From conception to publication, Gabriel Squailia's debut novel, Dead Boys, has been in the works for nearly 15 years. Well-known for spinning parties at Jacob's Pillow and Berkshire Museum as DJ BFG, he spent years perfecting his writing before making the jump into the literary world. His hard work and dedication have paid off, because his book, which he describes as a “Greek version of the underworld meets George Romero-style zombies," hits bookstores March 10. In 2000, when I was traveling around Europe, the idea was to write my first novel in Greece, but I ran out of money. When I got back to the United States, I landed in Schenectady at my grandmother's. I tried to find a job, but it wasn't easy. One weekend, I went to visit a friend from college in Great Barrington and while I was there, I ran into a different friend who needed a roommate. She was working at Helsinki, which at the time was located in the Barrington House, so I immediately went down the hall and got a job at Baba Louie’s. So I had a job, a roommate and a friend within a week of hitting the Berkshires. I was immediately impressed by the community here. I got the idea for the book shortly before I moved here, when I was crashing on a friend's couch in Dublin. One night, we went to a massive pub. It was really huge, multiple levels, and there was no dancing, just floors of people talking and drinking. I had this vision of the Underworld, with a corpse bar and actual corpses drinking. They were decomposing and could deconstruct their bodies and use them as weapons. So it was corpses having an eternal world, but with a very Looney Tunes quality to it. I started to see there was more to this city and to this world. The whole journey of the book was figuring out why and how that journey could happen. It took a while before the book took off. I treated it as a serial I was sending out; I would work on it chapter by chapter and send it to my small council of my wife, father and best friend. They would read it chapter by chapter and critique it, and then I would work on trying to glue it together. The drafts are where I developed the world itself. I would go in and do research and then stop, let it cool off for a while. After a while, it seemed like the writing was actually keeping me from the book, so I spent a decade honing my technique in the form of poetry. I had to settle my grudge with the sentence before I felt I could write a book. In 2009, I started the version of Dead Boys that exists today. I found out about author Patrick Rothfuss and the charity World Builders. He has an annual auction where you can bid on reading critiques from different editors and agents, mostly in science fiction and fantasy. I bid on a reading critique from his agent. I knew if I could get him to read at least 100 pages, then I had a shot at getting him to represent the book. I won the auction, and a little while later he emailed me offering to represent the book.
Once you get 20 or 30 rejections, you think there's just no one who is interested in this. While most of the feedback was positive, we were hearing "it's too literary for fantasy" or "it has too much fantasy for a literary novel." We needed to find an overlap. In the summer of 2014, I signed with Talos, and my editor was amazing to work with. Ultimately, I wanted an editor who didn’t just find it interesting, but loved it and wanted to dig into the book. He really was in the basement, making decisions from the underground up, and his enthusiasm brought so much to the editing process. As a writer, I prefer Pittsfield to any place I've lived. I can afford a separate office, which is key. I have an actual office where I can close the door and turn off the Internet, which really helped me get through writing the first draft. The community has been really great, too. That's why I work at Dottie's; to stay plugged in to the community. There are a lot of creative people getting stuff off the ground.
