Robert Taylor interviews Hugh Sterbakov about

City Under the Moon

So…why Werewolves?

Primal, gutwrenching fear.

I was a neurotic kid to begin with, but An American Werewolf in London pretty much destroyed whatever frayed sanity I ever had. I was only eight when it came out, so I didn’t even see it. But the images were all over the place. They showed a glimpse of the transformation during the Academy Awards, and it was like a nuclear bomb went off in my head. And then the Thriller video was everywhere you turned. I became obsessively afraid of werewolves—it was a serious problem for me and my parents.

The fascinating thing is that the story is on a scope we rarely see in horror novels.

This is a massive premise. I don’t think werewolves have been done like this before—not in this scope, and not in this style. I’m attacking the mythology from the perspective of modern science, politics and warfare. The theme is old world vs. new world, and that manifests into struggles between supernatural and science, monsters and military, and man and technology—but as big as it gets, it’s an extremely character-driven story. The perspectives stay intimate and personal the whole way through.

We’re at the crime scenes, the hospitals, the laboratories, we’re on the hunt for the man behind it all—we’re even in the White House. Each of those story threads has to stay true to its natural tone. Sticking to one perspective, one voice or one flavor would be doing a disservice to the premise.

You seem to wear the pop culture aspect of the monsters on your sleeve…after all, you named one of the protagonists Lon.

Lon’s preferred place to live is on the Internet. He’s a fanboy in the worst sense of the word, the kind of person that takes offense when you disagree with him about subjective things. His passion is horror literature and film, and he’s a self-appointed werewolf expert—he took that name himself, after Lon Chaney, Jr, the star of the original Wolf Man.

Lon is my point of view to address the presence of werewolves in pop culture. Right now they’re everywhere, but they’ve been swept up in this paranormal romance trend to the point where the core of the concept is no longer a horrifying monster, but an outcast hearthrob.

Obviously, that’s not my angle. And it drives Lon insane. But I couldn’t just pretend that’s not the world we live in. My characters had to come into this scenario with all of the preconceived notions that any of us would. It actually worked to my advantage, because it’s so pervasive that I could leave it in the subtext. And it was very easy to rejuvinate the monster.

Imagine watching someone go through an agonizing, violent transformation into a werewolf—right in front of you, on the street, in a crowd—and bullets won’t stop it, and it’s so fast, and it turns to you. Suddenly, the last thing you’re thinking about is brooding teenagers.

Tell us more about Lon and the book’s other hero, Brianna Tildascow. They are about as far removed from one another as one could imagine.

Tildascow is a counterterror operative, immersed around the clock in the most dangerous cat and mouse games our world has ever known. Unofficially, she’s an assassin. Ruthless by design and necessity. But there’s no glamour here—she’s no Armani-clad James Bond. She’s a rusty, bent, blood-crusted scalpel.

Instinctually, Tildascow is a killer. She uses her job to find the right person to target. The government is well aware of this—they know she’s dangerous—but she’s competent and intelligent and skilled, and she has no self-preservation instinct. That’s a rare and valuable commodity, and it makes her a perfect guinea pig for the government.

On the other hand, Lon is soft and sheltered. He’s one of those people who isolates himself to protect his own ego. He’s no dummy, but he hasn’t done any self-examination. And he’s certainly never been exposed to the kind of human hatred that Tildascow studies every day.

So you’ve got Brianna Tildascow, the master manipulator, and Lon Toller, the wet putty. The stakes are so high that Tildascow can’t afford to worry about personal ramifications for Lon. She’s forced to play shell game with his emotions throughout the entire ordeal. And there are definitely moments where she crosses the line.

But someone doesn’t just become like Tildascow by accident, and not overnight either. So Lon might remind her of ghosts from her past, and that creates an interesting dynamic between them and within them.

I have to ask, where did you come up with the name Tildascow?

Oh man, I know this name is going to haunt me. Nobody can figure out how to pronounce it. Not in real life, or in the novel. It rhymes with “bill has cow,” or, as she says, “kill jazz now.”

But her name had to be inelegant, like a compound fracture. She has always felt like pieces from different puzzles jammed together. Her mother was a porcelain-skinned soul singer and her father was a scruffy plumber, and yet they were perfect for each other. But that leaves her somewhat adrift between these identities.

After the book’s villain, Demetrius Valenkov, unleashes the werewolf disease into New York City, his message isn’t one of destruction. He wants the U.S. to figure out a cure. Without revealing too much, tell us more about him.

Demetrius Valenkov is a phantom—never present, and yet always there. They only see him on surveillance cameras, and his eyes are boiling with merciless rage, and his only message is written on his shirt: find a cure.

As Tildascow hunts Valenkov, she realizes she’s dealing with a strategic mastermind. He’s always ahead of them, taunting and toying, knocking her off-balance and keeping her from catching up. As someone who lives on the hunt, his evasiveness is more than just frustrating to her—it’s frightening. It causes her to doubt her own instincts. But gamesmanship isn’t Valenkov’s goal. He doesn’t care about her, or anyone. His ransom is clear, and simple, and maddeningly unreasonable, and it’s repeatedly thrown in their faces.

Imagine trying to find a cure for AIDS or smallpox or the cold in a matter of days, as an epidemic spreads through Manhattan, ever threatening the mainland. It’s unrealistic. Impossible.

So Tildascow asks herself: If Valenkov is so brilliant, can’t he see that his demand can’t be met? And if that’s the case, could he have another, ulterior motive? That’s the puzzle she has to put together while she chases his dust.

Can you give us some insight into the process of crafting those intricate action set-pieces? The New Years Eve one is especially jaw-dropping.

A location like Times Square on New Year’s Eve is great because it conjures a visceral sensation—you’re already there; all I have to do is keep you there. I’m going to bet you haven’t spent much time thinking about how authorities would react if werewolves suddenly transformed in the Times Square crowd, but you can play some of it out in your mind. I had to stay true to those expectations, while throwing my curveballs at them. It’s horrific, but there’s a black comedy to it, and I fully embraced both of those flavors.

And again, my goal was to put you right into the moment with the experts. The perspective above the crowd comes from Marine snipers. I made sure their positioning was appropriate, I studied their weapons and I had an actual USMC scout sniper help me write their dialogue. The result is like a special effect in a film—you shouldn’t notice it, because you’ll be immersed in the verisimilitude.

Is this just the first in a series of novels, or is it self-contained?

This story is entirely self-contained, and it has a definitive ending. I’d like to meet some of these characters again, maybe in different types of adventures. But you definitely won’t be left hanging at the end of this one.

Aside from your Emmy-nominated work on Robot Chicken, most readers will know you from your cult-favorite comic series Freshmen. Tell us a little bit about altering your writing style for a novel and why they’ll love the book.

I’m so proud of Freshmen, and I feel truly blessed that it’s the work that I’m known for. City Under the Moon is a horror thriller and Freshmen is a romantic comedy, but they both have tremendous genre crossover.

I do think Freshmen fans will recognize my voice right away. The characters in City are self-aware, clever, funny and flawed, just like our Freshmen crew, but they’re thrust into a wildly different circumstance. There are a lot of similarities between Lon, the introverted horror blogger in City and Norrin, the embattled, powerless team leader in Freshmen. They’re both their own worst enemy, and both starving for validation.

Robot Chicken also taught me a lot about pacing, because it’s so economical. We fire jokes like a machinegun, and any word or gesture that can be cut should be cut. Any idea has to be distilled down its core, and then rebuilt so that the final sketch is always in service of that idea. The result is masterfully controlled chaos. Working with those guys vastly improved the precision of my writing.

Give us a few teases of what readers have in store for themselves after they finish the free preview pages.

Werewolves. Lots and lots of werewolves.

Oh come on, you can do better than that.

A hundred thousand werewolves.

Much better.