by Shock Totem
I’m relatively new here at Shock Totem, or at least new to the editor seat, and seeing as this marks my first interview between our pages rather than online, I can’t help but feel like I’m standing at that magazine rack in Borders and picking up my first copy of Cemetery Dance. If you’re a fan, you know what I’m talking about. If you’ve never read his work, I urge you to do so even to the detriment of whatever deadlines and family obligations you may have going at the moment. His books are brimming with good fun and great writing. Now I’ll step aside and let you get to the interview. That is, after all, what you’re here for.
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ZCP: You have a new collection of horror stories titled After the People Lights Have Gone Off scheduled for release at the end of September. Your previous horror collection, The Ones That Got Away, came out back in 2011. Given the wide range of your work, can readers expect this collection to be an entirely different beast, or is the tone similar?
SGJ: Still horror, so, I mean, there’s blood and werewolves and snapping teeth, of course. But, whereas The Ones That Got Away seemed to be more looking up from a kid’s angle—I didn’t even realize that until Laird Barron’s introduction—this one’s... I don’t know if I’d say “older,” but the people in it aren’t kids, anyway. The stories scare me, too. Whenever my wife or kids or even my dogs walk in while I’m working them, I nearly jump out of my skin. Especially the dogs, as they’re slightly below where I expect the sound to be coming from. But, I’ve rigged up a rearview mirror over my monitor now. It adds the possibility of shapes showing up in the mirror that aren’t there when I turn around, of course, but, in trade, it does at least allow me to watch for when real people are trying to sneak up on me. I know, though. It’s the other kind of “people” I should really be worried about...
ZCP: You’re known for being prolific. We’re only halfway through the year and you’ve already published a handful of titles. You’ve stated before that writing is a compulsion for you. Do you ever get tired?
SGJ: I don’t get tired of living in these made-up places, no. Special effects are cheap there, and I can make things make sense, more or less. I can tie up the loose ends, and real life doesn’t allow that. But, when I’m writing a novel but not writing that particular hour, like, if I’m at the grocery store or the dinner table or wherever, that’s the part I don’t like. Not because I’m not writing, but because I am still writing, and that leaves me moving like a ghost down the candy aisle, trying to touch things, always expecting my characters to round the corner, see me lock eyes for a bad instant. I don’t know what happens next. That’s what writing’s like for me.
ZCP: Floating Boy and the Girl who Couldn’t Fly was released in July. You co-wrote with Paul Tremblay on that one, yeah?
SGJ: Yep. Was great, working with Paul. He really thinks about a story, a chapter, a sentence. And he’s not hesitant to cut stuff out if it’s not working. I learned a lot, writing this novel with him. About writing, but also about YA. The editing process for this one, it was more grueling than usual. We’ve got so many drafts of this book that I can’t begin to keep track.
ZCP: How does writing for a younger audience influence the process? Do you think you’ll be writing more YA anytime soon?
SGJ: Was on a plane yesterday or the day before—I’m on a plane most days, it feels like—and had all this stuff I needed to get done, so I figured forget all that, you’re a writer, dude. Why not write? So I started a new novel. It’s YA. So, yes, I plan on having more of it at some point. If I can get this premise to work. But that’s usually just about paring it down, making it simpler, making it more direct instead of big and epic. One thing I’ve learned across all these books and stories, it’s that simplest is always best. Now I’ve just got to remember that when I’m actually writing.
ZCP: As one of the few horror writers working in academia, how does the content of your work impact your position within that particular writing community? Does the community impact your own writing?
SGJ: If it does impact it, then I’m blissfully ignorant of it, anyway. I mean, sure, some of the book awards and the like, I know that if I want to have half a chance, I’ll enter the least bloody thing I have that year, just because the selection committee likely isn’t into horror. But, luckily, I’ve usually got just all kinds of books, so there’s something that’ll contend. And, I’m sure it does impact my writing, yeah. Or, take “The Elvis Room,” say. That dude’s a professor. Were I not a professor, I kind of doubt he would be. But, those of us in the university, we have to be careful not to make “professor” our default setting, too. “The Elvis Room” may be my first story to have done it. Maybe the last, too. Unless Dan Brown taps me to ghostwrite some Robert Langdon stuff. Or maybe I’ll novelize that old Dennis Quaid DOA.
ZCP: Everyone has something to say when it comes to writing, and it can sometimes be difficult for writers, especially young writers, to separate the bad from the good. What piece of writing advice do you think gets passed around too much and should be ignored? Conversely, what do you think is the single best piece of advice that isn’t passed around enough?
SGJ: The advice I hear that always makes me cringe is to wait until you’re good enough to start submitting. But, man, if that were the case, I still wouldn’t be submitting anything. The point at which you’re good enough is the point at which magazines and publishers start buying your work. And you’ll never know that until you get stuff in the mail. Don’t wait, I say. You might be golden right out of the gate. As for the best advice, it’s probably from Joe Lansdale, talking about how, instead of letting publishers make him write in this genre or that, he instead drew his own lines, and now writes in the “Joe Lansdale” genre. That’s the dream, for me. I mean, to have my own shelf, where I can write science fiction and fantasy and literary and horror and whatever I want.
ZCP: I remember seeing your special issue of Mixer, in which you wrote a handful of stories in different genres. I remember thinking how interesting it was to see your range of work in a sort of microcosm. It was great to see so many borders torn down so easily. Does your unique style and range of work ever work against you in terms of trying to place a story, or does that work itself out naturally? What is it like writing in the “Stephen Graham Jones” genre so to speak?
SGJ: I feel like it gives me more places to submit, really. I mean, in the short story market. But, even within a collection, I’ll of course use different modes and styles and all that, like everybody does. To avoid being monotone, I suppose, but it’s really just to be continually setting up challenges for myself. I’m the first one who needs to not be bored, and I get bored pretty fast, so sometimes that’s a trick, staying ahead of the “nothing,” to put it in what I think as The Neverending Story terms. With novels, though, it’s a different story. Publishers often can’t figure if I’m literary or horror or just some weirdo or what. I’m completely happy just being some hard-to-market weirdo, I guess. Each book I do, it’s different than the last. Which isn’t to say I won’t finally ever settle down. Who knows? Maybe from here on out all my novels will be drive-through urinal novels. It could be a deceptively fertile field. I do know I always come back to horror, though. Or, no, that’s wrong. Horror, it always surfaces in my fiction. For me, it’s the most real of any genre, it’s the only one that can, when done well, elicit not just an involuntary visceral response, but can then change the reader’s behavior. Make them leave the lights on, like. It’s where I belong, I guess. At cons, stepping down into the lobby, that’s where I feel so at home. Just moving among people who cherish the same things I do. I used to think that didn’t matter, so much. I was wrong.
ZCP: Aliens or Predators?
SGJ: Aliens, all the way. Predators are bad, no doubt, but they’re like Batman-bad: it’s all in the utility belt. Aliens, though, xenomorphs, they’re naked, and they’ll chew a hole through your soul in a heartbeat, never look back. I’m not saying I’d rather be a xenomorph. I’m saying a xenomorph is the
one I wouldn’t want to be locked in a room with.
ZCP: You’re a known movie buff, particularly where slashers are concerned. As any slasher fan knows, there are rules one needs to follow in order to survive. Are there any rules for making it through a Stephen Graham Jones story unscathed? How would you say morality plays into your work, if at all?
SGJ: This’ll be something of a spoiler, for some, but, to answer this I think I need to go back to Demon Theory. What I was doing there was, as with every horror story, the thing I thought was most scary, and the thing that was most scary to me was a mother turning on her kid. Demon Theory’s the only one of my novels where that happens. Everywhere else, from Flushboy to Ledfeather, from The Fast Red Road to The Least of My Scars, the mothers in that, they’re all not just willing to step between danger and her kid, they do. It’s built into me, probably from having the mom I did, and do, who always fought for me and my brothers, even when we really didn’t deserve it. As for how to make it through a story of mine unscathed, man, tell me if you figure it out. I never make it through unscathed. I come out scathed on the face and the heels of my hands and everywhere that comes into contact with the story. That’s how you’ve got to write, right? Anything else and you’re faking it.
ZCP: Last year brought a remake of Carrie. Remakes of both Pet Sematary and It are on the horizon. What does the moviegoer in you think about this surge of King remakes?
SGJ: I didn’t know about It. Like, a movie or a miniseries? Either way, I’m there.
ZCP: Movie. It actually might be split into two films, apparently.
SGJ: I carry It on my phone, both as ebook and audionovel. That move it makes at the end, where the kids start forgetting the horror, I think that’s one of the two great decisions on the page from the twentieth century—the other being Goldman’s Marathon Man ending, um, as it does; I don’t want to spoil (and hope I can speak openly about It, as, who here hasn’t inhaled that book ten times already?). As for King remakes in general, though, sure, I’ll be there. I dug the first Pet Sematary, of course, but, watching it now, that blue-light show at the end is about ridiculous, isn’t it? Feels very like The Keep. And, that Carrie do-over, I had no problems with it, even kind of dug it. Though I guess I would prefer it if the studios would choose to finance remakes of the ones that got more broken in adaptation, instead of the sure-things. But I understand too that the people who make those decisions, they’re the people who want return on their investments, and sure-things are, you know, more sure.
ZCP: In the past you’ve given shout-outs to authors who deserve a wider readership. Anyone readers should keep their eye on?
SGJ: Yeah, but instead of a specific writer this time, how about I just try to push Bizarro? It’s one of the most vital and alive things going on bookwise, I think. It’s a genre that’s taking chances left and right, I mean. It’s going too far in order to try to establish the landscape, like. And it’s not just leftover splatterpunk meets absurdism-on-steroids. It’s a real, happening thing. And it’s funny, and gross, and terrifying. It brings in the cautionary tales old science fiction was known for and mixes it with body-horror stuff and then draws it all in cell-animation in one fevered night, then projects it on whatever wall’s handy. More important, though, a lot of the time it’s got engaging stories. That’s always got to be first, and last. Readers need characters they identify with and root for, and those characters need to be in bad situations to keep us turning the page. Bizarro’s got plenty of bad situations.
ZCP: Any upcoming work you’d like to tell the readers about?
SGJ: There’s that After the People Lights Have Gone Off, out from Dark House in October, for Halloween, with a Lansdale introduction. Fifteen stories that kind of creeped me out writing them. Hopefully they’ll get a reader or two to look over their shoulder as well. Writing horror, that’s the main thing you hope for. And, if the contract-stuff works out, fall will also have the second installment of The Bunnyhead Chronicles. The first was It Came from Del Rio. This one’s Once Upon a Time in Texas. It’s got a car chase through South by Southwest, where a wolf is driving the front car, and a rabbit’s driving the second. And then there’s some King Kong type developments as well. And a train. And chupacabras. Some books, you just put everything you love in a bag and then wail on that bag with a tire beater. That’s what Once Upon a Time in Texas is. And, I just the other day keyed on the closing image for the third of that Bunnyhead trilogy. Just need to steal some time from myself, get it written down.
ZCP: Thanks so much for taking the time. It’s been an honor. Anything you’d like to say in closing? You have the floor.
SGJ: Just that I think it’s time for a new slasher boom. Tucker & Dale and Cabin the Woods and You’re Next haven’t been one-shots. I see them more on a continuum: parody escalating to parodic escalating to something much more in keeping with Scream. The slasher’s the most vital of all horror genres, I think. Well, okay, slasher and haunted house. Okay, and monsters—werewolves, zombies, vampires, the rest. And I guess possession stories never really die away, either. Still, the slasher. It’s where I live and breathe the happiest. And I want more, and faster, until they’re competing at the box office, trying to one-up each other like the eighties. That’s when we’ll see the real innovation, that’s when the next big step forward can happen. And, I’m not saying my The Last Final Girl needs to be part of that necessarily. But it would make a pretty cool poster.
YOU ARE HERE
by Stephen Graham Jones
I have seen a baby finger on the gleaming tile floor of a hotel lobby. The air was full of screaming. The floor had been generously waxed. It seemed the baby finger was hovering just above the tile. The effect was of someone trying to touch the giant eye of a whale, and not realizing there was a clear, gelatinous layer before the white of that eye started.
The finger, it was the index.
Like the head—I never knew this—the finger survives its own severance for a few moments.
I watched it curl over itself like a raw grub, just exposed to the sun. That curling caused the finger to move slightly, as if it knew how vulnerable it was. As if it were going to inch into the crack between the elevator door and the floor of the lobby, inch there and dive down into that blackness, to grow a new baby in the hard and lonely years to come.
My hand still on the stairway door I’d just walked through, I allowed myself to sweep down into that years-later basement, to visually dissect this finger-grown baby. It would have no pupils, I decided. Or, rather, its eyes, they would be all pupil, as the lights down there would never have been clicked on. For sustenance, it would have learned to eat the cigarettes deposited down into the shaft, and sunglasses dropped and fumbled after. And secrets. All the things people say between floors, when alone.
And what of its fingers, right?
They would be grimy and calloused, as expected of a child with no mother, but would one of them, the seed-finger, would it be stunted? More important, when the maintenance man found this baby and reported it to the night manager, who, peering down into the dark, would call Animal Control, who would in turn—after flashlights—call the police, who would bring in Child Services, would this maintenance man remember this day I was in now?
I think not.
By this time—we’re not talking nine months, but something on the order of years, as a human infant grown from a single finger, it would have to develop slowly, cell by cell, the skin and hair coming very last—by this time, not only would the tile in the lobby have been updated, but the staff would have suffered turnover as well.
Whatever bellboys or desk clerks or maids were already rushing this way, falling into the whirlpool of this mother’s insistent screaming, in the years between this day and the day of that finger-grown baby’s discovery...I have to suspect they’re all in different lives. They’re different people, by now. Or, more themselves, anyway. The bellboy, say, he more than likely took a job at his uncle’s transmission shop, and found he had
not just an aptitude for calibrating speedometers, but that process of calibration, it makes him feel whole in a way he could never articulate. The desk clerk is still a desk clerk—a voyeur at heart, a skulker at the peripheries of the lives of others—but, due to certain complaints, has been hiring on at increasingly remote motels, in lonelier and lonelier stretches of interstate.
And, the guests, well, transiency is the order of the day in hotels, isn’t it? They’re already half-gone, are already looking ahead, to their next stop, their next rendezvous.
All except one.
All except this screaming mother, this mother forever caught stepping a moment too late from the ashtray to her nine-fingered child.
From her stance, it’s easy to tell she’s about to crash down to her knees, wrap her yet-to-scream son in her arms as if what’s happening to him here, it’s not that crushing space between door and jam, but a more fundamental process. To her, would it not appear that this child she made inside herself, that it’s falling apart? That the biological glue she imparted to him, it’s reaching its expiration date decades too early? That, if she can just collect him and press him tightly enough to her, she can keep the rest of him from cracking off?
No, for this woman, for this mother, this is a day that’s going to persist.
Six years later, there she is, secretly spying through the living room curtains on her son’s precious lemonade stand. The pretty girl down the street has just handed over thirty-five cents, and this nine-fingered boy’s holding a cup of lemonade across to her innocently, eagerly even, and he thinks this girl is pretty too, this mother can tell. He’s poured more lemonade in that cup than it can really hold, such that it’s sloshing over the lip, onto his stump, which is the closest finger—or non-finger—to the lip of that cup. That lip the girl’s mouth is expected to touch. And now that stump, it’s shiny with lemonade. And this girl whom the mother no longer considers pretty, she’s shying away from the cup, she’s averting her eyes, and, for the first time, this nine-fingered boy, he’s seeing his missing finger not just through another’s eyes, but through her response. He’s realizing there’s the base-ten world, and there’s him.