January 2017

Apart from being monstrously talented, Paul Tremblay seems like a perfectly normal guy. He teaches math, plays guitar, and has a lovely family. He’s quick with the self-deprecating humor and strikes me as the kind of writer who keeps his demons relegated to the page. None of which keeps me from feeling just a little bit creeped out as I hike with him through Borderland State Park to Split Rock, the location near his home in Massachusetts that inspired his second novel, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock. It’s like stepping into the book; a book I found heartbreaking, disturbing, and infested with unsettling possibilities both natural and supernatural.

The rock itself is a thing to behold, titanic and menacing. Someone has painted a small blue pentacle on the lichen-flecked stone, and the air inside the cleft feels cold and claustrophobic even on this warm September day. After a photo shoot in which no one goes missing, we settle on top of the rock as the declining sun dapples the forest floor below to discuss the author’s fast growing body of work and the current state of horror fiction.

DW: Maybe people should read the story before the interview, but can you tell us something about the inspiration behind the story you have in this issue of Dark Discoveries?

PT: Yeah, actually, it’s funny… You know, sometimes I just start off with a what if? You know, a crazy what if just occurs to you. I was at a reading in Providence, at the Lovecraft Arts and Sciences. It was a fun reading, it was a great day, and I don’t know…horror writers, we just get these dark thoughts sometimes. I think I had just finished my reading and sat down and looked around—everyone was happy, everyone was complementary, and I was like: Jeez, what if I got up there and just pulled out a gun and shot myself? Which, you know, I do not think that way in general about self harm, but the thought was really like an exercise in wow, what would happen? And how could you play with that as a story? That was the start. I mean, it’s not a big secret, because within the first couple paragraphs you realize that somebody is talking about his writer friend who shot himself.

DW: (Laughter) Cool. Speaking of short fiction: how did your short story “The Growing Things” become integrated into A Head Full of Ghosts? Were the sisters from that story prototypes for Merry and Marjorie?

PT: I think they were without me realizing it necessarily. And I have sort of cannibalized my own short fiction in the past, at least idea wise. Like my first novel, The Little Sleep. There’s a scene in a short story called “There’s No Light Between Floors” that appeared in my collection, and there’s a scene in that book that I essentially just moved over to The Little Sleep. Sure, right? Might as well.

DW: Did you know that that story would figure into A Head Full of Ghosts when you started writing the book?

PT: I didn’t, but I think I definitely had those two sisters in my head. There was certainly something about their relationship, and as soon as I figured out in A Head Full of Ghosts that the girls were telling stories to each other, I definitely thought of the “Growing Things” story right away and figured okay, I wanna work that in there, and I was like, Oh, look at that, these sisters are already like a cool mirror image of the two sisters anyway. I think maybe subconsciously it was there, but once I thought Oh, “The Growing Things!” it instantly became a major part of the book.

DW: In the collection you mentioned (In the Mean Time, Chizine 2010), there are a lot of apocalyptic short stories, which was interesting to me because apocalyptic fiction is usually done on the novel scale. You give us a lot of cool glimpses of apocalypse-in-progress where we might not get the full picture but it’s intriguing. Do you think you will eventually take on an apocalyptic novel?

PT: Um…actually sort of, yeah. Yes. I think in the novel I’ve just started now, there is the potential for an apocalypse at the end, like maybe there is, maybe there isn’t kind of thing. Yeah, that short story collection…I was definitely kind of obsessed. I think more so than any of the other things I’ve written, those really represented my fears as opposed to just general ideas. I would say, for at least five or six years I was definitely obsessed with the world ending. It was a great fear of mine that I was going to live to see the world end. And live to see my own children’s end. And to me, you know, that’s the most horrific thing that I could think of.

DW: Of course. Was that tied in to a particular set of world events at the time?

PT: I think, honestly, Katrina actually had a big part in that. Just, I don’t know if people remember, but things even economically for the whole country were thrown out of whack because of the port of New Orleans being shut down, and I had a lot of friends in the New Orleans area and I was reading their accounts and it was just so terrifying and awful. And it sort of tied in to my larger fears about what’s happening with climate change and whatnot, and so for a while—I mean, I still have a great fear of all those things but I feel like I’m in a healthier place with regards to them.

DW: Maybe writing through some of those fears was helpful?

PT: Yeah, maybe. Sure.

DW: So what is your process like for writing a novel, and has it changed much in the course of writing your most recent books? Do you plan a lot, or is it more improvisational?

PT: I’ve done both. Every book has been different for me. I’d say more times than not, though, I’ve written like a 10 or 15 page summary first before doing the novel.

DW: Does that include the ending typically?

PT: Yeah. And that’s not to say things can’t change. For stuff like my mystery novels, I’m not good enough to make up a mystery plot as I go, so I knew that I had to have at least the bare bones of what the mystery would be. And Devil’s Rock—I felt that it had more of a mystery setup or component to it than A Head Full of Ghosts, let’s say. So I did do a summary for that as well. But A Head Full of Ghosts I sort of made up as I went. You know, I was sort of lucky that I knew almost from the beginning that there would be the two sisters, there would be sort of this three-part structure where it’s before the reality show shows up, when the reality show shows up, and after. So I had all of those pieces as sort of big blocks in my head. I didn’t know all the details.

DW: I saw the notebook that you posted on your blog where some of those early ideas came up. It’s cool how much of it is there in the inspiration.

PT: The notebook for Devil’s Rock is a mess. For A Head Full of Ghosts, it’s… I don’t know…I feel like I got lucky with that story. It’s like it’s pretty clean, I sort of knew what I wanted.

DW: It presented itself kind of fully formed?

PT: Yeah, whereas Devil’s Rock, I have just reams of notebook paper, of different ways the plot went and I crossed it out and went into some other stuff, yeah.

DW: Do you do a lot of what ifs in the process? Maybe this could happen, maybe that?

PT: Yeah, you know, I just try to think it out and then, maybe that’s the one place where the math part comes in… I have to believe that this could happen. Even though there’s a potential supernatural thing, if I feel like there’s any kind of crack or it doesn’t make sense, I scrap it and start over, and that was, I think, the hardest part for me for getting a handle on Devil’s Rock, was there were a lot more moving parts. I tried to make it somewhat realistic that this could have happened, so there was a lot more work on that part of it.

DW: You mentioned cannibalizing things from your short stories for new work. And you mentioned at a reading I attended that you were working on a different book when the idea for A Head Full of Ghosts came to you, and it had an awesome title: Charles Manson Doesn’t Answer My Letters.

PT: Yeah.

DW: Do you think we will see that reincarnated in some form? Will that be cannibalized possibly? I guess it’s hard to say…

PT: I would like to go back to something there. You know, I sort of lost where I was going with it a little bit, and I kind of feel like, you know, part of it was going to end up almost like what Nick Mamatas did with I Am Providence, so I would feel like I would have to go in a different direction because there was going to be a part that would take place at like a Lovecraftian convention.

DW: I thought of Nick’s book when you mentioned the idea behind your story with a suicide at a Lovecraftian reading venue.

PT: Yeah.

DW: So, I always think of Mulder and Scully, their dichotomy, when I’m reading a Paul Tremblay book. And I admire how you sustain the tension over which way the story will break. When facing the unknown in real life—questions about things like Bigfoot, and I’ve seen you do the Bigfoot walk—are you more of a Mulder or a Scully? What’s your predisposition?

PT: I’m definitely more of a Scully, but I wish I was a Mulder.

DW: You want to believe.

PT: During the day, I mean 95% of my life, I feel like I’m a card-carrying rational skeptic. But there is that other 5%. It’s usually at night, or if I’m home alone at night, or if I just wake up from a really weird dream, you get that feeling of maybe there is something. You know, the next morning you wake up and it’s like, Eh… So for those two novels especially, those are the two sides I grappled with. I mean, some of the ambiguity in both books was me just trying to satisfy my own neuroses, like: that wouldn’t happen. I wouldn’t believe that would happen. Or maybe it would, if it was presented in such a way.

DW: So it takes a lot for you to suspend your disbelief as a writer.

PT: Yeah.

DW: It has to stand up to possibly more than one interpretation.

PT: Absolutely. And I also think if I were, or if anybody was, but if I was experiencing something that was supernatural, I think I would have a hard time recognizing that it was in fact supernatural. I don’t think it would be like this big clap of thunder or whatever. I think it would be really subtle, and unsettling because it was so subtle that you wouldn’t be always questioning it. That’s how I’ve approached it with those two books, anyway.

DW: In Disappearance at Devil’s Rock you do eventually take a side on whether or not there’s something supernatural happening, but only after maintaining that delicate balance and ambiguity for almost the whole book. After two novels that have straddled that line between supernatural and psychological horror, do you see yourself going all the way to one side or the other in a future book?

PT: Yeah, I think, it’s funny my agent and editor sort of joke that I’m Mr. Ambiguous Horror for those two books. I feel like I can’t do that forever. I think people would get tired of it.

DW: But it’s interesting territory to explore, and not many people are.

PT: Absolutely. The novel I’m working on now I think would be a nice third book to go with the other two. So there will be some play of is there something supernatural or not to that book, but I’m going to approach it in a little bit of a different way. I feel like with A Head Full of Ghosts and Disappearance at Devil’s Rock that in those books what happens in reality is, I think, the most horrific parts of the book, but is it supernatural or not is hopefully what lingers with the readers. And I think with this next book I’m going to try to flip that a little bit. You know, what’s going to happen in reality is really awful, but I want the potential supernatural ramifications, like if there is in fact something supernatural at play here, that is the most horrific thing. So I’m going to try to flip it a little bit in the third book.

DW: Very intriguing. Is there anything about the premise of the book you’re working on that you can share with us? Is it too early for that?

PT: I’ll just say it’s going to be sort of my take on a home invasion story. I think it’s gonna be a fairly short novel, but hopefully intense, and I’m pretty excited about it. The idea sort of came to me in much the same way the idea for A Head Full of Ghosts came to me. But I did write a summary. I sort of had to to pitch it to my editor. But yeah, I’m excited about this book.

DW: This magazine issue is probably coming out in the winter. January or February… I don’t know where you’ll be in your schedule for the book by that time. Do you have a title for it yet?

PT: The book will be called The Four, and if all goes well it will be summer of 2018.

DW: Cool. Getting back to Devil’s Rock: what got you interested in the doppelgänger idea? It seems to me especially resonant when you think about the multiple selves we all seem to have on the Internet and especially for teenagers who are grappling with identity and social media… Were those issues overtly on your mind while writing the book, and did being surrounded by kids in that age group as a teacher have an influence on the book?

PT: Wow, that’s a great question. I would say yeah, I mean I think the short answer would be that’s why I ultimately ended up going with the doppelgänger. Some of it just started off that I love the movie Lake Mungo, and I’m really interested in doppelgänger stories as well. So I think people who have watched the movie Lake Mungo will certainly see that there’s more than a wink and a nod to that.

DW: As a teacher, you have very well drawn teenaged boys in the story. I know that you’re a father of a kid that age, but did you find details working their way into the book through the day job?

PT: Oh yeah, the slang that the boys use was taken from my school. That slang is probably already a couple of years old. I’ve noticed them using it less and less. And as a teacher, that’s sort of the fun part is the voice because, especially a high school teacher, these words will come up every once in a while, and these words tend to mean the same thing the old words might have represented a few years ago. Usually, giving a kid a hard time, at my school, has become a “chirp.” I can’t remember what it was previously but it was something else and you know, “hardo” used to be like a huge thing, everyone was calling each other a hardo, and I noticed that started to wane a little bit.

DW: There’s a postmodernism influence in your work. Where does that come from for you? And what attracts you to the use of narrative devices like blog and journal entries and interview transcripts and those kinds of things?

PT: Honestly, some of it just comes from my own interests as a reader and reflects my day-to-day life, like how much I am reading online and reading blogs and Twitter and whatnot.

DW: A fair amount of your reading is nonfiction?

PT: No, I just mean more like the social media hangout aspect of it. Just reading other writers blogs and stuff like that. Especially when I was first writing, I felt like I was reading people’s Live Journals a lot. That sort of stuck with me. And the stories that I write… I’m really interested in writing a story that’s part of what’s happening now. I mean, to me the idea of deathless prose, it makes me roll my eyes a little. I can’t imagine worrying about writing a story that would be considered deathless prose when it’s hard enough to write a story that people are interested in reading now.

DW: You want something tuned into the world we’re living in and not worrying that some of the references are going to seem dated.

PT: Absolutely. And I don’t worry if the references will be dated because I feel like if you tell the story well enough, if you’re not just putting in those references to be clever, if they are actually part of the story, then people, if there are people around to read these stories 20 or 30 years from now… Because you made Twitter, you know, an integral part of the story, they’ll figure it out, they’ll go Oh, okay. It’ll be a part of the setting.

DW: It will be historical fiction (laughs).

PT: Sure. It’ll mark the story as 2015, and that’s okay because the story took place in 2015 and that time was important to the story.

DW: We all geeked out on Stranger Things because it had so much of the tangible 80s we remember. And I saw a Facebook conversation recently—I think it was Simon Strantzas—talking about how 70s horror novels have a certain vibe to them and what is it that brings that vibe to it? But I think that’s part of the enjoyment of reading something that’s of an era.

PT: Absolutely. Someone posted an article, an essay… I’m probably gonna butcher the point but… It wasn’t about deathless prose but it sort of came up in it. And she brought up Neuromancer by William Gibson and the first line: The sky was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. And I obviously instantly know what that is, but if someone like a millennial was reading that now, they might not remember it. But that’s okay because within the rest of that novel you’re going to figure out what he means because all of the references are such a part of the world that he created.

DW: The past can be presented like fantasy fiction where not all of the terms are explained but you pick it up as you go, the elements of this world you find yourself in.

PT: Right.

DW: Let’s talk about the state of the horror genre. It’s hard for me to know how much of my perception is what Robert Anton Wilson would call my immersion in the “reality tunnel” of horror fiction and horror entertainment, but it seems to me that we are sort of on the cusp of a horror renaissance in fiction and film. I’m curious what you think about that. What’s your impression? Is horror making a comeback?

PT: I definitely think so. For a little while I’ve been saying, I mean I think some of it is a little bit of ego on our parts because every writer working in their time would like to think they’re working in the Golden Age, right? But I do think there’s some truth to that. Particularly having, after the 90s where there was clearly… You could point to the mainstream sales of horror and how it tanked, and how horror really hasn’t been a publishing niche or market for a while, at least in terms of the mainstream. But because of the advent of the Internet and how the small press has become so vibrant, there are these groups that are not only keeping horror alive but I think making some of the best horror fiction.

DW: I’m hoping that will make it more viable to larger publishers like yours, that small presses are demonstrating that there’s an audience. But around the turn-of-the-century, do you think 9/11 had anything to do with the drop off in interest? I remember reading a comment by Clive Barker where he said basically that when real horror is too close to people, they don’t want it as their entertainment.

PT: I’ve read the opposite: in bad economic times people go there.

DW: So vote for Trump if you want to sell horror books?

PT: Well that was sort of the joke with Bush, we were all like yeah, you know it’s bad times, it’s gonna be good for horror. And I’m sure someone could make the argument that the unbelievable boom in zombie fiction happened right after 9/11. I mean, I know there was some before it but… I think there could be arguments either way.

DW: It seems like sometimes a sub genre of horror will become huge but no one really feels like horror is making a return. Apocalyptic is huge now. Zombies were huge.

PT: Certainly from my experience it does seem like more readers are looking for horror than they were maybe 10 years ago, from what I can remember. And obviously I think it’s a great sign that a schlub like me can get a deal with William Morrow. And they published Stephen Graham Jones…

DW: Mongrels is a great book.

PT: It’s funny, just in the last couple of days there have been a couple of articles that have talked about a second wave of horror after the boom of the 80s and that maybe this isn’t the tail end of the boom, this is what would be considered the second wave, that people who grew up with 80s horror, these are the people now who are part of the second wave, which I think is an interesting way of looking at it.

DW: And there are so many creative people working in other media who were so strongly influenced by reading Stephen King growing up. I know movies have influenced a lot of your writing, like independent films such as Lake Mungo… I wonder how much the sort of small press equivalent in video—live streaming services such as Hulu and Netflix, even HBO and Showtime, which have the creative freedom to do things now at greater length and in the serial formats that have become so popular, things that you can’t do with a two-hour film… I wonder if that’s going to spill over into books again and establish more of a horror climate.

PT: I think it has. I think the health of the independent horror movie business over the past 5 to 10 years, you know It Follows, The Babadook, all of these great independent movies that have had buzz and have done well, I think that’s a snapshot hopefully of the health of the genre overall. And there’s no doubt that video has helped save, or at least helped move the horror fan into getting them to be able to see the movies. I was just watching The Thing last night, you know the classic horror movie. When it first came out, it didn’t do very well at all. It was video that saved it. It was video where it found its audience. Now we’re surrounded by video and DVDs and it’s easier to find that horror audience because it is there.

DW: Do you, on the other hand, have any concerns about being typecast as a horror writer when your previous work shows more diversity? You’ve dabbled in noir detective stories and some science fiction stuff, some things with comedic elements also.

PT: Not right now. I think I would like to write (hopefully) a humorous book again someday. But I’m pretty content to do the new novel I mentioned and maybe one after that as well. But I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t frustrating when I tell someone, when they say, “Hey, what do you write?” and I say horror, or if I’m feeling particularly obnoxious, literary horror, and more times than not their eyes sort of glaze over. I feeling that attitude is maybe going away but it’s still there, you know? I was at the literary convention in Newport. I hesitate to bring up the story because I had such a wonderful time at the Newport Book Festival. But I was at the dinner and I ended up talking to these writers who I wouldn’t ordinarily end up talking to in my everyday life. They’re from England, some of them are historical writers. And when people ask me, “What do you write?” and I’m like, literary horror… “Ah, I can’t read that stuff. I don’t read that stuff.” At the time, I’m like yeah, I understand, whatever, I dismiss it. But I woke up in the hotel at like five in the morning thinking about it. Like what if the woman I talked to had said, “I write historical fiction from the 1600s,” some very specific time period in England, and how would they have reacted at the table if I’d said, “Ah, I don’t read anything from before 1750.” It would seem totally obnoxious. So it’s weird how it’s still totally okay to pan horror or speculative fiction in general.

DW: It took a long time for even Stephen King to finally have some critical acclaim. I don’t know…maybe he’ll be the only one who finally attains that, but Peter Straub is certainly respected, and we’re starting to see literary horror books garnering good reviews in the New York Times, so maybe there’s hope. Even runaway mainstream children’s fiction like Harry Potter is deeply influenced by horror. You can’t separate the two. So you would hope that people would get over it and accept that they are horror fans, even if they don’t call it that.

PT: I do think the attitudes are getting better. It’s interesting that you mentioned Harry Potter, and I think people are more willing to accept a genre fiction because so many people grew up reading Harry Potter and it wasn’t a stigma to read Harry Potter for them.

DW: Right. They were young, so they were granted permission to read genre fiction.

PT: Absolutely. I think a lot of those readers are continuing to read. Even if they have more literary sort of interests, you can find any kind of genre fiction that has literary interests as well.

DW: What is your definition of literary horror? What sets it apart from other horror fiction? I know you talked a bit about this in the introduction to an anthology you co-edited called Phantom, but I wonder if you could sum up your current thinking on what makes a piece of horror fiction literary.

PT: How about horror that doesn’t suck? That’s not necessarily fair. So… horror that isn’t only concerned with gore or attempted scares or the twist, or funhouse horror. Aside from employing well constructed plots, themes, characters, I would argue that literary horror aims to push beyond the scare or affect, and ask of the readers the most difficult and transgressive questions literature or art can ask. Don’t get me wrong, I like me some funhouse horror too. But instead of the jump scare that’s fun for thirty seconds but easily forgotten, I tend to prefer a story that crawls inside and lingers there, becoming a part of me and changing who I am and will be at the same time. 

DW: Two silly questions left. This past summer you exhibited your amazing T-shirt collection on social media. Do you have a favorite? If you could keep only one, which would it be?

PT: Oh boy. If I could keep only one… I have to think about that… I can’t just keep only one! Can I admit something embarrassing? I was looking at my T-shirts today and thinking, I don’t have any cool T-shirts to wear.

DW: Are you kidding? How bad is the laundry?

PT: My current favorite is the new one, the Black Phillip Butter T-shirt. It’s new, so I really like that one. But what is my go to T-shirt? I really like my Creature Double Feature T-shirt. Channel 56. It fits me well, too, makes me look bigger than I am.

DW: And the last thing; you knew it had to come up… You knew I couldn’t let you off without asking about pickles. You have a notorious aversion to pickles.

PT: I do. That’s all I’ll be remembered for.

DW: I gotta know: when was the last time you actually tried one?

PT: … Never.

DW: Never? How do you know you hate them?!

PT: Just the smell and the look and…yeah. I mean, I’ve had like pickle juice infect a sandwich and it’s just awful.

DW: Does this apply to cucumbers too? Does it carry over? Or is it the vinegar?

PT: No, I like cucumbers. It’s just pickles.

DW: And what would it take to get you to try one? What’s your pickle price?

PT: It’s not gonna happen. Nope. No pickle price.

DW: All right. That’s all I got.

PT: Nice.