Who the Hell is Robert Kluver?
An Abbreviated History of Reading and Writing
I’ve loved reading books for as long as I can remember. I recall the moment I first “saw” what I was reading in my mind’s eye. I was in the third grade, sitting on a beanbag in my bedroom, and reading about the adventures of a couple of boys in the Southwest. I forget the book’s title, but not the scene that I imagined while reading it: the moon creating a spotlight through a hole in the ceiling of a cave the boys were lost in. The words formed a movie in my mind. From that moment on, I was hooked.
I read anything I could get my hands on, and my parents obliged. They owned several years of National Geographic issues, and assorted other books, including an unabridged dictionary, that I would pour over in moments of boredom or curiosity. I loved browsing the two bookstores in the mall (I know it’s hard to believe now, but I’m a Gen Xer, and malls with multiple bookstores numbered among the many glories of youth), as well as the small branch library that was closest to home.
But the real treat, because it was somewhat rare, was a trip to downtown Modesto to visit the main branch of the county library. A stately, two-story building with columns around the outside housed the largest collection of books I’d ever seen. This was back in the days of card catalogs. Just past the lobby, there were hundreds of pull-out drawers of organized cards for the thousands of books the library held. There were even audiobooks on cassette and CD. It was all magical.
Like so many folks in horror, I read King and Straub, among many others, from a very young age, and also saw a lot of fucked up films for a kid under the age of ten (Phantasm, Robocop, Nightmare on Elm Street, The Serpent and the Rainbow, to name a few). Horror was woven into the fabric of my identity just as much as my love for books in general.
I also discovered early on that I love to write. In first grade, I wrote and illustrated a kid’s book about a family of bunnies checking books out at the library. A few pieces of lined binder paper stapled together. My first book. I’d go on to love all my English classes and teachers. For the most part, I enjoyed writing book reports and essays.
My first attempt at writing horror was in the summer after sixth grade. My best friend, a year older, lived a couple of doors down. Something, likely a scary movie we’d watched, spurred us to have a writing competition. We were each going to write a horror story. I was excited for the project. I conceptualized a weapon that combined the properties of a boomerang with a saw blade and put it in the hands of someone terrorizing a hotel. I wrote several pages over the course of a few days but then stopped. It was summer and distractions were plentiful.
By the time high school rolled around, home life was tense. My parents’ marriage had fallen apart. Divorce papers were served by an off-duty sheriff during the premier of a Summer Brady Bunch reunion special. Mom had warned me that it was coming, and so I was in my bedroom, not watching the special with the rest of my family, waiting for the hammer to fall.
During the troubled times that followed, I often disappeared for hours at a time into an epic fantasy series that I was in love with. It was then, in freshman year of high school, that I decided that I wanted to become a writer. I wanted to provide other kids going through hard times with a means to escape. Books had helped me get through a rough spot, and I wanted to help others with a book of my own.
Over several months, I wrote about 120 pages of an epic fantasy novel that totally ripped off the David Eddings novels I was reading. I had a great time writing it. It’s when I first discovered that I could get high from writing and creating. And I loved it.
I wrote a handful of stories for English classes in high school. One was a psychological horror story about abortion, and another, pandering to a sappy teacher, was about surviving getting drugs shoved into my face at a party. I cribbed the title for the latter story from Stephen King’s collection Four Past Midnight, which I was reading at the time. I titled the story ‘Four ‘Til Midnight’, or something very close to that.
College was a dream. All reading and writing all the time. Yes, please! Sign me up. I wrote little to no fiction in college, but I developed and honed academic writing skills. In my first semester, in Intro to Philosophy, I wrote a ten-page paper on Socrates for the first assignment. I put a lot of time and attention into it and was pleased with the result. But I was still very pleasantly surprised when the professor asked if she could photocopy my essay and distribute it to the class of 50 as an example of the kind of writing that she was looking for.
That sealed the deal for me. I wanted to write. I needed to write. But at the same time, I also discovered that I didn’t need to write to get high. I met drugs and alcohol, and we became good friends. My classes and writing never suffered because of it, but I stopped writing fiction. I figured artists partied hard and pushed boundaries. So, party I did.
I graduated with honors, determined to put my B.A. in English to use. After an interminably long job search at the turn of the century, I landed a job with a long commute and low pay just so I could have the title of editor. The publisher put out annual legal and judicial directories. For better or worse, the product became increasingly useless as the internet changed everyone’s relationship with data. Still, I acquired invaluable editing and proofreading skills during my five years there.
A year after starting at the publisher, my mom was diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma. Losing her over the course of fourteen months was one of the hardest things I’ve ever gone through. I became deeply depressed and drank heavily for many years to come. I kept a journal while my mom was sick. It’s still hard to go back and read it.
Years went by before I finally pulled myself out of a downward spiral. I started taking better care of my health. One afternoon on my way to my apartment complex’s gym, I was propositioned by a prostitute. (There really is a first time for everything!) I politely declined and went to work out. No regrets there. But later, I turned it into a story. I shared that story with a couple of co-workers. And I got a bit of the writing bug back.
Around the time that I met my amazing, wonderful wife, I wrote a story about a kid who lived his life inside a video game. I was proud of it at the time. But I had no clue where to send it. I fired it off to a dozen different literary magazines; nowhere it belonged. I realized that I should read the magazines I was submitting to, so that I’d know what they published. But there were so many, and I didn’t know where to start. It was daunting and expensive. I wasn’t even aware of horror magazines at the time. The story was rejected all around.
Tragedy struck again, taking away my father in an instant, and I stopped thinking about writing altogether. And though he was gone in an instant, he was kept alive in name only in a coma for two weeks following a medi-flight to Stanford. Our family had to make the painful decision to remove life support. I was subsumed in grief once again, but I was also getting married. The strength of my wife and our relationship went a long way towards carrying me through an intensely sad time.
I returned to school to get my Paralegal Certificate and ended up working for the same boutique personal injury law firm for a decade. My editing and proofreading skills were utilized again! I prided myself on providing the attorneys with error-free court filings, motions, and correspondence. But after a decade of that, I needed to do something different. It felt like life was slipping away as time fast-forwarded through the years. I wanted to do something personally meaningful. I still wanted to write.
I resigned from the law firm and decompressed for about a month. Feeling refreshed after that, it was time to start writing. I got about 60 pages into a novel I’d tentatively titled The Psychedelic Lawyer before I set it aside, bored. I started off determined to capitalize on my experience with lawyers but ultimately decided to leave that world in the past. Who knows. Maybe at some point The Psychedelic Lawyer will live on to litigate another day.
After a years-long drought, I started reading novels again. At some point, I discovered one of the big horror podcasts and devoured episodes. The episodes were like guideposts in this great big forest of horror that I was re-discovering. I was led to Chuck Wendig’s Book of Accidents and had a really great time with it. By the time I finished reading it, I knew that I wanted, and quite possibly needed, to write horror. Not that I thought I could outdo Chuck. Not at all. He’s one of the greats. It was just inspiring, what he accomplished with that novel. And it reminded me of what I’d loved about so many of Stephen King’s books (small town horror, giving evil a voice, the modern Gothic tone and feel of the stories).
I read horror nearly exclusively after that. I made mental notes of things that I thought worked well and also things that didn’t. I started playing with ideas for a horror novel of my own. Then I began writing what would become Send Me Your Nightmares.
It was a wild, cathartic journey into uncharted territory. I found that writing nightmares as fiction gave me a sense of freedom and creativity. Anything could happen because the story inside the story wasn’t real. And once cancer reared its ugly head in the story, I found I was allowing myself a much-needed space to write about the grief of losing my mother.
I set a daily writing goal of 1,000 words. Over the course of about seven months, I had a 117,000-word manuscript. It went through a couple of drafts, and then multiple editing and proofreading passes. And it’s now a leaner, meaner 82,000-word novel.
(Folks, I’m available for the copy-editing and proofreading of your fiction.)
Send Me Your Nightmares has been out for nearly six months. Though a supernatural thriller, SMYN is a very personal project. I hope that it has found its way into your TBR pile (or your finished pile!).
If you made it this far, thank you so much! Please stick around because I’m just getting started! I’m 35,000 words into an eco-horror coming-of-age novella that I’m very excited for.
Robert Kluver 