I’ll be at the Haverhill Public Library participating in the Book Festival organized by Christopher Golden and featuring a whole slew of amazing writers.
The MERRIMACK VALLEY HALLOWEEN BOOK FESTIVAL 2017 will be held on Saturday, October 21st, 2017, from 10am till 4:30pm. Once again, the event will be held at the Haverhill Public Library (Haverhill, MA) and is FREE and open to the public.
MERRIMACK VALLEY HALLOWEEN BOOK FESTIVAL 2017
Joe Hill
Gregory Bastianelli
Matt Bechtel
Stephen R. Bissette
Daniel Braum
Lisa Bunker
Dana Cameron
Glenn Chadbourne
Jason Ciaramella
Joseph A. Citro
Tom Deady
Kristin Dearborn
Rachel Autumn Deering
Barry DeJasu
Amber Fallon
Dan Foley
Craig Shaw Gardner
Christopher Golden
Scott Goudsward
Catherine Grant
Kat Howard
Christopher Irvin
Nicholas Kaufmann
Brian Keene
Toni L.P. Kelner
John Langan
Tim Lebbon
Fred Van Lente
Bracken MacLeod
John McIlveen
Hillary Monahan
James A. Moore
Holly Newstein
Errick Nunnally
Jason Parent
Phillip Perron
Charles Rutledge
Hank Phillippi Ryan
Mary Sangiovanni
Cat Scully
Rob Smales
Sarah Smith
Thomas Sniegoski
Laurie Faria Stolarz
Paul Tremblay (hi, there!)
Tony Tremblay
Kenneth Vaughn
Trisha Wooldridge
Douglas Wynne
Rio Youers
Here’s the deal (no exchange of currency–not a deal in that sense–, this is free!): The lyrics, the tone of the song, or the video (or all three) will be horror-ish. Also, to take pressure off myself, this isn’t an all-time list (like then I’d have to include Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me”), but a list what’s pinging in my ears and eyeballs right now. No order in particular:
–Neighborhood Brats, “We Own the Night” (Sometimes I play this song five to ten times in a row. Hack guitar player that I am, I learned how to play this too. No werewolves were harmed in the making of his list).
–Protomarytr, “Come and See” (This band sounds like the coming apocalypses)
–The Drones, “Shark Fin Blues” (I can’t have a horror list without a shark song, or two)
–Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Heads Will Roll” (I once used this video in a how-to-write-horror-that-doesn’t-suck lecture, or screed)
–Pissed Jeans, “Bathroom Laughter” (A quiet little ditty about dread and despair and consumer TV and a little dog)
–I Speak Machine, “Zombies 1985” (Soundtrack to an 80’s film that never existed…yes, please)
–Nina Nastasia & Jim White, “Late Night” (“there’s blood on the road and blood on your face”)
–Salem, “Sick” (a recent discovery as a friend posted this song, and it haunts me)
–Shellac, “The End of Radio” (paired with “Sick,” another end-of-the-world take)
–The Tragically Hip, “Nautical Disaster” (brilliant narrative lyrically…and water, big water scares me, so much so I haven’t really been able to write about it)
I’m so proud and honored that DISAPPEARANCE AT DEVIL’S ROCK won the British Fantasy Award for best horror novel. Congrats to all the talented winners and nominees. I wish I could’ve been in England to celebrate with you all. Thank you British Fantasy Society and thanks to my wonderful editors at Titan Books and William Morrow.
Extras in the paperback include reading discussion questions. An essay about my satanic movie consumption, and a liner notes essay about the novel itself.
I hope you enjoy the novel. If you enjoyed it, tell a friend.
And just for fun, a video I shot at Borderland and Split Rock with my son.
Crap year, great books. I’m breaking with my own bloggery tradition and internet rules that ordain one must choose 10 or another number that oh-so-cleverly-deviates-from-ten in one’s year’s favorite’s list. This year I’m making the list bigger because I want to celebrate more of the books I read this year (most published in 2016) that I enjoyed and I highly recommend. The order mostly when-they-were-read chronological order.
–Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom (novella)
–Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney
–A Collapse of Horses, Brian Evenson (collection)
–Liz Hand, Hard Light
–Amy Lukavics, Daughters Unto Devils
–Megan Abbott, You Will Know Me
–Peter Straub, Interior Darkness (collection)
–Letitia Trent, Almost Dark
–Valeria Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth
–Idra Novey, Ways to Disappear
–Bracken MacLeod, Stranded
–Michael Cisco, The Knife Dance (novella, I wrote an introduction)
–Legend, Samuel Sattin and Chris Koehler (Comic… I wrote an introduction to the first trade!)
–Livia Llewellyn, Furnace (collection)
–Stewart O’Nan, City of Secrets
–Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Certain Dark Things
–China Mieville, This Census Taker (novella)
–Nick Mamatas, The Last Weekend
–Glen Hirshberg, Good Girls
–Damien Angelica Walters, Paper Tigers
–Stephen Graham Jones, Mongrels
–Christopher Buehlman, The Suicide Motor Club
–Gabino Iglesias, Zero Saints
–Jon Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (non-fiction)
–John Langan, The Fisherman
–Brian Evenson, The Warren (novella)
–Laird Barron, Swift to Chase (collection, I wrote an introduction)
–Chuck Wendig, Invasive
–Jeffrey Ford, A Natural History of Hell (collection)
–Michelle Paver, Thin Air
–Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (my favorite read of the year…)
–Kang Han, The Vegetarian (novella)
–Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Hex
–Caroline Kepnes, You
–Steve Rasnic Tem, Out of the Dark
–Manuel Gonzales, The Regional Office Is Under Attack
Yes, I know, you readers using older e-readers are having a difficult time seeing some of the diary pages. I think what happened is the publisher reproduced them as images (in order to preserve the affects used in the hardcopy) and that prevents some older and black and white e-readers from enlarging them. Maybe? Something?
Well, the diary pages are sort of important to the novel, so I’m putting the text of the pages up here. Use only for entertainment purposes.
So many of my novels have been inspired by and/or were reactions to other works (AHFoG wears its influence on its sleeves (Yes it has sleeves), The Little Sleep: The Big Sleep and Raymond Chandler (obviously) and No Sleep Till Wonderland: The Long Goodbye). DaDR is no different, and being a novel partly inspired by New England folktales and folklore, of stories that interconnect and interact, here’s a brief list below of other works that inspired and informed Disappearance at Devil’s Rock.
YEAH, SPOILERS BELOW. Don’t read unless you’ve already read the book or don’t plan on reading it. Or do what you want really. I’m not here to tell you what to do…
…..
WHERE
You can read Michael Calia’s WSJ Speakeasy blog for more about the novel’s genesis. But basically I started off with a teen going missing and a place, Borderland State Park. It’s a place I’ve been visiting for going on seventeen years now. See this post for my photos and the like. I renamed the town of Easton as Ames, otherwise, the geography of the area and park is as described in the novel. Including Split Rock. Although, Split Rock doesn’t have the gnarly tree on top. That tree is on another unnamed boulder in the park. I just moved it over a little.
THE TITLE
No, it’s not a Hardy Boys mysteries title…. This is the first novel I have ever started writing without a title in hand. I started off calling it, simply, ‘Borderland.’ But I knew that wasn’t a good title and wouldn’t work. It was a place holder.
Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is one of three Australian films that heavily influenced the novel. A bunch of private school girls go on a trip to Hanging Rock at the edge of the outback, and some of them disappear, as does a chaperone. If you think my books are maddeningly ambiguous, try the wonderful Weir film. There’s barely a hint of an answer as to what happened. But the general unease (doubly impressive given how well-lit and sunlight splashed the film is…the light itself becomes trippy, hallucinogenic, creepy) and feel of the film is just brilliant.
So Disappearance at Devil’s Rock it became. Hardy Boys be damned.
THE MISSING:
Being the parent of a teen (and a second teen on the way to teen-ness), the fear of losing one is high up on my list of fears, and it’s where I started with the novel. I made sure that Tommy Sanderson was not in any way like my son, though, in an effort to detach from some of the fear/anxiety. It worked, mostly. Tommy was instead modeled after a kid who lives down the street. (Sorry kid who lives down the street). That said, Cole was my Minecraft consultant.
The “hardo” and “chirps” lingo the boys use is what the kids at my school used circa 2014 to now.
Friend and brilliant writer, Stewart O’Nan published his Songs for the Missing in 2008. I even got to read with Stewart at the KGB bar in Manhattan as a part of that book’s tour. He floored the room with his reading from this harrowing, brilliant novel about an almost-to-college aged girl not coming home from work one night. The novel is an almost unbearingly too-realistic portrayal of what happens to the parents and a sibling and friends and the town when a young person is taken away. I’ve only read the novel once (because it was so much to take emotionally), but I knew instantly that I wanted to treat Tommy’s disappearance with a similar weight, gravitas, and melancholy. In this way, the novel has a similar tone to the movie Lake Mungo (more on that…later)
ARNOLD
When I was a little kid, there was a small period of time where an older kid, a teen named Vito wanted to hang out with me. I remember not knowing why such an older and cool kid wanted to hang out with me, but I loved it. Made me feel so much older and important. We of course did some dangerous stuff that I shouldn’t have been doing (mostly playing with fire and messing around with trashed wood and nails and such). The friendship didn’t last long. I know my parents weren’t happy about it existing in the first place and likely were relieved when the older kid stopped hanging out with me. I know because I’ve been hesitant to allow my daughter to hang out with another girl who is four years older. Those four years are a bridge over a canyon when they span puberty.
So enter the mysterious older boy Arnold into the novel.
I read a bunch of true-crime accounts of men coercing others into violent acts. Just awful stuff. But these two fictional tales, and one movie based on a true story, were the biggest influences on Arnold.
Cormac McCarthy’s brilliant and disturbing Child of God was another book that helped to inspire bits of Arnold and his character. Particularly Lester Ballard’s proclivity to crawl around caves in the woods.
Based on a horrific true story, The Snowtown Murders (another Australian film) is one of the most disturbing movies I’ve ever seen. A movie that I will only see once. In it, a strange, charismatic man befriends his girlfriend’s totally messed teenage son and convinces/bullies/coerces the kid into unspeakable acts.
DOPPELGANGER/SHADOWMAN
What did Tommy see in the woods and/or Elizabeth in her bedroom? Hell, if I know for sure…
There are a whole slew of apocryphal doppelganger stories floating around out there, and I mentioned a few in the novel. My favorite fictional use of the doppelganger is in the film Lake Mungo. Such a quiet, clever, melancholy movie about a family dealing with the drowning death of their teenage daughter, and there’s a genuinely moving and frightening doppelganger reveal toward the end. The movie shares so much in tone and feel with the O’Nan novel as well. It’s the slow build and aching realism that makes Mungo so effective.
The story of Devil’s Rock in the novel is presented as a long-ago folktale, one typical of puritan New England. I wanted to juxtapose that with our own modern, version. Tommy’s drawing of the shadowy-maybe-doppelganger goes viral with sightings (real or imagined) of a shadowman peeking in windows and bedrooms all over town and then the drawing and name trends as a hashtag on Twitter and is then being argued over on social media sites and news shows by vapid talking heads.
Slenderman is our 21st century version of those devil-in-the-woods folktales, complete with hysteria and controversy surrounding the tale/figure (and of course, a near tragedy perpetrated in his name). I wanted Tommy’s shadowman to fill that Slenderman role and be juxtaposed with the Devil’s Rock story. Or maybe it verifies the Devil’s Rock story?
Paul Tremblay (the online version!) 