Joe Hill seemed to come out nowhere in 2007 when his first novel "Heart-Shaped Box" was released and became a bestseller and one of the best debut horror novels in years. Like all overnight success stories, it was a long time coming, the thirty-something writer having published one short story collection previously and won the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy, and the Bram Stoker Award for his short fiction.
Since then, Joe Hill, a pen name he adopted to avoid comparisons with his father, Stephen King, has established his own name and reputation. He launched "Locke and Key," a comicbook series with artist Gabriel Rodriguez from IDW Publishing. Hill is currently on tour promoting his just-released novel "Horns," the story of Ig Parrish, who wakes one morning to find horns growing from his forehead and discovers that he has the power of the devil. The story twists and turns, is sad and nasty, uncomfortable and sometimes even beautiful. In short, what a good horror novel should be.
ALEX DUEBEN: I really liked Horns and Im curious where the novel began for you. Was it this idea of character who wakes one morning with horns or where did it start?
JOE HILL: On one level, I had written a book of short stories about ghosts and I wrote a novel about a ghost and I thought, well what can I do now? Part of my game plan has always been to write about dark characters, but see if I cant fool the reader into rooting for them anyway. You really cant get much darker than the devil.
On another level, before Heart-Shaped Box there were four other books that I was never able to sell. One was this big nine hundred page epic fantasy novel that I worked on for three years and it was turned down everywhere. One of the elements in it was a character who had a psychic gift, whenever he met someone, he knew their ugliest secret. I couldnt quite leave that idea alone. Later I wrote several hundred pages of another book called The Surrealist Glass that employed a similar concept. With Horns I think the reason it gelled was because I brought the devil into the story.
AD: There was a great line in the book that really struck me and I think sums up how you approach the character of the devil. It was perhaps the devils oldest precept that sin could always be trusted to reveal what was most human in a person, as often for good as for ill.
JH: I think thats true. We have this story about a person who wakes up one morning and finds hes 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 whats worst in a person, but thats not the whole picture, and the people worth knowing are still worth knowing even when youve seen the ugliest parts of them.
AD: And almost everyone in the book that Ig meets think that he brutally murdered his girlfriend and so everyone believes that they know Igs most terrible secret.
JH: 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. Hes viewed as this sex murderer who escaped unpunished. Of course hes innocent, but the perception in town is that hes this terrible figure.
AD: Theres usually a point in horror or fantasy books where either events become smaller and more personal or they become bigger. Horns becomes more intimate.
JH: 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 cant 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 didnt 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 Igs youth and we get to see him falling in love. I think thats a satisfying arc, when we get to see a character move from innocence to experience. Maybe thats also traditional to all stories of sin and the devil. You have to have this fall from grace.
AD: There are a lot of musical references in your books and stories. Do you listen to music while you write?
JH: Every story Ive 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 Im 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 thats so creative. If your investment banker told you that, youd definitely find someone else to invest with.
AD: It also helps to be a published writer. Being an unpublished writer just means youre a guy who spends time alone listening to his voices, which fits an FBI profile.
JH: (laughs) Im laughing, but you raise a serious point. The act of sitting alone every day is intimidating, especially if youre just starting out and you have another job and youre writing on the side. Youre thinking to yourself, I could be out with my friends, I could be with my family. Im 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 theres going to be a reward.
AD: You published the short story collection 20th Century Ghosts before Heart-Shaped Box, and youve continued writing a lot of short fiction. Do you know when youre writing a short story vs when youre writing a novel?
JH: Lately Ive known when Im 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 witchs 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.
AD: Did you know story behind the suit and the backstory of everything?
JH: 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 dont 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.
AD: When you were writing Horns did know in advance how it would be structured or at least what ground the novel would cover?
JH: 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 its 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 Im more proud of this book than of anything else Ive ever written, just because it was difficult.
AD: Was part of difficulty the much talked about sophomore effort?
JH: Absolutely. There was another book I worked on that I got several hundred pages of that I abandoned, basically because it wasnt 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 dont know if I really want to make a grave the metaphor for my book.
AD: Its the kind of metaphor a horror writer would make. On that subject, youre labelled a horror writer but how do you think of your own work and how do you think of the genre that you work in?
JH: I think when horror fails, its because the people behind the movie or book forgot the most basic rule. Theres 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.
AD: Thats interesting because what scares us or unnerves us is very different from what startles us, which is what a lot of horror attempts to do.
JH: Exactly. I think most of the torture porn stuff is just a fad. I think once youve 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.
AD: Beyond having a new novel out which is a very big deal, theres a new issue of your comic Locke and Key coming out and you have a short story in the new zombie anthology, The New Dead.
JH: Im pretty proud of the short story. A lot of social networking has left me cold. Im the worlds 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 couldnt do a story about it, so I did this story, "Twittering from the Circus of the Dead" for Chris Goldens 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. Its just like one of those Traveling Pants books. Then they arrive at the Circus of the Dead and zombies start eating people. (laughs)
AD: If that description doesnt sell a few copies, I dont know what will. As far as Locke and Key goes, were in the third story arc of the series, "Crown of Shadows."
JH: One of the great pleasures in my life has been to collaborate on this thing with Gabriel Rodriguez who is the artist.
AD: Who also drew the devils face that appears throughout Horns.
JH: Yes. Im 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. Theres no reason that the story cant 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 hes an icon was Sidney Pagets illustrations which fixed the look of the character in the publics 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.
AD: With Locke and Key you do have an ending youre writing towards. Is it all plotted out in your head?
JH: I think I have an end point, but Im not writing it any differently than anything else Ive ever written. Its 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 were up to issue 15. Weve still got a ways. Ive scripted ahead of where Gabe is illustrating so Ive written twenty issues total.
AD: Anything youd like to spill about what you have planned?
JH: Im definitely not one to spoil anything. I havent titled the next arc but it might wind up being called "Six Stories." Those six issues will each be stand alones. This is something Ive 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 Ive intentionally done with Locke and Key is never to raise a mystery
Since then, Joe Hill, a pen name he adopted to avoid comparisons with his father, Stephen King, has established his own name and reputation. He launched "Locke and Key," a comicbook series with artist Gabriel Rodriguez from IDW Publishing. Hill is currently on tour promoting his just-released novel "Horns," the story of Ig Parrish, who wakes one morning to find horns growing from his forehead and discovers that he has the power of the devil. The story twists and turns, is sad and nasty, uncomfortable and sometimes even beautiful. In short, what a good horror novel should be.
ALEX DUEBEN: I really liked Horns and Im curious where the novel began for you. Was it this idea of character who wakes one morning with horns or where did it start?
JOE HILL: On one level, I had written a book of short stories about ghosts and I wrote a novel about a ghost and I thought, well what can I do now? Part of my game plan has always been to write about dark characters, but see if I cant fool the reader into rooting for them anyway. You really cant get much darker than the devil.
On another level, before Heart-Shaped Box there were four other books that I was never able to sell. One was this big nine hundred page epic fantasy novel that I worked on for three years and it was turned down everywhere. One of the elements in it was a character who had a psychic gift, whenever he met someone, he knew their ugliest secret. I couldnt quite leave that idea alone. Later I wrote several hundred pages of another book called The Surrealist Glass that employed a similar concept. With Horns I think the reason it gelled was because I brought the devil into the story.
AD: There was a great line in the book that really struck me and I think sums up how you approach the character of the devil. It was perhaps the devils oldest precept that sin could always be trusted to reveal what was most human in a person, as often for good as for ill.
JH: I think thats true. We have this story about a person who wakes up one morning and finds hes 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 whats worst in a person, but thats not the whole picture, and the people worth knowing are still worth knowing even when youve seen the ugliest parts of them.
AD: And almost everyone in the book that Ig meets think that he brutally murdered his girlfriend and so everyone believes that they know Igs most terrible secret.
JH: 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. Hes viewed as this sex murderer who escaped unpunished. Of course hes innocent, but the perception in town is that hes this terrible figure.
AD: Theres usually a point in horror or fantasy books where either events become smaller and more personal or they become bigger. Horns becomes more intimate.
JH: 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 cant 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 didnt 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 Igs youth and we get to see him falling in love. I think thats a satisfying arc, when we get to see a character move from innocence to experience. Maybe thats also traditional to all stories of sin and the devil. You have to have this fall from grace.
AD: There are a lot of musical references in your books and stories. Do you listen to music while you write?
JH: Every story Ive 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 Im 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 thats so creative. If your investment banker told you that, youd definitely find someone else to invest with.
AD: It also helps to be a published writer. Being an unpublished writer just means youre a guy who spends time alone listening to his voices, which fits an FBI profile.
JH: (laughs) Im laughing, but you raise a serious point. The act of sitting alone every day is intimidating, especially if youre just starting out and you have another job and youre writing on the side. Youre thinking to yourself, I could be out with my friends, I could be with my family. Im 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 theres going to be a reward.
AD: You published the short story collection 20th Century Ghosts before Heart-Shaped Box, and youve continued writing a lot of short fiction. Do you know when youre writing a short story vs when youre writing a novel?
JH: Lately Ive known when Im 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 witchs 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.
AD: Did you know story behind the suit and the backstory of everything?
JH: 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 dont 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.
AD: When you were writing Horns did know in advance how it would be structured or at least what ground the novel would cover?
JH: 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 its 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 Im more proud of this book than of anything else Ive ever written, just because it was difficult.
AD: Was part of difficulty the much talked about sophomore effort?
JH: Absolutely. There was another book I worked on that I got several hundred pages of that I abandoned, basically because it wasnt 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 dont know if I really want to make a grave the metaphor for my book.
AD: Its the kind of metaphor a horror writer would make. On that subject, youre labelled a horror writer but how do you think of your own work and how do you think of the genre that you work in?
JH: I think when horror fails, its because the people behind the movie or book forgot the most basic rule. Theres 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.
AD: Thats interesting because what scares us or unnerves us is very different from what startles us, which is what a lot of horror attempts to do.
JH: Exactly. I think most of the torture porn stuff is just a fad. I think once youve 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.
AD: Beyond having a new novel out which is a very big deal, theres a new issue of your comic Locke and Key coming out and you have a short story in the new zombie anthology, The New Dead.
JH: Im pretty proud of the short story. A lot of social networking has left me cold. Im the worlds 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 couldnt do a story about it, so I did this story, "Twittering from the Circus of the Dead" for Chris Goldens 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. Its just like one of those Traveling Pants books. Then they arrive at the Circus of the Dead and zombies start eating people. (laughs)
AD: If that description doesnt sell a few copies, I dont know what will. As far as Locke and Key goes, were in the third story arc of the series, "Crown of Shadows."
JH: One of the great pleasures in my life has been to collaborate on this thing with Gabriel Rodriguez who is the artist.
AD: Who also drew the devils face that appears throughout Horns.
JH: Yes. Im 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. Theres no reason that the story cant 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 hes an icon was Sidney Pagets illustrations which fixed the look of the character in the publics 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.
AD: With Locke and Key you do have an ending youre writing towards. Is it all plotted out in your head?
JH: I think I have an end point, but Im not writing it any differently than anything else Ive ever written. Its 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 were up to issue 15. Weve still got a ways. Ive scripted ahead of where Gabe is illustrating so Ive written twenty issues total.
AD: Anything youd like to spill about what you have planned?
JH: Im definitely not one to spoil anything. I havent titled the next arc but it might wind up being called "Six Stories." Those six issues will each be stand alones. This is something Ive 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 Ive intentionally done with Locke and Key is never to raise a mystery