Biography

“I will become one of the most respectable names in horror literature of all time,” I thought when I was 18.

It was an era of big changes in my life. I was the son of poor parents, living in a third world country and the baby of the family. Born on 17 May, 1972, in the city of Santos on the São Paulo coast, I had big plans to change my reality. I began by crushing, in just one blow, an offer of a job in the steelwork industry where my father had worked his entire life. And with the job I crushed a world of expectations that my family had cultivated.

In that moment, that first existential crisis, I started to trace, without knowing, the route of all real adventurers – I abandoned a middle-life — secure and without taste or dreams — for the dangerous road full of suffering, and incomprehension, but also glories, freedom and life.

I decided to be a writer.

The prodigy schoolboy who enchanted the teachers with his drawings and precocious redactions didn’t go to university. He noticed that he hated the classroom; with its teaching methods that dampened the creativity of people and molded them to be just a cog in the system.

In adolescence I discovered the universe of paranormality; of the occult, the mysteries that hovered above mundane worries. I swapped the magazines of Hulk, Spider Man, Swamp Thing and Ghost Rider for the books of Allan Poe, Stephen King, Theophille Goutier and those about UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle. The illustrated stories that I drew, with my own super heroes, were inch by inch substituted for tales that were longer and scarier. Thus this time-pass grew in importance in my life, overshadowing all else — family, friends, a job that I detested, indeed what would conduct me to a future where I will be just one more retired old man in front a TV, trying not to think of the emptiness of my existence.

Maybe the transition would have been smoother if I had somebody to talk to. But that wasn’t the case. The redirection happened amid terrible family altercations. The peaceful Taurian began to disclose the sign ascendant of Leo. Thus, while I started an unstable freelance cartoonist career, I filled pages and pages with fear’s stories.

But something unexpected happened: in the years that followed, while I was rejected by publishers, I discovered another universe — the universe of writers such as Richard Bach and Saint-Exupéry. Very slowly, there was change within me; the rebel discovered that it does not suffice to just highlight the world’s defects, he needed to show solutions. I discovered the universe of paranormality was just a dangerous game if wasn’t serving spiritual evolution.

This way, I arrived to a new crossroad in my life. I took a deep breath and faced my first big test — weaning myself from horror stories; and I can say with pride that I passed it. I destroyed the hundred pages with fear’s stories that I had taken time and effort to create. What wasn’t destroyed became new story drafts. So, as a flower that emerges from the soil’s darkness, a new river of stories budded from these drafts; I noted that I could use my talent to create beauty and constructive things; good things, that help people with their problems.

I never became – and I don’t desire it any more – a respected name in horror literature.

In truth, my desires are much simplified. Today, a walk under the autumn sunset is a plain gift to me. I discovered the big truths are the more simple ones, and the best pleasures are those that money can’t buy.

Books


Alfredo Karras is also the author of BE, previously published by Smink Works Books

BE came to me very naturally, emerging from the strange force — flowing from the river of creativity that appeared after my life-changing decision. After some hesitation in the beginning, where I contemplated whether to write a fable that featured animals or humans, the story of Henrique, with all his life upsets and discoveries, filled my mind with extraordinary speed.

Writing is pure magic. It is a way to enter a thousand people’s lives and help to transform them. It is a way to became useful to God, the world and myself. I hope Be, like my future books, will fall in the reader’s hands in the moment they need some word; the same way as the words of Richard and Antoine have helped me.


Provocative drawing

Today I live in Cubatão city and continue to work in the parallel cartoonist’s career. I make cartoons for many of the newspapers of São Paulo’s coast, and some exhibitions have included my surrealist paintings and cartoons. Although the citizens always like my cartoons, the politicians and other authorities sometimes do not. In 2003, two military policeman took legal action against the Povo de Cubatão newspaper because a cartoon showed the policeman using “moderate force” against unarmed civilians during the Carnaval. Against all expectations, they won. The things of Brazil.

Plans...? Yes, I have many; film, inclusive. But that is another story …

Alfredo Karras used an unusual method to create these illustrations for the novel Be. He had to use a mixture of color pens and water because it is difficult to find water colors where he lives in Brazil. " When you are poor, you must to be creative," he says.