By Kenn Gold, Jim Iaccino & Jennifer Iaccino

Tom Sniegoski is the author of the Fallen book series, upon which ABC Family based their summer mini-series about fallen angels seeking redemption.  His current work, The Brimstone Network is a three part series (the first book was released last month, with follow ons due in December 2008 and January 2009).  The Brimstone Network is a secret agency whose mission it is to protect the Earthly realm from supernatural threats that threaten the planet.  When the entire Brimstone Network is betrayed and killed, it falls to young Bram Stone, the son of the network’s leader, to rebuild a team to counter the menace.

Tom recently came on the MediaBlvd radio show, Dr and Mrs Who to talk about the series and his inspirations for writing it.

Tell us about the plot and the main characters, and what the series is about?

The Brimstone Network is inspired by the old pulp adventure novels.  At the time of the organizations conception, it was a secret organization that existed to protect the Earth from the supernatural.  What I establish in the book is that there have been magical barriers that separate the Earthly realm from various supernatural realms that would like nothing better to come through and have a bite of the human race, or set up some nefarious thing on the planet.  The Brimstone Network was established to beat back those supernatural forces and prevent them from ever getting a foothold on the Earth.   In the prologue of the very first book, we actually see the very first member of what would become the Brimstone Network, and it’s pretty much the equivalent of a caveman. 

I couldn’t help but think of the first X-files movie with the caveman being possessed by the alien force.  Or maybe 2001 A Space Odyssey?

Less sci-fi more horror on my end though.  So this organization has existed pretty much since the dawn of humanity.  When the book opens, we have the current Brimstone Network which has kind of come out into the open and the human race knows about them now.  That’s because of the A-bomb tests in the 50’s which have basically sundered the curtains, the veils that exist and punched larger holes in the supernatural realm.  So things are coming through more often, so the network has had to come out into the open and say, “We’re here to protect you.”  They are kind like a worldly organization that exists to protect the world from any supernatural threats.  The main plot of the first book is that there is a traitor in the Brimstone Network who happens to be working with some of these darker forces.  These darker forces basically assassinate all the members of the Brimstone Network, all over the world and in the main base of operation.  Everyone is killed in this really horrific attack, and the supernatural forces think, “Hey, we’ve just eliminated the Brimstone Network, and the world is ours.” But, the leader, has a child, which nobody realizes.  This child has been hidden away, and he is the failsafe-  in case of emergency break glass- and his name is Bram Stone.  He is called upon with the demise of the current team, to build a new Brimstone Network to deal with these horrible threats that are going to overrun the world.  But he’s only 12.  That’s the problem.  He’s very young, very inexperienced, and has this huge responsibility thrust upon him.  He gathers together these special potential agents that his father has put together files on, and they’re all kids or people around his age who all have special, supernatural based talents that could help deal with these threats in a more effective manner.  These aren’t people who just happen to know magic.  There’s a cripple boy who is also telekinetic.  He has one of the most powerful brains on the planet.  There’s a teenage girl who happens to be a werewolf.  There’s a little creature from an alternate universe, named Bogie, who is a transporter.  He can open up doorways to other realms and can get them where they want to go quickly.  And my favorite character is named Mr. Stitch.  He’s basically Frankenstein’s monster, but he’s put together from the finest pieces of all the Brimstone agents that have ever lived.  Occasionally, these pieces have memory.  His kidney will remember something that’s very important to the current case, or the arm will remember certain magical spells to get them out of a certain problem.  He was a great character to write.  Mr. Stitch was constructed to be the messenger to go and find the son and bring him home to begin the mission to find the new network. 

What drew you to this wonderland?

Almost everything I do has something to do with the supernatural or the paranormal or mythology.  So the world of The Brimstone Network is just a combination of all these things I’ve read about since childhood.  It’s a big melting pot of all these things I’ve loved, thrown in and stirred liberally.  When I was in San Diego (at Comic Con), I was on a panel with a writer by the name of Mel Odom.  He’s a very good writer, a very nice guy and we were talking and he asked what I was working on now.  So I described The Brimstone Network to him, and his eyes just bugged out and he said, “That’s a pulp!” I said, “Don’t let anybody know that.”  Your average publisher these days doesn’t know what that is.  You kind of describe the feelings these old time stories have and they wouldn’t get it.  You have to disguise it in the masks and costumes as something else.  It’s a “young boy’s adventure”, and you do this fancy dance.  Anybody who knows me knows exactly what I’m doing three pages into the book. 

The revelation of the traitor is really something in this book, with his motivations.  Where did that come from?

Tom Sniegoski at the ABC Family booth at Comic Con 2007.

How did you come up with the name for The Brimstone Network?

The name has been something that I literally had floating around in my mind and my file cabinet for the last 15 years.  I never could find the right story to go with such a great title.  One day, things just kind of clicked into place.  I was like, “Brimstone Network- Abraham Stone.  Bram Stone.  Brimstone.”  It was kind of like this weird domino type thing and in an hour and a half I had all these crazy characters and this crazy situation and the title fit perfectly. 

What inspired you to write this series?

When I was growing up I fascinated with the reprints of the old pulp magazines from the ‘60s, like Bantam.  Bantam started publishing Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, The Shadow, and The Spider.  I was probably only like 7, 8 or 9 years old when I was seeing these things, but I was absolutely fixated on them.  I couldn’t go into a department store without gravitating towards the book racks, and seeing these books and begging my mother to buy them for me, and trying to read them to figure out what it was that I was reading.  They were a little above my reading level at that time, but I was absolutely fascinated with them.  And as I grew older those became some of my favorite books.  I love the old pulp heroic adventure stories and The Brimstone Network is maybe my way of introducing some 9 or 12 year old out there to the kind of story that got me into the types of things I love to read about.

I couldn’t help but make correlations to The Brimstone Network and the 2^nd Hellboy movie.  I know you wrote a Hellboy novel also.  I think Hellboy is a tribute to those pulps also.

Oh without a doubt!  Mike Mignola, the creator of Hellboy is a pretty good friend of mine and it all comes from the same place.  He used to haunt the bookstores when he grew up in California.  He would haunt the bookstores at Berkley buying these old pulp reprints that he absolutely loved.  Like H.P. Lovecraft, and Kenneth Robeson who did the Doc Savage books.  It’s so funny because when we get together it’s just like this collective nerd fest of all this stuff we kind of like and carry around inside our skulls, and try to get out on to a piece of paper to show how much we love it.  

So we actually have the second book coming out in December, and then the third in January, right?

Yeah, right, the three books are written.  Depending on sales for the next two, there might be more, there might not.  I kind of brought the third book to a little bit of a conclusion.  It kind of comes to a nice finish, but if the publisher said to me they wanted to do more, I could very easily do more.  We’ll see. 

I can’t help but think that ABC Family or one of the other networks might take an option out on the series. 

Personally, I think it would be  a great TV or movie series.  It’s a great adventure series. 

You’ve said you don’t ever intend your books to be political, but here we’ve got in the news lately, the Hadron collider, which some people are worried might tear the universe apart.  What if it opens up a gateway to the supernatural? (laughs)  So you have a massive disaster, and there is this young inexperienced leader, with no experience what so ever who has to come in and take over.  Your stuff does seem kind of to reflect the real world.  In the later books of the Fallen, you have “The Powers” who are ignoring what they are supposed to be paying attention to and all of this terrible stuff is happening.  It really mirrors our political world. 

Honest to God, I wasn’t thinking that when I wrote it.  The first Brimstone was written a good 8 or 9 months ago.

So you are pre-cognizant too?

I guess so.  I can’t tell you how often people do that to me when I’m at signings. People came up to me and say, “What you really were saying here is.,.” and they’ll come out with this really outrageous thing that when you think of it that particular way, it could mean that.  It didn’t when I was writing it, but it could now.  So I nod my head and smile and look a lot smarter than I actually am.

How long did it take you to write the first novel?

The first Brimstone Network took me about 3 and a half months. 

Is that pretty fast?

It’s average.  Between 3 and 4 months is about average.  The Remy books take a little longer, but my other stuff like Billy Hooten Owl Boy, or Hellboy, those are about four months.

Do you ever get writers block?

Oh yeah, big time.  My current situation is I get stuck in slow motion.  Like the book I’ve been writing, I love what I’m writing, but I’m not doing it fast enough.  I’m not producing the amount of pages I need to be producing on a daily basis.  I’m just stuck in low gear, not in my usual gear where I’m writing 8 or 10 pages a day.  I’ve been doing like 3 or 4 which is not good.