Fantasy novelist Sam Sykes loves going over-the-top

Even among fantasy readers, Sam Sykes is not a household name, despite being the son of best-selling author Diana Gabaldon ("Outlander").

But anyone who has been to a book panel at Phoenix Comicon over the past several years will recognize the tall goofball making snarky asides about Brandon Sanderson, Patrick Rothfuss and other fellow fantasists. His infectious humor and obvious love of fantasy novels has made him a fan favorite at conventions across the country.

Both those traits shined in a recent chat at First Draft Book Bar in Changing Hands Phoenix. The Scottsdale author, who is celebrating the release of his fourth novel, "The City Stained Red," at the Poisoned Pen on Saturday, Jan. 31, chatted about his love of comicons, old-school fantasy novels and what being an adventurer really means.

Question: My introduction to your work came after seeing you as a panelist at Phoenix Comicon. I'd never heard of you, but you stood out on a panel full of some of the biggest names in fantasy.

Answer: When I was starting, it was a little intimidating, but my natural tendency is to crack a joke when tensions get too high. It's much easier to get along with someone when they are laughing along with you. I was a drama kid in high school, so I have a strong desire and ability to perform, and I enjoy doing it.

Q: Since then, you seem to have become a professional panelist.

A: Well, Phoenix Comicon keeps inviting me back each year, despite the fact that my panels get more and more obscene each year. But it's not just the big ones like Phoenix; I just came back from a small con in Detroit and it was very relaxing. But there's something about being in front of a room of 500 people and just talking about things you love and getting them all excited about those things.

Q: Are you intimidated by anyone?

A: The only person I'm still not sure how to act around is Brandon Sanderson. Because he is an encyclopedia of the genre, he just knows everything.

Sanderson is a lot of things I'm not — a Number 1 best-seller, for one thing — but he's also very thorough in his writing. He understands all of what he is doing before he actually writes it down, which probably contributes to his seemingly breakneck writing pace.

I'm very much seat-of-the-pants writing. I'll come to a conflict and not know where to go, so I'll sit on it for a day or two and then figure something out that was completely not what I saw coming.

That has its upsides and downsides. It works for me because it's a lot rawer, and I enjoy that electric emotion in my writing, it's like handling a live wire. But that does mean that it takes me a lot longer, and it might not be as clean as Sanderson.

Q: You mentioned being in drama. How did you transition to writing?

A: My favorite part of being a drama kid was writing our own plays. Every semester, we would write, direct and star in our own play. I had tons of fun with that. Mostly it goes down to the fact that writing was all I was ever good at, and I didn't want to do anything else.

But it's actually an easy transition. Acting and writing are essentially the same thing — getting inside a character's head and figuring out what makes them tick. The difference is with writing you are inside several different characters and you have to figure out how to keep them from getting what they want.

That's the biggest part of writing, figuring out why your characters can't be happy. I have little patience for some writers who act like it's some mystical art. It is at its core something simple and primal, it's understanding why people are people, and why they do what they do.

Q: Tell us about "The City Stained Red."

A: The book comes out on Jan. 27 and I'm quite proud of it. Although it's my fourth novel with these characters, it doesn't require knowledge of the previous trilogy, so you can just dive right in. Basically it's about broken people in a broken world trying to become unbroken. It's got demons, cultists, a lot of murder and intrigue … and a fart joke or two.

It takes place in the desert city Cier'Djaal. The main hero, Lenk, has come here because he thinks it would be a great place to hang up his sword and stop killing. He wants to settle down, but all of his companions, including the woman he loves, are having a hard time accepting that. That's the basic conflict.

But the same time, though, the city is in the middle of a thieves war. And against all of that, two foreign armies are camped in the city. So there's three huge bombs. And they all explode at the same time.

Q: Sort of a Quentin Tarantino fantasy novel.

A: I like that description; it's accurate. It's over-the-top, but I can't resist over-the-top. I grew up reading "Dragonlance," so my favorite novels were all over-the-top. I can't resist monsters and magic and crazy swords and whatnot. But what I really love about "City Stained Red" is that while it is over-the-top, it all makes perfect sense.

Q: There's also a joy to it.

A: That comes from reading those fun "Dragonlance" novels as a child. Fantasy is still a fun genre. I'm not here to reinvent it, I'm here to celebrate it. I think joy is what gets a reader involved.

Q: So what was the genesis of these characters?

A: It came from me playing the computer game Icewind Dale years ago. In it, you played a party of adventurers, and as near as I could tell, adventurers were people who broke into other people's houses, beat them up and stole all their stuff.

So in my world, adventurers are the scum, they are the lowest of the low. This doesn't lend them to being particularly heroic. But as I like to do, I'm forcing them to try to be heroic. I don't care if they fail, but I want them to try.

Q: The eBook has been out for several months. How has the response been?

A: It's getting a great response, I'm hearing a lot of positives. I think it's a marked improvement over "Aeon's Gate" (his first trilogy). The pacing is much better. And the readers seem to agree.

But trying to please all readers is an exercise in madness — I had one reader on Amazon who complained that ("City Stained Red") started too slow and that I should have opened with a fight scene like "Aeon's Gate."

Q: And you are working on a sequel right now as well.

A: Yes, I have three chapters to go, and then it is off to edits, so it should be ready for release this summer. It's called "The Mortal Tally," and it features an ever-increasing of the stakes, so the conflicts get even bigger.

There's no respite for the adventurers, not even a chapter.

Sam Sykes release party for 'The City Stained Red'

When: 2 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 31.

Where: Poisoned Pen Bookstore, 4014 N. Goldwater Blvd., Scottsdale.

Admission: Free admission; $16 for book.

Details: 480-947-2974, poisonedpen.com.