Looking for a spooooooky read? If you’re looking for the goods on a famous horror writer, look no further than Grady Hendrix. His books will kick, punch, slash, and stab you in all the right places.
Grady Hendrix is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter. He’s the author of Horrorstor (which is being turned into a movie). He’s also written My Best Friend’s Exorcism (which is being adapted into a feature film by Amazon Studios), We Sold Our Souls, and the Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires (currently being adapted into a TV series). He also wrote the Bram Stoker Award-winning nonfiction book Paperbacks from Hell, a history of the horror paperback boom of the seventies and eighties. And most recently, The Final Girl Support Group about the women who fought back and defeated the killer, avenged their friends, and emerged victorious. But after the sirens fade and the audience moves on. What happens to her?
If you’re a seasoned horror genre consumer, you’ll catch the winks and nods from Grady while he pokes the genre tropes like a mysterious goo that’s leaking from the undead neighbor’s bathtub.
If you’re new to the horror genre, this will send you happily down a foggy cemetery trail at midnight toward more of his recommendations.
In the interview below, Grady and I chat about how to reinforce genre while also subverting it’s more conventional and overused tropes. He talks about some Stephen King recommendations that most people don’t know about, and shares how he got started writing fiction!
Interview
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LINKS
Grady Hendrix’s Website
Connect with him on Twitter
3 BIG TAKEAWAYS
- Writing is hard
- Writing is really all about the rewriting
- Treat writing like a job
In part 2 of this interview we’re going to be talking about Hendrix’s knowledge of the horror genre, his most difficult moment as a writer, and he shares the one thing he hopes people take away from this conversation with him.
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You’ll get to see Hendrix in his element casually rattling off genre greats. It will make you think about your own writing or reading niches. Sometimes we become so obsessed with what’s new and up and coming, that we forget these stories have roots intertwined with older ones. Thanks to Grady, I’m going to take some time inspecting the stories I love and back-tracking to find out where they started. Not only will this be fun to explore the stories of the past, but also as a way to see a fuller picture of the stories we love.
We also talk about his most difficult moment as a writer, choose your own adventure stories, and we get his advice for writers. Finally, he’ll share the one thing he hopes people can take away from this interview.
If you have a minute to subscribe and rate this podcast, that would be amazing. It helps out a lot with keeping this train on the tracks.
Next week we’ll hear from a debut non-fiction author who writes parenting stories about sick children. It’s a dark subject but a really inspiring and uplifting story and shares the humanity in all of us. So join us next week when I talk to David Metzger, author of Nurse Papa.
Full Transcript
DG: Welcome to part two of this interview. Today we’ll be continuing our conversation with Grady Hendrix. He is an award winning novelist and screenwriter. He’s the author of Horrorstor, which is being turned into a movie. He’s also written My Best Friend’s Exorcism, which is being adapted into a feature film by Amazon Studios. He’s written We Sold Our Souls, and The Souther Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, which is currently being adapted into a TV series. He’s the author of The Bram Stoker award winning nonfiction book Paperbacks from Hell, a history of the horror paperback boom of the 70s and 80s, and most recently, he’s published The Final Girl Support Group about the women who fought back and defeated the killer avenge their friends and emerged victorious, but after the sirens fade and the audience moves on, what happens to her?
In part one of this interview, we’re going to be talking about the final girl support group, Grady Hendrix new novel. We also discussed his projects in production, what it’s like adapting books into films and what he’s working on now, he shares some of what his life is like as a writer and give some really great advice. Alright, Let’s jump right into part one of this interview. Please welcome phenomenal writer and my future best friend Grady Hendrix, Grady it’s great to have you.
GH: Hey, nice to meet you. Thanks for having me.
DG: So the first thing I have to say is we have so much to talk about before we do I am just absolutely shook at how much fun I have reading your books. So if I faint at any time, like I’m a teenager at a Kpop concert just keep going. I’m sure I’ll wake up at some point.
GH: I’ll tap dance. No worries.
DG: Perfect. So, before we dig into the good stuff, there’s something I need from you which is, I know it’s been a few years, but I need a recommendation for a Stephen King novel. I know you did a huge reread of Stephen King. Can you tell us a little bit about that and maybe a recommendation that maybe people overlook.
GH: Yeah, so years ago I was, I would write a lot for tor.com. And I decided I was going to read the first 10 Stephen King books, and in order and and sort of like you know just ‘where are they now?’ you know. I’ve read most of them at some point, many of them more than once but just sort of do a reread and then I read the next 10 And I think by the time it was done I read like gosh all 38 or something of his novels. This was a few years ago. He’s written about 11 since I stopped, but it ultimately took me about five years. His books don’t get shorter, and it was really, really fascinating. It was, it was just, um, it’s one of the things I’m so glad I did some books that I grew up loving like Salem’s Lot Salem’s Lot was my jam when I was growing up. And rereading and I was like, really, okay. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s really…Listen, if you like Salem’s Lot that’s great. Rereading it, t felt very thin, and it felt very overwritten. I think King hadn’t really settled into I’m a horror writer at that point. His style was still a little bit shaky. And it was only you know his second published novel. He’d written a lot that were trunked, but there’s a lot of sort of like, Shirley Jackson-isms in there but they don’t quite work because he’s not Shirley Jackson. That’s just not the writer he is, but it would be it would be things like you know, pollen and gently wafting up nostrils and just sort of weird little purple prose, things like that, and also the whole thing with the Marston house, you know, that sort of sits over the town of Jerusalem’s Lot. It doesn’t really relate to the story at all.
And he works really hard to make it work and even since then and later years he’s like yeah I was really influenced by Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House and, you know, it’s fine. So, but then other books that I really had hated when I read like the Tommyknockers I wound up really loving.
So it was really a fun experience. Undiscovered King, I would say, you know, a couple of his books that don’t get a lot of attention for an old school one Cujo is so great. It’s so holds up beautifully. That book just gets better and better and I feel like that book lives in the shadow of King’s, quote, in an interview that he was really drunk at the time it doesn’t remember writing it, and a lot of people dismiss it because of that which is too bad.
In his more modern books, I was really, really, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, I think really is a pretty dead on great King book. And also, I have to say, Desperation and The Regulators which came out sort of back to back, I’m not a big fan of the regulator’s but desperation is a really interesting book kings really working out a lot of stuff about his Christianity and that book and it’s really, I was really surprised at how interesting it was I’d always sort of dismissed it as a gimmick because it was sort of published back to back with The Regulator’s but it really it really holds up for me.
DG: That’s cool. Thanks, those are those are definitely some I have not gotten to. I feel like I hit King’s like, you know, the more famous ones I did, I did read Cujo but some of those I’ll have to checkout. So, have you always been into horror, is this something you’ve kind of been reading as a child growing up or is this something that’s kind of brand new, or newer to you?
GH: No, not always. You know I wasn’t a big horror fan as a kid. I thought the covers of the books were too gross. And they kind of intimidated me, so I read a lot of military adventure stuff men’s adventure. Military fiction, men’s adventure stuff. A lot of Sci-Fi a little bit of fantasy, and you know I you know I read King when I was a teenager and I really fell in love with Clive Barker’s stuff when I was a teenager, but not a lot beyond that.
But it was always sort of out there around the margins. Like as a little kid I read a lot of those short stories and those Alfred Hitchcock anthologies like Monster Museum and stuff. But I really came to it later. And you know, of course, like, like I think most people, my big gateway to horror was watching horror movies with my friends and like middle school in high school, like that’s I think like the way in for most people and, and it’s, I really like that because it starts horror out is something that’s fun and social, and something that’s a way of like connecting with other people.
DG: Yeah, I love that my wife and I watch a lot of horror movies and from there, I’ve found that I read more horror books because of that we kind of recently I’ve gotten into some more horror movies so I feel that I feel like it is a gateway,
GH: and you know like the movies are the gateway to the books and the books are the gateway to adventure.
DG: I love that it’s a nice little catchphrase.
GH: I spent a lot of time in libraries with their PSA posters.
DG: That makes sense. That makes sense. So let’s talk about The Final Girl Support Group. For people who don’t know, what is a final girl and how did you come up with the idea for this story.
GH: So the final girls are women who survived horror movies. They usually kill the killer, make it to the end, watch most of their friends die. It seems pretty traumatic. Seems like they need a lot of therapy afterwards. And I really this was like My Best Friend’s Exorcism I had the title before I had the story and the story just sort of started coming together I think the first draft was 2014 and just. There was just a lot of vagaries kind of to get over the finish line, but really, I mean, you know, sort of root causes. I’ve been really fascinated by like the beginning of Friday 13th Part II where we see, you know, Alice Hardy from part one and she’s putting her life back together and all this and it was really the first time I started thinking about, like, these characters outside the movies having an independent existence.
And then, Heather Langenkamp as Nancy Thompson shows up in Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors to lead a support group for other kids who are like you know being attacked by Freddy and I was like, oh yeah so characters from one horror movie could like help ones from another horror movie. And when the title came to me it’s like everything about the books right there in the title, you know like, it’s all right there.
So, yeah, so that’s sort of sort of where it comes from and how it comes together, you know, I mean I figured like age wise these women and all the older, why are they still in a support group obsessed with something that happened when they were teenagers and they’re kind of asking that same question and drifting apart and then they start to die one by one and one of them believes that it’s a conspiracy.
As someone pointed out after they read a proof of an arc of the book. Oh, so basically it’s exact same story as Watchmen, except not by Alan Moore and with horror movie characters instead of superheroes. I was like God damnit. Okay, fine. Yeah, right. That’s what I didn’t realize, yeah until they said that and the book was basically done and I was like, I really hope no one else notices that.
DG: I did not so that’s that’s good.
GH: That’s good I’m fooling people.
DG: You certainly are. Okay, so you’re you’re a horror expert and we’ll talk a little bit more about that later and you’re kind of your background with the nonfiction side of horror, but you have these characters these narrators. I’m thinking definitely The Final Girl Support Group I’m thinking, Southern Book Clubs Guide to Slaying Vampires. Definitely My Best Friend’s Exorcism for sure. You have these like conventional narrators kind of doing like non conventional things, and in that way it seems like you’re subverting a lot of the genre norms. So, in what ways you have to play by the rules of genre, while also kind of sabotaging it with with your stories.
GH: Well, I mean you kind of hit the things that you need to hit to stay where you are, I mean, you know, there’s got to be mayhem there’s got to be horror. There’s got to be murder. I mean there’s those things you got to get. But beyond that I really feel like my job is to sort of apply the reality principle as much as possible and stop before it becomes absurd and that usually leads like, yields sort of fun stuff.
And you know, in the heart thing is really keeping your characters on track to have a story and not just sort of nope, their way back home. That’s always the hardest part for me. So starting with the character who’s already hell bent for leather like Lynette is really nice. Whereas with someone like Patricia in The Souther Bookclub, that’s a character who’s much more likely to just not rise to the challenge and so that’s a sort of harder character to write the book I’m working on right now which I’m doing like week or more, I think. But that’s been really hard because the main character really doesn’t want to change. She doesn’t want to go on an adventure she’s sort of, you know, gets into it all against her will and it’s really, it’s hard. It’s really everything takes twice as long and then of course when you go through the rewrite, you’re like okay well I can skip three steps here because the reader is going to be ahead of the character I can just jump to the next thing but, but right now and sort of in that first draft territory, and it’s really laborious, it’s really can be tedious to sort of like get all the pieces moving and figuring out why and how.
DG: And so does, does that. Do you find that that comes in the rewrite, I mean was that the same thing with Patricia? Did you have to go through the rewrite to see the plot parts that you could pull out or is that something that you can do along the way as well.
GH: Um, I’m bad at writing, like I it’s not a process that ended I do well. And so with Southern Bookclub I you know, there’s two entirely separate versions of that book that are radically different from the final version. And everyone was really upset and nonplussed by those versions because they felt like it was so far off the mark.
And so then when I landed on the version that sort of like after many rewrites became the final version, that first draft to get everything out there and then the rewrite really is taking things out, And then combining things, you know, oh these three scenes I could just have one. And so that’s, with the book I’m working on now. Really hoping I’ve gotten a little better at this, and that this will just be a case of taking things out, And combining things and then smoothing over the cracks. But I think this manuscripts at like 200,000 words so like half of that’s got to come out. So it’s I can’t think about that or I’ll just lose all hope. They’ll find me years later, just like a wizard mummified skeleton by the side of this road.
DG: Well I’m sure people who are writing are glad to hear that the struggles never end right you never like figure out writing and at least it doesn’t seem that way.
GH: I don’t know. Do they want to hear that? I keep entering each new novel like optimistic that I’ll get it right this time. And I wind up every single one of them feels like the war, and eventually, you know my editors are just like we’re, we’re going home, we’re pulling out, like, get on the choppers and I’m like, wait, we can’t and then just mayhem.
DG: Good something to look forward to right.
GH: I try not to I try to start each one in a state of total ignorance and optimism.
DG: You have to I feel like you can’t go in any other way.
GH: Yeah.
Interlude:
DG: All right, I want to pause here for just a second. I think writers sometimes feel like we just don’t know what we’re doing and we wade into the waters wishing we knew as much as best selling award winning novelist, with several stories under production with major film studios, but here’s Grady Hendrix telling us that writing is hard, that it’s a struggle. And that struggle doesn’t end when you finish your first book, in some ways, we’ll always feel like we’re bad at writing scoop up some courage and recognize writing for what it is a struggle. It’s Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill with a smile on his face, because even an amazing writer like Grady Hendrix doesn’t have it all figured out. In the second part of this interview, we get into the nitty gritty of his adaptations, which was really fun to talk about. We also chat about how he got started writing, and he relays a message about writing that really motivated me and I’m sure will motivate you to, but said back to the interview.
DG: So, you’re also writing the screenplay for a Horrorstor is that right?
GH: Yeah.
DG: How’s that going?
GH: Yeah, that’s what I was doing when I started doing this interview. Mornings are novel and afternoons are an evenings are screenplay. It’s going okay. I would love to have words with the guy who wrote this book. It’s been a hard adaptation, And I turned in the first draft, which was very much the book. And, you know, the producers gave me notes and, and they have a lot of valid points, and so I’m rewriting and I’m on that now. And the issue with it is that it works as a novel, but a couple of times, a couple of moments in the novel that are really big, are basically the main character, Amy, deciding something or realizing something, and that just doesn’t play on screen and so it’s very hard to make that work. And so I’m having to come up with other solutions because movies are relentlessly external and books are entirely internal, so it’s just it’s just been a real challenge. So yeah, that’s it’s going okay, I remain hopeful.
DG: That’s good, that’s that’s always good. I’ve heard I actually heard a, I wish I can remember his name is a writer once who who sold the rights to his book, he said, It’s like driving to the border of California and you throw your book, across and they throw a bag of money back at you and you drive away. But it sounds like you’re at least more involved in in Horrorstor has that been the case with the other adaptations for your books as well?
GH: Up and down, I mean, the first round with a lot of them, and like My Best Friend’s Exorcism, which I think is in post production right now. I was kind of like I don’t want to be involved. Do your thing. And I realized that was not the best idea that there was nothing wrong with what they were doing but I realized that I was able to save people, a lot of time by sort of…You know it’s funny I’m so under the hood of these books that I know why they work as stories, and it really is helpful for producers to have someone around who: A knows where these are set and has that background material, extra material, but also can be like, just remember this is about X this is the one sentence that is this story. And so I’m much more involved with Horrorstor and Souther Book Club, and The Final Girl Support Group just in that capacity, more like a producer, than than a writer, but it seems it seems to help.
DG: Has it been harder to modify your work or to stand by while someone else is doing it, or in between?
GH: Yeah, I don’t mind what people do to it. You know, it’s a little bit like Southern Bookclub. I mean, it’s I don’t care if they move it or make it contemporary or relocate it or change a lot of it, but as long as it holds on to the essential fact that it’s about a bunch of, you know, moms in a book club, and Dracula moves into their neighborhood, and they have to kill him, because he threatens their children is long as it’s that. But that’s a really easy thing to go missing, you know, it’s weird you wouldn’t think it is, but oftentimes, you know, someone will look at your book and say well it’s about this. And they’ll pick something you never noticed and that’s totally legitimate reaction, but in terms of making the story work it’s not as helpful.
DG: Hmm. That makes sense. So, what’s so interesting to me about you and your work is how the study of genre that you do kind of informs the work that you’re producing. So I’d be insane. I know we’ve chatted a little bit about this through email, but I’d be insane if I got to talk to you and didn’t get to ask about the podcast that the Super Scary Haunted HomeschooI. absolutely loved it I actually listened to most of it. Well, I’m planting bushes in my backyard so every time I look at those shrubberies I think of you.
GH: Oh, that’s really nice. Now you got to like make them into topiary that like looks like me striking a heroic pose.
DG: Well I was a little bit afraid they’d start like growing teeth or something that I think we’re safe for now.
GH: Or eyes. Yeah,
DG: What was it like to produce that? Did you just have all that knowledge sitting in your head and thought like how can I get this out?
GH: Well so what happens is, after I did Horrorstor was like, I’m never doing an author event again I hate them. You know the thing where you read from the book and do a q&a It’s just, death. And so I decided I would do like a one man show, for each book and it would be like, you know, and so, I don’t do a ton of research on the subject matter before I write a book. I mean I do some but like I but what happens is I really dive in afterwards to do the show.
And so it’ll be like you know I’ve got one from Paperbacks from Hell that sort of verbal version of the book with songs and I’m doing one for The Final Girl Support Group now, which is like a history of sort of murder books and slasher movies, and they’re fun to do and a lot of, they take up a lot of research and so for Southern Bookclub I done all this research for vampires. And then we had the pandemic and so my whole book tour got cancelled, I was like what am I going to do? So I thought I’d do the podcast. And what I learned is podcasts are hard. Um, and, you know, I was the only person and I’ve got I’ve got rudimentary audio skills. Not very good, but um, but the hardest part… I mean that, so that was tough to record it and edit it and do all that stuff and and and people listening it can tell from the audio quality. But the heartbeat..
DG: I thought the accents, I gotta say were phenomenal. I mean, come for the horror, stay for the accents.
GH: Yes, come for the knowledge stay for the accent. Yeah, but, uh, but my. The hardest thing became because I wrote the first three basically sort of based on the material I had. And then after that, researching and writing the scripts was enormously difficult I mean, I was getting to the point where it was taking me five weeks just to do an episode and I was like, this is crazy.
And so I finally sort of hit that stopping point with World War One, I had a Hammer Horror episode ready to go and then, like, you know, basically, the research done and ready for a script and then after that I had two more episodes sort of plot it out, or really one big episode plotted out.
And I just don’t have the time and, and you may have learned this or maybe you’re smarter than I am at this stuff but you know podcasts just don’t pay they’re not a gold mine here. And so for me it was like I’ve got paying work to do, or non paying work to do and the paying work took priority. I would love for someone to come on board who is like a one stop shopping solution who would like, you know, handle the technical side of it and do all that stuff and give me that support and everything and we had talked to a few people about it but it just was not to be.
And it’s also weird. It’s hard to convince people of the viability of a project like that. I think a common mistake, And maybe it’s not a mistake. Maybe these people are smarter than I am, I don’t know wouldn’t be the first time, but I think a lot of people are like, oh horror and the history of horror. So, what was the first horror movie?
And they start with really elementary stuff and what you wind up with is a lot of horror nonfiction content. It’s the same story over and over again just looked at from different angles and for me, I think the details are what’s fascinating to like really do a deep dive, and what a lot of people worry about from a producer point of view is, well that’s going to lose people.
And I’m like, I don’t think so, like, I think at this point, people are going to watch a horror documentary or listen to a horror podcast, they know the basics, and what they want is to look at those sort of details because it’s sort of that that, oh gosh, what’s the term for it I can’t remember it’s very fancy, but the idea that that almost holographic idea, where like, every, every molecule of that of the horror story contains the whole. You know, and it’s like, by talking about VD scare films and Dracula you’re also talking about a much bigger thing. And I think people like those details I think those details are what makes something come alive, but it’s very it’s really hard to convince people of that, you know, so and so that’s that’s that’s sort of where we live in. The British seem to do a better job of it and I hate to say that about our previous overlords because in general I believe they should not be celebrated, but I look at someone like Mark Gaddis who’s doing who does all these like audio documentaries and BBC documentary television documentary about horror, you know, here’s three episodes on hammer here’s six episodes on Dracula and like wow, that is, you know that stuff goes deep.
DG: Yeah, I mean the research alone has to be like you said, I mean five weeks for an episode it sounds crazy but when you listen to the podcast, it makes sense I mean there’s a lot of information crammed into every second.
GH Again, even then I’m getting stuff wrong like there was actually a brief boom in vampire operas, right before in like 1812-1813 right before Polidori wrote The Vampire. Well I didn’t know about those at the time I just hadn’t come across them so like, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, history is not done ever, you know, like, a history book is not a finished thing.
DG: Yeah, I love that, I mean you’re you’re full of these quotes today. You really did spend a lot of time in a library.
GH: I know right.
DG: Alright so I want to I want to backtrack a little bit, let’s talk a little bit about your origin story here. So you got started as a journalist right and you wrote for Slate the New York Sun, you had an Asian cinema blog for Variety. Why did you choose journalism and how did that career prepare you to write fiction?
GH: Really, that was the kind of writing that was out there, like in the 2000s. There was a huge amount of cultural coverage journalism that was like, that gobbled up freelancers like like Cookie Monster gobbles up cookies. And I knew a lot about some aspects of film like I lived in Hong Kong for a little while so I knew Hong Kong film and, you know, late 90s into the early 2000s that was sort of hot. And so I had a little niche where I could write some and then I had a little field of knowledge and sort of expanded from there and I also sort of lucked out and landed an article in Playboy, very early on that was like my first big official clip because I was doing a documentary about the Confederate flag with some friends from high school, In ‘98-’99, and I bumped into a guy at a party was telling him about it and he turned out to be the nonfiction editor for Playboy, boom, there you go. It all happens in smoke filled rooms.
And so but with a clip from Playboy you could like lie about some other clips and then use that clip to get more work. So that’s kind of what I did. And, you know, the things that gave me that are both helpful and hurtful one is an ability to hit deadlines and to write quickly and prolifically. That’s not always the best and I’ve actually with the book I’m doing now I’ve discovered that by slowing down, I’m actually doing better.
But, you know, that was one thing and the other thing is, well sort of twofold one is it really gave me a love for research and kind of meeting people and talking to them and finding out about stuff I didn’t know anything about. And it also made me very, very used to working with an editor. And one thing I never really realized because I didn’t really come up through the ranks of fiction. I didn’t do a creative writing MFA or you know or submit to a lot of magazines or anything. I didn’t realize how much a lot of writers don’t really interact with their editor. And for me, nothing I write or nothing I wrote for many years as a journalist was was done without my editor, taking a pass on it if not two, and giving me notes that I had no choice but to incorporate and changing what I had written. It just gave me a really high tolerance for that relationship and I think it’s a good relationship, but knowing how to navigate, it’s really important, and I sort of arrived, writing fiction already knowing how to navigate that back and forth.
DG: Yeah, I’m sure that was that was helpful. So help me picture this, you’re in New York, working as a journalist, so are you writing in the mornings at nights, weekends, whenever you get a spare moment for your fiction or did it kind of happen all at once?
GH: I was trying to write fiction I wasn’t very good at it. Mostly because I was trying to write short stories and those I just find really really difficult. I was writing scripts with a friend of mine Nick Rucka, I mean I was writing everything and it was just sort of like my day, my work day was writing and if it was all paid work that day it was paid work if it wasn’t paid work that day it was unpaid work. So that was my day, I mean that was a real like nine to five, or even longer 12 hour day. And so, that yeah and so I just did that over and over again, I mean I wrote lots of free articles online I mean, whatever I could, you know, I just wanted to be out there doing this.
David: Welcome to part two of this interview. Today, we’ll be continuing our conversation with Grady Hendrix. He is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter. He’s the author of Horrorstör which is being turned into a movie. He’s also written My Best Friend’s Exorcism, which is being adapted into a feature film by Amazon Studios. He’s written We Sold Our Souls and The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, which is currently being adapted into a TV series.
He’s the author of the Bram Stoker Award-winning nonfiction book, Paperbacks from Hell, a history of the horror paperback boom of the ’70s and ’80s, and most recently he’s published The Final Girl Support Group about the women who fought back and defeated the killer, avenged their friends and emerged victorious. But after the sirens fade and the audience moves on, what happens to her?
In part two of this interview, we’re going to be talking about Grady’s knowledge of the horror genre, his most difficult moment as a writer, and he shares the one thing he hopes people take away from this conversation with him. So, without putting it off any longer, let’s get to part two.
So, I want to ask you some new genre questions, because I feel like people who listen to this are likely to have read your books are interested in the thriller horror genres, and I mean, you know your stuff so this should be fun and educational. So based on your podcast and Paperbacks from Hell and other interviews you’ve done, it seems clear that you’re invested in like parsing out the history of horror. Why do you find that so compelling?
Grady: Well, I sort of fell into it. I realized that the stuff I was writing that people responded to more fell into horror. And I, you know, I really like I also was writing for Tour at the time and a couple of other outlets, and I found that just knowledge I’d picked up over the years about horror from seeing a bunch of movies was giving me a little bit of a niche writing about horror for reviewing horror movies and stuff like that. I sort of knew where that stuff was coming from. And, you know, late ’90s J horror remakes are really big in the States and I had seen most of the originals. I was pretty conversant with Asian film and Japanese film and Hong Kong film, and so that sort of was a part of that and writing for Tour, not sure how I stumbled into it, but I started writing more about horror for them.
And I think it was doing recaps of Under the Dome, the Stephen King TV series, which I got to say I am enormously proud of the recap I did because I did all three seasons of Under the Dome. And you can see about, I think it’s about three recaps in, I began to lose my mind, and by the time you get to Season 3, I existed in a state of sort of like I wasn’t a wave or a particle. The writing just becomes totally lunatic, and I’m so proud of those recaps. They’re just bizarre. And I look back and I read them and I’m like, how did I write this? What was wrong with me? I would spend hours on them, and it was a brief moment where recapping was like an art form and I feel like I came in at the end of that. Atlantis was sinking around me and I was up in my tower doing my best wizardry as we all slip beneath the waves.
And then off that, I did the Stephen King reread, and off of that, I had started going into paperbacks swap shops, which is my preferred bookstore of choice and I noticed they always had big horror sections, full of authors I’d never heard of and so I just started reading them randomly and I asked Tour, can I just start writing about these books? And as I did, I started to sort of get into areas no one else was writing about and my editor at Quirk, I had written Horrorstör and My Best Friend’s Exorcism by that point, and he was like these articles you’re doing for Tour, you could pitch into us as a book. He’s like, I don’t think we would buy it. I can’t imagine we would buy a book of these but I would want to read the pitch, just for kicks. I like these articles. So, he did and they bought it.
And so then I had to write it and I brought on board this guy Will Errickson, who runs Too Much Horror Fiction, which is like the only person at the time who really knew about this material and was out there and accessible. We spent a long time on the phone just being like, is there a story here, a narrative arc that goes A to B to C and D. And we finally figured one out, but it took a long time, but it was really good to have Will there, as someone to be like, oh, what about coma? Where does coma fit into this? Oh my God. Do heads fit into the same category as coma? What about killer baby books? It was just nice to have someone to bounce that off of, but yeah, so that’s, sort of where all that came from. And just since then, you see the fruits of my sin behind me, these boxes and boxes of horror paperbacks, and I just keep reading them and I just can’t stop, and so my addiction has become my super power.
David: That’s awesome. When I read Paperbacks from Hell, it just seems so comprehensive and there were just so many books there. I was just like, wow. I mean, this guy must have read literally every paperback or novel that he could find it at least.
Grady: Well, ignorance is bliss, because I think I would do a worse job of the book now because I know more, so like some things that I skimmed over a little bit like YA horror or the splatter punk movement and serial killers, I’d write a lot more about that now, but I’m not sure it would help the overall book. I think they got about the room they needed in the book to keep the story going. But now I feel compelled to be like, but what about the Robert W. Walker books? We need to talk about Christopher Pike and my ignorance let that book be good.
David: I’ve read, I think through your website, Valancourt, they brought a bunch of the paperbacks back because of the book, right? That must have been pretty cool.
Grady: Yeah. Well, some of the books that I was writing about were already coming out from Valancourt. They had a couple of Michael McDowells, some things like that. I think they’d done a Ken Greenhall by then, Hell Hound, and that was lucky on my part to sort of bump into them and I wound up writing an intro for Joan Samson’s Auctioneer with them and then sort of started this relationship. But yeah, I think now it’s 13 books. I think the new one Gwen, in Green is coming out and it would be 20 books or more now. I would say 21 actually.
The right situations with these things are just insane. I mean, tracking down who holds the rights, then getting them to agree they want to do it then getting either their agent or often the publisher who last had the book to agree that the book is no longer in print is just torturous. Some of the things I’ve watched publishers do because a book that’s not been in print since 1992, the rights of reverted to the author and the things I’ve watched publishers do because they can set up all these obstacles for the author to reclaim their rights – paperwork being filled out, all this stuff, and a lot of paperwork – and then just not responding to emails for weeks or months. It’s really gross actually. We were doing one book that we wanted to bring out so badly. The author had passed away. His heirs were in their eighties and lived in Australia and they were really happy. They were like, oh my God. Our brother’s book will come out. That’s so great. And ultimately the publisher just kept making them fill out forms and forms and forms, and finally, they were like, guys, we’re old. We don’t want to do this anymore. We want to enjoy our lives. Sorry. And it was just gross. It was really gross behavior on a publisher’s part.
David: That’s too bad. I mean, that’s too bad. okay. So, I confess – I’m a budding horror enthusiast now. You’ve completely convinced me. I’m obviously not nearly as knowledgeable as you, but I feel really invested in the genre and I think there’s something insanely human about being scared. So, if someone’s listening to this and they’re like, yes, this is my world. I want to be in that world, but they’re overwhelmed – probably rightfully so – where do you suggest they start? And that could be movies, books, both. What do you think?
Grady: Well for me, I mean, all I can really do is say what worked for me, but really for me, I found something that spoke to me genre-wise and just when after it, and from there, I kind of branched out. I’m a zombie guy. I’m not really a slasher guy. Since I was a kid, zombies are my thing. So, I saw Return of the Living Dead and loved it, and then Dawn and then Day, and then I was like, okay, I think I’ll watch Night. I really loved it. And then I was like, well, let me go back to watch earlier zombie films. I went back to Val Lewton’s I Walked with a Zombie and liked it okay. I appreciated it. Then I sort of was like, okay, watch the Zombi by Lucio Fulci. That was all right and just that gave me a stepping stone to start looking at other Fulci stuff. It’s just finding your sweet spot and just sort of walking that path and then that’ll take you places.
You know, if you like slashers, you will wind up watching serial killer movies and you will also probably go back to things like Psycho and Peeping Tom. And then you’ll be like, well, what’s the earliest slasher? And you might wind up with 13 women all the way back in I think ’32, and then you’ll probably look at some Giallos, which starts getting into the Italian stuff. And then maybe you’ll be like, well, I wonder if there’s like Asian versions of this. Then you’re getting to the evil, dead trap territory. So, you just follow it where you want to go. And usually what I see people doing is they find something in there that they really love, and they just keep trying to watch or read all the variations of that possible. You’re into haunted houses or you’re into werewolves and sure, there’s werewolf movies, but you’ll eventually run dry. And then you’re like, well, what are the books and you’ll wind up maybe with The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore or somewhere in there. So, it’s just a matter of finding your thing and branching out.
David: Okay, let’s take a breather here, and I want to stop in this particular place for two reasons. First, you just got to see the genre expert, Grady Hendrix in his element. I mean, he just casually rattled off genre greats, some even with the year they came out. Second, I want you to think about your own writing and reading niches. Sometimes we become so obsessed with what’s new and up and coming that we forget that stories often have roots intertwined with older stories. Thanks to Grady, I’m going to take some time inspecting the stories I love and backtracking to find out where they started. Not only will this be fun to explore the stories of the past, but it will also serve as a way to get a fuller picture of the stories we love.
In the second part is interview. I asked Grady what his most difficult moment was as a writer. We talk about Choose Your Own Adventure stories and we get to his advice for writers and what one thing he hopes people can take away from this interview. Let’s head back to the interview.
What, if you could think back to your kind of entire writing career so far, is there a moment that sticks out that was most difficult or just really hard to overcome for you?
Grady: Yeah. So, I did a book called We Sold Our Souls. This was right after I wrote Paperbacks from Hell and my publisher at the time was Quirk, which was great. We had a really good relationship. My editor, Jason Rekulak is a really phenomenal editor, and I really want to write The Final Girl Support Group as my next book after Paperbacks from Hell. I already had a draft of it and actually a really revised draft of it, and he’s just like, look, man. I don’t want to do a Final Girl’s book. He’d already turned it down once. And I was like, come on, I did another version of it. He’s like, I just don’t think the market wants that right now. And I was like, okay. And one thing I learned very early on is you never want to write a book that your publisher doesn’t want to publish and publishers will publish books they don’t want to publish if you really push. I just think it’s a mistake. You’re not going to find a lot of enthusiasm. I was like, all right.
So, then I was like, okay. Well, what about this book club versus Dracula thing? And he was like, well, maybe. Okay, we could do that. I started working on that and about six weeks in, he gave me a call and he’s like, look, I mean, if you want to write the book, it’s fine. I get you started working on it so it’s kind of unfair of me to pull the rug out, but sales and marketing are just not into it. They don’t know how to sell a book to this demographic. Most of our books we sell to young people. We got a pop culture thing. This would appeal to a lot of middle-aged women and that’s just not an audience they know how to reach. And he’s like, also vampires. Vampires are really overdone right now. And I was like, okay.
David: So, wait – what year is this?
Grady: This is 2016, I think.
David: Okay.
Grady: So I was like, all right, and so then I pitched them a heavy metal horror novel. He’s good with that. Start working on it. I really wanted it to feel new. Horror often uses the same tropes and symbols and bag of tricks, which is fine. I do it all the time, but I really wanted to have a horror novel that was at home in a world of MK-ULTRA and Pizzagate and Chemtrails and Swatting. I wanted to be pulling horror from that, and I had actually seen the people who did – and I may be getting my years a little fuzzy here – but who did Too Many Cooks, that thing that was on Adult Swim, that really surreal sit-com horror thing, had done this short movie. It’s like 40 minutes long, 30 minutes long called Unedited Footage of a Bear. That really had a big impact on me. It’s so incredible. A lot of it was about pharmaceuticals and all this. And I was like, oh man. I so want to be in that territory and I so feel like this is it.
So I’m doing all this heavy metal research, cause I’m not an actual metal head and that’s great. That’s easy. Metal heads are fantastic people. The second you are interested in what they’re interested in, they start writing down bands and albums you should listen to, and they will talk to you for hours. And so finding the music wasn’t the problem, but doing the research on this sort of conspiracy side of it. I had always loved conspiracy theories, but I hadn’t really been around that world and I dove in. All the subreddits, all the message boards, the website. I was really out there, and this was 2016 and beginning of the Trump presidency and that stuff, it had gotten really dark.
And conspiracy theories, when I had been around them, mostly it was like pre ’99 and people – not all of them, but a lot of them – had a sense of humor and I had spent time in sort of the militia community and places like that, and there was a self-awareness there, and maybe that’s because I naturally didn’t go into the danker parts of that swimming pool, but that was all gone. The world of conspiracy theories in 2016 and ’17 was very angry. It was very hopeless. It was very cynical. It was just like, you know, nothing matters. We’re all puppets on a string. We’re all sheeple. The world is just a machine that chews up human souls. And so I was really immersed in that and it really was depressing. I’m writing this book; was very immersed in that, and it just wasn’t coming together, and the book was very depressing and Jason rejected the first draft. I was like, okay, I get it. I get it. I got a lot of rewriting to do. Not a problem. My first draft always needs a lot of work. Second draft, and eventually it gets to the point where we’re into the end of 2017. This book’s really down to the wire and he calls me, I think it was December 22nd, and he’s like, look, man. I think the book’s got to come off the schedule. It’s just not working. You’ve tried all these different versions. It’s not coming together. It’s not going to work.
We were on the phone for like two and a half hours. I mean, we were really trying alternative everything. Finally. I was like, all right. Okay. He’s like, look, we’ll try again. We’ll try. Let’s regroup in the new year. So, we got off the phone and he was really good about it. He really was, but the problem was I had sort of immersed myself in this world that there was really dark to stay in the mindset to write this book that no one wanted and I was broke. You get paid half your advance when you sign the contract, and the other half when you turn in the manuscript, and not only was I not going to get the back half now, but I needed to return the front half and I had spent a lot of time on this book. We were living on credit cards and my wife didn’t know that. We were paying bills on credit cards and cash advances and money orders. I handled all the money so she had no clue, and I was really down a hole here and I was very depressed.
I think it was probably the day after Christmas, couple of days out, 26th, 27th. I was like, I can, and there were two things going on. Well, there was really one thing going on, or two things. One was, I was broke. I didn’t have the money to return the advance. And the other thing was my characters don’t come to life. They don’t talk to me. They don’t do any of that. But you do live with these imaginary friends for a very long time and so I become very attached to them and to walk away from this book would be really abandoning Chris, who is my main character sort of in limbo. And her whole MO was just sort of powering through. And I was like, I can’t do this to her. I just can’t do this.
I looked at the calendar, I realized it would be about December 8th and 9th, I think before anyone was back in the office to sort of officially take the book off the schedule. And so in about seven days, I completely rewrote the book. I mean, completely. I still had chunks I used, but I rewrote those chunks, the new character, all this stuff. I was like, I can’t let this die. I need that back end of the advance, and also, I can’t abandon this. I had a draft waiting for Jason when the offices reopened, and he was like, okay. We can work with this. And so, we went from there and it worked out okay, but that was really bleak and really down a hole. And I got to say, when the book went to press and I deleted my membership on a lot of message boards and have never gone back, it was a really happy day inside my head. It was just really stupid, dumb set of choices I made writing that book and I love that book. It’s sort of my favorite of all my books, but it’s also my lowest selling book. As has my agent who I didn’t have at the time later said, every writer wants write a rock and roll book, and it’s the job of every agent to stop them. Music books just notoriously don’t sell and he’s right.
David: Yeah. Interesting.
Grady: So that was a really long-winded answer to your question. I’m sorry.
David: No, I think that’s great. I mean, I feel like a lot of times we hear about writers and they talk a lot about the success that they’ve had. I think it’s so humanizing in a lot of ways to hear those struggles and I can’t even imagine how much it messed with you. First of all, your writing. The fact that you were able to put something together while you’re going through all that stress. I mean, it had to be a Herculean task.
Grady: Well, I wasn’t doing it well, and those seven days were really interesting because I really learned a lot about writing in those days, and also, I think up until that point, I had this idea of kind of confronting readers with something that I wanted them to see, rather than something they wanted to read. I’m not saying you have to write to your reader or try to, but it really helps to keep your reader in mind. And that’s something that I hadn’t been doing so much, especially with that book.
David: All right. So, I want to end with some probably random questions, but there are things that I wanted to know and I didn’t know how to organize them, so I thought I’ll just throw them in at the end and pretend like that’s where they’re supposed to be.
Grady: Let’s do it.
David: So, I know you did some interviews with people who wrote Choose Your Own Adventure books and I’m dying to know are you planning a Choose Your Own Adventure horror story because I think that would be awesome?
Grady: I would love to. It’s really complicated. Also doing something new with choose your own adventure is really hard. Ryan North did a Choose Your Own Adventure version of Hamlet called To Be or Not to Be that I kind of feel like is the ultimate Choose Your Own Adventure book. I’m not sure I could come up with something better than that. I’ve always said that I don’t want to play with other people’s toys. I don’t want to swim in someone else’s bath water. Someone’s done it as well as I think it can be done. I don’t have a better idea. I’m staying away.
David: Yeah. I figured a Grady Hendrix, 40 endings, 39 of them you die. Good luck, right?
Grady: That’s basically like the old Choose Your Own Adventure books. I mean, they were enormously morbid.
David: I remember reading them and it’s funny, that kind of got lost somewhere. And as I was reading your interview. I was like, oh, wow, wait. I used to read these and they were awesome.
Grady: Yeah. And also, all the sort of knockoff ones that twist the plots and the Dungeons and Dragons ones. I think they were called Endless Quest and the Infocom ones. I mean, there were so many versions of them out there, it was really wild. Like you said, to sort flip that light switch in a part of my brain that hadn’t seen illumination for a very long time, was like, oh my God. These shelves are full.
David: All right. What’s a question that you wish interviewers would ask you that they just never do?
Grady: You know, I don’t know actually, and I hate to sound like a cop out, but I don’t know, because I could just babble happily on anything. One thing I always wish writers would talk about though amongst themselves is I really, really wish people would talk business a little more, and I don’t mean in interviews because I think it’s boring for people who aren’t in this industry to sort of hear about. But one reason book contracts can be so bad is writers are really shy about talking nuts and bolts and talking numbers and talking contract. I wish more of us – and there’s several writers and people I know, but I’ve shown them my contracts because I’m like, yeah, here. This is what that looked like, because I think the fact that we’re all negotiating separately in the dark really means that we’re all kind of negotiating against ourselves.
And there’s some things in publishing that are just completely, completely archaic ways of doing business that we’ve all accepted that are really, really bad, to be honest.
David: Interesting!
Grady: The fact that you get your royalties paid to you twice a year is ridiculous. The fact that your publisher doesn’t give you a royalty statement until you get your royalties paid. I’m sorry, man, this is not Christmas and I’m getting a card from my great aunt, and is it going to be a $20 bill in it? Am I going to be getting a 50? This is fricking money I earned. I want to see daily accounting of that stuff. And slowly, some publishers are. They’re putting up portals where you can check in, but not enough and definitely not small publishers because they find that kind of bookkeeping overwhelming and onerous, which was probably the case a while back. But at this point, if that kind of bookkeeping’s too onerous for you, then you shouldn’t be running a business. This is not a way to do business. So anyways, so yeah, I really wish… I want interviewers to ask whatever they want, but with writers, I wish we all talk to each other more about the business part of this, because I really do feel like it could be much improved.
David: Wow. That’s something that from the outside, people have no idea about, so it’s definitely an insider thing that people like you and other writers, the issues that we don’t see from this side of it. Okay. So, if you could choose one thing that you hope people take away from this conversation, what’s one thing that they should or could, or you would want them to take away?
Grady: You know, really, it’s kind of like what I want people to take away from anything I do, which is that you can do this. I mean, you have to make some decisions along the way, but if you want to write for a living, chances are you can find a way to do that. You will have to make decisions. My wife and I – she’s a chef, I’m a writer – and we love living in New York, and for years, we wanted to have kids. And at a certain point years ago, we had to look at it and be like, okay, we can do two out of these three things, but we can’t do all three, and so we don’t have kids but that’s a choice. It’s not something that was done to us; it’s a choice we made.
But not just the writing part of it is something you can do. Any of this is something anyone can do. You’re into horror. You can follow that trail wherever you want to take it. You can follow that into 19th century classical literature. You can take it back to Greek literature. You can take it back to mythology and fairy tale. You can go anywhere with this stuff, as long as you’re willing to do the reading. Ultimately, reading and writing are the only ways to sort of do anything. That’s the fuel.
David: All right. Well, Grady Hendrix, I could talk to you for hours, but I want to respect your time.
Grady: No, I appreciate it.
David: My last question is where can people find out more about you and your work?
Grady: Everything’s on gradyhendrix.com and all my social media platforms. The episodes that exist of Super Scary Haunted Homeschool, my podcast. Also, my events page has all the stuff I’m doing. I’m doing a welcome to The Final Girl Support Group show, songs, slides. It’s ridiculous and stupid. I’m doing a few more virtual versions of it, but starting in September, it’s going to be mostly live and so that’s all up there. I mean, I hope I’m doing it live if things get better. I still write a tremendous number of reviews of just dumb paperbacks I’m reading that are all up there in the book reviews of the damned section. So yeah, gradyhendrix.com. If you want to avoid me, don’t go there. If you want to embrace my nonsense, that’s probably the best place to go.
David: Well, I will give it a glowing endorsement. I have gone into every corner I feel like of the gradyhendrix.com website, and it’s a lot of fun, so I could not recommend it more. So, thank you so much for spending the time and hanging out with me today. I really appreciate it.
Grady: Oh man. David, thank you. I know. I appreciate you doing this. Thanks man.
David: So that’s it for this interview. I had an absolute blast talking to Grady Hendrix about his background and his stories. I expect you’re going to hear a lot more about him as time goes on with so many of his stories being turned into movies and TV shows. It’s like he said in part one of his interview, movies are the gateway to the books and the books of the gateway to adventure. So, hope you enjoyed hearing from him, learn something from him, and like he says, you can do this. If you have a minute to subscribe and rate the podcast, that would be amazing. It helps out a lot with keeping this train on the tracks.
Next week, we’ll hear from a debut nonfiction author who writes parenting stories about six children. It’s a dark subject, but with a really inspiring, uplifting story. He shares the humanity in all of us and how important these stories are to tell. So join us next week when I talk to David Metzger, author of Nurse Papa. I’ll see you then.
