 When I tell people I write horror, there is sometimes an awkward moment, and I can picture them saying, as if they’d just discovered while watching the news that I turned out to be a serial killer: “Craig is such a nice, quiet guy, I would never have guessed he wrote horror.” Could you tell the readers a little bit about yourself? I’m a middle-aged American living in Canada, a father of two, and an author of thriller and horror fiction, with notable works including Suffer the Children, One of Us, Our War, The Children of Red Peak, and my newest from Hachette, Episode Thirteen. Which of your books best represents you? Probably Suffer the Children. In this horror novel from Simon & Schuster, a parasite kills the world’s children only to bring them back to life three days later. The parents learn if they give their kids human blood, the children will reanimate exactly as they were before death, but only for an hour or two; and then they need more, and more, and more. So the question for the parents becomes: How far would you go for someone you love? The children are basically vampires, but the monsters in the novel are the parents who go all the way, willing to do evil out of the purest love in the world. I think this novel best represents me for several reasons. One, a lot of the horror is psychological, and the reader is placed in the story by being invited to confront the premise: What would you do? And possibly learn something new about themselves in the process. I certainly did, writing it. Two, it’s pretty grimdark and shocking at times, as my stories find their own identities that tend to shy away from the familiar and challenge the reader, often in a disturbing and uncomfortable but always visceral way. And lastly, a lot of my own blood is in that book, as in the writing I confronted my midlife crisis and existential fears as a father. It’s a brutal read, and it was brutal for me to write it. Almost a decade after its publication, I’m still proud of it, and it is still producing consistent sales. Can you tell us about your latest book, and can you tell us about what you are working on next? My latest horror novel is Episode Thirteen, published by Hachette and now available in bookstores, libraries, and online booksellers. A “found footage” novel made up of documents like journal entries and video transcripts, it tells the story of a ghost-hunting reality TV show crew that investigates a notoriously haunted house, only to discover way, way more than they bargained for—things that not only challenge what they know about ghosts but their concept of reality itself. The result is what starts as an entertaining reality TV episode about hunting ghosts becomes a nightmarish documentary of obsession, madness, and terror. I’d never done an epistolary novel before, as I think it’s a challenging format for hooking the reader, but I’d watched enough found footage movies to develop a sense of what worked and didn’t for me in the form, and so when my editor expressed interest, I really went for it. I’m happy I did, as I love how it turned out. At its heart, Episode Thirteen is a found footage horror story, but it goes much farther with an inside look at how reality TV shows get made, how ghost hunting is done, and how science regards the paranormal. Emotionally, I played a ton of Phasmophobia, a really amazing ghost hunting game, with my son, and bottled the dread. As for my next, I just signed a deal with Hachette for How to Make a Horror Movie. In this story set in horror’s slasher era in the 80s, a director makes a horror movie with a cursed camera that kills anyone he cares about. The scream queen he loves wants to survive the night. Together, director and Final Girl, they’re about to make movie history. This novel really dives deep into horror as a genre and what makes it tick, and how movies get made. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun for readers, especially for fans of horror movies and in particular 80s horror. A book reviewer once said I never travel the same ground twice as an author, and I hope other readers agree with that. While my work has particular trademarks, for me, every novel I write must have its own distinct voice, style, and flavor. The term horror, especially when applied to fiction, always carries such heavy connotations. What is your feeling on the term “horror” and what do you think we can do to break past these assumptions? When I tell people I write horror, there is sometimes an awkward moment, and I can picture them saying, as if they’d just discovered while watching the news that I turned out to be a serial killer: “Craig is such a nice, quiet guy, I would never have guessed he wrote horror.” I think the problem is that for many people, horror is a place you might visit, not where you should live. Another is that horror is a big tent, and the genre’s most notorious representatives involve torture or extreme gross-outs. As a result, when it comes to movies for example, critics tend to judge horror based on preconceived notions. If they don’t like the genre but like a particular work, they simply call it something else. I know people who say they’d never read horror, but they love Stephen King. I’m not sure anything really needs to change. If you’re an author and want to try to be more mainstream, you might brand your book a “paranormal thriller” instead of horror, for example, and write a mainstream story with horror elements rather than the other way around. Thematically, you can explore metaphor or hit on a social trend to elevate the work’s impact. But in the end, there is a fundamental human emotion that is horror, there are many people who love it, and there is a community of creatives who serve them. How far horror permeates into the mainstream comes and goes and depends on a lot of things, but there must always be that passionate core to keep the genre alive and evolving. Given the dark, violent and at times grotesque nature of the horror genre why do you think so many people enjoy reading it? Back to my zombie fiction days, I’ve always been fascinated by the psychology of humans in crisis. Ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations where we see what they’re really made of. The potential to hold up a fractured mirror to humanity to reveal some dark truth. This led me as a horror author to explore the psychology of what freaks people out, so I could maybe gain insight into how to do it better. When I started Suffer the Children, for example, I asked myself what scared the absolute shit out of me. The answer was if something bad ever happened to my kids, and so the novel was born out from the classic parental brag they’d put their arm in a thresher for their children. I thought, okay, good, but would you put someone else’s arm in a thresher for them? How many arms, exactly? Similarly, when I started The Children of Red Peak, which is about the survivors of an apocalyptic cult that committed mass suicide, I started with the Biblical story of Abraham being asked by God to sacrifice his son Isaac, only to stay his hand at the last moment. I thought, okay, good, but what if God didn’t stop him? And: What was it like to be Isaac that day and all the days that followed? What followed was a deep dive for me into the psychology of grief, trauma, memory, and how even conventional religion contains aspects of cosmic horror. So looking at what makes horror and why people would want to literally suffer it, I started with the fundamental desires of sex and death and its deep human drives of lust and fear. Out of all human fears, the biggest two are fear of the unknown and the fear of something preying on them. Really, it’s all about fear of dying. I think people are attracted to confronting this in fiction for the same reason they go on roller coasters; to gain a momentary, reassuring feeling of importance. To symbolically face death and vanquish it, experiencing a cathartic sense of immortality. And that all of this has rules, a sense of moral justice: The good survive, and the bad ones get what’s coming to them. These unconscious ideas are primal and archetypal, and they’re embedded in story. 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? While storytelling has enduring forms and elements that go back to the first story, its expression is often a reflection of the times we live in, which is great. It makes the story resonant and relevant. Horror is no exception, keeping in mind it’s an emotion, not a rigid set of rules defining what it must be. In the next ten years, I think we’re going to see more horror elements expressed as metaphor, for starters. We’ll definitely see more tech horror such as AI, smart homes, synthetic biology, and the like. As social justice has a lot of energy behind it, we will likely see more horror around these themes, and as the horror community is becoming more inclusive, we’ll likely see many more works from a diverse range of perspectives. As income inequality worsens and becomes more visible, we may see more horror around economic justice themes. One thing that is particularly worrying is artificial intelligence, which is currently impacting book cover designers in a big way. In the next few years, we may see many tools that empower writers to be more efficient and prolific. I could see publishers replacing slush readers with an algorithm to automatically vet incoming works as being worthwhile for an acquisitions editor to review. In the long term, however, AI may wind up good enough to compete directly against us as writers. The future may bring basically the equivalent of social media influencers—very likeable manufactured personalities—as human brands fronting AI-generated works. As an author, I can tell you this is my idea of horror! What, if anything, is currently missing from the horror genre? In my view, the big thing that is missing is confidence among bookstores that horror is a well-defined, profitable genre and that it has a big enough fan base for it to warrant its own dedicated section with many diverse authors, including the best of small presses. In many stores, you go in and if it even has a horror section, there’s Stephen King and Dean Koontz on half the shelves and a few titles on the rest. Then you have works that are arguably horror not even placed in the horror section but instead in general fiction. For horror to grow, it should be defined, understood, and promoted as a sought-out category at the bookstore level. We can’t rely on Halloween as that one time of the year horror gets its due attention. Are there any reviews of your work, positive or negative, that have stayed with you? Reviews are funny things, and they’re dangerous for authors. Nietzsche once said a single sentence can change your whole world. Similarly, a single review can invigorate an author to write another book or consider giving up. The conventional wisdom authors like to preach insistently and loudly at each other about trolling reviews is to grow a thick skin, and they’re right, it’s just a part of the business, but we’ve all been there at the end of a horrible review, hating life. I recently saw a review of one of my works where the reader got a free advance copy, read 10% of it, hated the approach, and then pronounced it objectively unfit to read with a one-star. I could hear Ralph Fiennes in The Menu, not a chef now but an author, saying, “People like you have sucked all the joy out of reading and writing books.” Then I read another review, a good review, not just good but that one perfect review where the reader completely got exactly what I was trying to convey, and I thought, okay, I’m going to go through all this again, I’m going to give hundreds of hours of hard creative lifting, I’m going to write another book, and this one’s just for you. EPISODE THIRTEEN |
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