Shawna Ervin-Gore: What fueled your interest in working on the Predator series?
Nancy Collins: The fact that I could set it in almost any period of world history had its attraction, because the Predator stories tend to follow a certain pattern. The interest comes from the changes that can be made in the setting and characters to make the story new and interesting. It's a real challenge to work under those conditions.
Ervin-Gore: And the setting you chose to work with this time around was the Ozarks during the Civil War.
Collins: The idea was something like "What if we did The Red Badge of Courage but with a Predator in it?"
Ervin-Gore: So the Civil War is an area of interest for you, then?
Collins: Well, I'm from the south, and I had family that fought in the Civil War, on the confederacy side obviously. I'm from Arkansas, but they were all living in Tennessee, Alabama, Texas. We're pretty southern -- third or fourth generation, maybe even fifth.
Ervin-Gore: As soon as I got a few pages into the story, I realized how much trouble these guys were in. It's not like they have tracking equipment or automatic weapons like some that have fought the Predator had.
Collins: These are guys that -- at that point -- had repeating rifles. Carbines were created for the Civil War and Indian fighting, so it wasn't quite a musket, but it wasn't much different.
Ervin-Gore: So you researched all the weapons from that time?
Collins: I already had reference material, and I tracked down a book about Confederate and guerrilla warfare in the Ozarks, which is probably the least covered campaign, news-wise, of the whole war. The battles -- the Trans-Mississippi Theater as they called it -- out on what was then the frontier were far bloodier and more hazardous than bigger battles because the locals tended to get involved without any real leadership or organization.
Ervin-Gore: And it was in that setting that you found your lead character, Jesse, whose older brother is named Frank. Is this a coincidence, or are these guys who I think they are?
Collins: They're very much the James brothers, I just didn't want to stick the last names on there. Everything that happens to Jesse -- outside of the Predator (laughs) -- everything he talks about and everything he describes, unfortunately really did happen to him, which is kind of why he was the way he was. He was a dangerous man from a young age, but not cruel; he just had a lot of really bad things happen to him early on, and it just hardened the way he saw the world.
Ervin-Gore: Jesse's character is so driven and almost brutal, to the point that he understands better than anyone else in the regiment what the Predator is there for.
Collins: It's not only that Jesse recognizes himself in the Predator, but the Predator recognizes himself in Jesse; it's the recognition of one to the other, basically recognizing the beast in themselves and each other.
Ervin-Gore: So is this a type of character you're drawn to creating, one that's so driven and hard?
Collins: In a lot of ways, he's cut from the same cloth as some of my other characters, such as the one I'm best known for, which is Sonya Blue. She's a vampire-slash-vampire slayer, and she's a very focused character who is basically -- in terms of being dangerous -- not someone you'd want to mess with. She's not evil, but she's genuinely predatory, like a panther is predatory.
Ervin-Gore: She's like Jesse that way, or Jesse's like her.
Collins: They're both shaped basically by the environment they've had to survive in. You have to be hard and deadly in response to the world, if the world you live in is hard and deadly. At the same time, they're trying to maintain some hold on humanity and trying to adhere to some central core value system, which may not be shared by anyone else.
Ervin-Gore: So bringing the Predator into a story like Jesse's isn't even like bringing a force of evil in -- it becomes more of a force, period.
Collins: They're basically the ultimate hunter mentality as opposed to the hunter/gatherer mentality. By defeating those things which you consider worthy, you absorb it's strength, it's mojo, whatever you'd call it. The only reason to kill in this society is to take on power. It's more of a test against yourself, against nature, the power of that which is stalked. But even as it's hunting him, the Predator recognizes that Jesse's the meanest son of a bitch in the forest.