BRENDAN DENEEN and I go back a while. Brendan took over as my editor at St Martin’s Press for the final novels in the original AUTUMN and HATER series. Now, in his role as Editor and Head of Film at TV at BLACKSTONE PUBLISHING, he’s edited SHADOW LAB VOLUME TWO – a cracking anthology that hits the shelves at the end of this month featuring a new short story by me, THE UNINVITED. I’ll share lots more about SHADOW LAB in the coming weeks.
Brendan is also the author of a number of excellent original novels, as well as a string of movie/comic tie-in books. A particular favourite of mine is his horror novel THE CHRYSALIS – a story about a young couple who move into a house and find a bizarre creature in the basement that begins to exert a horrific influence on the lives and relationship.
Today’s the day Brendan’s new novel – TRACER – hits the shelves, and it’s another corker. A story that reads like an action-filled hybrid of MAD MAX and BLADE RUNNER, I lapped it up and I recommend you check it out too.
In the near future — after a virus has swept the globe and the oil has run dry — what’s left of humanity has created a new technology, one that turns plastic back into oil. A mad scramble for resources ensues, with new cities being built on the seven largest landfills in the world. Plastic is the new gold.
Tracer is the adopted daughter and hired gun for the president of PH City—built outside of what used to be Los Angeles, atop the Puente Hills landfill. When a distress call comes from the landfill city outside of Las Vegas, the president of PH sends Tracer to answer it.
But Trace soon discovers this mission is more than she bargained for, and that a dangerous deal has been struck without her knowledge, sending her further down a complex and violent path…
Brendan’s experiences over his career to date have given him an enviable insight into many aspects of publishing and film development and production. To mark the release of TRACER (and the impending release of SHADOW LAB VOLUME TWO) I asked him a few questions about what he does and how he does it. First, I asked him to summarise his career to date.
“I moved to NYC when I was 25 in the hopes of being an actor and a writer. I proceeded to act, write, direct, and produce (plays and short films) for the following three years – and had a great time doing so. Then the temp agency I was working for asked if I’d want to go on a job interview at a literary agency. I wasn’t really looking for a full-time job at the time, but I thought “Hmm, maybe I can get a literary agent out of this!” So, I took the interview. When I showed up, I was shocked to discover that it was the William Morris Agency (before it eventually got eaten by Endeavor). I had a great year there, and during that time, my unpublished kids book got picked up by a theatre company and ran off-off-Broadway (it even got a great New York Times review!). After a year at WMA, I ended up working as a book-to-film executive for infamous uber-producer Scott Rudin and I survived there for two years (didn’t get much writing done during that time). As if that wasn’t enough of a pressure-cooker, that led to a job working for Bob & Harvey Weinstein(!!), where I stayed for four years (the last two years of the original Miramax and the first two years of The Weinstein Company). During this time, my first comic book series was published, entitled SCATTERBRAIN, followed closely after that by FLASH GORDON. That was a pretty big deal for me as an author and a lover of comics.
After my inevitable falling out with Harvey, I became a literary and book-to-film agent, which lasted about two and a half years. At that point, I was lucky enough to be offered an editorial job at Macmillan, where I stayed for over eight years, first at St. Martin’s Press and then at Tor/Forge. During that time, I not only launched my own film/TV company within Macmillan, I also had my first novel published, THE NINTH CIRCLE. As great as having my first comic published was, the first novel was even better.
Since then, my writing career has (thankfully) gone into overdrive. My next graphic novel was THE ISLAND OF MISFIT TOYS, and then I wrote my bestselling book so far, NIGHT NIGHT GROOT for Marvel/Disney, followed by three sequels. After that, my next novel came out, THE CHRYSALIS, which is in currently in development as a feature film. I quickly got hired to write books based on well-known characters, including MORBIUS, GREEN ARROW, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY (again), and ALIEN.
After Macmillan, I worked at production company/packager Assemble Media for a few years, and then ended up at Blackstone Publishing, replicating the role I had at Macmillan. One of my co-workers read the first 50 pages of a novel that I had been working on for a decade and loved it, and quickly snapped up the publishing rights. That book is TRACER, and it hits bookstores today!”
I asked Brendan about the genesis of TRACER, and whether he has plans to expand the story.
“Over ten years ago, I was cleaning my kitchen and was staring at a piece of plastic, trying to figure out if it was recyclable. Unfortunately, it didn’t have that tell-tale triangle, so I dumped it into the garbage. That got me to thinking: How much plastic is thrown out every day? (And that doesn’t include all the plastic we put in recycling bins that never actually gets recycled.) As I continued to clean the kitchen that night, I was thinking about how plastic comes from oil – and how valuable plastic would be if oil ran out. Curious, I looked online to see if it was possible to turn plastic BACK into oil, and sure enough it was a technology that was in the works – a process called pyrolysis. My brain was on fire at this point. What if there was a virus that had wiped out most of humanity? (This was six years before COVID.) What if oil had run dry? What if pyrolysis had been perfected by then? Wouldn’t landfills – chock full of plastic – suddenly become the most important places on the planet? I looked up the largest landfills on Earth, and there are six of them (seven, if you count The Patch in the Pacific Ocean). The setting for the book came into mind – a landfill city, erected on top of mountains of garbage. As for the characters, I’ve always had a fondness for mercenaries (maybe stretching back to Han Solo), so Tracer was born – someone who tracks down plastic for her boss. Throw in a mission to another landfill city, some backstabbing, and a little romance – and TRACER was born!
Interestingly, the events in TRACER were originally supposed to be two novels – but I realized that it would end on too huge of a cliffhanger, so I combined them into a single book. The novel ends in a very satisfying way (I think!) but it also leaves it wide open for sequels. I would LOVE to write a sequel set on a city built on The Patch, which is (sadly) a mass of plastic in the Pacific Ocean.”
If you’ve been following my writing for any length of time, you’ll know that I describe myself as a frustrated filmmaker, and that many of my earlier novels were originally conceived as movie pitches. Given Brendan’s pretty unique dual life as an author and development exec, I asked him if he wrote his own stories with print or film in mind, and how he develops his novels.
“You would think that with all my Hollywood experience, I would write stuff that is a bit more readily-adaptable, but TRACER is probably way too expensive to make a movie or TV series. It shares some DNA with MAD MAX, so the fact that FURIOSA did not do very well doesn’t really help my case. But that didn’t matter to me when I wrote TRACER. It was an idea what came almost literally out of the garbage can, and I HAD to write it – not because it would make a great movie or show but because it was clawing its way out (I’m sure many artists can sympathize with that feeling!). I think my last original novel, THE CHRYSALIS, was written with film in mind a bit more, so I guess it’s no coincidence that it was optioned by Paramount before it was published (which then expired) and it’s now in development again with a legendary horror director and an A-list horror producer. I’ve also been dabbling in short stories (which are super hot in Hollywood), and those are definitely being written with film and TV in mind! But sometimes you have an idea and you HAVE to write it – for no other reason that it won’t let you rest otherwise!”
I asked Brendan about writing tie-in books – how those opportunities arise, and how it feels dabbling in other people’s (much loved) IPs.
“I feel really, really lucky to have been given the opportunity to write the franchises that I have. The first “franchise” I was asked to write was FLASH GORDON, and that’s a movie I saw (and loved) in 1980, so that was an absolute no-brainer. I had SO much fun writing that character for several years. I got to do “my” version of a legendary character. That happened thanks to the editor of SCATTERBRAIN, who asked me if I wanted to pitch King Features – and luckily, they loved my version! I also grew up watching the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer special every single year – and LOVED it — so I went after those rights and was allowed to write an ISLAND OF MISFIT TOYS “side story.” If you pause the Rudolph movie when he sneaks away from the island, you can read my graphic novel and it fits in PERFECTLY. That project was honestly a dream come true.
I also grew up reading comics (a LOT of them – I had 15,000 comic books by the time I graduated high school — #nerdalert) and so I have been pitching ideas to Marvel and DC since the late 1980s(!). At one point, I pitched Disney Publishing GOOD NIGHT, DOOM, a parody of Good Night, Moon starring a baby Dr. Doom (I actually wrote the whole book as part of my pitch). At that point, Disney didn’t own Fox yet, but they loved the idea – so we picked another “ooh” character, which turned out to be Groot. That book came out a month before Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 and was a massive seller – so much so that they asked me to write three more books in the ROCKET AND GROOT picture book series.
At some point, I met with an editor at Titan Books and I handed him a copy of THE CHRYSALIS. He read the first chapter on the subway and within probably fifteen minutes of our meeting, he emailed and said, “Would you want to write a MORBIUS novel?” I think my answer was something like, “F*ck yes I would!!!”
I have read SO many Spider-Man comics in my life, and always thought Morbius was cool as hell. The best part is that Titan basically let me choose my own story to write – so I went through Morbius’s entire history and picked a completely random place to set my story – set between two issues of the black-and-white Marvel magazine Vampire Tales from the 1970s. Like THE ISLAND OF MISFIT TOYS, if you put down one of those Vampire Tales issues and read my book, you can then read the next issue of the magazine and it fits in perfectly. I love doing stuff like that.
I then got a call from a different editor at Titan who said something like, “You wrote MORBIUS for us, and you wrote four ROCKET AND GROOT picture books – would you like to adapt Annihilation: Conquest for us but with a focus on the Guardians of the Galaxy? To be honest, I had never read that crossover, and I’m not super interested in doing novelizations, so I said something like “I’ll do it – but only if I can put my own spin on it.” And they were fine with that. So, basically, I was allowed to use that mega-event as a rough outline – and then was able to write my own version of the Guardians of the Galaxy’s origin. It was really, really fun.
At some point during all of this, Covid hit and I was bored at home for long stretches of time (like a lot of people), so I started doing some fan fiction. I wrote a new Alpha Flight #29 (deep nerd cut) and a Grendel comic book that takes place between issue #12 and #13 of Matt Wagner’s classic series (an even deeper nerd cut). I also wrote a synopsis for my own version of Alien 3, since that movie has always bothered me so much. Since Titan publishes Alien books, I sent the synopsis to my MORBIUS editor and asked if they would ever do an “alternate” Alien 3 novel. His answer was something like, “Uhhhh, NO.” A year and a half later, I got an email from him out of the blue with the subject line ALIEN. He had finally read my synopsis and loved it – but he asked me if I would change the characters and make it an original Alien novel. I said something like, “Uhhhh, HELL YES!” And out of that, ALIEN: UNCIVIL WAR was borne. Yet another dream come true.
Titan also just hired me to write an upcoming short story starring a certain Cimmerian barbarian. An absolute bucket list character for me.
Like I said, I’ve been really, really lucky – and I am very grateful for every single opportunity.”
And what’s next for him? “I’m dabbling with two ideas for my next book. One is super commercial (romantasy) and the other one is not very commercial at all (an “important” book). I’m not sure which one will win!”
With TRACER published today, and SHADOW LAB VOLUME TWO coming up at the end of the week, Brendan’s a busy guy and I’m grateful he took the time to answer my questions. Do yourself a favour – if you’re a fan of character-driven, action-packed dystopian fiction, grab a copy of TRACER today.
