Interviews

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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An Interview with Scott Adlerberg on Going Viral on Reddit and Blending Genres

March 23rd, 2016

The first book I read by Scott Adlerberg was this little novella titled Jungle Horses. It was like nothing I’d ever read before. It carried this unique, surreal atmosphere that I immediately fell in love with. So when Adlerberg asked me if I was interested in an ARC of his newest novel, Graveyard Love, there was no way in hell I could pass up on the opportunity. I devoured the novel immediately. Somehow, it was even better than Jungle Horses. Today, Adlerberg was kind enough to stop by LitReactor and answer a few questions.

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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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10 Questions With Matt Bell

September 16th, 2015

Photo via Brazos Bookstore When I first started reading Matt Bell's first short story collection, How They Were Found, I almost thought of him as a literary chameleon. Each story was radically different from the next as far as genre was concerned, ranging from surrealism to noir.

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A Conversation with Patrick Wensink About His New Novel, 'Fake Fruit Factory'

September 15th, 2015

Patrick Wensink rose to incredible heights of fame when Jack Daniel's politely asked him to change the cover of his novel, Broken Piano for President. It's a story that LitReactor broke, and got none of the credit for, but hey, that's life, and we were honored to be there at the start of the journey. 

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A Couple Of Questions With LitReactor Instructor And 'The Art of Horrible People' Author John Skipp

August 31st, 2015

Horror-bizarro legend John Skipp is a busy guy. His hit LitReactor class, The Choreography of Violence, starts this Thursday. And he just released a new collection of short stories, out from Lazy Fascist Press, called The Art of Horrible People.  John is an incredible addition to our workshop program—the energy and insight he brings to the classroom is unrivaled. So to mark the occasion of a busy month, I posed a couple of questions to him.

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Words On The Streets: City Poet Steven Reigns

August 27th, 2015

Poets were once central to public life. The Ancient Greeks and Romans regarded poetry as the best way to record epoch-making events, laud emperors or deities, and map the quests completed by heroes. Wherever a city fell or a conqueror rose, a poet observed from the sidelines and would, later, carve their account into cool clean lines of dactylic hexameter. Civilization, politics, and moral principles compressed into feet and couplets;  history registered as art. 

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Chuck Palahniuk Interview - San Diego Comic-Con 2015

July 21st, 2015

For something you’re not supposed to talk about, there’s a lot of buzz about Fight Club 2 at this year’s Comic-Con. In addition to the Dark Horse comic and Beautiful You, published last fall, Chuck Palahniuk has a short story collection, Make Something Up, out now, and is currently cutting his screenwriting teeth on Andy Mingo’s adaptation of Lullaby.

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