Be sure to check out the end of the interview for chance to win a copy of the first two volumes of The Malus Domestica series
BIO
S. A. Hunt (she/her) is the author of the Malus Domestica horror-action series from Tor Books, which begins with Burn the Dark. In 2014, she won Reddit's /r/Fantasy "Independent Novel of the Year" Stabby Award for her Outlaw King fantasy gunslinger series. She is an Afghanistan veteran (OEF 2010), a coffee enthusiast, a fervent bicyclist, and she currently lives in Petoskey, Michigan.
WEBSITE LINKS
www.sahuntbooks.com https://www.facebook.com/authorsahunt https://twitter.com/authorsahunt https://www.amazon.com/S-A-Hunt/e/B00BJODGKW
Could you tell the readers a little bit about yourself? I’m a bestselling horror author, a transgender woman, and an Afghanistan veteran. I grew up in the mountains of Georgia but I moved to Michigan and so far it’s been the best decision I’ve ever made. I am a hot mess, but I’m good at it. I love dogs so very much, they’re the best people I know. I’m 80% Irish. I love to eat, probably too much. I’m 39 this year and I only started taking my writing career seriously in 2013, so it’s never too late to chase your dreams. Just don’t chase someone else’s dreams. That’s creepy. Which one of your characters would you least like to meet in real life? Probably Rhetor Logos—or any of the Sileni from the Outlaw King series, to be honest. If there is one creative bone in your body, he can use his powers as a muse to convince you to do anything he wants. Other than the horror genre, what else has been a major influence on your writing? The fantasy genre, for sure, and especially the sword-and-sorcery genre. My reading pedigree started with Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, and continued on through Mercedes Lackey’s The Black Gryphon, Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (which heavily influenced my Outlaw King series), Marion Zimmer Bradley, Julian May, and Andre Norton’s Trillium books, Patricia C. Wrede’s Dealing With Dragons, Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, and T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone. Fantasy and horror go hand in hand, you know—magic has been a part of horror ever since the fairytale days, and so many of our darkest myths and legends hail from medieval times. Magic is an invisible thread through so many of our modern, supposedly realistic, gritty, or otherwise pragmatic horror stories--Nightmare on Elm Street, what do you think brought Freddy back and gave him a doorway into people’s dreams? It wasn’t quantum physics. What gave the protagonist in Jon Watts’ Clown the ability to shrug off bullets and blades? Definitely not greasepaint. 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 feel like maybe I have a too-pure perspective on this matter because while I’ve hit my fair share of roadblocks when it comes to writing horror—such as an agent telling me that “horror doesn’t sell,” nobody’s really ever explained to me what’s wrong with horror. And so I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, personally. So I’m honestly not sure what you mean by connotations, and I don’t know what to tell you. I legitimately don’t understand why anyone would look down on it as a genre, or look down on genre writing in general. Some of the best stories ever told have been horror fiction, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula. That book was way ahead of its time. Between you and me, I think real-life is horror, and so horror is the most emotionally authentic fiction experience you can have. See my answer below about why people enjoy horror so much—people’s lives are so horror-iffic, that they need a less abstractly horrible piece of fiction in order to cope. Look at the news. Look at a video of a bloodworm shooting a web across somebody’s hand. Look at someone whose loved one is deteriorating in the hospital from cancer, or coronavirus. Look at the dark space between the stairs in your real-life basement. Look at your own aging face in the mirror. That’s horror. Existential horror, body-horror, psychological horror. Life is horror. Horror is life. Any industry wonk that tells you otherwise either doesn’t understand horror, or doesn’t understand life. And giving people a way to overcome the latter by giving them the former sounds like one hell of a dignified career to me. A lot of good horror movements have arisen as a direct result of the sociopolitical climate. Considering the current state of the world, where do you see horror going in the next few years? After having so much inspiration lately, there will probably be more stories revolving around red-state antagonists—white supremacists, Nazis, racists. Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers is already one of those, and my series has a couple of them. I think we’re going to keep seeing sharper, more subtle, more complex horror like Haunting of Hill House and The Invisible Man, with more diverse characters and more biting social angles like Get Out. But y’know, honestly? I can’t say with any certainty where I think horror is going. I feel like that’s the good thing about horror, my favorite aspect: it’s so unpredictable and powerful, and commanded by so many unique new voices, that it’s liable to go in any direction at any moment. I mean, nobody saw Jordan Peele, Ari Aster, Leigh Whannell, or Mike Flanagan coming. There’s always something breathtaking around the next corner. Given the dark, violent and at times grotesque nature of the horror genre why do you think so many people enjoy reading it? At the risk of stirring a lot of shit, I think horror is sort of like self-harm. When you self-harm, you’re trying to confine your pain. Self-harm is emotional Tylenol. You’re trying to take an abstract pain like depression or anxiety, and focus it into a physical pain that you can define and thus defeat. Define and defeat, that’s horror for you—define the threat and defeat it. Find the vampire, find the serial killer, feel their menace, and then kill them. Find or create something you know is true and you can fight it. Horror does that for us, it gives us something specific and defined to focus our mental energy on. Instead of some cloud of general anxiety and dread, we know what to be anxious about, we know what to dread: that monster, that ghost, that axe murderer under the stairs. And when you know what’s bothering you, you can get closure on it. What, if anything, is currently missing from the horror genre? Older main characters that aren’t starring in an update to a legacy franchise, like Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. Transgender main characters, played by transgender actors. We’re not caricatures, we’re not y’all’s supporting casts, sacrificial lambs for the masked maniac to kill, or titty-squeezing, mirror-dancing Buffalo Bills. Every human being on Earth is the protagonist of their own private story, cisgender or transgender, and that is true for fiction as well. More strong, well-written horror comedy. Less gross-out humor, less slapstick, more subtle and paced humor. Slip that comedy stiletto between my ribs, don’t clobber me over the head with a comedy hammer. What new and upcoming authors do you think we should take notice of? Frankly there are so many new horror authors cropping up, most of them I haven’t even gotten around to reading yet, I can’t really name anybody specific right now. Are there any reviews of your work, positive or negative that have stayed with you? I once got a real kick in the guts on Amazon that said some of the words I used were too obscure. They had to look them up in the dictionary. Personally I’m a fan of learning new words and new concepts, but in the end, momentum is the most important thing about storytelling to me, so I started using a simpler vocabulary, and reserving the obscure stuff for proper noun names, like “the Chiral,” and “the Brontide.” With contextual worldbuilding, you know what those words mean. Every time your reader has an opportunity to put your book down, that’s another opportunity to walk away from it. And that’s book death right there. Momentum is key. Momentum is the secret truth. Keep the story moving, keep the heart beating, keep the reader reading. What aspects of writing do you find the most difficult? FINDING ALL THE TYPOS. AAAAAAHHH. Heavens to Murgatroyd, every time I read a manuscript, at whatever stage, I find fistfuls of errors. I just had a book release in July where I found a glaring error during a video reading for a bookstore, and I wanted to just close my laptop and take a shower. Is there one subject you would never write about as an author? I may incorporate Black people, gay folks, indigenous peoples, and other marginalized groups into my stories as part of an ensemble cast, because that’s how the world works and every normal social circle or band of survivors has some level of diversity, and to tell me my entire cast has to be white because I’m white is one hundred percent silly and I’m not going to do it. That’s not realistic. I’ll also do my best to show their specific struggles, because I refuse to ignore the humanity and perspective of an entire human being just because reasons. But I’m also not going to write a whole-ass story in that voice and culture. I’m not going to write an indigenous story about indigenous events starring an all-indigenous cast. I’m not going to write a Black story about Black events starring an all-Black cast. That’s not my place. Indigenous authors can do that. Black authors can do that. Tag me on the tweet about that book and I will RT the hell out of it. I’m also not going to write about rape, or at least depict it in a graphic fashion. Some of y’all might dig that shit, and I might even get perilously close sometimes like a certain scene in The Hellion, but it hurts a majority of people to read things like sexual assault and I’m not going to subject anyone to that. Writing is not a static process. How have you developed as a writer over the years? I’ve definitely developed more of an eye for sensitive subjects like race and sexual assault. I’ve learned to put more of my trust into my editor’s judgement and, literarily speaking, not be such a fan of the smell of my own farts. I’ve learned that trying to outline a novel doesn’t work because that’s not my process—I’m a pantser and that’s the only way I produce quality work. What is the best piece of advice you ever received with regards to your writing? “Write what you know.” Writers will hear that saying and stand there all day saying things like, “Don't write what you know! Make up something new!” “If I write what I know, does that mean I can't write about things I don't know, like space travel or being a woman?” “But what if I don't know anything?” “What do you mean? I can’t write about cannibal Martians if I’ve never tasted human flesh?” That’s not what “write what you know” means. WWYK means to use your sensory or emotional memories to inform your writing with visceral authenticity. Maybe you don’t know what it’s like to stab an alien in the chest with a vibro-blade sword. That’s true. But you know what it’s like to jam a knife into a pumpkin and feel the punch and give as the blade penetrates the rind into the gourd’s mushy interior. You know what it’s like to push a running lawnmower that’s shaking your hands numb, or hold a pair of electric clippers humming in anticipation of shearing off your hair. You know what it’s like to be so completely fucking angry at somebody you just want to kill the shit out of them and watch them bleed out on the sidewalk!!!!!! And most importantly, maybe you know what it’s like to purposefully hurt somebody only to realize that now you’ve hurt somebody, possibly fatally, and all your nerve has fled you at the thought of someone dying because of something you did to them, because maybe you’re not a killer after all. Your bowels turned to concrete and your knees turned to water and briny saliva pooled in your mouth at the realization of what you did. That’s a terrible feeling. Great. Take all of that and feed that into the Imagination Machine until your alien swordfight comes out. Start writing. Which of your characters is your favourite? I have to say it might be Anders Gendreau from I Come With Knives and The Hellion, although my real favorite character, I’m saving for a future installment of this series. I think Gendreau mentions “the Jötunn” at one point in The Hellion, and I have a really cool idea for that guy I can’t wait to use. Which of your books best represents you? Probably I Come With Knives. There’s so much internalized grief and trauma and feminine rock-chick rage. I am a mess, and so is that book. Do you have a favorite line or passage from your work, and would you like to share it with us? “Tall grass listed in sideways air.” From The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree. This may sound like I’m up my own ass, but it’s so evocative. I feel like it perfectly describes how gentle the wind from the protagonist’s perspective—a soft, subtle breeze that’s only touching the wheatgrass enough to make it lean to one side. Can you tell us about your last book, and can you tell us about what you are working on next? The last book I completed was The Hellion, whose working title was King of the Road. Now I’m working on a John Carpenter tribute, a retro scifi adventure set in a nuclear winter where the apocalypse happened in 1987. A woman with robot arms and legs has to lead a convoy into the rotten heart of post-fall Paris to rescue a man who knows about a giant shelter somewhere in eastern Europe. I’m also working on Deadname, a time-travel thriller about private detective Torres, a transgender woman that’s pulled through a wormhole into the past, where she has to team up with her former male self and take down a mysterious serial killer that calls himself The Hundred-Handed One. And of course, I’m working on Malus Domestica Part 4 and 5, and the fourth installment of The Outlaw King. If you could erase one horror cliché what would be your choice? In film: killing off Black or gay characters in the first act. In books: filler masquerading as suspense, character development, or subtlety. I’ve read so many boring-as-hell horror novels in the past few years that just drone on about bullshit and leave the real horror for the third act. There’s setting up a scare by making you care about the protagonists and building up the villain with hints and clues, and then there’s a man having a snide phone conversation with his ex-wife for an entire chapter and a whole 15 pages devoted to talking about who he slept with in college or what bands he listened to. Too many authors put together a character, and forget while they’re doing so that the character is in a horror novel. What was the last great book you read, and what was the last book that disappointed you? Great: at the risk of sounding like a broken record, Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers. It just did everything right. Before that, it was Rhett & Link’s Lost Causes of Bleak Creek. Before that was Edgar Cantero’s Meddling Kids. Disappointment: Universal Harvester, by John Darnielle. Everything interesting happens “off-camera” during time-jumps from chapter to chapter, and we only ever see the after-effects. I saw so much online buzz for this book, and by the time I finished it I was infuriated. It felt like the editor had gone into it with a pair of kitchen shears and cut out all the good parts. What's the one question you wish you would get asked but never do? And what would be the answer? Are you happy? And the answer, after all is said and done, is yes. Sometimes that’s a maybe . . . . But mostly, it’s a yes. 
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina meets Joe Hill in S. A. Hunt's I Come with Knives, a horror-tinged action-adventure about a punk YouTuber on a mission to hunt witches, one vid at a time Robin - now armed with new knowledge about mysterious demon terrorizing her around town, the support of her friends, and the assistance of her old witch-hunter mentor - plots to confront the Lazenbury coven and destroy them once and for all. Meanwhile, a dangerous serial killer only known as The Serpent is abducting and killing Blackfield residents. An elusive order of magicians known as the Dogs of Odysseus also show up with Robin in their sights. Robin must handle these new threats on top of the menace from the Lazenbury coven, but a secret about Robin's past may throw all of her plans into jeopardy. The Malus Domestica series #1: Burn the Dark #2: I Come with Knives
competition
For a chance to win a copy of the first two volumes of The Malus Domestica series simply like and retweet this tweet
the heart and soul of horror author interviewsComments are closed.
|
Archives
May 2023
|
RSS Feed
|
|