JOHN PELLETIER IS THE MAN WITHOUT A HAT
21/7/2022
 BIO John Pelletier is a horror writer and proud supporting member of the Horror Writers Association. He has self-published 4 novelettes on Amazon with many more stories left in him to tell! He works as a librarian and lives in Ohio with his wife, and their three cats. Before he started writing he got a bachelor’s degree in English from The Ohio State University and a master’s in Library and Information Science from Kent State University. WEBSITE LINKS https://www.johnpelletierfiction.com/ https://twitter.com/JPelletierFict https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/21632338.John_Pelletier https://www.bookbub.com/authors/john-pelletier https://www.amazon.com/John-Pelletier/e/B097F92XQ2/ref=aufs_dp_mata_dsk Could you tell the readers a little bit about yourself? I’ve been married to my wife for twelve years now and it’s hard to remember what life was like before I met her. I work as a librarian at a public library having earned my master’s degree in Library and Information Science in 2016. Before that I worked as a painter at The Ohio State University for fourteen years. I started reading Stephen King in my teens and was drawn to horror slowly. The supernatural was something that interested me but also scared the hell out of me. I spent many years watching horror movies through my fingers. It wasn’t until I was old enough to be certain that monsters weren’t going to come for me that I could begin to dive into horror proper. Now I want to bring the journey full circle and share my own horror stories with people. Which one of your characters would you least like to meet in real life? Doctor Charles Barrett. He’s the main character in A Visitor. He’s very much a man willing to do whatever he needs to do to get what he wants. If I found myself alone with Dr. Barrett in a room, I’d be looking for anything I could find to physically defend myself. That encounter would only end one of two ways and I would do my level best to make sure that I was the person to walk out of that room. 😊 Other than the horror genre, what else has been a major influence on your writing? Science Fiction/Fantasy. I grew up watching Star Trek and the first book that I ever read for fun was the Star Trek The Next Generation novel Vendetta. 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 think most people hear the word horror and immediately think of movies like Friday the 13th – slasher flicks full of gore and nudity. Eye candy in short. I think horror is much much more than that. I think horror at its core is about an individual coming to terms with the titanic forces that eclipse our understanding of size and scale. Humanity loves to cast itself as masters of the universe. We have no control over the cosmic nor can we control the forces that our own planet can unleash every second of every day. Horror comes into focus for all of us when something comes along and goes, ‘Hey dipshit, let me show you something…’ In short - anything that offers us a glimpse behind the curtain lays bare our total lack of control. Once people realize they live side-by-side with horror, they can begin to appreciate horror writing/movies in all their glories. 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? Looking into my magic eight ball… I think horror is going to continue to do what it does. By that I mean that there will be a large collection of stories that chase the current trends/issues to be relevant and gain wider acceptance. But there will also be those stories that drop out of the clear blue sky, and they will be timeless. I instinctively pull back from anything trendy or ‘new’ because some trends are not worth my effort to realign my existence in order to be viewed as cool. For example, imagine if musicians had only written music that fit inside the Disco genre. Forever. Think about all the different music we would have lost out on because everyone was so focused on the ‘new’. Horror can and should be contemporary, horror should be open to all people and horror should represent the times in which it was written. But above all else, horror should be real. If it only applies under limited, narrow circumstances, then it can’t transcend boundaries. Take Jordan Peele’s movie Get Out as an example of something that managed to be both timely and timeless. As a white man I will never know what it’s like to be treated like a second-class citizen because of my skin tone. But I can relate to Get Out because I can relate to the class distinctions of rich versus poor, of those in power versus those that are not. Those themes are timeless and can be felt by everyone. Given the dark, violent and at times grotesque nature of the horror genre why do you think so many people enjoy reading it? Everyone has an opinion on this issue: people like being scared, people like living vicariously, people have blood lust, etc. etc. If you push past all the flash and spectacle of horror, people – deep down in the dark places of their souls that no one likes to talk about – people know that life is horror. We live it every moment of our lives. Take shows/comics like the Walking Dead for example. At its core you have a group of people just trying to get by. Sure, there happens to be zombies, but they are all just dealing with food insecurity, crime, scarcity of resources, violence and disease all while trying to maintain a sense of identity and family. Sound familiar? That’s because that’s what we are all dealing with daily. Whether your stomach is full right now or not, somewhere in you is a primal fear of going without. That’s what drives so much of human behavior (if not all). Fear. Reading horror allows us to tap that prehistoric, cold, foundational emotion without being enveloped body and soul. At least, we like to think we’re safe. 😊 What, if anything, is currently missing from the horror genre? More everyday horrors. Some of the scariest things that I’ve ever read involves the normal everyday things that are harmless on the surface but strike terror into your soul, nonetheless. Under the right conditions, a door opening can be terrifying. A good example of the mundane being horrifying is found in Stephen King’s novel The Shining. In The Shining, about half-way through the novel little Danny Torrence makes the mistake of going into the one damn room he is supposed to stay out of! And there’s a point when King writes how the door slowly swings open and it scared me. Sitting in my chair safe at home far away from the Overlook Hotel, I got scared. The whisper of a suggestion that someone or something was behind that movement is something that every person who’s seen a door swing open on its own has heard in their own head. Its personal, it’s relatable and therefore the ‘realness’ of it is breath taking. I’ll never forget how something so routine, like a door swinging open on its own – something we have all experienced! – when placed in the right setting can really, really f**k someone up. That’s horror. What new and upcoming authors do you think we should take notice off? There are hundreds of new/emerging authors out there (myself included). My take on reading a new author is that it is like inviting a stranger into your home for the first time. Will they be a good guest or will they shit on the rug and set fire to the house? Do you want them to be good? Or do you want them to rattle your cage a little (or a lot)? Right now, I’m looking to expand my horizons and I’m picking up authors I have not read yet. I just bought a copy of Adam Nevill’s The Ritual and Beverley Lee’s The House of Little Bones. I’m hoping that they will be memorable house guests. Are there any reviews of your work, positive or negative that have stayed with you? All of them stay with me. The good, the bad or the ugly. One reader wrote in part that Interrogation in Room #249 was ‘a strange story’. They might have meant it as a criticism, but I took that to mean I told the story that I had meant to tell. I had another reader review for Pox where they wrote that they had stopped reading another book and started reading mine. That’s a cool feeling. But by far the reviews that put me over the moon were from Yvonne Miller for the Kendall Reviews website. They were great reviews from an established book reviewer. Suddenly I felt like I had a right to be writing, that it just wasn’t me ‘playing’ author, but that my work could have an impact on someone. Sure, making a living from writing is the dream, but as long I live no matter what happens in my career, no one can take that experience away from me. I wrote those things, and someone felt something about them. That’s mine forever. What aspects of writing to do you find the most difficult? Grammar and punctuation. I have a bachelor’s degree in English and I couldn’t diagram a sentence to save my life nor do I know what verb tense I’m using right this instant. Should there be a comma there? F*ck if I know. Thank God for editors. Is there one subject you would never write about as an author? Animal cruelty. I can’t bring myself to write anything where an animal is made to suffer at the hands of anyone. Let me be very clear: I don’t think for one second, written words (or movies, or videogames) make people do horrible things. Bad people do bad things. But I do think that sometimes these things can plant specific ideas in the heads of people who are already prone/vulnerable to these types of suggestions. Not to throw Stephen King under the bus, but in his novel Rage (originally published under his infamous pseudonym – Richard Bachman) a student takes a gun to school and holds his class hostage. King made the book stay ‘out-of-print’ for fear that people already on the razors edge of sanity would find that work to be inspirational for all the wrong reasons. If something I wrote planted/inspired an idea for animal cruelty I would feel morally responsible for that animal’s pain. People are already shits towards animals; they don’t need my help being any shittier. Writing, is not a static process, how have you developed as a writer over the years? One of the hardest fought realizations of my life is this: it’s ok to fail. No one sits down, fires off 40,000 words, and slaps their hands and say, ‘Ok. All done.’ No one. If you ever talk to someone who even remotely lets on that they think writing is simple/easy, stop talking to that person because they are liars. Or frauds. Or trying to undermine you. Expecting a blank page to give itself over to you is roughly akin to thinking that the stars in the heavens give one ounce of shit whether you live or die. They will continue to twinkle in the night sky long after you and I are gone. And I doubt they feel one way or the other on the issue. Neither does the blank page so get over yourself. My process is to get into a ‘clean’ headspace – by that I mean I try to relax and put life’s worries to the side for a while – and think. I think about what happens, who’s doing what, what decisions are made, what consequences flow from what I’m seeing, what are the characters seeing/feeling/hearing/smelling, etc.? I try to make it relatable, first to myself and then to a larger audience. That’s the nuts and bolts of writing. The magic of writing is the idea. That first lightning strike when the Muses grace me with the kernel that the story will grow from. I can’t tell you (or anyone) how to get that initial ah-ha idea. What is the best piece of advice you ever received with regards to your writing? My wife patiently listened to me talking about my stories/ideas for years. Years. The day finally came when she told me I needed to get going on the writing. Stop thinking, stop thinking about it, and stop talking about it. Do it. Do the work. It was hard, it was scary, but she knew it was something that I had to do. Which of your characters is your favourite? Most of my characters make all sorts of bad choices but the one I’m having the most fun with right now is the main character in a novel that I am working on. He’s quick on his feet and even faster with his mouth, able to cut someone down verbally in a heartbeat. But he has a massive blind spot that gets him into some serious trouble… Which of your books best represents you? There’s something of me inside all my writing. If you’ve never had a bad thought or an evil impulse in your life, you won’t be able to effectively write about anyone doing those things because you have no personal knowledge of the subject matter. If you haven’t felt anger, how could you explore that with the written word? What would you base it on? It would sound like the scene in the 40-Year-Old Virgin where Steve Carrel described a breast as feeling like bag of sand. It would sound fake. I’ve never been to Italy and if I were to write a travel blog about Italy, it wouldn’t take people long to get the sense that all my musings were inspired by Google search results. My writing is personal attempt to exorcise my own demons by dragging that bullshit into the light of day and saying, ‘See! This is what that type of shit does to a person! Don’t be that guy.’ And I like to explore the extreme edges of those tendencies. I don’t have to murder a room full of my house guests to know the dangers of obsession, but by writing A Visitor I could take obsession all the way down the twisted path and find out what lay at its end. So, if I invite you over for dinner, you’re probably going to be ok. Probably. Do you have a favorite line or passage from your work, and would you like to share it with us? The closing line of Pox: “I finally wrote the fucking thing, Jane.” I think it perfectly sums up Alan Dandridge’s total lack of empathy and single-minded fixation on his writing. Can you tell us about your last book, and can you tell us about what you are working on next? The last novelette I published was The Man Without a Hat. It’s about a man living in a dry sunbaked world. Society has collapsed and he’s responsible for keeping his enclave of people alive by trading resources with a small mining community. Without the trade, they’ll have no water to drink. When he shows up to trade, he finds that things have gone from bad to worst. In terms of the near future, I’m tiding up another novelette titled The Mission Bell. It’s a story about a wayward group of ranch hands that have the misfortune of spending the night in a church on the wrong side of reality. Every time the bell rings, a body turns up. Hoping to get that out into the world soon. After that I’m diving into the several WIP’s I have on the back burners. Novels take time to write and are much more costly to self-publish. But now that several of my smaller works are out, I’m swinging back to the long form and getting them all the way out of my head to make space for more ideas. If you could erase one horror cliché what would be your choice? The virtuous survivor. One of my favorite reads is Off Season by Jack Ketchum. At the end of the story one of the good guys dies senselessly. It comes out of nowhere and is unexpected. Which is great writing because it totally fits with the rest of the story. Life can be cruel and senseless, sparing one house from a tornado while devastating the one next door. In the final analysis, it doesn’t matter if you’re a good person or not. When your number is up, it’s up. I’m not advocating that life should be a melee of murder and mayhem because nothing you do matters. Quite the opposite. I’m just saying you can’t buy your way into safety or survival by living a certain way. The idea that the trope of the virtuous survivor sends the wrong signals to readers worries me. What was the last great book you read, and what was the last book that disappointed you? The last book I read was Chuck Wendig’s The Book of Accidents. His voice is clear, and the writing is fast paced. And he’s merciless. The last book I had a hard time getting into was Odd Apocalypse by Dean Koontz. His writing style is way more about setting the atmosphere and laying the stage for the back half of the novel. I think I’m too impatient of a reader to slow down and enjoy the world building. What's the one question you wish you would get asked but never do? And what would be the answer? “What Is the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow?” And my answer would be, ‘I love Monty Python and the Holy Grail!’ The Man Without A Hat |
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