Poured Over: Stephen Graham Jones on Don’t Fear the Reaper
“For us, horror stories are a long, dark, scary tunnel. You hear sounds you don’t want to hear; you see things that are going to stick in your head. But if you keep putting one foot after the other, that speck of light at the end is going to grow a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger and one day you step out into daylight.”
Stephen Graham Jones’s second installment in the Indian Lake Trilogy, Don’t Fear the Reaper, is a big hearted, blood-soaked romp that rivals the very best slasher films. Jones joins us to talk about creating his fierce and funny characters, the importance of setting, Native American authors in horror, his favorite scary movies and frightening books and more with Poured Over guest host, Jenna Seery. And we end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and Jamie.
Featured Books: (Episode)
Don’t Fear the Reaper by Stephen Graham Jones
My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones
The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
The Shining by Stephen King
Books of Blood by Clive Barker
Experimental Film by Gemma Files
Fantasticland by Mike Bockoven
A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay
My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix
Road of Bones by Christopher Golden
Maeve Fly by CJ Leede
Featured Books: (TBR Topoff)
Carrie by Stephen King
Bad Cree by Jessica Johns
This episode of Poured Over was produced and hosted by Jenna Seery and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes of Poured Over land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and wherever you listen to podcasts.
Full transcript of this episode:
Jenna Seery
Hello everyone. I’m Jenna Seery. I’m a bookseller and the associate producer of Poured Over and today we are here with the prolific Stephen Graham Jones. You know him from his many books. Mongrels, The Only Good Indians, My Heart is a Chainsaw and now Don’t Fear the Reaper. He is a Bram Stoker Winner. He is a Shirley Jackson Award Winner. He is the winner of many things, including all of our hearts, as well as a hoard of novels, short stories. novellas. Stephen, thank you so much for being here with us today.
Stephen Graham Jones
It’s an honor to talk with you. Thank you.
JS
So we now here have the second installment in the Indian Lake trilogy. Following My heart is a Chainsaw. And like any good slasher, this sequel starts with a bang or more of a squelch I guess you’d say. I’m not going to give any spoilers today I want to do a spoiler free read for everyone who I know is waiting on the edge of their seats to read through their fingers on this one. I read this book in a sitting so I know that everyone out there is going to have a great ride with this one.
SGJ
So nice. Well, I wrote it during a sitting now.
JS
So I want to start with probably my favorite part of the book, which is Jade Daniels herself. I think that so often in horror, we think of horror based on their plots. So we think of haunted house stories, zombie stories, werewolf stories. But something so different about your novels is that character is just as important as plot. So tell us a little bit about Jade.
SGJ
You know Jade doesn’t fit in with her family, her community or school. She doesn’t really have a peer group or she does but it’s a peer group of slasher hounds spread across the world, you know, and luckily a lot of them found Chainsaw, which is great. Jade is Blackfeet she’s living in Idaho, Proofrock, Idaho with just 1000 feet up the mountain, little, small community 2,500-3,000 people maybe on a good day, when everybody’s home from work. People sometimes say why don’t you set it in Colorado? Because I live in Colorado. Why don’t you set it in Montana, I’ve known Montana my whole life. Why Idaho? What I wanted to push there was the idea that there’s not a single American Indian story. If we only find stories about Indians set on reservations with like the language sprinkled throughout and you know, traditions and all that. You might think that’s how you’d be Indian. But I think Jade is just as Indian. She’s long, long ways from home, she has no ties to the community. She’s just as Blackfeet as anyone else. I think to say otherwise would be to propose that all those kids who were abducted from their homes and adopted out you know, back when a few decades ago that they’re not Indian and to me they’re 100% Indian I mean it’s wonderful to be plugged in. It’s wonderful to know some words and some history on that but it’s not necessary. And Jade early on in her life at a time when she really needed it, she found the slasher, she found Mario Bava’s Bay of Blood, which is kind of a grandfather to the slasher anyways. And she insulated herself with it and she, being not plugged into any of the communities that she could have been, any of the groups he could have been, and she was kind of left out in the cold but she found a way to insulate herself and that’s with slashers. And the result of that is she wears slasher goggles. So she sees every interaction through slashers at least in My Heart is a Chainsaw she did. In Don’t Fear the Reaper she’s come home four years later, after the legal kind of fallout of My Heart is a Chainsaw because I wanted to push that slashers, these cycles of violence, they don’t reset with each installment, they accumulate. And there is definitely consequences from each one. But what she’s dealing with now is she’s four years older, so she’s kind of grown out of that slasher goggles self that she had in high school. And she’s plugging back into her community, but the community all expects her to be the same as she was the last time I saw her. It’s hard. We all know that when we go home after a few years, people remember us the way we were there. Like that’s how you’re going to be for us forever. But we need to let people change you know, and she’s going by Jennifer now not Jade,
JS
And she is definitely a lot more grown up than the last time we saw her. She thinks of things incredibly differently. Did you consider this a coming of age story for her? I know you’ve had coming of age stories before. I mean, Mongrels is a huge coming of age story. Even in Only Good Indians, you have Denorah’s coming of age story at the end. Do you think that that’s an important piece of this?
SGJ
I think it’s a really important piece. And I think that coming of age was not limited to My Heart is a Chainsaw. So I think it’s a process that continues throughout all three books in the trilogy. And you know, we call it coming of age, but it’s really kind of like a ritual that you go through to go to your next stage of maturation or just your next place. It doesn’t even have to be higher just to the next place. But you know, I really think that slasher is built specifically for that. People always wonder why aren’t the slashers coming at the 40 year olds and I think that the reason the slasher activates the best around high schoolers is that high schoolers are at that point in their life where they’re about to change into something else and the slasher can distill, exaggerate and express that feeling of change so much faster than if you tell it without that you know, it’s a horror adventure like a slasher it’s like a transformation change or transformation chamber or an acceleration chamber. No, you get on it and boom, you have to become what you’re gonna be or you don’t live.
JS
She certainly becomes someone strong, someone fierce. She never loses that humor. She never loses her view on the world but she definitely finds her footing. In the first book, she doesn’t consider herself a final girl at all she’s ready to give that up to someone else. But towards the end of My Heart is a Chainsaw you see her sort of realize what she needs to do. Do you consider Jade a final girl? Do you think she subverts the final girl?
SGJ
I think I do consider a final girl and I do think she is subverting like the perfect warrior angel princess model of the final girl which is really hard to identify with. Final girls in slashers are supposed to teach us how to push back against bullies, to insist upon our own values. But when the final girl gets too difficult of a space for us to occupy, if the final girl has been idealized to the point where we can’t enter into that space, that identity then the final girl has lost her usefulness. So Jade doesn’t see herself as fitting the mold, the model of a final girl but yes at the end of the My Heart is a Chainsaw because she’s the only one left standing she’s not gonna let her fill iand she has that heart and that’s what you need final girl is on the inside, not the outside. Then in Don’t Fear the Reaper, she no longer has that desire to kind of put the final girl up on a pedestal. She understands the cost, she used to pray at the altar of Craven and Carpenter and beg them to send the savage angel down, these slashers because she needed some justice in her life. But now she knows the price that that exacts on people close to her, on her community and she no longer wants a slasher to happen. But a slasher may be happening around her all the same and she has to react accordingly.
JS
I think that’s interesting what you said that it accumulates rather than just each individual moment happening. So often in the in slasher movies, you don’t see what happens in between Halloween one and two, you don’t see that community dealing with the aftermath. And I think that is a very important piece that you can get in a horror novel that you’re never going to see and that slasher film.
SGJ
Yeah. And when you go from iteration to iteration or sequel sequel of a slasher through a franchise, the characters generally don’t have to deal with the trauma. You know, sometimes it’s because they’re all dead and we have a new group of people but you don’t really see the community dealing with the trauma. And I think even if a slasher just happens once in your community that is going to be like a burl in the woods that everything has to go around and accommodate.
JS
When you were writing this story which came first Jade herself or the story you wanted to tell?
SGJ
I wrote the first early, early proto-draft of My Heart is a Chainsaw in 2013, it was called like Lake Access Only and it was told from the voice or with the voice of a, what do you call it, a Greek chorus or royal first person, a we instead of an I. And you finally realize that the voice isn’t a chorus, it’s one kid in an iron mask, who has so many parents that he considers himself plural instead of singular. And Jade was not there at all, there was a version of Hardy, he had a different name, Indian Lake was there Proofrock was there, I think Terra Nova was there. So a lot of the elements were in place. But Jade was not there. Jade did not show up until, I put the novel on a shelf because I wasn’t working. And I came back to it at the very end of 2017 or maybe early 2018 and had to rewrite it from the ground up. And I realized I needed a different angle because the big reveal of this kid in an iron mask wasn’t working. It was really just me trying to emulate the cover of Quiet Riot’s Metal Health, which I love. I don’t think that’s a really a great reason to write a novel either. So also that first version was really dependent on a certain kind of turtle that I made up. And I don’t know if people want to follow me into the biological worlds like that. I believe the evolutionary randomness, not randomness- the evolutionary, the natural selection that can lead to this type of turtle anyways, turtles are gone, now. I don’t know if there’s any turtles in these trilogies whatsoever. And Jade showed up. And in our very first instance, he was writing a book on all this and then that fell away and there was various other versions of jade across like a year and a half when I was finally getting it done but there’s actually a version of Lake Access Only which was My Heart is a Chainsaw that Letha told a third of it, Hardy told a third of it, and Jade told a third of it, which was really fun. But people kept getting sad when we’d leave Jade, my readers would say, well, I liked it as long as she was there. And then when she wasn’t there, people got bored. So I realized that Jade has to be the center.
JS
I mean, I think that makes sense. I think there’s something so particular about her view, of her knowledge that allows you into the story more deeply than if it was being told from the outside. I think, for the horror initiated, her commentary makes everything so much more fun. But for those readers who maybe aren’t as familiar with slasher films, I think it really allows you to deepen that experience right off the bat.
SGJ
Yeah, that’s a good point. And Jade, she does kind of hold your hand and lead you into slasher land. But, you can’t totally trust her either. You know, she’ll squeeze your hand pretty hard and she’ll set you up for a scare/
JS
And she does for those around her as well. I mean, I think another important part is the cast of characters. And Proofrock is eclectic. It is interesting, and I’m from or I used to live in, like a smaller town area. I went to college near Fargo. And so the it has some of the same vibes where the community shapes you, and you shape the community right back. And I feel like you see that in the cast of characters outside of Jade.
SGJ
Oh, great. Great. That’s wonderful. Yeah, thank you very much. That’s very cool. Yeah. Grew up in a lot of small towns. So I guess that dynamic of everyone here has known you since you were in preschool, and I know every secret about you, and no matter how much you grow up, they’re still gonna say, Oh, you’re the kid who did that on the recess in seventh grade, you can’t ever escape.
JS
I think Jade feels that. I mean, she is constantly bucking against her circumstances. And yet, yeah, wants to live right in that as well, too. As far as your other cast of characters comes, I just have to ask about the names because your names of your characters are, you know, pretty great from Letha to Bear Sherlock Holmes, to the incredible name of Dark Mill South. So I just need to know how you get those names.
SGJ
Well, Mr. Holmes, he started out as just Mr. Holmes and then Jade joked around and called him Sherlock at one point, I don’t know if it’s still in the text or not. And, and then I needed to remind my readers that bears are in this area. That’s the bear name. And I had to come up with a front name for him, which turned out to be Grady. It kind of surprised me. I don’t know. It’s didn’t know it was going to be Grady. Yeah, maybe I guess I did know Grady Hendrix by then and he’s the only Grady I know. So it must have been him. And but Letha, Letha Mondragon, in junior high I had classmate, her name was Mondragon. And then in high school for about a semester I knew someone named Letha. And I was always so impressed by their names. And so I just added in, I added them together to get Letha Mondragon. But it’s funny. I’ve heard some people pronounce it Leh-tha which always freaks me out. I should have put it like a long e sign over the E or something.
JS
I think you get it from the nicknames that people use from her there. I mean, the character of Dark Mill South himself, people will come to know from Don’t Fear the Reaper, but that sort of takes over a lot of what was so interesting about this book. It’s a different tone, a different feeling from the first one. I think it really, really brings a lot. So how did he enter the story?
SGJ
You know, how his name came about was forever I’ve known that Jerry Reed song Amos Moses and there’s a point and Amos Moses where the line is, Doc Millsap. Like Dr. Millsap had a child who could eat up his weight and groceries and my whole life I’ve misheard that as “dark mill south”, not Doc Millsap. And so that’s just where the name came from. But you’ll notice on Dark Mill South’s birth certificate he’s DM South because I had to ask myself who’s gonna name her kid Dark? That’s not the best thing to do to a kid. Even if you’re not a great parent you still don’t name your kid Dark, I don’t think and so I feel like Dark is a name he picked up probably in its adolescence, you know, when we all want to have like a cool goth name or something. And, but as for himself, I was interested in the way America turns its serial killers into like, I don’t know, legendary characters or something. I guess they get mediated so heavily that we don’t even consider them real. They’re like the big bad wolf in a Red Riding Hood story or something and we kind of celebrate them which is such an odd dynamic. I think as for his like, physical appearance. The reason he has a hook hand is that I wanted to dial back to the old hook hand stories from Lovers Lane from what the late 50s, early 60s, you know, because a lot of people say that’s where the slashing started, I think the slashing starts earlier. But that is definitely a place where it catalyzed and get a little bit a little bit codified. So I thought, I should probably make a note of that and his stature. He’s a big dude, he’s 6’6”, 6’7, long hair really, really tough. The trick is, when you’re setting up a novel with a protagonist and an antagonist, it’s always really important that the antagonist be more capable than the protagonist. Because then, if the protagonist, the hero, the final girl, is able to overcome that it’s not via muscles, it’s via our smart monkey brains. Like if you’re fighting that dinosaur in a story, you don’t kill it, but biting harder than a Tyrannosaurus Rex, right? You know, you kill it by luring it into a chasm or something. I really liked like Nancy Thompson from Nightmare on Elm Street. I love how she thinks her way through the end and survives, which doesn’t cash in any of her identity. She’s able to stay Nancy, but she just uses her brain and tell you the truth, most final girls don’t. Most final girls adopt the slashers characteristics of who can swing a machete harder, and that’s how they win the day. But I like how Nancy thinks. I appreciate that a lot.
JS
I agree. When I was reading the book, I was putting myself in Jade’s shoes. I’m not sure I’d be able to think my way out of a situation when that person is standing in front of you.
SGJ
Oh man, for sure. And Jade also thinks her way out of the confrontation at the end of My Heart is a Chainsaw with Stacey Graves. She like puts together the pieces she has of how this legendary character works and she realizes what she has to do to meet it.
JS
She’s got an encyclopedic knowledge of things that can get her out of a bind. Yeah, as far as characters go, I just my one question on craft for you in this is do you know your characters fates when you start or does it come to you, as it happens,
SGJ
It comes to me as well as it happens and kind of as it’s needed, like, an example that would be Banner from the first book, he’s just an annoying high schooler. We don’t like we don’t like the things he says in class, we don’t like this person, his character. And the second one, he’s, he’s growing up. So it’s just it just, it’s four years later for Jade, it’s four years, four years later for Banner. And due to the, the big showdown at the end of Chainsaw, he kind of had a moment of growth or awareness or self-awareness as well. And I think he changed into a different person a little bit. He grew up, and we see him now. He has some responsibilities and some duties, and he cares about things. You know, in high school. He just wanted to play football and go on dates with girls. That’s all he wanted, you know, but he’s a different person now. And I think that’s important that we let people change. Like I say that Jade’s issue is she’s coming home, and everyone expects her to be the same, the same as she was when she was 17, which none of us are. We don’t really like our 17-year-old selves, generally, the same way. The community of Proofrock should let Jade change we as readers should hopefully let Banner grow up and change too.
JS
There’s a lot in this book where you need to call back to the characters you knew in Chainsaw and reformulate what you were thinking and reformulate what you think of Proofrock as a whole because the town itself is very different than it was at the end of Chainsaw and I think, in this setting, the city Proofrock, the town of Proofrock is almost a character itself, it plays its own role in the story.
SGJ
Totally. You’re totally right. I never realized that. I think in 2017, I think it was actually coming off Mongrels, and Mapping the Interior and I wrote this big crime novel, Texas is Burning. And I wanted to set it against the backdrop like a Kafka backdrop, or a Joe vs the Volcano backdrop, or just like a great desolate city that is nameless, featureless, it’s just like a background on a stage. You know, I wanted that kind of nameless, speechless place. But then about 115, 120 pages into it. It started feeling like I was pushing a boulder uphill. And that’s never how novels are for me novels are sitting in the boulder, and we’re rolling down a hill and I’m just trying to hold on and not die. You know, that’s how that’s how writing should be, I think. And I was like, what is going on here? How about something, and I didn’t know what to do. I got invited to a book festival and it was in my hometown of Midland, Texas, and I went down there. And I’m being shepherded away from this venue to that venue, you know, over the weekend, and I started looking around for the backseat of those cars. And I saw the buildings, the roads and the people of Midland, Texas, my home. And I realized this is the backdrop. And so I went back to that novel started over again, I told it with Midland as a backdrop and they just told us up it was like riding the boulder downhill and it was amazing and wonderful. And I never considered myself a place writer but now understand that place is not just a character and maybe the essential character.
JS
Yeah, I mean, first of all, we have a bit of a TS Eliot nod in the in the name itself. So that sets it up. I mean, even the two parts of the word proof and rock I think are very, an interesting combo there. But In many ways, it’s the perfect slasher setup, right? You’ve got your small town, you’ve got a suspicious summer camp, you’ve got a new housing development with outsiders coming in. Did you see all these pieces coming together and need all of them in order to formulate your slasher setting?
SGJ
You know, in retrospect, I understand how necessary they were. I wish I could say it was strategic enough have conceptualized it all from the get go. But it really took me a lot of a lot of drafts to figure it out. You know, I said, I wrote that first version in 2013. In that first version, that kid in the iron mask telling his story with the we instead of the I. He is a son of Terra Nova. He lives over in Terra Nova and I think Terra Nova was an island at the time. Not sure. So yeah, it just all came together. And it’s almost like through the draft, I would keep the next parts that worked and throw away other things and keep the next part that worked and through drafting it so long. Eventually I had a lot of working parts like Terra Nova and Proofrock play against each other well, and Indian Lake is wonderful to try to cross or not cross and Glenn Dam was a blast, Camp Blood was a blast. High mountain Idaho is really fun and you’re right, small town, mountain town that does give you so many options for isolation and isolation is always key for the slasher, because if this is happening in the camera’s eye have a lot of people are watching then how can I continue? Like I remember and what is it Cheerleader Camp? People start dying and they, they keep putting the kids in the freezer or something? I’m like, I don’t know about that.
JS
Well, sometimes necessity is the mother of all invention. Right? You have to you have to do what you have to do. Yeah, I mean, sometimes when you’re in a small town, you don’t have a lot of options. We got one doctor, the town itself. I mean, it takes on sort of a life of its own I think in this one was it decisive to make it sort of not a real city but more something that you had a lot more control over and people wouldn’t have their own ideas coming in.
SGJ
It was important that it actually feel like a small town and 8000 feet up the mountain in Idaho. I had to get that at least close to right, you know, I’ve lived in a lot of small towns so that was not that difficult and I live in elevation as well. So that wasn’t that difficult. The reason I made it up number one, you’re right because I wanted to do that nod to J. Edgar Prufrock of course. Proofrock for a mining community seems like the perfect name to me as well. Yeah, and I made it up yeah you’re right because I wanted I wanted to I wanted to feel like it was all clay so that when I needed to I could move this over here and move that over there but if I had to be aware in Chainsaw I didn’t have to be aware of this and in Don’t Fear the Reaper, I did- that I put the post office here so it’s got to be there it can’t move around. What I had to do when I was writing Don’t Fear the Reaper I had to go back and listen to Cara Gee’s amazing voice acting on My Heart is a Chainsaw and take copious notes about it takes us long to get from here to there and this is north of that and that’s south of that and you know all those things. I had to draw an actual map so, maybe I’m a fantasy writer now- I don’t know.
JS
Yeah, the next installment’s gonna have a big map with Dot’s and the dollar store. Melanie’s bench, everything.
SGJ
And it’s even gonna have a tree of characters and relations.
JS
It’s perfect. I think I think the fans will love it. I mean, it’s a very hyper stylized feeling you feel like you’re in that slasher movie which in comparison to the settings in Only Good Indians which are sober and you know, stark, it definitely creates the tone, like rolling around in a pool of blood in that slasher movie.
SGJ
Also and up for Reaper since Chainsaw was in the height of summer. I thought I can’t do the same thing again. So this one is in the depths of winter. It’s like a snow furnace. And it does a lot of damage all this cold.
JS
Yes. And I someone who lived in northern Minnesota and North Dakota. Got it. I felt it. I knew those moments.
SGJ
So you know the true cold like I’ve talked to people who move to Minnesota from Alaska and they go back home because they’re like it’s too cold here.
JS
I felt those moments where they’re crossing the lake and they can’t feel their hands, feet anything. You got it right there. So sort of pivoting off of setting as a piece in Only Good Indians. It’s a very different tone. It’s a very different story. It’s based on the idea of tradition and how our past comes back and sometimes you can go home, sometimes you can’t and sometimes you shouldn’t. How is that a different feeling when you’re writing more for tradition and to incorporate those aspects?
SGJ
Yeah, I mean, Only Good Indians, Chainsaw, and Reaper. They’re all slasher, so they have that in common anyways, but that’s probably just because of me, because I love slashers so I try to make everything a slasher. Even my 2012 novel Growing up Dead in Texas, which people considered a memoir, not a memoir, but it does have my life out there, that’s even to me a slasher. I just I think the slasher model or dynamic is something that I know so intimately that I can very do a lot of variations on it. You know, Night of the Mannequins, Last Final Girl, Demon Theory, all these other things. The trick is when Only Good Indians came out and did what it did, and a lot of people reading it. I heard people calling it what do they call it social criticism fiction, something like that and, and I was like great. People are like, I think we go into every story with axes to grind political, social, financial, whatever it is. And through the scenes and to the storytelling, we find a way to grind those axes. I guess a lot of that came out in Only Good Indians. But I was really nervous that people might start to try reading me as some sort of social criticism writer, I don’t know, I don’t want to be that. I want to be somebody who does have my resentment, hostilities and things I champion and all that we all have that we can’t help it. I mean, that’s always gonna find its way into my fiction. Everything we do is political. But I never want to be like, polemical, I think that’s the danger like you can shade over from being political to being polemical. And that’s, that’s when you kind of metastasize into something weird that people don’t even pay attention to for good reason. I knew that with the with My Heart is a Chainsaw, I had to take a different angle, but I still want to talk about a lot of the same things. I want to talk about the treatment of Indians over the past 500 years, for sure. And you know, I never realized that My Heart is a Chainsaw until I turned it in, like when I turned my novels into my editor Joe Monti at Saga, he usually sends me a message back and says, “Oh, it’s about this. It’s about that.” And I’m like, Yeah, sure, because I don’t have any idea what they’re about. I have to write him. He wrote me back about My Heart is a Chainsaw and he said, “Hey, a novel about gentrification.” And so I tabbed over it to make sure I understood was gentrification was. But, he’s right. But gentrification, like, in a little community, this kind of colonization is gentrification. But on a continent level, it’s all of a sudden, it’s coming across from Europe to steal our lands and kill us and all that stuff. It’s no accident that Terra Nova was called what people used to call America, the new world. You know, it wasn’t that new to us, but it was new to a lot of people anyways. So yeah, I just managed, I think, or I hope to the grind all the same axes I’m always grinding and maybe find some new ones also, hopefully, do it in a way that doesn’t get me labeled as someone who has a checklist of things they want to accomplish, politically, socially, whatever, ideologically.
JS
But there is now a growing sort of cohort of authors writing in this sort of sub-genre of indigenous fiction of indigenous or native horror. I mean, you’ve got Erika T. Wurth. You’ve got Cherie Dimaline.
SGJ
Shane Hawk, Andrea L. Rogers.
JS
It’s really a movement. I think it goes into how do we choose who tells what story? And it seems like your stories find you when they find you. But does this genre? Do you feel that horror itself allows you to go outside the bounds of white storytelling, of Western storytelling in a way that other genres don’t?
SGJ
That’s a good question. I do think that because I am using the novel as my delivery method, and novel is a Western form, I think I probably am locked into some sort of like eschatological thing, build, climax, and then like in Revelations at the end, that’s what eschatological means, as I understand it. So I think I am locked into that, to a certain extent. And I mean, in a smaller sense, I say eschatological that just that’s really like, Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth just stretched out into a screenplay format, outline things into beats, I don’t think I can escape that. I don’t know if I want to escape that either. To tell you the truth. I think when you’re doing written fiction, that it doesn’t hurt to use conventions that the reader is already conditioned to know. And also, I should say, I am conditioned on those conventions as for the characteristics of oral storytelling, I know it, but I don’t know if I know it intimately enough to replicate it or express it or render it. You know, maybe, I’ve tried before and some of my novels for small sections, and it’s really fun. As for how to make that be a whole long narrative and novel. That’d be tricky. And I’m interested in trying too, of course, I think I’ll probably always be in the western novel tradition, I think.
JS
I think that now it’s sort of horror is growing as a genre in general, I think especially horror writing is sort of ballooning- maybe it’s just because the world we’re living in is a little horrifying. So people are looking to identify there, but I’m not sure I do consider your work elevated horror or literary horror. I don’t know if I agree with those terms. But I see that thrown around a lot. And I wonder if you have a thought on that.
SGJ
I always try to resist those terms whenever I can. Just because I always feel like when somebody says this is elevated horror, they’re in the same breath dismissing all the other horror, kind of insulting all the rest of the horror like, look at that unelevated horror, this is actually much better. I think when people say elevated horror what they mean is I’m not a horror fan, but this must be different. And because I don’t like horror, like this, it must be a different kind of horror. It’s just too bad that the kind of hierarchical language that they’ve utilized to say like this is insulting the rest of the genre.
JS
Right? Sometimes we want pulpy, sometimes we want schlocky horror, and I don’t think one negates the other, I think, I mean, if you’re reading the Indian Lake trilogy, you’ve got both- you’ve got breathtaking passages with descriptions that you could find in any literary fiction novel, and then you’ve got people’s insides coming out.
SGJ
Thank you very much. Yeah, that’s always been my goal. I’ve always wanted to have a foot not just on each side of the fence, but in all the pastures which is like straddling 18 fences and how you do that with two legs. And then I’ve always been quite nervous about people calling me this or that kind of writer I do consider myself a writer who writes almost exclusively horror, but I guess three days ago I wrote a literary story, I just happened to do it. I think anytime you let the market or the critical establishment put an adjective in front of your name, like a Native American writer, or horror writer, that’s just letting them put a handle on you so they can pick you up and put you on a shelf and forget about you. I think if you can just be a writer, then that’s what you want to be. You know, I remember back in ‘02 I was down in Austin on a Conan the Barbarian panel with Joe Lansdale, Joe R. Lansdale amazing writer, and good friend. And someone asked him in the question-answer period, Joe, what genre do you write, and he didn’t even skip a beat, he said, I write in the Joe R. Lansdale genre, next. I realized, Whoa, that is my goal. I want to write in whatever genre I want to write. And the only like, thing that makes it all cohere together is hopefully the intent that I put into it, or the quality of the work or something like that. But I want to write from a Stephen Graham Jones genre, that’s my goal.
JS
I think you’re I think you’re doing it. I do. I sensed a lot of things in these books where you don’t find them in the other novels, the other horror novels that are out there right now, where do you see horror going as a genre as it becomes maybe more mainstream in literature as it hits more readers? Where would you like to see it go?
SGJ
That’s a good question. Yeah. Like, I think part of horror’s identity has always been we band together, because we’re all outsiders. We’re all outside the fence outside the light and suddenly, we hang out together. And we’re like, No, we’re rejects from there, but we’re together now. You know, I think we definitely feel that. And so I think there is a little bit of danger with being asked him into the dance. You know, we’re used to looking through slats in the wall to see the people dance and we’re not used to be on the dance floor, we haven’t been since the late 80s. Probably. This recent rise in the popularity or the acceptance of horror, I feel like it started with Jordan Peele’s Get Out in 2016 and then Victor Lavalle’s Ballad of Black Tom maybe that’s 2017. And I feel like that was like a one two punch that alerted the audience, that we’re not just a weird, nightmare carnival way out there at the edge that you don’t have to pay attention to. We are actually- horror is in dialogue with the social political issues of the day and we always have been. We’re not just having fun with blood gags and scaring each other, we’re actually doing important work. We’re sometimes functioning as a funhouse mirror for the anxieties of our time, or we’re helping people process through their own trauma we’re doing a lot, horror does a whole lot of stuff. And so far, the audience has not kicked that, they’re still subscribed to it. They’re believing it for the moment. And I think that has done a lot to contribute to horror’s rise these past few years. And then of course, you factor in the pandemic and number one: people wanted to read during the pandemic, number two: they need to believe in the fact that there’s light at the end of this long dark tunnel we’re all walking through that’s what horror does. For us, horror stories are a long, dark, scary tunnel. You hear sounds, you don’t want to hear, you see things that are going to stick in your head. But if you keep putting one foot after the other, that speck of light at the end is gonna grow a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger and one day you step out into daylight. Horror gives us the assurance that there will be an end of some sort.
JS
I agree. I know that I found myself reaching for horror books, horror movies during those unsettling months and some people would say, why don’t you want to just watch feel-good things, don’t you just want to feel better and sometimes what makes you feel better is the knowing that you can overcome things that no one would think you could.
SGJ
Yeah, for sure.
JS
So what are some of your horror influences? Obviously slasher films, but if we have someone who’s never seen a slasher movie, where should they start? or even some of your deep cut faves? I know I always say my starting point is the Carpenter Halloween, that’s one of my favorite places to start. And then I always try to get people to watch It Follows.
SGJ
It’s so good. You know some people resist that movie being a slasher, but I think it’s 100% a slasher. The same way Final Destination was a slasher too and you never see death. In It Follows you have this whatever it is that can inhabit different walking people or express itself as different people and yeah, I think it’s 100% a slasher and I think that is a wonderful milestone to hit when educating someone with a slasher. I would say start with, I agree with you, ‘78 Halloween- John Carpenter, Debra Hill, that’s a wonderful- that’s where the slasher got codified. And it started out with, maybe it got started with Beowulf back then. But in the 20th century, you get Peeping Tom and Psycho in 1960 and then you move forward a little bit and the Italians are doing the Giallo, the Giallo has these masked killers, the masks are on their hands, they’re gloves and the camera angles. The Giallo grows up and changes and gives us a lot of wonderful characteristics. And then you have something like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, that’ll give us even more, it’s not a slasher, but it has a lot of slashing characteristics. And then Black Christmas to add up and then it all finally gets codified in Halloween, and after that, the Golden Age hits and it lasts until the mid 80s and we get just a glut of slasher, not all of them wonderful, but all of them contributing to the fringe DNA of this genre. And the slasher dies and comes back with Scream in ’96- Kevin Williamson Wes Craven. It goes on for about five years, we have a really nice Neo-slasher boom. And then in like late 2000s, like what is it 2008 or so you start getting stuff like Tucker and Dale vs Evil or Behind the Mask, the Leslie Vernon story. And you get these different takes on slashers. And it finally leads up to Happy Death Day and Freaky and all these ones that they’re doing such wildly different things with the same basic build. And that just proves us that there’s endless variation within the slasher dynamic and we can keep going on in the future. And we’re not going to run out of ideas anytime soon and the conventions aren’t tired and the audience is not feeling fatigue. Hopefully last forever.
JS
Laurie Strode still out there. So, you think there’s a bright future for slashers? We’re not going to see them fade away. Yes. This year’s
SGJ
I think the slasher will always be with us. It won’t always be the hot horror sub genre. But as long as we live in a world that is basically unfair, then we’re gonna keep subscribing to justice fantasies. And that’s what the pleasure is. It’s a justice fantasy. It lets us for a couple hours or 300 pages or whatever it lets us believe in a world where people who do wrong are punished and I’m not talking about wrong being drugs, drinking, sex. That’s not what the slasher punishes the slasher punishes the lack of compassion. You know, so many of the pranks that cause this cycle of violence to start because it’s avenging angel to rise are crimes of no compassion. It’s a group of entitled people picking on someone who is less important than them, then it goes wrong, somebody dies somebody, is psychologically scarred, emotionally traumatized for the rest of their life. And that starts the cycle of justice because no one is punishing that entitled group of pranksters. So the world and slasher produces its own avenging angel to come punish that and we love to believe that the world can be fair
JS
Swapping from movies to books, what are some of those horror books that you recommend if people have finished My Heart is a Chainsaw, they’ve finished Don’t Fear the Reaper, what should they go to next?
SGJ
You know, I go back to The Shining, Stephen King’s The Shining a whole lot, that I always read that when I need a reminder of how things can work when they really, really work. Really, really, really, really well done. I mean, a lot of Stephen King stuff is really well done really, you started off this talk, talking about character being central. And that’s the best thing we’ve learned from Stephen King, that you build the person to be real such that we care about them when they go into the meat grinder of the story. And if we can just take that lesson from him then the whole genre will be better I think. So The Shining let’s see I would also recommend I guess Clive Barker’s Books of Blood that just a wonderful cycle through his sticky imagination- terrifying as well. Recently, Gemma Files’ Experimental Film, I think that functions exactly- It’s a horror novel that’s firing on every cylinder. Really, really impressive. Oh, like Mike Bockoven’s Fantasticland a whole lot. I think it’s from 2016 or so. Well, it’s an amusement park that gets isolated by a hurricane and people segment themselves off into tribes and have war with each other and things don’t have to go bad but because people are people things go bad. From that same year possibly Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts is pretty amazing. I love the way he’s able to maintain three separate narratives that play off each other but braid together and each one of them moves the story forward- that’s really accomplished. Grady Hendrix’s My Best Friend’s Exorcism maybe that’s 2017, 2018. I love the emotional punch at the end of that novel. It’s really,really effective. I think Christopher Golden’s Road of Bones that’s the recent one that really got to me. It’s just really fast paced, horror that never lets up. That’s what I really love. I love it when it never lets up. And maybe the last one, CJ Leede Maeve Fly. It’s coming out this year, and I guess it’s pulling comparisons with American Psycho just for its depravity and brutality. And it deserves it. It’s wonderfully depraved like that, it’s just a horror novel that so, so works. I’m super super impressed with Maeve Fly. I can’t wait for people to be reading.
JS
So for all of our listeners, that’s it. That’s your reading list for the coming months to get yourself over the fact that Don’t Fear the Reaper will be done. I mean, again, I think there’s going to be people who are finishing it in in a sitting. Because once it gets going, you can’t get off that ride.
SGJ
In the Barnes and Noble edition, there’s, there’s a couple of extra chapters at the end that are they were cut from their original, like, when Joe Monti my editor at Saga was helping me resculpt the novel, there was a lot of stuff that got left on the cutting room floor. And this is two of the things that get left on the cutting room floor, which I miss dearly but um, it’s I think it’s cool for people to see other ways Jade’s story could have gone.
JS
I gotta get my hands on that because I am dying for more of this story. And we only have one more. We have one more book with Jade, one more book with Proofrock, anything you want to share on the end of this trilogy?
SGJ
You know, I turned I turned my copy in on August 15. So it’s already been, it’s already in the can. And I’m currently in notes on it. And I suspect it will come out in 2024, I don’t have any dates yet. I can’t say the title yet. My publicist will like break through this green screen and do something terrible to me. So I wish I could announce it. I’m really anxious to but I want to let people sit with Don’t Fear the Reaper for a bit before we jump into the third book, and I almost said the title there.
JS
I think people are gonna want to sit with this. I think whether people want to sit with it or not, it’s gonna sit with them. That’s the way I’ve been feeling. There’s a couple images up there with different impaling techniques that are being there for a long time. Again, thank you so much for talking with us. Thank you so much for creating this world that we all get to live in and play in and be a little bit glad we’re not right there along with everyone else. Don’t Fear the Reaper. It’s going to be out soon. Thank you for talking with us. It’s been a great pleasure having you here.
SGJ
It’s been a great time talking with you. Thank you so much.