Pandemonium, and the collection Unpossible and Other Stories, a Publishers Weekly book of the year. He also teaches writing and is a regular instructor at the Viable Paradise Writing Workshop.

---

Find Daryl & The Album of Dr. Moreau: Website | Twitter | Goodreads | Amazon | Bookshop.org

Read my review of The Album of Dr. Moreau