CLAY MCLEOD CHAPMAN SITS DOWN FOR DINNER WITH THE GHOST EATERS

21/9/2022

This book, ghoulish as it sounds, was a way for me to come to grips with my failure as a friend. It took on a life of its own and has now evolved beyond this particular bit of personal history, but that core conceit—losing a loved one, a friend, to drugs and the void it creates in the living—was the emotional genesis for Ghost Eaters.

For anyone who has not read your fiction, sum up what you do in a couple of sentences?

Scraping the psychological headcheese out from the skulls of unreliable narrators. Poe-inspired diatribes from the minds and mouths of men and women and monsters.

As a fellow McLeod, can I ask where that part of your name comes from?

Dunvegan Castle! The Isle of Skye! Clan McLeod! Hold fast! I keep banging on the drawbridge, but the fam never lets me in… One day.

And I have to now have you been brave enough to go to Kentucky and visIt that grave?

Yessssss! Please pop your head in and say hello to the Little Witch Girl of Pilot’s Knob, Kentucky. Her grave is there, waiting. If the sojourn is a little too far, I’d recommend a quick jaunt through YouTube where you can see a handful of mini-Blair Witches—handheld videos made by folks who’ve gone to her grave and see if they can have their own supernatural encounter. I find it utterly fascinating. Audience-urban-legend-interplay at its finest, which served as a true inspiration for The Remaking.

Check out the full story of The Little Witch Girl in the video below

You are big fan of the first person narrative, what draws you writing using this narrative perspective, and what are your thoughts on the latest “discourse” that first person narrative is a lazy way of writing?

I personally love first person. If it makes for lazy writing, then I’m the laziest. Moby Dick, lazy? Geek Love, lazy? Never. If anything, I feel like the writer is doing double-duty—both telling the story and presenting character, all at once. By filtering the narrative through the perspective of your narrator, you’re consciously hobbling your point of view, relegating your worldview through the eyes of one character. You’re in the trenches! It makes for a sense of immediacy, a feeling of urgency, that third person doesn’t have (for me). I feel unmoored by third person, lost in the vast expanse of the narrative cosmos… but first person roots me to the ground. It’s isolating and limiting, for sure, but that very limitation can be your story’s strength. Particularly when it comes to unreliable narrators.

I was being cheeky about Poe before, but he’s honestly been such a lodestar when it comes to my narrative style. When I first read The Cask of Amontillado, my world changed… I was done for. I’ve essentially been writing Poe fan fic for years now.

Your last three novels The Remaking (2019), Whisper Down the Lane (2021) and Ghost Eaters (2022) have all been outstanding and wildly distinct from each other. You were first published back in 2002, do you feel your writing has had a new lease of life?

God, yes. Thank the lord for Quirk Books. They broke me out from publishing prison. In all frankness, I’ve been fortunate enough to live an humble existence in-and-out of the publishing industry for two decades. There have been a lot of ups and downs through that. I’ve never been a bestseller, but I’ve been able to tell the stories I’ve wanted to tell. Ghost Eaters will be my tenth book. Tenth! How amazing is that? I’m a lucky, downright blessed son of a bitch, that I get to call this a career… but it wasn’t until Quirk that I’ve found a home. Their faith and support has been an absolute balm. It’s one thing to get a big advance at one of the Big Five—Four? Two? What’s the publishing monopoly up to now?—but it’s something entirely different to be at a house where everyone who works their believes in you and wants to help get your stories out into the world. I owe them so much thanks.

In your latest Ghost Eaters, there is a drug which allows users to see ghosts. Where did the inspiration for this come from?

A lot of different places… Two main sources, mainly: Years back, in Hollyweird, I was developing a feature film in the wake of It Follows that was about a group of teens who encounter a haunted drug. It was a trippy Freddy Krueger-style slasher and ended up not going anywhere, but I always loved the core concept of it. I couldn’t let go of the story but I didn’t know how to crack it. Get into the narrative and dig down deep. I had to find a way to make it personal. Make it matter to me.

I lost a friend to addiction in my early twenties. There’s no succinct way to discuss this, but I wasn’t there for him when he needed help and I’ve always regretted it. This book, ghoulish as it sounds, was a way for me to come to grips with my failure as a friend. It took on a life of its own and has now evolved beyond this particular bit of personal history, but that core conceit—losing a loved one, a friend, to drugs and the void it creates in the living—was the emotional genesis for Ghost Eaters.

And which ghost would you most like to see, and which ghost would you really not want to meet?

I would never ever ever ever take a haunted drug. Never. I’ve seen too many scary movies to know that’s a big no-no. Buuuut… since we’ve been riffing on Poe so much, maybe him? I could say thanks.

I thought Ghost Eaters was a terrific read and in a roundabout way the book asks the reader how far they would go in order to get the ultimate kick or high. Would you agree?

Absolutely… But are we reaching out for? The characters at the core of Ghost Eaters are all suffering from a certain ennui that leaves them desperate to feel anything. That vapid gulf of post-collegiate life, where you’re no longer a special snowflake and the professional workplace is sucking out your soul… What’s left to feel anymore? Death is the ultimate high. Let’s get haunted!

And what is your ultimate high?

Me, personally? Coffee. I’m boring, I know, but caffeine is about as high a bar as my body can take.

The central toxic and co-dependent relationship in Ghost Eaters between Erin and Silas was also very convincing and makes the subsequent horror very easy to believe. How did you develop the story? Did the supernatural element come first and you then built the characters around that idea or something else?

The focus as first was the grounded emotional relationship between the two of them. Then the supernatural elements were layered on. It’s almost like I tried to write the story without the ghosts at first, to show that we can be haunted without an actual supernatural haunting, so that when the real ghosts enter into the fold, it felt like a natural—not supernatural—progression of the story.

Ghost stories always seem to be a big hit with readers, why do you think this is, and what makes your version of the ghost story genre stand out from the crowd?

It's a bold declaration to make, and I’m bound to fall flat on my face here, but… I wanted to try to tell a new kind of a ghost story. How could you reconceptualize a haunted house tale? For me, it started with asking the simple question of “what’s it like to be haunted?” I kept going back to that basic premise and tried to keep it honest, keep it simple: How does it feel to be haunted?

But yes, you’re absolutely right… People go ga-ga for ghost stories. I sure do. This type of tale is intrinsically rooted in our own purview. We take these ghosts home with us, even after the story is done. You close the book, you turn the DVD off, and now your imagination is left to do the heavy lifting. The other side is right there, the veil always pressing against your neck. It’ll never go away because it’s just so unknowable. We don’t know what’s waiting for us until we kick the bucket… but we’re always wondering, always imagining, what might be there beyond this mortal coil. That makes for great grist, if you ask me.

We are all haunted by grief, do you think we can ever exorcise these ghosts fro our minds?

No. I know I can’t. I’m a man who defines himself by his regret, so I might be the worst person to answer this question… but I think that’s what makes us human and therefor more interesting. I am haunted by the personal tragedies in my life and I feel like to a certain degree they define me.

What attracted you to writing about the Satanic Panic phenomenon in Whisper Down the Lane? (even though it is never specifically named as such in the book).

Oh, man… I grew up during that era. The pentagrams were spray-painted on the walls! Looking back at it now, I find it so fascinating that our culture—here in the states—created a communal fear out of the unknown. We were taught to be afraid of something that didn’t exist, but so many of us believed it was real. Satan was real—or, if not the Devil himself, then his followers.

I wanted to tell a story about a lie that takes on a life of its own, only to come back and haunt the person who originally told it. I was fascinated by the McMartin Pre-School trial and how all these children had been coerced into spinning these fantastical flights of fancy, and people believed it! I asked myself: What ever happened to those kids who’d been put on the witness stand? Where are they now? Are they hiding? How do they feel about what they did? What they said?

I grew up during the Satanic Panic era, and it apparently did hit the UK shores, but I can’t remember much about it. Why do you think it resonated so much more in the US than in the UK?

Here's a grand-sweeping statement for you: Americans need a boogeyman. We are a culture that is desperate to codify its fears upon the ‘other’ rather than look inwardly and rectify our own flaws. Satan is a simpler pill to swallow than to address our own shortcomings. The devil made me do it!

Culturally and politically, certainly in the UK we seem to be going backwards in time, do you think there is chance for a Satanic Panic 2?

Oh, man, it never left! It’s still going on right now! It’s just mutated and sublimated itself, but it’s always there, simmering in these disparate pockets of the internet. Pizzagate! L’il Nas X! Hillary!

When you were writing Whisper Down the Lane you completely avoided eighties stereotypes and wrote a totally non-sensationalist account of a scary time. Did you deliberately go out of your way to avoid the cliches often associated with the period?

First off… thank you. That’s really a relief to hear. With Stranger Things running rampant, I was always worried it would feel like an 80s pastiche and not a story truly rooted in the 80s. Honestly, I just wrote about myself. I was a child of the 80s, born in the 70s, reared on Spielberg. I just wrote from the point of view of a child absorbing the world around him, navigating the fears of adults.

Like Whisper Down the Lane your great witch and curses novel The Remaking (2019) also has an element of true crime to it. Is this another interest of yours?

True crime really has become a catch-all, hasn’t it? It totally interests me… but it comes with a strong sense of guilt. True crime to me is someone else’s personal tragedy. As a reader, I‘m always aware of the fact that this actually happened. How do the friends and family of these victims feel about the fact that I’m reading this book? Exploitation of grief and tragedy inevitably plays into the experience of reading these true crime books, and it most certainly factors into writing them… so when it came to The Remaking, I wanted to address that head-on. The appropriation of another person’s personal tragedy is right there in that book. Who has the right to tell these stories? What right do I have to tell somebody else’s tragedy? What’s the line between true crime and urban legend?

Could you walk us through your educational background and literary path towards having your debut collection Rest Area published in 2002? Did you see yourself as a short story writer before a novelist? Or by this point had you written longer fiction which hadn’t been published?

Ooooh, man… that’s a whole interview in of itself. Look: I was totally Cinderella. I was 21 when I got my first book deal from Disney. It was my senior year in undergrad, two weeks before graduation. Two books. The first would be a collection of short stories and the next would have to be a novel. That just doesn’t happen and it was suddenly happening to me. I didn’t have the depth of experience to understand how truly miraculous it was, nor the emotional depth to savor it. It was one of the best experiences of my life and I look back at that pivotal moment in my life where I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I loved it. I miss being naïve, but you can never go back, can you?

Let me see if I can answer this better: All through college—and in high school—I had been writing and performing these bizarro mono-stories. All first person narratives, all mini-Poes. Creepy characters telling their creepy life stories. I would read them to crowds and they took on a life of their own. I was lucky enough to convince an agent, who convinced Mickey Mouse, to make a book out of them… and I was off to the races. I spent the first five years of my professional life writing nothing but these weird stories and for the longest time that’s all I wanted to do. Back then, I would’ve loved to just keep writing them… I never wanted to write a novel. Not at first. My first novel-writing experience was a lesson in how NOT to write a novel.

Between 2013-4 you wrote a trilogy of children’s books called Tribe. How did those come about and is it an area you might be interested in returning to in future?

Yes! Absolutely… Middle grade horror is having such a surge right now, I love it. I love reading it and I’d love to write more of it. My series was a something like a frightening Fight Club for middle schoolers. What if there was a tribe of runaway kids living inside your school that no one but yourself knew existed? What if they wanted you to join their ranks? What would happen if you said no?

I fell in love with horror writing in middle school… I vividly remember sneaking in Stephen King under my desk and reading his short story “Survivor Type” while I should’ve been paying attention in class. If I could write more for that age group, I would be absolutely over the moon…

Do you read much horror fiction and how widely to you go beyond the genre? Recommend us something amazing you read recently.

I try to read as much of the genre and beyond it, for sure. You’ve got to be a student of the world, you know? I’ve definitely been imbibing a lot of great books lately… Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman. The Hollow Kind by Andy Davidson. White Horse by Erika T. Wurth. So many!

What sort of stuff did you read as a teenager and which authors have had the greatest influence on you, horror or otherwise? Do you have any ‘gateway’ novels which flicked the switch for you?

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn was a fundamental text for me. The poetry of Ai remains bedrock. Spalding Gray, Eric Bogosian. Stephen King taught me about my family tree. The Tin Drum. Flannery O’Connor. Shirley Jackson. Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark. The Far Side by Gary Larson. So many.

Which author, alive or dead, would you most like to walk past sitting on a bus reading one of your collections?

Um, Mr. Poe? Pardon me, but is this seat taken? Mind if I sit next to you? Whatcha reading there?

As well as writing novels you have had a successful career in the comic book world, what differences are there when writing a novel compared to writing a comic?

Comics are a visual medium. My script for a comic is not the final product. I am an architect for story and will eventually have to surrender my blue prints over to the individual who will build the actual thing. It’s a collaborative process where I’m in direct conversation with the artist and they lift my doggerel to a higher level. Thank God.

If you got the opportunity to turn your books into a comic, who would be your dream team to work with regards to illustration, lettering etc?

Oh, wow! What a toughie… Dave McKean was the first person to pop into my head. I still have my copy of Mr. Punch and love it. As far as letterers go, I had the good fortune of working with Aditya Bidikar and you absolutely cannot beat their work. He’s a master.

Could you tell us a bit about your next ‘work in progress’?

I’m going to have to keep a bit mum about it, but let’s just say I’m wallowing through rewrites now on what I hope will be my next book and I’m absolutely floundering. Someone needs to rescue me.

BOOK REVIEW: GHOST EATERS BY CLAY MCLEOD CHAPMAN

GHOST EATERS
BY CLAY CHAPMAN

“A Gothic-punk graveyard tale about what haunts history and what haunts the human soul. An addicting read that draws you into its descent from the first page.”—Chuck Wendig, New York Times best-selling author of The Book of Accidents

From the acclaimed author of The Remaking and Whisper Down the Lane, this terrifying supernatural page-turner will make you think twice about opening doors to the unknown.

Erin hasn’t been able to set a single boundary with her charismatic but reckless college ex-boyfriend, Silas. When he asks her to bail him out of rehab—again—she knows she needs to cut him off. But days after he gets out, Silas turns up dead of an overdose in their hometown of Richmond, Virginia, and Erin’s world falls apart.

Then a friend tells her about Ghost, a new drug that allows users to see the dead. Wanna get haunted? he asks. Grieving and desperate for closure with Silas, Erin agrees to a pill-popping “séance.” But the drug has unfathomable side effects—and once you take it, you can never go back.

Clay McLeod Chapman

“Like a demonic angel on a skateboard, like a resurrected Artaud on methadrine, like a tattletale psychiatrist turned rodeo clown, Clay McLeod Chapman races back and forth along the serrated edges of everyday American madness, objectively recording each whimper of anguish, each whisper of skewed desire. This is strong stuff, intense stuff, sometimes disturbing stuff, but I think the many who admire Chuck Palahniuk will admire Chapman as well.”—Tom Robbins, author, Still Life with Woodpecker

Clay McLeod Chapman is the author of the novels Whisper Down the Lane, The Remaking, and miss corpus, short story collections nothing untoward, commencement and rest area, as well as The Tribe middlegrade series: Homeroom Headhunters, Camp Cannibal and Academic Assassins.

Ghost Eaters, a new supernatural horror novel, hits shelves September 20, 2022 from Quirk Books, and it will scare the pants off you.

Upcoming projects include Unknown, a psychological horror anthology television series co-created with director Craig William Macneill, produced by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy at Kilter Films and Amazon Studios.

Chapman’s story late bloomer was adapted into a short film, directed by Craig William Macneill. An official selection at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, the short won Best Short at the Lake Placid Film Festival and the Brown Jenkins Award at the 12th Annual H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival.

Their second short, Henley, based on the chapter “The Henley Road Motel” from Chapman’s novel miss corpus, was an official selection at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. It won Best Short at the 2011 Gen Art Film Festival and the 2011 Carmel Arts and Film Festival. The Boy (SXSW 2015), a feature-length adaptation of Henley, co-written with director Macneill, was produced by SpectreVision (Elijah Wood, Daniel Noah, and Josh C. Waller) in 2015.

In comics, Chapman is the writer of the Marvel series Scream: Curse of Carnage. He has written Absolute Carnage: Separation Anxiety, Iron Fist: Phantom Limb, Typhoid Fever, as well as for Edge of Spider-Verse and Venomverse, The Avengers, Amazing Spider-Man, Ultimate Spider-Man, American Vampire, Scream: King In Black, and ORIGINS among others.

He is the creator of Self Storage (451 Media) and Lazaretto (BOOM! Studios).

Chapman is the creator of the rigorous storytelling session The Pumpkin Pie Show. In the twenty years of its existence, it has performed internationally at the Romanian Theatre Festival of Sibiu, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, New York International Fringe Festival, Winnipeg Fringe Festival, Edmonton Fringe Festival, Minnesota Fringe Festival, Dublin-based thisisnotashop art space, IGNITE Festival, Women Center Stage Festival and Impact Theatre Festival.

Chapman wrote the book for Hostage Song (music & lyrics by Kyle Jarrow). He is the author of such plays as commencement, the cardiac shadow and volume of smoke. His story-monologues birdfeeder, undertow and the wet echo have been featured in The Best American Short Plays anthologies.

Chapman was educated at the North Carolina School of the Arts for Drama, the Burren College of Art, and Sarah Lawrence College. He currently teaches writing at The Actors Studio MFA Program at Pace University.