Joe Hill was kind enough to take some time out of his schedule to participate in this email interview with me. Special thanks to his publicist at William Morrow, Eliza Rosenberry for making this happen.
Let’s get right into it….
These stories were written over the course of a couple of years, did you have a collection in mind before finishing the stories or did you say to yourself, “I’ve got these tight, taut stories, let’s put them together?”
The earliest story in the collection, “Snapshot,” was just something to write during my downtime, while I was on tour for NOS4A2. And after I finished it, I more or less forgot I had written it.
I wrote the next, “Aloft,” about a year and a half later, just after I finished the first draft of The Fireman. When it was done, I realized I had another story about the length of “Snapshot”… that is, it was too long to be a short story and too short to be a standard length novel. At that point I began to think about Different Seasons, a book I love to pieces. I thought, too, of Legends of the Fall, Jim Harrison’s sinewy triptych of story. I think there’s a good argument to be made that fiction is at its most powerful in the form of the fat-free short novel. Look at David Mitchell’s masterpiece, Cloud Atlas: deconstruct it, and you’ve got six perfect short novels in six different genres. When people talk about Dickensian novels, they usually mean something with a thousand characters and a thousand pages. But isn’t Dickens’ most lasting work A Christmas Carol, a novel so lean it can be read in a day? (I don’t say it’s his best… I just say it’s the one we’re most certain to remember a thousand years from now)
With that in mind, did the order of the stories come naturally or was this one of those seemingly small decisions that provided unexpected consternation?
I knew “Loaded” had to come second or third. It was too bleak to begin with that one — no one would want to go on! And you don’t want to end with that one either. For myself, I always want to finish a book on a high… not feeling like I got kicked in the nuts. I also knew that “Rain” and “Snapshot” couldn’t go side-by-side, because they’re both in first person.
So it got to be a bit like that riddle, the one where you have the fox, the goose, and the bag of beans, and you have to get them all across the river, and you can only take them one at a time. In the end I feel like there was only one possible order for these four stories and that’s the order they’re in.
The first story, “Snapshot” is a great way to start the collection, a weird Lovecraftian tale, either H.P.’s or your own Lovecraft (though technically, I suppose both). I’m guessing this is the story you hinted at in your fuse interview last year (https://www.fuse.tv/2016/05/joe-hill-interview-the-fireman) that is connected to Locke & Key or am I just thinking that because your pal Gabe Rodríguez provided the lovely drawing at the end of the story?
The narrator comes in contact with a black liquid that turns to a lightweight steel upon contact with oxygen; he refers to this stuff as “whispering iron.” I’ll let readers draw their own conclusions.
Isn’t Gabe’s art lovely?
Quite, yes. Extremely evocative.
The darkest of the tales is the most realistic, and perhaps the one that will generate the most heated discussion. How much more challenging was “Loaded” compared to the other three stories/short novels? (I type up these questions a day after the Las Vegas shooting).
I’m very proud of “Loaded,” but not for the reasons anyone might think. What pleases me most about the story is that there’s hardly any figurative language in it. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to the ideal represented by writers like Elmore Leonard and Walter Mosley. The dialogue does most of the work. The sentences themselves are — or at least I hope they are — almost invisible.
I used to tweet about the nation’s true favorite sport, the weekly mass shooting. I used to do the social media thing to share my outrage and my anxiety. But there is not a single damn thing I could say on social media about guns at this point that hasn’t already been said… and said and said. I’d rather use fiction to examine the subject now. Stories are more powerful than tweets.
There’s a through-line connecting “Rain” and your great novel, The Fireman for their sudden apocalypses, which you call out in the afterword. Although I imagine you’d never say never, would you say have had enough to say about the apocalypse for now (aside from the one in which we may all be living)?
I’ve been watching my way through Charlie Brooker’s brilliant Black Mirror. The show is supposedly near-future SF. But it isn’t really about the future. It’s about the way we live right now: basing all our feelings of self-worth on likes and favorites, getting off on mass shamings, developing relationships with our phones that are more intimate and powerful than anything we share with lovers.
The Fireman is about the end of the world. “Rain” is about the end of the world. But… at the same time… they’re also just about the way it feels to be alive right now. They’re Black Mirror episodes. I mean, on one level The Fireman just imagines our cultural online flamewars as actual real-world flamewars. In spite of the hurricanes that leveled the coast of Texas and trashed Florida and sank Puerto Rico, it’s hard to get our heads around the really immediate threat of climate change. But if the sky opened up and started raining nails — yeah, we get that would be very bad and we’d have to do something.
In both cases, the point was to take the metaphorical and make it actual, which is one of fiction’s superpowers. And in both cases, that meant walking us up to the edge of the apocalypse. You just follow the metaphor wherever it naturally wants to go.
The other three tales seem a significant shade darker than “Aloft.” Although there’s an undercurrent of longing throughout the story, it feels like a fairy tale in some ways. Can readers expect more whimsical tales like this one in the future?
Yeah, I’ve got one really light-hearted thing that might actually be a novel, which I’m hoping to write soon. It’s been on my mind for a couple years. Weirdly, it has a relationship to The Fireman that is much like the relationship between The Regulators and Desperation.
Part of what’s fun about The Foo Fighters is the way they veer from the heaviest of metal to playful 60s style pop. I do try to mix up the mood so it doesn’t get monotonous. No one wants to eat the same meal over and over again.
Connecting to an earlier question, Charles Paul Wilson III’s art graces “Aloft.” Would that story perhaps be connected to good ol’ Charlie Manx’s world, seeing as Mr. Wilson provided the art for The Wraith?
Naw. There’s no connection there beyond CPiii’s lovely pencils and inks, which are so like the kind of thing Ernest Shepard did for A.A. Milne. Although CP is a lot more subtly disquieting.
Shorter tales can allow a writer to experiment with a style, genre, or narrative structure than longer novels. Is there any genre or style in which you haven’t yet written, in either shorter or longer forms, you are anxious to tackle?
I’d like to try my hand at historical fiction. I’d like to write a couple of screenplays: an adaptation of someone else’s work, and something original. Although I think I should do some more writing for TV before I take a stab at scripting features. I’ve written three hour long episodes — the pilot for the Tales from the Darkside reboot, and two episodes of Locke & Key for Hulu. I feel like I’m finally getting the hang of it.
Maybe a play?
That said, I do like writing weird fantasy stories. Stuff like “Snapshot” and NOS4A2 are my bread and butter.
Last Locke & Key question: As a fan of the comics (and wonderful audible adaptation) I would be remiss if I didn’t ask about the Locke & Key adaptation. Anything you can share about the progress?
I’m scared to say too much about it — it’s been such a good time and we’ve caught so many lucky breaks. I don’t want to jinx it.
I spent a week in the writer’s room and it was one of the most exciting creative weeks of my life. Carlton Cuse has pulled together the screenwriting equivalent of The Avengers to script this thing. We’ve got a remarkable cast and two of the warmest, most empathic filmmakers in the business, Andy and Barbara Muschietti, behind the camera. Hulu is a joy to work with — their whole team is supportive, smart, and completely committed to making television that can go up against the best from any other network. Handmaid’s Tale proves it.
Halloween is right around the corner as this book hits shelves and these four short novels certainly fit the mold for Hallowe’en reading, especially that great creepy “Snapshot.” What books/authors and films does Joe Hill do to celebrate All Hallows Eve?
I have three teenage boys. We all like the same kind of horror, stories that mix the harrowing with the hilarious, work that’s scary, but which also is clever enough to have some fun with itself. We’re particularly choosy about the Halloween movie. Last year it was What We Do In The Shadows. The year before it was Cabin in the Woods. Our tradition of having a fun fight night goes all the way back to when they were kids and we watched Monster House together. Man, remember how good Monster House was?
As for reading, I’ve got this one called Sleeping Beauties set aside for the last weeks of October. I hear good things.
The obvious question your fans (including myself) want to know is: what’s next?
Just lately I’ve been writing short stories. Not short novels, but shorter still: narratives of about 20 – 30 pages. I’m the incredible shrinking writer! In another year or two I’ll probably be down to writing vignettes. By 2020 I’ll just be writing haiku. Or, worse, tweets.
My review of Strange Weather can be found here: https://www.sffworld.com/2017/10/strange-weather-by-joe-hill/
