In Convo with Paul Tremblay

Lisa Quigley – I actually read your two most recent novels—A Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil’s Rock—back to back. Needless to say, I’m a little traumatized. But, what intrigued me about both of them is that the supernatural element (in both of them) is never really explained or even really confirmed or verified. So you’re left wondering, was that aspect really real, or were they imagining it, or what? Which is almost more terrifying than having it explained, I think. Would you explain your thought process for choosing to make those elements of the novel more ambiguous?

Paul Tremblay – You are a wonderful glutton for punishment!  Or ambiguity…

Treating the supernatural as ambiguous (ie. is there really something supernatural going on or not?) is one of the links between the two novels. I wanted what happened in reality to be the most horrific aspects of each novel, with the hope that the ambiguity and maybe-supernatural would be what lingered and nagged at the reader once they were finished with the novels. Some of that satisfies my own skeptic’s brain; it’s difficult for me to commit to full on supernatural-ness. If that’s not a word, it is now. I try to take a realistic approach to the supernatural insofar as I think that if I were to personally experience a supernatural event, I believe it would be very subtle, difficult to describe or explain or identify. It wouldn’t be obvious that something supernatural happened and I’d be left with doubt and a sense of something being off, a glimpse of the cracks of things.

LQ – There’s a lot of social media in your newest novel, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, almost to the point of commentary in my reading of it. It’s like, there are all these pros and cons. It unites us in a really empowering, global way, but it can also be really horrifying when people’s unfiltered thoughts are just unchecked and on display like that. What are your thoughts on social media?

PT – Besides the ambiguous supernatural element, I wanted to treat Tommy’s disappearance as realistically as possible. I wanted to zoom in on the emotions that his friends and family would be experiencing, and also explore what the day-to-day would look like during the investigation, and what that all would look like now, particularly if something weird was happening at the edges.

There are definite pros and cons to social media. Without going too far down that rabbit hole, giving voice to the voiceless and instant data and reaction are/can be great things. At the same time, social media gives people as false sense of safety and comfort. Social media attention often muddies the waters and makes incidents/tragedies worse. Just last week the Twitterverse was sharing the name and photo of a man who was not the Dallas shooting suspect, right?

I’m addicted to social media and I’ve become more and more, if not frightened by it, then anxious over it.

LQ – I loved when Elizabeth goes down a google rabbit hole after her mother sends her the article about “felt presences.” And then the comment about how the article was the kind that people usually share without reading the entire thing. It’s funny, I remember being a kid/teenager, and when I wanted to learn about something, I had to watch a documentary or go to the library. Now, there’s google and, not to mention, everybody sharing everything (true or not) on facebook, on twitter, etc. It’s a virtual information shitshow. (Haha.) Do you think this has helped and hindered us and the way we now absorb information/learn things?

PT – It’s done both, though I fear that we may be reaching a point in the Internet’s brief history where we should be calling it the ‘misinformation age.’ That both Google and Facebook curate their algorithms and pages according to the users data, which means the user on sees what she/he is predisposed to believe in, which in turn hinders learning, discussion, and the sharing of true information. Instead, we get comments sections…

LQ – I’m curious about the decision to include Tommy’s journal entries as actually handwritten, along with his drawing of the “shadowman.” What was the thought process behind doing that, rather than allowing the reader to conjur these images with their imagination?

PT – I wanted the diary pages to look more personal, more like they actually came from Tommy. I think that kind of visual cue can make for a more powerful connection to the character for the reader.

The drawing of the “shadowman” is so important to the story plot-wise, I wanted the reader to have that image. Again, I think it help to build Tommy’s character; you get to see part of his personality, his talent as an artist, and whatever it was he saw or experienced.

Besides, it was also an excuse to ask one of my favorite artists, Nick “The Hat” Gucker, for an illustration. He’s such a talented and gracious guy. Now I have to write more books with pictures in them…

LQ – It’s hard for me not to compare your two most recent novels to each other, given that I read them back-to- back. And though there are similarities between them—I’m thinking of the blog/reality TV show in Ghosts, and the social media/Internet in Disappearance—they are also very different in tone, voice, and texture. Tell me a bit about your writing process—how do you hone in on the specific tone/style of whatever you’re working on?

PT – For every choice I make in the novel writing process, my first question is ‘does this serve the story? Everything from setting, character, style, and point of view. A Head Full of Ghosts would not have worked as a third person account. It would’ve been a cheat. Merry had to be the one telling the story and from her unreliable first person point of view. I didn’t think Disappearance at Devil’s Rock would’ve worked as first person as I needed multiple character point of views and it wasn’t going to be as expansive (and certainly nowhere near as brilliant) as Marlon Jones’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, where his story had the space for all those amazingly constructed first person voices. DaDR needed to be close third (for the most part), with a similar style and tone, I think, throughout, to help build a claustrophobic feeling.

LQ – More about your writing process: Your books often have terrible, dark secrets that are revealed at the end. Do you start off knowing what those things are and then work your way backwards? Or is the process one of discovery for yourself as much as it is for the readers?

PT – It depends on the story. I got lucky with A Head Full of Ghosts in that I knew the structure of the story almost right away. I knew where it started and where it would end, and I only had to figure out how to get from A to Z. When I get to work that way, I find it fun to have a beginning and ending in mind, and then the challenge is to find the winding path between them in the middle.

Disappearance at Devil’s Rock was much different. I wrote a 15 page plot summary before writing the book, and before that I filled a whole bunch of notebook pages with plot ideas and character sketches and the like. That book was pieced together over a much longer period of time and through many revisions and edits, including an ending in the first draft that was slightly different than what we ended up with.

For me it’s less about finding the process that works me, or any notion of a personal process, but the process that works best for that particular story. I think that keeps things fresh for me, and it feels like I’m starting over from scratch each time I start a new novel.

LQ – Something that makes me giddy is the way your novels are genre-bending. I’ve heard them described as ‘literary horror.’ Do you do that on purpose? What are your thoughts on the ‘genre’ vs. ‘literary’ debate?

PT – I do. It’s my agenda. Muhahahaha!

Horror remains, I think, the genre that is most associated with its worst works; the mostly crappy and exploitative Hollywood films (not the good movies, which are almost all indie productions).

That said, I do think we’re seeing a shift toward a more progressive and inclusive attitude toward genre, but you still see asshat comments (reeking of classism and narcissism, among other things…) like the following from Glen Duncan in a review of Colston Whitehead’s Zone One:

“Colson Whitehead is a literary novelist, but his latest book, ‘Zone One,’ features zombies, which means horror fans and gore gourmands will soon have him on their radar. He has my sympathy.”

I interviewed the great Peter Straub recently and he said the following as a part of an answer to the genre question: “…everybody of any sense, anyone who can read at all well, should understand it’s the way the things are written and not what their content is. There are good books and bad books.” I’m on team Peter. The very idea that horror genre elements would preclude or disqualify the use of character development, style, theme, symbolism, and any other techniques of literature is patently ridiculous.

Horror fans are not blameless in the literary vs. genre discussion as far too often readers will view or use “literary” as a pejorative. But as I said above, I’m hopeful these attitudes are changing.

LQ – Which authors did you grow up reading? Who were you most inspired by?

PT – I didn’t fall in love with reading until I was a mathematics graduate student. I didn’t know any better…

Second semester senior year I found my way into a freshman lit class (don’t ask) and I read Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?” and it blew me away. I had no idea people wrote stories like that. Soon after, my girlfriend (now my wife) bought me Stephen King’s The Stand for my birthday. I inhaled it. And then for two years in graduate school, struggling to get my degree, I read all the King books, and moved on to Peter Straub, Shirley Jackson, more Oates, Kurt Vonnegut, and so many more.

LQ – Who are your current favorite authors?

PT – I’m afraid to leave some of them off here, but, let’s go with…

John Langan, Laird Barron, Liz Hand, Stephen Graham Jones, Megan Abbott, Victor LaValle, Livia Llewellyn, Nathan Ballingrud, Jeffrey Ford, Aimee Bender, Junot Diaz, Mark Danielewski, Nick Mamatas, Kelly Link, Stewart O’Nan, Sara Gran, Michael Cisco, Brian Evenson, and I know I’m leaving off many others…

LQ – Okay, I’ve got to mention it: Stephen King blurbs your novel A Head Full of Ghosts. How did it make you feel to hear that that though he’s not easily scared, your novel terrified him?

PT – You mean August 19, 2015…yes, I have the day of his tweet memorized… I fell in love with reading, never mind writing, because of Stephen King. I’m not ashamed to admit that I got emotional when I read his tweet about the book.

Other friends had seen the tweet before I did and my phone was blowing up with notifications. It was a fun way to find out. I immediately sat down with a few adult beverages and my laptop, and watched people react to it for a little bit. That was a good night.

LQ – Do you have any book recommendations, anything new and fresh we should know about?

PT – Stephen Graham Jones’s coming of age/road/werewolf novel Mongrels. Joshua Gaylord’s werewolf novel without any werewolves When We Were Animals. John Langan’s epic The Fisherman. Livia Llewellyn’s collection Furnace. Laird Barron’s forthcoming collection Swift to Chase. Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom. A little bit off the beaten path, but Karen Runge’s collection, Seven Sins, is just fantastic too.

LQ – We’ve got a lot of readers who are also writers. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

PT – Read, read, read, and read some more, and as widely as possible.

Also, it’s okay to have patience with your writing and career. Don’t let jealousy take over your mental energies. You can fool yourself into believing it’s healthy and motivational, but it isn’t.

*This interview originally appeared on Dwarf + Giant

In Convo with Richard Thomas at StokerCon 2017

Mackenzie Kiera – Richard, so nice to speak with you. I believe you and I originally met at UCR’s low residency MFA program. So nice to see you here at StokerCon 2017. Tell us what you’re reading these days?

Richard Thomas – I’ve been reading a lot of stuff for the classes I’m teaching. That’s been taking up most of my time, haven’t had a whole lot of time to read just for fun. The Best Horror of the Year anthology, edited by Ellen Datlow, which is really cool because one of the stories in there, “Wilderness,” came out of the Exigencies anthology I edited, and it’s by my friend Leticia Trent and her whole story went on this journey when we were starting Gamut. I asked her if she had anything and she said yes, she had something that had been previously rejected and she sent it to all the top magazines and she’d lost some faith. 

MK – Absolutely, it’s hard. 

RT – Totally, so I told her to send it to me. She sent it over and I immediately knew I wanted it. It’s just one of those stories where you read the first line, first paragraph and think, “Okay, if it can keep this up then I definitely want it.” I even led off the anthology with that story. In the end it’s all subjective, but I really loved this story and I really believed in it. It was also nominated for the Shirley Jackson award. 

MK – So, read the short story “Wilderness.”

RT – Yes, absolutely. Read this story. We all doubt ourselves as writers, and I loved it from the start, couldn’t understand why it kept getting rejected, so, it was really wonderful to see it climb as high as it did and get nominated for the Shirley Jackson award. Made me feel like my intuition and aesthetic was sound and that’s important considering what I do for Gamut. But yes, it’s good to always read The Best Horror of the Year. Every year, as a writer, I want to see what’s out there, feel like I’m in the loop. And check out other annuals, too, such as The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by John Joseph Adams, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, edited by Paula Guran, and Year’s Best Weird Fiction, edited by Michael Kelly. These are all excellent books.

MK – Absolutely. 

RT – Some of the other stuff I just got done reading for the class I’m teaching is all contemporary dark fiction. And that spans some time—China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station. It’s pretty dense and really dances between science fiction, fantasy and horror. That book has been out for like, twenty years but it really kicked off the whole “new weird” movement. It’s a brilliant book and there’s so much going on, but you don’t have to have a science degree to read it. That’s a book I have really fallen in love with. 

Also, All the Beautiful Sinners, by Stephan Graham Jones. One of my favorites. That’s more of a psychological thriller, it’s very slippery and surreal, but it’s also kind of at the heart of neo-noir, a genre I really love to read and write in. The biggest neo-noir name might be Dennis Lehane, such as Shutter Island or Mystic River.

MK – Both of those. Yes.

RT – But there are other voices, lesser known that are great—such as Craig Clevenger and Will Christopher Baer. In my class, we also studied Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation. It won the Nebula and Shirley Jackson award, and it’s part of the Southern Reach trilogy. It’s really tense and there are so many things in there. Oh! Also, Bird Box, by Josh Malerman. 

MK – That book is amazing.

RT – Right? It’s hypnotic. I read it over Thanksgiving when it came out and I literally could not put it down. It’s so good. I’m sitting by the fireplace just sweating and I mean, when’s the last time you read a book and you just could not put it down? 

MK – Best kind.

RT – Then, to go back and read it through a critical lens for my class—I just have such an appreciation for what all of these authors are doing on a sentence by sentence level, even the word choice and imagery, it’s just inspiring because I want to keep pushing myself to evolve as a writer and, while I have my style, you still need to grow. I like to read these things to keep me going and even the older books, like Perdido. That’s why I always read Tor and Nightmare Magazine. That’s all contemporary. 

MK – The critical eye that you use when you’re teaching, do you also use that for Gamut? 

RT – Yeah, when it comes to submissions I get or when you solicit from somebody it has to work on a couple different levels. It has to surprise me, but also, can’t be so weird that I just can’t understand it, it has to be accessible. Maybe it’s too scientific, or too smart for me. But if it’s doing something different, that always makes my ears perk up. Then, if it works? It’s sort of like a blend of the old and the new, which I talk about all the time, how can you write a book that’s familiar enough that readers understand you, but also be unique enough that they haven’t seen it a million times. So, how can you be accessible, but also, break the formula. That’s what I try to read. Intellectually, you want to be stimulated by what you’re reading, but it also has to have feeling behind it. You want to be able to relate, in some way. It’s why I don’t read a lot of series. By book ten, I tend to know the author’s tricks. Unless it’s Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. 

MK – Or Game of Thrones.

RT – Absolutely. But that is so character driven that I’m in. I love all of the characters and I want to see what’s going to happen to them. So, I’m always trying to battle between what’s familiar and expected, versus what’s different and surprising. When I was younger, I’d rather read book twenty by Stephen King than read an unknown author. And that is a really narrow view and a shallow way to look at it, but as I’ve matured, getting my undergraduate degree, and my MFA, I’ve changed all of that and now I’m much more open. I just want to read something that’s great. I’m way more willing to take a chance. I remember reading Toni Morrison in my MFA and thinking, “What am I going to like about her work? What do we have in common?” And then I read Beloved and it crushed me and I thought, “I have to stop thinking this way. I have to change the way I think and write and edit.” That was several years ago. Now I am just more open to what I read on a global level. I still need to read more outside of the US and you know, at Gamut we’ve bought stories from people all over the world and that’s one of the great things about being online, is we can find them and they can find us and they can read Gamut regardless of where they are. Those points of view may be a little to the left, a little to the right but they’re bringing with them so many different experiences, and yet not so different that you feel uncomfortable chasing it. 

MK – Totally. Well, a while back, you yourself were unknown and so you have to say at one point, I was unknown and someone took a chance on me so now I need to read unknowns.

RT – Absolutely. Read unknowns. Take that chance.

*This interview originally appeared on Dwarf + Giant

In Convo with Stephen Graham Jones

Mackenzie Kiera – How many years have you been teaching?

Stephen Graham Jones – Sixteen, I guess. Started in 2000, at Texas Tech University. I had no experience, a lot of nerves, and a good pearl-snap shirt. Turns out those three’ll get you through most situations. They did me, anyway. I’m still teaching, just, now, I understand that a big part of it’s me learning from the students.

MK – Think you’ll ever ‘bleed Colorado?’ or does the South have a different draw for you?

SGJ – I keep thinking I need to write a Colorado novel, yeah. Just need to be sure I have a good and real feel for it. Which is a trick, in Colorado, since so many people who live here aren’t from here. But, I mean—maybe that’s the “it” of it, right? It’s not about walking into a room of ten people who live in Colorado and saying that two of them have a “Colorado” voice or outlook, since they were born here and came up here. I think the way to do Colorado right is to let all ten people in that room be Colorado.

MK – How long have you been writing? When did you first feel that pull to write?

SGJ – My first story was published in 1996, I guess. Twenty years ago already, wow. That pull to get things down on the page, though, that would probably be in my freshman comp class. That was where I kind of started figuring things out, it felt like. Not at all saying I’ve got things all figured out, but that’s probably about where it starts for me, with a professor reading what I turned in and telling me it wasn’t really what the assignment was, but still, it’s kind of all right. There’s something there. I should keep moving that direction, maybe.

MK – Any more werewolves for the future?

SGJ – Definitely. I mean, to read and watch and dream about, always. Just watched a new-to-me werewolf movie today. And I’ll for sure keep writing werewolf stories. I wouldn’t doubt if I do them in a novel again, too. Even, say, a couple of follow-up novels to Mongrels, should I get the greenlight.

MK – What’s next? Mummies, right? Wrong?

SGJ – Mummies never really crest in popcult, do they? I think it’s because we can’t figure if they’re zombies in wrappings, or what. Next, though, I hope that’s werewolves. Back in 2002, the zombie took over from the vampire, and I don’t think the vampire’s ready yet to be the top creature. Werewolves, though, they haven’t really dominated the media landscape since the eighties, I’d say. And the stories you get with werewolves, they’re more vital now than ever. We need to be engaging narratives that remind us that not only are we animal inside, but we’re an animal that plugs into a bigger system.

MK – Any authors you were ever obsessed with? (Or currently)  Why?

SGJ – For a few years now, I read anything CJ Box writes. His most recent, Off the Grid, blew me away. And so have the rest. I don’t know about ‘obsessed,’ though. I mean, until you see me drawing his face on a paper plate then using yarn to wear it over my own face, let’s just say I’m an avid reader.

MK – Any books you prefer to read more for craft than the story?  Vice Versa?

SGJ – Every once and again I get engaged with a novel that I realize isn’t going to do anything surprising story-wise, so, if I’m to get anything from it, I’m going to have to extract technique from it. Sometimes as model, sometimes as cautionary tale. But I’ve never gone back to any of those to read them again, either. More like, getting what technique I can, that’s trying to salvage something good from the read. I’ll always look for story first, though. Those novels, I’ll go back to them over and over.

MK – Mongrels was originally a short story titled ‘Doc’ in After The People Lights Have Gone Off. Was that planned? Have any of your other books started out as short stories?

SGJ – Only one’s done that, and it’s not published, as I don’t think it’s good enough yet. But, yeah, after I wrote “Doc’s Story” it kept kind of padding around in my head, until I had to just get the rest of it down on the page. Never really had a novel sneak up on me like that. Was kind of cool.

MK – Are all werewolves wary of the snow? Are there any that have figured a way around the foot-print issue? What do beach werewolves do?

SGJ – I’ve got a story about a beach werewolf. “Wolf Island,” over at Juked.com. I think a werewolf could maybe make it all right on the beach, though. Run close enough to the water, and the sand’s not firm enough to leave a really crisp print. And the water comes and takes it away anyway. Snow wolves, though, yeah, that’s a problem. I don’t like the idea of werewolves traveling by tree, really, so they’re definitely going to leave prints. Best bet? Stay super-remote, like, way high up in the backcountry. And maybe even stick to well-used game trails, so the elk can thunder through, erase evidence of your passage. Except they’ll smell you and panic. I don’t know. Snow, it’s forever tricky for werewolves. It’s not like you can wear stilts, or boots, or swing on vines.

MK – You wrote this in 14-16 days, yes? How long did it take you to get it to the shelves? I guess what I’m asking is, how long did the whole process take, to bring this book from cub to wolf?

SGJ – Yeah, got the first draft of this down in a couple weeks. Then the second draft, that took probably two months. Then the next draft was a few more months—I was incorporating notes and suggestions from agents and editors, which completely made the novel a novel. But, let’s see. I wrote it in January, but what year? Wow. All right, back from my directories. Looks like it was 2014. And it’s 2016 now. So . . . two-plus years, from idea to shelf, I guess. Seems like forever. But I’ve had ones take a lot longer. Demon Theory was more like seven years.

MK – All these characters are so real. So perfect and crazy and cool. It’s the grandfathers that took hold of me, though. Both grandfathers are eccentric and loyal and fierce. Also noticed that Mongrels is dedicated to a ‘Pop.’ Are these grandfathers based on your own? One more than the other?

SGJ – Yeah, Pop was my great-grandfather. He was around a lot until I was . . . twenty, twenty two? I grew up with him telling me stories, each one more outlandish than the next. But I wanted to believe so much that I just did believe. That story about the hammer, in here? That’s Pop’s story. He used to tell that one all the time. Also, I grew up with my grandfather on my mom’s side. He was more like the . . . well, the other grandfather. Don’t want to spoil anything.

MK – Favorite scenes to write? For instance, are you a sucker for action/family/love/scary/chase scenes?

SGJ – Sucker for two kinds of scenes: good fights and tearjerkers. I think, with Mongrels, my favorite pieces to write were the little flash fictions that come between the chapters. Just these self-contained werewolf moments. And, of those, it’s a hard call. I liked them all. But I guess maybe “The Heaven of Werewolves” stands out. I got to put a werewolf in a white nun habit for that one. That’s always been the dream.

Dr. Stephen Graham Jones was raised mostly in Greenwood, Texas. Currently, he teaches English and Creative Writing for the University of Colorado, Boulder and University of California, Riverside-Palm Desert. He is the author of twenty-three novels, the current of which is Mongrels. He’s also had some 250+ stories published. Dr. Jones lives in Boulder, CO with his wife, two teenage kids and some dogs that are, regrettably, not werewolves.

*This interview originally appeared on Dwarf + Giant