A Conversation with Stephen Graham Jones
Stephen Graham Jones is writing when I walk up. When I nod toward the laptop he just closed and ask him about it, he says, “I had a few minutes to kill.”
“Minutes must work differently for you,” I think now, as the recording of our conversation loops. Let me put it for you like this: he’s written more books than even extra-fingered AI-hands (and feet) can count. And oh. His stuff is also good. Capital G.
Stephen Graham Jones is the NYT bestselling author of The Only Good Indians, Night of the Mannequins, The Last Final Girl, and Demon Theory (my picks). And his most recent titles include Don’t Fear the Reaper and the ongoing Earthdivers. Check out our conversation below, where we talk slashers and Final Girls, narrative risk and formal experimentation, the final installation in the Indian Lake trilogy, The Angel of Indian Lake (coming in 2024 and available for preorder now), and more.
Special thanks goes to Megan Red Shirt-Shaw, Director of USD’s Native Student Services, for arranging this interview.
Photograph ©Gary Isaacs
To kick us off, could you share a bit about your current projects, upcoming events, and any recent horror obsessions?
Current horror obsession is what it’s always been—slashers—but I really like horror in all it’s forms. I haven’t found a genre that I can’t find some good in. And man, I should really look at my calendar. I’m going to New York Comic Con soon. StoryFest in Westport, Connecticut, where I’m interviewing Neil Gaiman, that’ll be pretty cool. Also really soon here, I’m doing Colorado Festival of Horror.
That’s the 15th, right?
Yeah, I did a comic book for that, too. A slasher comic book—True Believers. And yeah, those are the big things I remember, some pretty cool stuff coming up.
Since we’re on the topic of comics, I’d love to talk about your comic series debut, Earthdivers. In some ways, obviously, Earthdivers is a very different kind of work compared to your short stories and novels. And, in a previous interview, you talked about their differences. I’m curious, though, about how these different works impact one another? What bleeds over?
What bleeds over, that's a really good question. No one's asked me that before. And you know, before Earthdivers, I did a graphic novel called My Hero, and then another graphic novel called Memorial Ride, and also a little one-off comic book called 13th Night, a Shakespeare thing. But yes, Earthdivers is my debut ongoing series.
So what bleeds over, yeah? I think what bleeds over for me is like this: I’ll write Issue 3 before Issue 4 is due three, four weeks later. Only, I don't know what's going to happen in Issue 4 because I don’t outline, I don't know where I'm going. And so, for me to figure out what's happening in 4, I have to go back and look at the character—not the plot, but the character—and ask myself: how is this character going to respond if x, y, or z happens now in 4? And that's not ever how I write novels, but I think that it is impacting the way I write novels now.
Earthdivers cover by Rafael Albuquerque
I think what bleeds over is […] I have to go back and look at the character—not the plot, but the character […] And that's not ever how I write novels, but I think that it is impacting the way I write novels now.
That back and forth is interesting. I think in the same interview, there was a question along the lines of “character versus plot,” and I wonder if working on Earthdivers has made you rethink your answer?
It's making me consider character in a different way, I think, because when you do serial storytelling, which is similar to television storytelling—I think of issues and episodes as being pretty similar—you watch the character develop over time. Like Walter White in Breaking Bad or something, you know? And so I'm doing that more now.
It’s making me consider character in a different way […]
Davide Gianfelice (artist) for Earthdivers
Jumping back to slashers, this makes me think about Jade, your trilogy’s Final Girl, and her character development in My Heart is a Chainsaw and Don’t Fear the Reaper. I have to ask, where does Jade go after Reaper? Where will readers find her in the third novel?
Well, for starters, she’s back in Proofrock. She can’t stay away from her home. It’s also three or four years later—again, just like the jump from Chainsaw to Reaper. And, you know, it seemed like the first two were already amped up pretty high, but I feel like this one goes even more into, well, it’s a bloody roller coaster.
So if we’re thinking about pacing, we have the first book, Chainsaw, as a kind of slow burn.
Yeah, definitely.
And we see the second, Reaper, quicken. But what does the final installation feel like? What role does pacing, timing, those temporal gaps, etcetera, play in your conceptualization of the trilogy as a collective?
Oh, it’s very much like Reaper. Fast. I look at books in a trilogy as being similar to act one, act two, and act three. In act one, you’re doing all the set up, which is why we’ve got Chainsaw developing slowly. Then Reaper is act two, with the middle part starting to move fast. And act three is where we get the prolonged battle scene—and so it can go, for nearly the entire time.
I—love that. I have this joke where I won’t watch any movie past the one hour-thirty minute mark, because I’m a sucker for the three act structure. At the same time, I’m really interested in how Jade as the Final Girl, and how you craft this on the page, deconstructs and reconsiders and reshapes the trope. Along these lines, are there any other containers or forms you really like to work within, or break out of, or just play around with?
Yeah, for sure. My second favorite is probably epistolary. Yeah, I like epistolary a lot. And my favorite—well my favorite way to write a novel is by using second person present tense. Given the choice, I would do that all the time. But sometimes the reader, the audience, the critical establishment, doesn’t engage as much with that.
No! Second is great! I think about how second person in, say, “Hairy Legs and All,” is able to engage narrative…differently? I’m curious about whether or not you find yourself leaning into second person more in shorter pieces? How does narrative risk or experimentation factor into your flash or short stories versus your standalone novels and longer works?
I can do way more narrative and dramatic backbends in shorter forms that I can in novels, just because you can be denser, syntactically or semantically, and lean into a particular cartoonish-ness in 750 words, even in 3500 words, because the reader knows there's only six pages left and is like, “I can take this for six more pages.” If a reader looks at the remaining pages of a novel, they're more likely to be all, “380 more pages of this ridiculousness? Yeah, I can’t do that.”
So yeah, I think I can take way more risks in shorter forms. To tell you the truth, if I have a favorite form of fiction, it’s flash fiction.
Flash fiction has to do so many gymnastics to get itself told in such a short space. And I love it when a story isn't what it presents itself as. Like a recipe card. Or instructions on how to make the door work in a bed and breakfast. Or something like that. I love it when that can be a story—that thrills me like no other.
[…] I can take way more risks in shorter forms. To tell you the truth, if I have a favorite form of fiction, it’s flash fiction.
Who’s thrilling you right now? What other writers are doing cool things with form, taking risks?
Adam-Troy Castro, yeah. Four times out of five, in a short story, he’ll take a wild chance, a formal chance. He’s messing with the structure of a story, for sure, but he’s also asking you to understand that something can still be a story even if it doesn’t look like one. I always appreciate his work for that reason.
Obviously, hybridity has a long history, but are more people, maybe, paying attention to hybrid and experimental writing? To stories that may not look like “stories”?
Yeah, maybe, for sure. It could be that online forums are making different kinds of writing more possible, too. For me, I’m always trying to “smuggle” story in.
Connecting this to film, any recent movies or filmmakers that have captured your interest in a similar way?
I really like Nefarious, that possession movie—have you seen it?
I need to—it’s on my list.
Yeah, it came out just a few months ago, too. It’s cool though, yeah, check it out. Ninety percent of the film is basically two people doing what we’re doing right now, sitting down at a table and talking, you know? And that doesn’t sound like a horror movie, but it really works for me.
[…] I love it when a story isn't what it presents itself as. Like a recipe card. Or instructions on how to make the door work in a bed and breakfast. Or something like that. I love it when that can be a story—that thrills me like no other.
In a previous interview, you spoke about narrative risk, and how you like to write novels "broken at the level of conception." I'm curious, is there a particular corner that you've written yourself into that you really liked writing your way out of?
Oh yeah, Mapping the Interior, a novella I did. That, and a book called Ledfeather, are very similar to me.
With each of them, I got about a third of the way in, and I thought I could see where the arc was going to land—and so I wrote, staged everything, with that ending in mind. But when I got to that ending, I realized it was junk. I realized, oh, I've got to do something else. I had to ask myself: Do I go back and fix everything here? Or do I add 10% on and take it further and see if that might be the ending? In both cases, I added 10% on, like a second movement.
And so, the corner I wrote myself into was that I got to where I was going—and it sucked. But it became a corner I had to back out of, through writing more, and maybe lucking into something better, which both of those times, I did.
That’s great. I really like how you talk about a lot of these things in cinematic terms, too. Have you enjoyed any slasher films recently that are taking cool narrative risks?
Man, both Happy Death Day and Freaky take really good risks.
I am obsessed with Happy Death Day.
Yeah! The timeline with the whole Groundhog Day in a slasher thing, that was a beautiful thing to do. And then Freaky, you know, swapping bodies like Freaky Friday, that was a big risk too. I mean, it's hard to take the structure of something that exists outside of horror and work it into a horror film or setting.
Tree in Happy Death Day is such an interesting character too, because she subverts the trope but also falls back into some of the more stereotypical Final Girl traits we see in slashers from the 70s and, yeah, great movie. I’m curious now though—what potentials do you still see for the slasher genre? Where do you see it heading? If you could influence the genre, would you nudge it in a certain direction?
I like it when the slasher talks to the issues of the world right now. It's easy for slashers to speak to each other, and just try to emulate Halloween or Friday the 13th or Scream or whatever, but I like it when slashers are in dialogue with the world. I think doing that can possibly bring more people to the slasher as well.
Sort of like slashers and the world are two lines, running parallel?
Something like that. They interrogate it. Like how Kevin Williamson’s Sick, for example, really utilizes the pandemic. That is a slasher in dialogue with the world. I like that a lot.
Still from Happy Death Day (2017)
It's easy for slashers to speak to each other, […] but I like it when slashers are in dialogue with the world.
And Scream’s your favorite slasher, right?
Yeah, and I think Scream is doing something like that, too, actually. In Scream’s day, in 1996, cell phones were still super new. People still had pagers, most of the time. And so, looking back, we see Scream incorporating that issue—how technology allowed people for the first time, in a lot of cases, to be in contact from anywhere, everywhere—into a horror story. We forget how revolutionary that was.
I think doing that can possibly bring more people to the slasher as well.
Still from Scream (1996)
You’ve talked about Scream in previous interviews, but is there anything you haven't been asked or talked about that you want to just rant about?
Oh man, yeah. The mask has a magic, and I’ve never figured out that specific magic, but it encapsulates something tragic and comic at the same time.
The sad eyes, you know, they’re drooping at a sad angle, but then the mouth is kind of smiling, kind of not. To me, that encapsulates what Jade in Chainsaw says a slasher is. A tragedy—and a comedy. Like two sides of the same coin flipping in the air. That's what the Ghost Face mask captures for me as well.
That’s a great moment the reader gets with Jade. One thing I’m interested in is how she seems to be straddling different lines, various sides of herself, her home, her family, all of it, too. And, physically, Jade is occupying a lot of similar places throughout the novels so far. But she’s also moving into new spaces, especially if we’re thinking about her fears, her growth, character arc…Does place impact or play a role in your writing?
Yeah, and it’s funny. Back in the early 2000s, I would hear a lot of discussions in writing circles about the use of place in fiction, and I used to always skirt those, you know? I thought: I’m not a place writer, I’m writing in a Kafka space of absurd backdrops or something.
But then, in 2013 or 2014, somewhere around that time, I was writing this one novel. While I was writing, I told myself that the backdrop was City X—it was a crime novel, a detective trying to find a serial killer, that sort of thing—and the setting was just going to be, yeah, more like backdrop, this City X. Well, I got about 120 pages into that novel, and it started to feel like I was trying to roll a boulder up a hill. That’s never how writing goes for me, so I’m like, what is going on here? [laughs] I was like, is this what it feels like for everybody?
So yeah, what happened was, I got invited to be a guest at a book festival back in my hometown, in Texas. But, because I hadn’t been there for a long, long time, as they were shuttling me around, chaperoning me between venues and the different events, I started really looking around at the city. That’s when I realized, oh, this is the backdrop of that novel.
I went home that weekend and started the novel over—same plot, same characters—but set in Midland, Texas. After that, the novel told itself. I realized then, yes, place really is important. Place is a character. I don’t, you know, strategically try to use place. What I do is try to be particular about what places show up in my work, and then listen to what they’re saying.
Could you share a bit of your thoughts about how place shows up in the trilogy’s third act? Any new spaces we see Jade, the other characters, occupy?
Well, I can say it’s in October, which is the place for horror.
And, yeah, this one moves into some new spaces. We go deeper into the forest this time. You know, Chainsaw, the first one, stays on the lake. The second one is more back and forth, across the lake. And this one, yeah, I might say it’s more in the trees.
What I do is try to be particular about what places show up in my work, and then listen to what they’re saying.
Here's a question I like to ask. When is the last time you felt truly afraid?
Probably a few months ago when it was still winter in Colorado. My daughter was driving back from college, and she had to drive on this stupid road. It's the only road between us and her in the winter, and it's a terrible road. I was truly afraid, you know, and I thought: I should have somehow gone to her or I should have put her on a train or—I don't know, something else, you know?
One of my friends says that when he was 18, he was always terrified of vampires and zombies and werewolves. But then when he got to be 45 with three kids, what he worried about was a call at three in the morning. I think what you're scared of changes throughout your life.