 Could you tell the readers a little bit about yourself? I’m all sorts of nerdy. A Dungeons and Dragons nerd, a Star Trek nerd, a sports nerd, a Gilligan’s Island nerd, a horror nerd. You name anything except mathematics and daytime talk shows and I’m probably a nerd of it. I grew up on a farm outside a town of 800 people, worked at newspapers until I decided it was time to return to school, and I’ve taught college journalism ever since. I’ve never outgrown my fascination for monsters. Which one of your characters would you least like to meet in real life? That’s easy, Robert Garrett from The Girl in the Corn. What a creepy little bastard. He gave me the willies just writing him. Other than the horror genre, what else has been a major influence on your writing? Science fiction and fantasy. As a kid, I read the classics from H.G. Welles, Jules Verne, etc., but also fell in love with Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke early on. On the fantasy side it was J.R.R. Tolkien, of course, Michael Moorcock and Robert E. Howard. What brought these together with my love of horror (I devoured H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen) occurred when I realized Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein was really a science fiction novel, and in 1979 when I saw Ridley Scott’s Alien as a freshman in high school. Alien is a straight-up horror movie, it’s just set in space. 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? “Horror” is a catch-all word to mean anything shocking, although it’s often misused. I believe true horror is in the suspense, which is in a different literary category. Today, anything with a monster is horror, slasher is horror, creepy is horror, gross-out is horror. There are plenty of titles marketed as horror that probably have no business in that category. So, how can we break past these assumptions? Slasher, jump scare, creepy, and gross-out should be put in a category together and leave the works that are truly gut-wrenchingly scary to have horror to themselves. 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? Wow. Yes. Writing is a product of the times. What I’m NOT expecting is pandemic horror. It’s too real. When the world gets tense (wartime, economic crisis, health crises), we tend to turn to monsters defeated by people as escapism. I hope we find new monsters to scare us. Vampires, werewolves, and zombies aren’t scary anymore. Given the dark, violent and at times grotesque nature of the horror genre why do you think so many people enjoy reading it? For the same reason we like roller coasters. We all love the unknown, the spine-chilling, the blood pumping, all the while knowing it’s not real. We’re not really going to get hurt. Why would someone read a novel that sounds too much like reality? We’re already scared of that. What, if anything, is currently missing from the horror genre? Truth and originality. Regurgitating the same vampire, zombie, serial killer, evil doppelgänger from another dimension tropes, there’s a lot of repetition. We need something fresh. A lot of that can be done with characters. Characters make or break the book. Sympathy for the Devil, and all. What new and upcoming authors do you think we should take notice of? That’s a great question. I read a lot during each year, but I don’t pay enough attention to know if the author is new, or established and I haven’t heard of them. I pick books by jacket copy and recommendations. That may sound like I’m an ignorant reader, and it may be true, but I’ve read some excellent books in and out of the horror genre that way. Are there any reviews of your work, positive or negative, that have stayed with you? Man, I love and hate reviews. I can get a bad review saying my novel’s pacing was slow and there were no memorable characters right next to a review of the same novel praising the pace and the memorable characters. So, I tend to brush them off as best I can. Getting too wrapped up in reviews can drive an author nuts. That said, I guess a recent review of The Girl in the Corn will stay with me for a while. “The Girl in the Corn is one of the first great horror novels of 2022.” Yeah, I like that. What aspects of writing do you find the most difficult? On the writing end, none. I’m a pantser, so there’s no outline. I simply sit down and write, discovering the story as the reader will when I’m finished. However, revisions are painfully hard. I had so much fun with these 100,000 words, now I have to %@$& with it for the next six months? That part’s work. Is there one subject you would never write about as an author? Any form of sexual abuse. Not acceptable. Writing is not a static process, how have you developed as a writer over the years? I hope I have. The Girl in the Corn is my fifth novel and sixteenth overall book. I think I’ve gotten better through all that practice. My first four novels were humorous sci-fi and I believe I firmly found my humor voice. Now I switched things up and wrote a horror novel and, by the review I mentioned, and a few other ones, it looks like I was able to quickly capture a way to make that voice work with horror. What is the best piece of advice you ever received with regards to your writing? Keep at it. I began my writing career in my early twenties in the newspaper industry, and once wrote a letter to Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist Dave Barry. I asked for advice, and to sum it up, he said if I have faith in my writing, don’t let rejection stand in my way. Rejections may be something as simple as an editor having a crappy day. When asked about my writing from writers who have yet to sell their first book, I give them that same advice. I tell them I’m not a better writer than any of them. I just never gave up. Which of your characters is your favourite? That’s tough. I’ll give you two, the good and the bad. The good: from my novel, So You Had to Build a Time Machine, there’s Brick, a huge lumberjack of a man who runs a muffin shop and nerds out to Dungeons and Dragons. The bad: from The Girl in the Corn, there’s Robert Garrett, the flunky of the monster set to destroy humanity. Bobby is wickedly creepy. Honestly, that was fun to write. Which of your books best represents you? My first, A Funeral Story. This is the story of a normal thirty-something guy who works IT, still hangs out with his high school friends to play D&D on Fridays (D&D seems to be a theme with me), and he lives with his mother to financially support her. However, this seemingly normal man has an unusual hobby; he goes to strangers’ funerals to pick up girls. I think it best represents me because I put more of myself in him than I have any of my other characters. Well, except the picking up strangers at funerals. I’ve never done that. I did watch my uncle attempt to do that—at his mother’s funeral. That’s where I got the idea. Do you have a favorite line or passage from your work, and would you like to share it with us? “When you leave a window open, you never know what may come in.” From The Girl in the Corn. Can you tell us about your last book, and can you tell us about what you are working on next? My last book was So You Had to Build a Time Machine. A small number of people in Kansas City, Missouri begin to notice some things they were certain of are now suddenly wrong. Street names, muffin flavors, and the fact that when the main character, Skid, punches a jerk trying to flirt with her in a dance club, the man disappears before he hits the floor. The man is a theoretical physicist who helped a government lab create a device that could intersect with different dimensions and times. All sorts of crazy things happen while a collection of four oddball characters try to find the machine to shut it off before something horrible happens. My next book is a horror novel about a man who successfully left his small town, but years later, something evil happens there to bring him home. I can’t say any more. I’m not that far into it. If you could erase one horror cliché what would be your choice? Hollywood rules. This is one of the reasons I don’t like vampires and werewolves in fiction. The creation/behaviors/how to kill these monsters is what Hollywood told us they were, and Hollywood, for the most part, was wrong. If you’re going to write a beast with a history as a character, make sure you do your homework. What was the last great book you read, and what was the last book that disappointed you? I read Disorder by Amy Crider a couple of weeks ago and quite enjoyed it. Characters, pacing, setting, etc., were all top notch. Disappointed is tougher. If I can’t get into a book, I put it down. People shouldn’t waste their time on books they can’t get into. I was like that with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It’s one of my wife’s favorite books, but I thought the writing was pretentious and put it down after a couple of chapters. I guess the last one I was disappointed in was Stephen King’s Billy Summers. I’ve loved King’s writing since I was in middle school, but some of his books just don’t click with me. This was one of them. I mean, it wasn’t bad, but there were problems with it his earlier novels didn’t have. What's the one question you wish you would get asked but never do? And what would be the answer? Q. What do you like to write best, fiction or nonfiction? A. Fiction, because getting angry and killing a character is frowned upon in nonfiction. THE GIRL IN THE CORN |
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