DarkEcho Interview: Joe Hill
11.27.05
"Most of all I try like hell not to be boring. I make an effort to avoid adverbs. I guess that's how I'd describe my fiction. 'Horror stories with few adverbs.'"
PS Publishing recently published 20th Century Ghosts,
a collection of short
stories, by a almost unknown writer named Joe Hill. He won't remain unknown for long, though, at
least in the fantasy literature world. I haven't found anyone yet who
has read the book and not been bowled over, blown away, and utterly impressed
with the high quality of the writing and the singular voice of the author -- and that includes a bevy of reviewers
who aren't easily impressed. You
-- if you have any appreciation for the short form or for modern fantasy and
horror -- will feel the same way. Go out of your way to buy 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill
and be the first kid on your block to appreciate the arrival of an incredible
new talent. (Read the DarkEcho review.)
Don't wait for a U.S. edition -- that will take at least a year -- contact PS
Publishing in the UK (editor@pspublishing.co.uk) or your your favorite
specialty bookseller online or off and get a copy in hardcover or trade
paperback. And here's something I don't think I've ever said before: If I were a
book collector, I'd invest in that "Deluxe Slipcased Hardcover" -- it might be
the best £60/$90 you ever invested.
Yeah. This guy is that good.
So, who is Joe Hill? (He's no relation as far as I know to the IWW martyr and labor folk hero of "Don't waste
time mourning, organize" fame.) At the moment, he's a full-time house dad in
New Hampshire and pretty happy with the situation. "When the kids are in school,
I have a good stretch to work, and can usually wrap up five or six pages a day,
plus an hour or two of revisions. Then, when they're home, there's time for the
stuff that really matters: baseball, comic books, building stuff. I have three
boys, so it's a lot like living in the monkey house at the zoo. You never know
when one of the kids is going to take it in their head to try sledding down the
back stairs, using one of their brothers as the sled."
Around age fourteen Joe Hill stumbled across The Drive-In by Joe Lansdale and
read it in a single day. He remembers thinking after, "Damn, I wanna do that."
Around the same time he started writing for an hour or two every day, because he
read in an essay by Ray Bradbury that's what you needed to do to become a writer. "It wasn't hard for
me to pick up the habit," he says. "I liked listening to my music and being
alone. I wrote a pile of stuff in high school, but I never bothered to rewrite
anything. I didn't get serious about that part - revising and revising until you
get it right -- until college. Then, my junior year, I wrote a short thriller
called Paper Angels, and spent a lot of my senior year polishing it. I never was
ever able to sell it, but it earned me the interest of an agent I'm still with,
Michael Choate, and nabbed a few admiring responses from editors."
After graduation Joe Hill turned out three other novels "and who-knows-how-many
stories," none of which sold. Then about four years ago he wrote a story, "20th
Century Ghost", and "with that one I kind of turned a corner."
"It was different than my other stories," Hill says. "Not that the other stuff I
wrote was bad. Most of it was professional, technically sound work. But 'Ghost'
came to life in a way most of my other fiction never did."
After compiling the collection a couple of years later, it made the usual rounds. "We sent the
collection around to all the big New York publishers, and one by one, they all
turned it down. They'd say they loved the stories, and they couldn't wait to see
a novel from me, but that there was no market for a first book of short fiction
by a writer with no reputation.
"So I took it to the small presses, expecting more of the same. But the reaction
there was very different, very enthusiastic. [PS Publishing's publisher]Pete Crowther read it in one
weekend and wanted it and said we could do a print run of almost two thousand
books, including a limited trade paperback, to make it affordable for people who
might not normally buy a limited edition. But other guys -- Richard Chizmar,
Bill Schafer, Paul Miller at Earthling -- were also interested and positive and
supportive. The bunch of them are among the very best people I've ever come
across in publishing. They don't make decisions based on what they think is
going to make them money, they just get psyched about a book and decide to
publish it, end of story. Peter Crowther, especially, is a tireless soldier when
it comes to supporting the short story form."
When pushed to describe his own work, Hill explains, "They're stories of the
surreal and fantastic, stories built around curious concepts, like the one about
the inflatable boy, or the one about the guy who collects dying breaths and
shows them off in his Museum of Silence. None of them are experimental. No
throw-aways. I'm not the kind of guy who can or wants to write thirty stories a
year. It takes me a month or more to write a good story, not a week. I try to be
deliberate. There aren't different rules for fantasy stories, or horror stories
than from other kinds of fiction. The same rules that apply to mainstream
stories apply to all the other genres. Stories need a believable,
psychologically interesting main character to anchor them. And then you need to
take that character and hold their feet to the fire. Most of all I try like hell
not to be boring. I make an effort to avoid adverbs. I guess that's how I'd
describe my fiction. 'Horror stories with few adverbs.'"
Despite minimal adverbs, Hill's stories are varied and readers are already debating which story
they "like best." The lead story in 20th Century Ghosts, "Best New Horror", is one that
horror anthology aficionados will appreciate -- and there's an odd story behind
the story. "I was lucky enough to get a story in Stephen Jones' annual anthology,
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror," says the author.
"Just after the book came
out, Steve sent a mass e-mail around, to all the people who had been in the
collection, asking if any of them could help track down one of the writers in
the book. He wanted to send this person a royalty check, but the guy had just
vanished from the face of the earth. Letters mailed to his address came back
unopened. His phone had been disconnected. He wasn't online. Steve's search for
this writer -- this young guy who had written one remarkable horror story and
then disappeared -- kind of grabbed my imagination. So I started writing.
"Now here's the funny part. I finished the story, and showed it to Steve
Jones. But when I told him how he had been the inspiration for the story, he was
totally confused. He said none of what I remembered ever happened. He hadn't
lost touch with any of the writers in Best New Horror, and hadn't sent out the
mass e-mail I recalled reading. He probably thinks I suffer from delusions."
"Wait," Hill ponders, "what if I do?"
Other than delusions of Stephen Jones's e-mail, several other influences are apparent in Hill's
writing. Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, and Bernard Malamud
seem to have left impressions, but he also notes the importance of Alan Moore.
"I really write with Bernard Malamud on one shoulder and Alan Moore on the
other. They're my latitude and longitude -- they're how I find my way from one
end of a story to the other. I know they probably seem like an unlikely pair.
Malamud was quiet and professorial and wrote powerfully about loneliness and
moral confusion and Judaism. Alan Moore is this hairy, overgrown shaman who's
written powerfully about superheroes and talking piles of moss. But I think deep
down, they have a lot of the same strengths. A gift for jolting transitions, and
honest, wrenching dialogue. A passion for getting the structure right, insisting
that form match content. When they write a character, every line of dialogue,
every gesture, becomes a pure extension of who that character is.
"Malamud wasn't
afraid to write fantasy or a ghost story or science fiction -- one of his last
books was an end-of-the-world novel. Moore isn't afraid to get literary, to
twist a genre story inside out and make it bigger than itself. I love that. I
also think both of them, deep down, show an almost brutal instinct for creating
suspense. In the end, that's the difference between winning a reader over or
not. Because if they're bored with your story, there's always something on TV."
Hill's agent is currently shopping a new novel, Heart-Shaped Box. "It's about a
guy who buys a ghost online, and what happens to him after UPS delivers it. I
started work on it not long after Peter Crowther accepted 20th Century Ghosts
for publication, and I wrote it in a very quick period of time, for me, just
nine months from the time I started, to the completion of the third draft. It's
the most fun I've ever had writing anything. Psychologically, selling 20th Century Ghosts to PS was an incredible boost, and made it that much easier -
that much more of a pleasure -- to get the book written. I'll be interested to
know what publishers make of it."
Another novel, The Briars, is still a work in progress that he's "been banging
away at, off and on, for the last couple years. It's the story of two miserable
prep school kids who go on a killing spree one summer...kind of Catcher In the Rye meets
In Cold Blood. There's a lot of good stuff there, but it still needs
work. With Heart-Shaped Box, everything was right from the beginning, and it
just leap-frogged The Briars completely."
If you visit Joe Hill's Web site
you'll find a nifty little game
called "Last Breath". It's more than just lagniappe for the visitor. "'Last Breath'"
is investment banking at work," according to Hill. "Artists also need to be investment bankers. You
need to create a diverse creative portfolio. That's the lesson of Neil Gaiman's
career. He's written in every possible form, books, scripts, comics, children's
stories. Even Christmas cards...one of his most memorable short stories was
originally published as a Christmas card. So I write short stories, but I also
try and work in other forms. I've done some writing for comics, and enjoyed
that. I've always written novels, and hopefully I'll break through with this new
one. The game was another form to explore, and it was a great chance to work
with Vincent Chong, a remarkable digital artist operating out of London. Vinny
also did the covers for20th Century Ghosts, and damn if he didn't do some
awfully eye-catching work.
"The other way to diversify your artistic portfolio is to write different
kinds of stories. So while the collection and the new novel are anchored in
horror and fantasy, I'm exploring science fiction in a new story, and I'm also
working on some stuff that's a little more planted in mainstream fiction.
There's a story in the new Postscripts, 'Bobby Conroy Comes Back From The Dead',
that doesn't have any fantasy element in it at all. It's this straight-forward
relationship story. Guest-starring Tom Savini and a pile of human body parts.
Hopefully people will think it's funny. So I like to explore other forms, but
also other dramatic material, not just dark fantasy. That said, you never want
to force anything. I take an organic approach to my own work. I don't write
anything unless I think it'll hold my interest, and a reader's. If I can't get
wrapped up in what I'm doing, why would anyone else?"
Now, go get wrapped up in Joe Hill's work. -- Paula Guran