BEST NEW HORROR:

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOE HILL

By all accounts, Joe Hill is a newcomer to the small press horror/fantasy scene, and yet unlike most newcomers, his work is refined and mature, as if spun by a veteran hand, a fact that hasn't been lost on some of today's most celebrated and respected editors. Already his fiction has appeared in such notable publications as Cemetery Dance, Postscripts, Subterranean, The Third Alternative, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, and The Many Faces of Van Helsing. Earlier this year Subterranean Press released Hill's novella Voluntary Committal, and PS Publishing are scheduled to release a superior collection of the author's short stories, entitled 20th Century Ghosts.

KPB: Joe, I think the question that has nagged at me since finishing 20th Century Ghosts is...where did you come from? I'm not referring to your origin, rather your sudden appearance on the small press scene. After all, it wasn't so long ago that I surveyed the specialty press landscape, and I'm sure I saw no Hills.

JH: The main reason I’ve stayed below the radar is that most of my stuff was either first published in England or in obscure, off-beat literary journals. That probably says less about me and much more about how few markets are left these days. Also I’ve done a lot of work that was never published. I wrote four novels I was unable to place with anyone.

When I first got out of college, I wrote a whole heap of mainstream, literary fiction. The kind of stories Ethan Canin and Tobias Wolff write so well. Some of the stuff I wrote along those lines was pretty good, in a technical sense, but no one ever got excited about them. I never even got all that excited about them. They were more like exercises then actual stories. Then, one day, about four years ago, I started this ghost story, “20^th Century Ghost,” and just got completely carried away by it. It was as different from my other stories as a Harley is from a Vespa. It worked. After that I really decided to let my freak flag fly, and I think I’m a better writer for it. I also think that’s translated into a lot of good things happening, in a very short time, on the publishing level.

KPB: Single author collections are tough sells, even more so when the author is a relative newcomer. Did you find it hard to get publishers to agree to take a look at 20th Century Ghosts?

JH: Oh, yeah, it was turned down everywhere. A lot of editors did agree to look at it, and what we’d hear back was that they loved the stories, but that there isn’t any market for first collections by unknown writers. I hope they’re wrong about that. Peter Crowther took a pretty big risk publishing 1700 copies of my book, I’d like to see him earn it back.

The great thing about guys like Pete Crowther and Bill Schafer and Richard Chizmar – when they get excited about a book, they just publish it, they don’t think about all the good, sensible business reasons why they probably shouldn’t.

KPB: Many of the stories in the collection feature children as the main characters. As a father yourself, do you find children tougher to write about than adults?

JH: Hell no. Just the opposite. I can’t work on a story unless I can find some way to emotionally connect with it. So I tend to write about children, boys especially, the fights they get into, the moral tangles they get stuck in, the masks they wear. Those are all subjects that matter intensely to me, now that I have three boys of my own. I’m especially interested in the kind of masks boys put on to hide their true selves. I love that stuff in Lord of the Flies, about how once the boys smear on the war paints, they find themselves capable of doing almost anything - torture and murder - because their real faces are hidden.

I don’t think it’s an accident almost every story in the book was written since I had kids, or that I’ve done my best writing since having children. I just think I write with more emotional conviction than I used to.

KPB: Quite a few of your characters in 20th Century Ghosts are baseball fans. Beyond the keyboard, where do your allegiances lie?

JH: Well, again, writing about baseball is a way to write about boys, the way they compete, the way they challenge each other. How they almost need to test themselves against other boys. But when I was growing up, I was actually much more into boxing than baseball. I lost interest in college, but just lately I’ve started watching fights again. I got sucked into The Contender. It must be all the testosterone wafting around the house. It’s changed my reading habits, too. Used to be I’d read anything. Jane Austen. Poetry. Oprah books. Nowadays, I mostly read manfiction. Elmore Leonard and Walter Mosley and James Ellroy. Pretty soon I’ll start forgetting to put the seat up when I take a leak.

KPB: With a credit from Marvel in your hip pocket, can we expect to see more comic book work from you in the future?

JH: I had a blast working on Spider-Man Unlimited. The experience inspired me to write a diseased superhero story called “The Cape,” which was the very last thing I added to the collection.

I’ve got a couple scripts in the pipeline over at Grave Tales. I much prefer creating comic scripts to any other form of writing. I spent the last year working on a novel, so I haven’t had the time to do any other work in the field, but I’m hoping to get back in the game soon.

For me, comics are literary comfort food. I’m never so low an issue of The Goon can’t cheer me up. And if I was going to make the short-list of the living writers I most care about, Alan Moore would be right there in the top five.

KPB: You have quite a nifty website (www.joehillfiction.com), which among other things features some free fiction and a rather unsettling--and terribly addictive--Flash game based on your story "Last Breath" (I didn't make it past the second round, by the way, so thanks a bunch for making me feel inadequate). How essential a tool do you think a website is for a writer, and what positive, and or negative results have you seen from yours?

JH: Sorry about the inadequacy thing. I wasn’t aiming to make anyone feel inadequate. Frustrated and filled with shame, maybe, but not inadequate.

I’ve had a great time mucking around with the website, and it was especially fun working on the game and watching it come together. Vincent Chong, who also did a pair of remarkable covers for 20th Century Ghosts, put together some very upsetting imagery for “Last Breath.” His visuals really pull you in.

That said, I’m not sure a website does all that much for a writer. If someone has read your stories, and is excited about your stuff, a website is a great way to connect with them. But the stories have to come first. There’s not much chance a kick-ass home page is going to persuade readers to check out your fiction. Why would they even bother visiting your site, unless they were already interested in you?

KPB: What can readers expect to see thundering out of the Joe Hill stable over the next year?

JH: I’ve got a new novel, Heart-Shaped Box, a ghost story, which I’m hoping to sell this fall. I wanted to write something relentless, a story that just tears along from beginning to end, and I think this does that. Even if I never do anything like it again, I did want to try for at least one story that runs with the force of something like I Am Legend or Carpenter’s The Thing. Not that I think I wrote anything on that level, but that’s the kind of narrative I was shooting for. A story like that can be a hell of a lot of fun – I’ve never had such a good time writing anything. Also, I think there’s been a natural progression, from stories like “The Black Phone,” and “20^th Century Ghost” and “Best New Horror,” to this book. I had to write all the short stories first, to learn how to write the novel.

KPB: Thanks for your time, Joe!

JH: My pleasure.

This interview originally appeared in Subterranean Press Newsletter