joe hill locke & key vol 1 welcome to lovecraft

And the first thing I figured out, the first thing that seemed true to me about him, was that Charlie doesn’t speak in contractions. I must have written and thrown away hundreds of pages trying to find that voice. But I had a hard time figuring out who Charlie was, and why he did the things he did. I got most of the other characters relatively effortlessly. Charlie was the reason the book took three years. Certainly Charlie thinks he’s the hero of the story.ĪVC: Whose voice did you find the most difficult to nail, in terms of how they saw the world? And I wanted to explore the possibilities-from one point of view, Charles Manx, certainly to himself, can almost seem like the hero of the story. And so even Horns is almost really just from one point of view. But even that is done is a way where this character is leaping into another character’s mind. In Horns, at one point we shift out of the main character’s head. But I wanted to do a story that was bigger, that was spread out across a lot of years, and that incorporated multiple viewpoints, which is also something I haven’t done a lot of. It’s so much bigger than my other two books.

I think comparisons to my dad’s work are especially strong because the book is so big. Not that I consider myself in David Mitchell’s league, but I learn from anyone I can learn from. It’s certainly a novel informed by a guy who read a lot of Stephen King, but it’s also a novel by a guy who has read a lot of David Mitchell. And I thought, “Maybe in this book, instead of ducking from it, I’ll confront that, and see if it’s fun to play with, and goof on people’s expectations.” So yeah, there’s a little Stephen King sampling in the book. I like to write stories of the supernatural, and… here’s my dad. And I had an idea with NOS4A2-you know, I like to write dark fantasy. One thing I absorbed from my dad, that I’ve heard him say many times, and that I’ve come to believe, is that anything that seems like a problem can almost always be used to your creative advantage. Because the two things are almost the same. But, in some ways, that makes it my senior thesis on Stephen King. One is, I’ve been describing NOS4A2 as my senior thesis on horror fiction. Joe Hill: There’s probably a few ways to reply to that.

Have you become more comfortable or confident about people connecting your writing with his? But NOS4A2 repeatedly references his books, especially It and The Stand. Club: From the beginning, you’ve distanced yourself from your family connections, and your father’s work.

Joe hill locke & key vol 1 welcome to lovecraft