AUTHOR INTERVIEW: JACOB STEVEN MOHR

There are a few I can think of off the top of my head, but I don’t want to place any artificial limits on myself. Anybody can write anything. No subject is off the table. Although I suppose there are a few subjects I just have no interest in. Competitive eating, for example. Or woodcarving. Or jazz.

Don't buy the hype: Jacob Steven Mohr was not raised by wolves. Feral children are capable of many things, but weaving wild words into flesh and fantasy isn't one of them. Lucky us. If it were, we'd all be speaking Wolf. Mohr's work has previously appeared in Outrageous Fortune, Aurora Wolf, Liquid Imagination, and Body Parts Magazin, as well as on the stage of the Browncoat Theater in Wilmington, NC. He lives in Columbus, Ohio.

WEBSITE LINKS
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B01HFYWA2E
https://twitter.com/jacobstevenmohr

Could you tell the readers a little bit about yourself?
 
I really didn’t get into horror much at all until I was in late high school. I was a big fraidy-cat for a lot of my life. I think that’s why I’m so fascinated by it now—the world of horror had such huge power over me as a child, and now not only can I take the punches but I can dish them back out. I guess I evolved, but I couldn’t begin to tell you how the change happened. I only know that I’m better off for it.

Which one of your characters would you least like to meet in real?
 
Lutz Visgara, 100%. He’s the villain of The Unwelcome, and he’s probably the only truly unredeemable character I’ve ever written. He’s the complete monster, the total package. He’s a killer and a predator—and you’d never know any of it, looking at him. We have this idea that monsters (and monstrous humans) look a certain way. We like to think we’d know, just by looking at somebody, whether they would hurt us or not. Lutz has no tells. He’s one big poker face, and he’s capable of an extraordinary amount of evil. Maybe worst of all—he does not care about you at all. He doesn’t even really believe you exist. How do you reason with somebody who denies your humanity? How do you fight back?

Other than the horror genre, what else has been a major influence on your writing?
 
In college, I did a big year-long project on short story cycles or “composite novels”—and the books I read for and around that project were huge influences on my style and my career. We’re talking Olive Kitteridge; we’re talking Knockemstiff; we’re talking Winesburg, Ohio. All these are very different from the books I ended up writing, but my first novel was in fact a composite novel. I borrowed techniques I’d studied in these other more realistic projects and applied them to temper my own admittedly fabulist sensibilities. I don’t know how successful I ultimately was, but that book did get published. That certainly felt like success at the time. 
 
The term horror, especially when applied to fiction always carries such heavy connotations.  What’s your feeling on the term “horror” and what do you think we can do to break past these assumptions?
 
I remember for the longest time thinking that “horror” and “slasher” were the same thing. Ghostface from the movie Scream was emblematic of that for me. But we’re already breaking past assumptions. We’re kind of in a post-cliché world. Everybody’s so genre-savvy thanks to the Internet and film essayists; everybody’s kind of an expert. That’s got its own problems, but it’s forced horror to return to some classic forms of horror storytelling and to focus on the storytelling and the characters in a way that the genre had previously ignored for a long time. Horror used to be a genre of storytelling that hated its characters. Now we’re back to creating heroes. Now we’re back to creating empathy—and I think that’s a good thing for the continuing health of the genre.

A lot of good horror movements have arisen as a direct result of the socio/political climate, considering the current state of the world where do you see horror going in the next few years?
 
Well, obviously we’re going to be seeing a great deal of pandemic/medical horror in the next few years or so. But that’s the easy answer. I think we’re going to see a good amount of horror that explores class conflict and racial tensions. Horror really isn’t much different than any other genre in that regard, however: Art always reflects the era in which it’s created. That’s why art is always inherently political. However, horror is uniquely suited to capture certain tensions and zeitgeists because of the primal nature of the genre. Fear is our basest emotion. It might very well have been the first emotion. It’s certainly our most important. It’s survival-based.

Given the dark, violent and at times grotesque nature of the horror genre why do you think so many people enjoy reading it?
 
I imagine it has a great deal to do with the dark, violent, and at times grotesque nature of the genre.

What, if anything, is currently missing from the horror genre?

Honestly—happy endings. Horror is dark by nature, and allows us to explore the darkness in our own natures, but my favorite stories are the ones where the heroes win. I think that ‘cautionary tale’ horror has run its course for a while. I want to see brave Coraline best The Other Mother with nothing but her bravery and her wits. I don’t think anybody wants to see the bad guy win another round right now. It’s just kind of gauche.
 
What new and upcoming authors do you think we should take notice of?
 
There’s a fellow in London by the name of Jon Richter who’s doing terrific work in the world of short form horror. He’s got two books of short fiction out now you absolutely should not sleep on.

What aspects of writing to do you find the most difficult?
 
The first half of any project is always the toughest for me. The spigot opens very gradually, for whatever reason—but once I’ve got the damned thing open, the words flow and flow. I usually write the last third of any project in about two or three weeks, in a white heat. Then I overexert myself and I get sick for a while, and then it’s on to editing.

Is there one subject you would never write about as an author?
 
There are a few I can think of off the top of my head, but I don’t want to place any artificial limits on myself. Anybody can write anything. No subject is off the table. Although I suppose there are a few subjects I just have no interest in. Competitive eating, for example. Or woodcarving. Or jazz.

Writing is not a static process. How have you developed as a writer over the years?

I think that my style has gotten sparer and sparer over the course of the last few years. I began as a very flowery writer; I think that came out of trying to meet word count quotas on school essays. Now I’m reading people like James Ellroy a whole lot, and that’s hacked down my word counts. I’m telling longer stories, but using less and less words to tell them. Soon I’ll be down to just subject-verb in every sentence.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received with regards to your writing?
 
“Read just as much as you write.” I think a lot of authors get trapped in their own fictions and forget to experience others’ work. That’s how your writing gets incestuous and inbred. If you don’t read, you start plagiarizing yourself, when you should be plagiarizing the world. I’ve been guilty of that for sure.

Which of your characters is your favorite?

Kait Brecker, the heroine of my upcoming novel The Unwelcome. She starts the book off as this nasty little spitfire; she’s a cat with her hackles raised at all times. But I think a lot of people feel like that these days, constantly under psychic attack from a world that doesn’t care about our comfort in the slightest. And she’s got this surprising strength to her as well, a strength that’s born out of her fierce loyalty to her best friend, even when that loyalty puts her through the shit. I love Kait because she goes through the worst horror I’ve ever put a character through, and she wins. She beats all the odds. She’s a better character than I am a writer.
 
Which of your books best represents you?
 
The Book of Apparitions has so many autobiographical elements to it that I have to choose it. That’s the book that’s the clearest reflection of who I was at the time I was writing it, and because I wrote it over the course of four years you can really track a kind of metamorphosis through it. And there are so many characters in it who are based very closely off of real-life people that I know and love that the novel comes off as a family portrait of sorts. And it’s got the first appearance of The Fat Orange Cat, which my sister Carolyn will tell you is Very Important.

Do you have a favorite line or passage from your work, and would you like to share it with us?
 
My favorite part of The Unwelcome is the whole of Chapter 19, which is titled simply: “Flesh.” I like it because it’s the one chapter told from the point of view of the monster. It begins like this:

He was the Alice-body. He was curled in the front seat of the station wagon.
He was the Ben-body. He was sleeping beside her in the cabin’s double bed.
He was the Riley-body. He inhaled sweet nicotine smoke under cold, unfamiliar stars.
He was the Lutz-body. He was waiting in the flesh among the trees, peering through frosted windows. He watched the empty world turn against him through another pair of unblinking eyes, and another and another and another.

The change was easy. A touch, a mental twitch, a chemical flashpoint—then the surging, pleasurable warmth of a new skin, eyes flickering open, the flesh smooth and welcoming. There was no effort, no expenditure of power. He had taken a dozen bodies this week alone, perhaps more. Now he would take one more, and one more besides, and then he and Heart-Brecker would come together and rest. Then the flesh would welcome them both. They would walk out together into the bright and empty world, and they would never come back.
 
Can you tell us about your last book, and can you tell us about what you are working on next?
 
My last book was called Daughter of Man, a dark fantasy novella. In a lot of ways, it’s a superhero origin story told from street level where all the collateral damage is happening. And my work-in-progress is another fantasy, a kind of fantasy-noir project called Devil City. I’m tremendously excited about that one, but I don’t want to share too much yet about it. I’m still in the early stages of writing.

If you could erase one horror cliché what would be your choice?
 
I’d click the button to delete the “everybody dies” ending—in a heartbeat. I said before I like my heroes to win. I like evil to be defeated. I think the point of night is the sunrise at the end, not the darkness. Even horror deserves a happy ending.

Kait’s volcanic temper has already scared most of her friends away, and a bad breakup with her college boyfriend Lutz has left her crippled by guilt and painful memories. So, when she learns that her best friend Alice is planning a three-day sabbatical in a secluded mountain cabin, Kait jumps at the chance to tag along, convinced that rekindling their fractured friendship is the key to fixing whatever’s breaking down inside of her. She should have known… Lutz would never let her go so easily. After a chance roadside meeting, Kait’s jealous ex-boyfriend pursues her into the foothills, revealing the monster under his skin for the first time: a body-snatching inhuman entity capable of assimilating and adopting the guise of any human host. Lutz is determined to prove his twisted love to Kait, even if it means carving his monument to his devotion in the pilfered flesh of her closest friends. Now, with miles of snow-hushed Appalachia between them and civilization, Kait must unite her friends against this horrifying threat, and learn to embrace her own inner monster, before the shadows of her past swallow up her life for good.

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