Interviews

A Conversation with Nick Mamatas About Lovecraft's Legacy, Writing Conventions, and His New Novel 'I Am Providence'

August 10th, 2016

There are a lot of ways I Am Providence could fail. It's a book about writers, for one thing. And it's told from two perspectives: The third-person viewpoint of a sleuthing horror writer, and the first-person perspective of another writer—who just happens to be lying dead on a slab in a morgue. Plus the whole thing is an exploration of and homage to H.P. Lovecraft, as divisive a figure as you can find in genre fiction.  And yet, it works.

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10 Questions with Donald Ray Pollock

July 12th, 2016

Writing an introduction to a Donald Ray Pollock interview is kind of like writing one for Margaret Atwood or George Sauders: They’re the best at what they do, so what else really needs to be said? His three books, the masterful short story collection, Knockemstiff, and his equally brilliant novels, The Devil All The Time and The Heavenly Table—which comes out today—have set the standard for working-class fiction, which also happens to be an almost near impossible standard to replicate.

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A Conversation With Ben H. Winters About Racism, Outlining, and His New Novel 'Underground Airlines'

July 8th, 2016

You know that feeling, when a book knocks your socks off so thoroughly, and you struggle with how to describe it, because you don't want to appear overly effusive, but you can't figure out any other way to talk about it?  That's where I am with Underground Airlines. It's excellent—both completely thrilling and incredibly smart, shining a bright light on a controversial subject without ever being pedantic. 

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Joe Hill Remembers Where He Came From (Part Two)

May 27th, 2016

Photo Credit: Shane Leonard Read part one HERE Aspiring writers are looking for a magical bullet.  They pour over how-to books, clickbait articles, random blogs, searching for that one thing—confirmation that they're doing this thing that pulls them away from friends, family, primetime television, and the internet right. 

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Joe Hill Remembers Where He Came From (Part One)

May 20th, 2016

Photo: Gage Skidmore Craig Spector, one of the founders of splatterspunk, once explained to me in an interview that the splatterpunks were people who "had grown up reading Stephen King." Joe Hill is not a splatterpunk, but he grew up the same. And that's part of the problem.

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A Conversation With Alex Segura About PR, Archie Comics, And His New Novel 'Down the Darkest Street'

May 17th, 2016

Alex Segura wears many hats.  He's a new dad. He does PR for Archie Comics. He's the editor for Dark Circle Comic. He teaches a class on pitching and writing comics for LitReactor. The second entry in his Pete Fernandez mystery series, Down the Darkest Street, just came out. Honestly I'm a little shocked he had time to do an interview with us.

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10 Questions With Jack Marshall Maness

May 2nd, 2016

image via Wooden Stake Press If you're like me, historical fiction serves to remind you of what a sieve your memory is, or perhaps just how much sleeping you did in history class. It's work that makes me feel bad about myself. Why didn't I pay better attention? This self-flagellation was subdued when I attended a book reading by author Jack Marshall Maness, who dove into the complex world of 1850's Kansas, the setting of his Songs of the Jayhawk trilogy.

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Interview with Transgressive Horror Author Nicole Cushing

April 29th, 2016

Nicole Cushing is a Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of multiple stand-alone novellas and dozens of short stories. Her work has been praised by the likes of Jack Ketchum, Poppy Z. Brite and Thomas Ligotti, and often leans toward the extreme side of horror. Her debut novel Mr. Suicide (Word Horde), about a teenager's descent into madness and degenceracy, is nominated in the Superior Achievement in a First Novel category for the upcoming Bram Stoker Awards.

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Rob Hart and Alex Segura Discuss 'Bad Beat', An Exclusive Digital Short Co-Authored for Polis Books

November 17th, 2015

Back in March, Alex Segura and I were having dinner, and as it so often does when comic book nerds convene, the subject of crossovers came up. As in: Why didn't they happen more in mystery novels? So many of us are writing series characters. It seems like it would be a good fit. We left that dinner with a very loose notion of teaming up my amateur PI Ash McKenna and his trouble-magnet journalist Pete Fernandez. And the idea grew from there—fairly quickly, we had a pitch, which we sent to our publisher, Jason Pinter.

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A Conversation with Delilah S. Dawson About Her New Novel, 'Wake of Vultures'

October 27th, 2015

The way I judge a book is, am I putting things aside to squeeze in a few more pages? Skipping lunch? Missing my stop on the train? Those are the books I live for. And Wake of Vultures by Delilah S. Dawson is one of those books. Written under the pen name Lila Bowen, it's smart and fun and exciting and a very promising start to what I hope will be a long series. 

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