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Manzarek Rocks Snake Moon

Rock legend Ray Manzarek, keyboardist of The Doors, told SCI FI Wire that his new novel, Snake Moon, is a story of the supernatural set during the Civil War. "It's a story of forbidden love and man's madness, greed, desire and lust," Manzarek said in an interview.

Manzarek said that the novel began life as a screenplay written with his co-writer, Rick Valentine, and film producer Rick Schmidlin. "We wrote a script, a ghost story set in the Civil War," Manzarek said. "[But the film] Cold Mountain had come out just when we finished the script and started shopping it around. ... Well, Civil War movies were dead after Cold Mountain; no one wanted to know anything about it, even if it was a low-budget [film]. So the two Ricks and I had done too much work on it to just let it go, and I said to Valentine, 'Hey, I want to novelize this. I'm going to turn this into a novel. This is too good to just drop.' So that's what I did. I took the script and sat down at home and began the process of turning that into a novel. So some of the verbiage is Rick Valentine's, and most of it is mine."

Although Manzarek is best known as a musician, he is no stranger to writing. Manzarek attended UCLA Film School, where he met The Doors' lead singer, Jim Morrison, and previously published an autobiography called Light My Fire: My Life With the Doors, as well as the rock novel The Poet in Exile. "[Snake Moon] is my third book, and my second novel, so I'm used to [writing]," he said. "It all comes out of scriptwriting. I've written scripts, [and] story and dialogue and description are all in the film scripts. ... It's not difficult to go from writing a script to writing a novel."

What's exciting about writing a novel is that the author disappears into it, Manzarek said. "You journey into that time and place that you're writing about," he said. "For instance, when I was writing Light My Fire: My Life With the Doors, I would relive in my mind's eye those experiences with The Doors. And in Snake Moon, I was there. I was in 1863. I was in the Civil War, and I was with those people, walking with them, the two main characters who go on this journey. I was following them, and I was with the women when the evil Yankees came down south and did bad things to [them]. I was there and watching it. I was eating with them and drinking with them, and I was carousing and I was insane with them. That's the fun of writing a novel: You leave yourself and walk with the characters."

Manzarek is currently researching a new novel, which he described as "a story of mystical thought in ancient Egypt," adding: "It's about Akhenaten, the pharaoh of the 18th dynasty." —John Joseph Adams

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