Joe Hill: Horns

I think that’s true. We have this story about a person who wakes up one morning and finds he’s growing a pair of horns. He goes out to see a doctor, see a priest, see his parents. No one can help him with his condition and all people want to do is confess their most terrible secrets. If you knew the worst about the people you loved, could you still forgive them and could you still love them? Ig is forced to face a lot of darkness over the course of the book. Ultimately I think he does come to feel that you can know what’s worst in a person, but that’s not the whole picture, and the people worth knowing are still worth knowing even when you’ve seen the ugliest parts of them.

In the small town of Gideon, New Hampshire, where the story takes place, everyone has thought of Ig as the devil for a good year before he actually becomes the devil. He’s viewed as this sex murderer who escaped unpunished. Of course he’s innocent, but the perception in town is that he’s this terrible figure.

It goes inward. It goes through the first hundred pages plays like a paranoid fantasy, kind of a Hitchcock thing. Back in the day, Hitchcock was thought of as a horror director. He was the master of creating these wronged man scenarios where you have a person who is isolated. All the people he thought he could trust, he can’t trust, and all the people he thought were on his side are actually his enemies.

I wanted the beginning to play like that, but I also didn’t think that that would be enough. It was important to see how these characters first met. It was important to see the characters at their worst, but for it to have meaning, you have to know who these people were at their best. So we have this long extended flashback to Ig’s youth and we get to see him falling in love. I think that’s a satisfying arc, when we get to see a character move from innocence to experience. Maybe that’s also traditional to all stories of sin and the devil. You have to have this fall from grace.

Every story I’ve worked on has developed its own playlist. A short story will maybe gather two or three songs, and a novel will often have fifteen or sixteen songs that I listen to repetitively, even obsessively. I have to turn the music off when I’m writing dialogue so I can hear the voices in my head more clearly. The best thing about being a writer is you can tell people that you spend hours listening to the voices in your head and everyone smiles and goes, oh that’s so creative. If your investment banker told you that, you’d definitely find someone else to invest with.

(laughs) I’m laughing, but you raise a serious point. The act of sitting alone every day is intimidating, especially if you’re just starting out and you have another job and you’re writing on the side. You’re thinking to yourself, I could be out with my friends, I could be with my family. I’m not really accomplishing anything. It just feels like a crazy person thing to do, just sit there and play pretend day after day after day with no reason to really expect that there’s going to be a reward.

Lately I’ve known when I’m working on a novel, but Heart-Shaped Box began as a short story. Heart-Shaped Box is the story of this burned out heavy metal musician who has a collection of disturbing artifacts, a witch’s confession and cartoons drawn by John Wayne Gacy and he hears about a woman selling a haunted suit online. He buys it and when it shows up at his house, it turns out that there is a very real and very dangerous ghost attached to it. I thought when I was writing the story that he would discover that the ghost was real too late and the thing would eat him for breakfast, but Judas refused to die on my schedule. It got to be kind of fun to see how long he could last.

Not really. I hung in there to see how long he could keep going. It turned out that he could keep going for about 325 pages. I don’t outline or plan stories out. Sometimes I think my life would be easier if I did. Not planning things out makes the first drafts very, very messy. I throw out anywhere from a third to half of my first draft.

No. The first draft was really rancid. When the first draft was done I showed it to a handful of people, and while people liked some of the scenes, I think I was maybe the only one who felt there was a good story there. Over half of that first draft was abandoned in the process, but it’s not about whether it was easy or hard. All that maters is how the reader feels when the reader was reading it. Horns was a very hard book to write. There were a lot of setbacks. Inevitably whenever I was faced with a creative choice, I would make the wrong one, and have to go back three days later and delete fifteen pages and start again. In some ways I’m more proud of this book than of anything else I’ve ever written, just because it was difficult.

Absolutely. There was another book I worked on that I got several hundred pages of that I abandoned, basically because it wasn’t any good. That was this book that I mentioned earlier, The Surrealist Glass. In some ways that was a very crude rough draft of Horns. I got into that second book mindset where I put more pressure on myself than I really needed to. It took about a year and a half to unwind and finally settle in. It was like digging a grave in the rain. The deeper you get the more the sides fall in around you. But eventually the rain stopped and it dried out and I got the hole dug. Am I going for the right metaphor here? I don’t know if I really want to make a grave the metaphor for my book.

I think when horror fails, it’s because the people behind the movie or book forgot the most basic rule. There’s a difference between horror and just scaring people. To me, all horror is rooted in sympathy. Before you can have truly effective horror, you have to give readers a character that they give a shit about. You have to introduce them to characters that they can identify with and love and root for who have complex and authentic emotional inner lives who have regrets and made some mistakes. I always approach horror from the point of view of getting a character to write first and then introducing the awful situation.

Exactly. I think most of the torture porn stuff is just a fad. I think once you’ve watched a certain amount of horror and read a certain amount of horror, those scenes really fail to produce an effective response. You laugh at them instead of flinch. There are not separate rules for horror fiction. The same rules that apply to mainstream literature apply to horror fiction or fantasy or science fiction or whatever. There has to be a character in a situation that explores some interesting questions that mean something to people on a larger level. I think one of the reasons people turn to fiction is to explore questions that are difficult to face and explore in everyday life. Questions that would upset us and worry us and so we look at them through fiction in the same way you would handle radioactive material through a pair of lead-lined gloves.

I’m pretty proud of the short story. A lot of social networking has left me cold. I’m the world’s most indifferent blogger. I like twitter because twitter is a chance to play with that underrated literary form, the one-liner. I think that Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain would have loved twitter. I wanted to see if I couldn’t do a story about it, so I did this story, "Twittering from the Circus of the Dead" for Chris Golden’s anthology The New Dead. The story is about this internet obsessed teenage girl and her crunchy granola mom. The two of them are on a roadtrip together and over the course of this trip they clash with each other and they open up to one another and they share their vulnerabilities and they reach a couple emotional epiphanies together. It’s just like one of those Traveling Pants books. Then they arrive at the Circus of the Dead and zombies start eating people. (laughs)

One of the great pleasures in my life has been to collaborate on this thing with Gabriel Rodriguez who is the artist.

Yes. I’m always sucking my friends into side projects. He stepped up with a great devil face. At one reading someone asked me if I could be anyone else for a day who would I be. I said I would want to be Gabriel Rodriguez because it would be so exciting to be able to draw like him even if only for a day.

There are two things I think writers never should have given up. Before Hemingway, every story was an illustrated story. Twain, Dickens, Doyle, Hardy, all these books when they first came out were illustrated. Post-Hemingway a feeling developed that illustration was strictly for kids books. There’s no reason that the story can’t have illustrations. When we think about for example Sherlock Holmes, part of the reason we love the character is the ingenuity of the stories but I think that part of the reason he’s an icon was Sidney Paget’s illustrations which fixed the look of the character in the public’s mind. The other thing writers never should have given up is writing episodically. These things were abandoned in modern publishing and the only place you can still find them is in comicbooks.

I think I have an end point, but I’m not writing it any differently than anything else I’ve ever written. It’s always possible it will surprise me and either end more abruptly than I expect or go on a little bit longer, but I project about 36 issues total. Right we’re up to issue 15. We’ve still got a ways. I’ve scripted ahead of where Gabe is illustrating so I’ve written twenty issues total.

I’m definitely not one to spoil anything. I haven’t titled the next arc but it might wind up being called "Six Stories." Those six issues will each be stand alones. This is something I’ve wanted to do with the series for a while.

I was a big X-Files fan, but like everyone, I thought that eventually the mythology got too big. You began to feel there would never be a satisfying answer to any of the mysteries. One of the things I’ve intentionally done with Locke and Key is never to raise a mystery