JOE HILL BIBLIOGRAPHY

Well, thanks very much for taking the time to do the interview.

My pleasure, Marco, Ben. Delighted. Thanks for talking to me.
 

First of all, we've got a couple of questions about your writing and your writing process.
 

Okay.
 

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How do you come up with the right setting of a story? Does it come naturally or do you investigate the settings before setting the scene?

So, setting is important because a lot of times my stories have stuff that doesn't exist in it, like ghosts or werewolves and so you're asking people to get over their sense of disbelief. One way to persuade them to surrender their sense of disbelief is to give them fact after fact after fact, and a lot of times you can do that with setting.
If I locate a story in New England, I know what the roads are like. I know what the jobs are like there. I know what the seasons are like, what it's like to send a kid to school in New England. I have a sense for those things and I can write about them with ease, confidence, and authority.
And if you'll believe me about the roads, if you'll believe me about the weather, if you'll believe me about the houses, maybe you'll still believe me when I bring on the ghost.

 

So, and then the other thing I would say is that often the story itself implies the setting.

I had a story that I wrote here in the United Kingdom called Wolverton Station and I wrote that story on a book tour. I worked on it longhand while I was on the English trains.
And it's a story about a man on an English train who meets a werewolf and winds up in a town full of werewolves. And to me, the setting and the concept were inextricably entwined.
So one thing provided the other. And I think that's usually been the case.
A lot of times there's been something about the concept that suggested the setting.

 

Something a bit more aiming towards the linguistic part of writing.
That's something that struck me when you sent out your latest Escape Hatch a couple of days ago, and you used the word ‘Blighty’, which is English slang.
So I was wondering, do you find that… you're coming more often to the UK, right?
 

Right, yeah.
 

Do you find you use more slang or does it incorporate its way into your work?
 

Well, what you hear tends to find its way into the work and I'm married to an English woman so some of her vocabulary sometimes filters into the books.
But you have to be careful about that because I have a particularly American voice and, as an American… I always thought it was very peculiar when Madonna married Guy Ritchie and suddenly she began talking like an English lady. I recall thinking, waitaminute… you grew up in New Jersey! Why are you suddenly sticking your pinky out when you drink a cup of tea? That doesn't feel authentic to me.
 

And so, I feel like I have a sense for my own voice, and I'm pretty well anchored in that.
I still call eggplants eggplants, not aubergines.
 

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And a bit similar type of question; obviously with the twins you're reading a lot of children's books and that has a different pacing, a different type of structure in language. Do you think that that also influences you?
 

I don't know if it influences it, but I know I always enjoy it. And I always pay attention.
So, it doesn't matter whether I'm reading, you know…

Earlier this year I read Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, which is a beautiful book about the Irish laundries in the 1970s and 80s. Terrific novel.
And I love the way her sentences looked on the page. And she's writing for adults. She's very much writing for a literary audience that's a grown-up literary audience, probably with fairly discerning tastes, you know?
But then I also read, you know, to the twins, I read The Tiger Who Came To Tea by Judith Kerr. And I've read the poetry of A.A. Milne and I find that language fascinating too.
I mean, I actually think the cadences of Judith Kerr's writing in The Tiger Who Came To Tea
explains why that book has never been out of print for something like 50 years. She focuses on all the things that children actually care about; like what was eaten at a meal, who ate how much, that kind of thing.
The mother, the father and the daughter go out to a cafe after dark and she mentions that all the cars have their headlights on, a thing which really matters when you're three years old.
By the time you're 30, you don't care anymore, but when you're three it's magic.
And so I think it's interesting that Judith Kerr could focus in on exactly the details a child needs for a story to come to life.

 

You mentioned you originally finished a series of short stories?
 

Yeah, I wrote six back-to-back-to-back while I was waiting on some...
King Sorrow, the next novel, is my longest book, probably the last really long one.

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So do you know about it already?

 

Yeah, let's talk about it.
But I'll say that while my editor had the second draft, I didn't really know what I was going to do next.
I had written some of the next novel but it's a project that involves a bunch of research, and so I was waiting on a research report from my research assistant and I wound up writing six stories back-to-back-to-back.
And some of them have, let's see, The Pram is out, that's one of them.
A Sign Of The Times came out.
Ushers has found a publisher and that'll be out whenever it's out. We’re announcing soon.
There is a story called A Little Payback that I haven't had a chance to revise and I'm not sure that'll be the final title.
There's a story called Jackknife. That will be the final title, and I feel pretty good about Jackknife. 

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It's short and punchy.
 

Yeah, I like Jackknife.
And then I've got a story called The Dinner Bell, which is actually a little more recent.
But I don't exactly know where all those are going to appear.
Of course, Ushers got a big movie option from Sony Screen Gems before it came out, which is really weird when that happens. That's pretty unusual so I must have done something right.
 

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Great news, and a question related to that is, you wrote those short stories while you were working on the novel?
 

Yeah, but kind of in between. I had set King Sorrow aside and I was not working on Hunger at the moment, so I had a moment to just write a bunch of stuff.

 

And then get back to King Sorrow with a fresh look?

 

Yeah, then King Sorrow came back to me and it was time to go to work on that.
That wasn't…that's not quite how the chronology works, but that's sort of the general… I think actually I did the short stories and then I wound up working on some screenwriting and then Hunger and then King Sorrow came back.
So it was quite a lot, because again, King Sorrow is a fairly long book.
I think of the six short stories, in some ways maybe Ushers is my favorite of them, and I felt that way before I got a movie option or anything like that.
I thought, you know, Ushers is the one where it really popped in first draft. And I thought, this one really goes like a… this one really takes off like a shot.
That's nice. It doesn't happen very often.
You Are Released kind of was like that. Ehm, what else was kind of like that? It just doesn't happen very often.
I mean, I've written some stories I'm really, really proud of and really, really love, but they were hard.
I mean like Faun, Faun was a hard story to write. I really struggled with that story.
In the end I'm happy with the way Faun came out, but it certainly wasn't like Ushers where it was just like, you know, I wrote it, I got done, and I thought, ah, I think maybe I nailed that one.
 

If it's good, it's not like a very structured thing that happens all at the same time, or the same way.
 

Yeah, I think sometimes actually when a story is easy, it’s because you don't just have the concept and the characters but you see the structure.
So that can be special.
So, when I wrote You Are Released…You Are Released is set on an airplane on the day that World War III kicks off.
And very early in writing it, I realized we were going to visit three parts of the plane.

First class, Economy, and the cockpit.

And that there were three characters in each area, and that each time we visited the area, we're gonna visit through the point of view of a different person.
We're in the cockpit, so we're gonna be in the mind of the flight attendant.
Next time we're in the cockpit, so we're gonna be in the mind of the pilot. And so on.

9 characters, 9 scenes, 3 locations. It was almost like a mathematical equation.
 

So that was an easy one to write because I had the structure.
And a lot of times a story is harder to write because you haven't figured out the structure yet or you haven't quite figured out the characters, or you don't quite see how to bring it in for a landing. And you have to sort of muddle along until you find the right parts of the equation.

 

Can you still read books like a virgin?
 

Oh yeah. 
 

Can you read it and say, that's new to me?
 

Oh yeah, all the time. All the time.
I get swept up in books all the time and fall in love and just like, this is the greatest thing ever.
You know, I'm a fairly slow reader.
But the reason I read slowly isn't because I'm not interested in what I'm reading but because I'm too interested. I'll read two pages and I get so excited.
I have to get up and make a cup of tea and, you know, I got to think about what I just read.
I'm like “Oh my god! I can't believe this thing just happened. Uh, what are they gonna do?”
 

Some comedian has a joke about little kids and he says “when you're a little kid, you don't have any control over your emotions”.
So, a cartoon comes on, the little kid sees Spongebob and he can't believe it and he goes running downstairs to his parents. He begins shouting, “Spongebob is on, Spongebob is on!” and his parents like… “Go watch it!” and he’s like, “Yeah!!!”.
And he runs back upstairs to watch it.
 

And I'm 51 and I'm still like that kid.
I'll be reading some book and I'll be like, “Oh my god, I can't believe it!”.
So yeah, and it's happened a bunch of times this year.
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. Just the beauty, the language, the evocation of a particular time and place, Ireland in the very early 1980s. I was completely gripped by that book.
The Horse by Willy Vlautin. I love Willy Vlautin and I'll read everything he writes.
A great horror novel called Lost Man's Lane by Scott Carson. If you love Stranger Things, you won't be able to resist Lost Man's Lane. It's a great book.
What else? I just read a Tana French novel.
She does crime fiction, but sometimes her crime fiction feels very horror adjacent.
So I just read Faithful Place and I loved that one, even if I figured out who the killer was on page 30.
The point wasn't that it was a surprise, you know, her stuff is more like Greek tragedy.
You know how it's going to end, you know it's going to be terrible, but you sort of are swept along by the emotion of the characters anyway.
 

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Some questions about projects or things that are in development. You already mentioned the other three shorts that have not been announced yet so we can skip that one.

In the newsletter you sent out last week, you mentioned you're going to start working on a new project or a different project, so is it going to be Hunger, Up The Chimney Down, or something totally different?
 

Let's see, did I say that, did I say I was going to be starting a new project, I don't know what I meant.

Well, no, I think...

 

That's my translation of what I read, but yeah.
 

So I think I was talking about, you know, that I'm close to being done with the third draft of King Sorrow.
So King Sorrow is about as long as 11-22-63, on the same scale as The Fireman and NOS4A2.
And it takes place over, I want to say, it takes place over almost 25 years.
And it's it zeroes in on six friends we meet in College in 1989, and carries us all the way through to 2016.
And when I'm done with that, you know, I'm going to go back to work on the novel to come after it, which is called Hunger.
And King Sorrow is my longest book, and Hunger is probably going to be my shortest.
It'll actually probably be a little bit shorter than Heart-Shaped Box.
 

In some ways King Sorrow is kind of like, it's a single novel, but it's also kind of like three or four short novels that are all connected about this one group of friends.

 

I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about the plot, but I'll tell you anyway.

So these friends meet in 1989, they have an interest in the occult, it's a goof-off, none of them take it seriously.
One of the kids is in trouble with some criminals, some truly unpleasant people, and they wind up joking around about summoning a dragon from a place called the Long Dark, to get rid of the people who are causing him trouble. And they wind up succeeding in summoning King Sorrow, but they make a bargain with him that they don't really understand initially, and it turns out they have to provide The King with a human sacrifice every Easter for the rest of their lives. King Sorrow himself is a lot of fun to write and he's your basic Smaug-class dragon who can occasionally break through into our world.

And, you know, that's basically the plot of the story.
 

So, third draft almost finished, you reckon there will be a fourth, fifth, sixth?
 

Almost done and it's interesting because when I was working on it I spent a long time working on part one. Really just like digging away at it, cutting stuff out, changing things, you know, and I thought “wow, this book might not come out until 2030 at the rate I'm going”. But weirdly after I finished revising part one, everything else has gone very quickly. I only needed a week and a half to rewrite part two, a couple weeks to rewrite part three, and so on. Maybe that's not that surprising because I…
I think beginnings often are harder than the rest of it.
Once you know all the characters and you've got the situation set up, then you can have fun.
And the book contains a lot of very big action set pieces, a lot of unexpected, frightening scenarios.
These kids that we meet manage to get themselves in quite a bit of supernatural trouble over the years.
One thing which is just sort of a side note is, I figured out how to write King Sorrow from writing You Are Released, because like You Are Released, we have six friends, the book has five parts, and each part is from the perspective of someone different in the group.
So anyway.
I think people who like NOS4A2 and like Heart-Shaped Box, they should have fun with King Sorrow.

It's definitely very much in the same mold.

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So hopefully sometime next year, probably won't be 2024, I reckon, but...
 

no, it's going to be, I think, probably summer or even early fall of 2025. I know my publishers, God love them, want to give it a big push. But that means it’ll move through the publishing pipeline very slowly. In the old days, you could get a book done, and maybe see it in print seven months later. Now it’s a year from turning in your final draft to see it in shops. And I haven’t turned in the final draft yet.

Hunger is more like Horns or The Fireman in the sense of maybe being a bit different from my usual kind of thing. It's almost like being a pitcher in baseball, you know, you want to throw the fastball, which is straight down the middle, but then you'll want to throw a curve now and then to keep the batters off balance. When you get attached to a writer there are things you want them to do—with NOS4A2 and King Sorrow I’m out to give people more of the kind of thing they enjoyed in Heart-Shaped Box.

But then there are these other novels, where I’m doing something a bit different, to keep things from getting stale. And you hope the audience will embrace those stories too. 

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Let’s talk about the sequel to Locke & Key. About World War Key, how far is Gabriel…
 

I don't know if it's gonna happen guys, I don't know if it's gonna happen. I'd love to do it but—so I got married and had twins and during that time I was working on a lot of screenplays. I was focused on screenwriting and doing comics.
I did the Hill House comics and I did Dying Is Easy and I did Locke & Key The Golden
Age, …In Pale Battalions Go… and the Sandman crossover. For a while there I was like a full-time comic book writer.
Then I turned 50 and I started to think about what do I want to do in my 50s and I thought, you know, I've never been a book-a-year novelist, I've never been the guy who has a novel out every year.
I think I'd like to do that.
I've had four published novels so far. I think I'd like to get to ten, and if I could do that in six years, that would be great.
And so the plan is very much to have King Sorrow out in 2025, Hunger out in 2026, the next book out in 2027, and try to run, you know, just do a straight run of six novels in six years.
It'll actually probably be more like three novels and a book of short stories, three novels and a book of short stories. So it'll probably be more like six novels in eight years, but hopefully there'll be a new book out every year.
I've never done that before but I think I can do it, the key is to make that the first project every day as opposed to screenwriting or working on a comic book. Because for most of my career, I've always been a novelist and a comic book writer and in some ways I've been a comic book writer first and a novelist second.
So now I'm reversing that and I'm a novelist full time and kind of not a comic book writer at all until I've got the next six books ready.
So, if there's more Locke & Key, it won't be until after the next three novels and it might be even longer.
I'm sorry.

We'll settle for a good novel, so no worries there.
 

Yeah, that would be cool.
I mean, I think a novel a year...
 

That actually brings us around to Gunpowder. Gunpowder will be one of those six novels.
It will be one of the...I'm not sure where.
I think that it will be King Sorrow, Hunger, another straight down the middle horror novel, and then Gunpowder.
So I think Gunpowder will be the fourth of them, if not the fourth then the sixth.
But Gunpowder is one of these projects that's a little bit off-centre. It’s not a King Sorrow or a Heart-Shaped Box. It’s more like The Fireman or Horns. It’s throwing the curve.
I would never do two books like The Fireman back-to-back.
I would never do two books like Horns back-to-back.

I think I've been lucky to have a great audience that supported me, you know, that supported whatever the stories were and were willing to follow me to some pretty strange places.
But fundamentally I think they really like stories like Heart-Shaped Box and King Sorrow and NOS4A2.
And so that's why I think it's important to write stuff like King Sorrow and, you know, some straight down the middle scary stuff.
I love that kind of thing and I think the readers always get psyched for it. It’s like, you know… you might dig it if AC/DC did an acoustic album, but you’d hate it if they did that every time out. You wanna hear ‘em blow out the speakers.
 

So Gunpowder, because the initial idea was to do four, let's say, novelettes or novellas?
 

So it still will be, there still will be Slave Girls Of Gunpowder, which I should note is a mocking title as opposed to… anyone who thinks I'm getting ready to write my John Norman homage is gonna be seriously disappointed.
There’s uhm, I've got it written down somewhere…I know what the title of the third part and fourth part are, and each of those novellas stand alone, but each of them makes a complete story which will be published as Gunpowder, and hopefully Slave Girls Of Gunpowder and the one after that will be published as standalone books by PS Publishing, and then eventually collected into a complete novel.
The fourth part of the book will probably not be a PS stand-alone, but that will be part of the book, part of the line. It'll be the ending to the book.
But like Hunger, like my story Loaded in Strange Weather, this is one of these stories where I actually know how the whole thing goes. I've had the whole thing in my head for a long time.
You know, it's always kind of a problem finding the right window to write it.

Actually, Hunger is like that. I’ve had the whole story in my head, beginning, middle, and end, for six or seven years.
 

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So, if I'm allowed to ask, Up The Chimney Down has then been put on the back burner or at the bottom of the drawer or…?
 

I think Up The Chimney Down might turn out to be a comic book or a screenplay.
Ultimately, you know, it's a fun little Hitchcockian thriller.
And it's kind of like… you know how Hitchcock would do these suspenseful movies that were also kind of almost like comedies, like romantic comedies?
They have a strong element of romance and a lot of fizzy, back-and-forth dialogue and weirdly, weirdly, Up The Chimney Down kind of feels like that. Which also means it doesn't really feel like the kind of thing I normally write or even the kind of stuff I do which is off-centre.

I just couldn't get comfortable with it.
There are things about it I really like and there's at least one idea that first appeared in Up The Chimney Down and then was transplanted to King Sorrow.
But I think if I ever write Up the Chimney Down, it might turn out to be a comic book or something.

I'll tell you something really funny about King Sorrow.
Part one of King Sorrow is called The Briars. The Briars was the last novel that I wrote that I couldn't sell. And there is a location in the story, a family estate on the coast of Maine called the Briars. And it is actually the location from that unpublished book.
Everything else is different, but that location appears in the unpublished book.
 

Later in the book, the Surrealist’s Glass turns up.

One of the characters is walking around with the Surrealist’s Glass.
And it is, it is exactly the glass from my…I wrote part of a novel called The Surrealist’s Glass that I could never finish and wasn't very good, but it had a couple things that were really good in it and the glass itself was really cool.
And so King Sorrow in some ways for me, ties up a couple hanging threads professionally.
You know, a couple stories that I never quite managed to pull off.
The best parts of those drifted into King Sorrow when I was finally able to make use of them.
So, no work is ever really wasted, you know, you always get to make use of it eventually.

 

What's the most memorable interview you ever had?
 

Oh, this one by far, no. This one, no question, come on.
The most memorable interview...
I've had a few good ones, this has been a good one, you know. I've had a few pretty decent ones.
I did an interview for Heart-Shaped Box with a guy from a British newspaper who clearly hated the book and didn't like me. And that was a pretty interesting interview.
I thought, oh, we're fencing with each other, and I thought, that's sort of interesting. You know, an interview with someone who's hostile doesn't necessarily have to be wasted time, or even unpleasant if you can sort of open yourself up to it and be, you know, like, okay, I guess we're going to clash.
You know, let's clash then.

It's like a healthy discussion that you're having.
 

It is a little bit too like… I think fencing is a pretty good metaphor, you know, and you work up a healthy sweat, having a fencing match, and it can be kind of interesting to see.. can I defend myself?
Am I nimble enough to defend, am I nimble enough to score a couple points?

You know, get this, stick him a couple times, that can be sort of enjoyable, so…

 

But this… that reminds me of a thing I was saying to a friend of mine the other night.
I've never had a bad review that I didn't secretly enjoy.
I've been ripped a few times, and still kind of enjoyed those reviews. 

I've got a fairly thick skin and a pretty good sense of humor and so getting trashed can be pretty funny sometimes. I always feel like if it seems like my readers are enjoying it then okay if someone didn't like it and wants to write about it…

Take your shot. I'm a big boy, you know.
 

My dad has said to me a couple times… 

I was talking to him about anxiety. About, I don't know if this story's good, I don’t know if this is working.

And he said, the thing about being a professional writer is, you're getting paid to carry that anxiety. You get paid to live with that self-doubt. That's the job.
And I think, I sort of feel the same way about reviews.
I sort of feel like, don't go… someone gives you a bad review, don't go trash them on Twitter.
You're a big boy, you took the check, you got paid for other people to have opinions about your books and that's it. You let the book got published, it's everyone else's turn now. 

Now is your time to shut up and see what people think, so anyway…

 

Nice closing words, well, thanks very much!
 

great talking to you!