We had the amazing opportunity to meet with literary horror master and multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning author Stephen Graham Jones. Jones, who has written many successful horror novels and short stories, including The Only Good Indians, My Heart Is a Chainsaw, Mongrels, and most recently, I Was a Teenage Slasher. We discussed his personal history with horror writing and his contribution to ETCH’s new docuseries, First Word on Horror.
The series will be released exclusively via Substack on February 7, 2025.
HGL: In First Word on Horror, you mention that you went and saw Scream in the movie theater seven nights in a row when it was first released. Would you say Scream has had the most influence on your slasher-themed novels?
Stephen Graham Jones: I would say yes! I never considered writing a slasher novel until I saw Scream, and until I was in that neo-slasher boom of the late ‘90s, I guess. Scream showed me you don’t have to hold your cards so close to the vest. You can flash them at the audience sometimes, and that was really exciting.
HGL: Do you find that growing up in small, rural places has contributed to an understanding of both the ugliness and camaraderie of the small-town mentality, and do you think those settings make horror scarier?
Stephen Graham Jones: For me, they do because when horror is set in a rural area or small town, the isolation beat is a little easier to pull off, so you can start the horror quicker. In different environments, like a city or space station, to isolate the crew, or the victim pool, takes a little more time. But out in the sticks, you snap your fingers, and you’re all alone, and it’s on.
HGL: What were a few horror books, and who were some writers that had a larger influence on your love for the genre in general, but also your writing?
Stephen Graham Jones: The first horror novel I ever read, when I was in fourth or fifth grade, was Whitley Strieber’s The Wolfen. That book became such a vital part of my writer DNA, I guess you could say. I didn’t start on any Stephen King until I was 16 or 17 in 1988; The Tommyknockers was my first Stephen King. Between Whitley Strieber and Stephen King, I was reading mostly Westerns and science thrillers.
With the science thrillers, it would be stuff like Einstein’s Brain, you know, where people dug Einstein up and split his brain up into six pieces, implanted them into six people, and now terrible things are happening. It was horror-adjacent, for sure. I read a lot of those “animal attacks” books back then, too, all the scorpions and everything that would come across a town and swallow it whole.
The writers who really became part of what I was trying to do… Philip K. Dick is huge for me, Louise Erdrich, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut… those are probably the core set of people who were on my horizon. I was walking towards them as steadily as I could.
RELATED: Book Review: ‘The Only Good Indians’ is a Cautionary Tale Filled with Haunting Folklore
HGL: So, not necessarily horror writers, but writers who did a great job of making regular things horrific.
Stephen Graham Jones: Exactly, and for me, what we should do as genre writers is I think of genres as fields that have fences around them, and we’re all supposed to stay in our pasture or meadow, but I think it’s really good for us to step across that fence when nobody’s watching, and go walk around in paleobotany, space opera, and romance, and then come back and sneak over the fence, and come back home. But what’s happening is when we’re swishing through the grass of these other fields is that burrs stick to our legs and then fall off back in horror.
So, my seed burrs might be Thomas Pynchon and Louise Erdrich, and they grew up in weird ways in horror. I think that’s how you keep a genre vital, or even a species vital; you introduce new DNA to it.
HGL: Which of your novels would you say has the biggest piece of you in it, and which are you the most proud of?
Stephen Graham Jones: Oh man, used to, I would have said Demon Theory as the one that has the biggest piece of myself in it, nowadays, I’d say I Was a Teenage Slasher, because the guy in that book thinks exactly like I thought at the time, in 1989.
For the one I’m most proud of, it could be Mongrels because I had tried two or three times before to write a werewolf novel, and I’d always end up just looking at pretty werewolves, but with Mongrels, I was finally able to look at pretty werewolves, but also tell a story that would reach people. It was a big moment for me to figure out that I could do horror, but also have fun with form.
HGL: Your books give a great insight into life on the reservation, especially for those who have zero experience around them. Is this something that is intentional to educate your readers in a political way, or something that just comes out naturally?
Stephen Graham Jones: I think it comes out naturally. You know, back in 1905, Zocalo Shaw did a book called Mourning Dove, and there were a lot of editorial footnotes explaining Native American culture and life, and that was kind of for a non-involved audience, or outsiders. I remember when I was reading that book, I was really uncomfortable because it was almost like… you’re selling your culture a little bit. You can call it “edutainment” if you want, but it felt weird.
I’m not trying to indict Zocalo Shaw; it was the mode of the time, and that’s why she was doing it that way. But yeah, some of my stories are set on the reservation. Good Indians was, but then it was really important for me to go from Good Indians off the reservation in My Heart Is a Chainsaw to a character who is Blackfeet, but who is completely removed from her culture, history, and language because I was terrified that if I wrote another reservation novel, readers might think “Oh, Indian stories only happen on reservations,” and I would hate to do that violence to people who have never been to the reservation, but they’re still Indian.
To be Indian is not a matter of blood, necessarily, and it’s not a matter of where you live and where you were born.
RELATED: Book Review: ‘My Heart is a Chainsaw’ is an Emotional, Jaw-Dropping Slasher
HGL: Do you prefer to write shorter stories or your longer novels?
Stephen Graham Jones: If I could make a living out of it, I would probably only write flash fiction. I love like a 700-word piece. I love how flash fiction moves like a poem; it’s just magical, and it works. But I didn’t know I liked doing trilogies until I did the Indian Lake trilogy. That was so fun to extend an arc over three books. It was really satisfying for me, and I think it made it hit harder in book three. If I could only do one thing, it would be scary and terrifying, and I’d feel trapped.
Maybe I’d land on short stories because they’re halfway between flash fiction and novels. That gives me a lot of latitude because a short story can be as little as 1,800 words or as much as 12,000 words, so I have some movement and range.
HGL: Going back to some of the things you said on First Word on Horror, do you think your experiences as a hunter when you were younger up until 2019 have made you a better slasher writer?
Stephen Graham Jones: You know, it might have, because sometimes when you’re field-dressing an elk on the side of a hill, and the elk is always trying to roll over, you open it up and to get everything out; to get the lungs and guts out, you actually have to kind of crawl inside the animal to push everything out.
You get so slathered in blood, and that’s probably where in My Heart Is a Chainsaw, Jade and Letha are buried under a mountain of dead and rotting elk. It probably comes from hunting. I do think my experience hunting has given me first-hand experience of the visceral component; the shininess of this organ, or the weight of a liver in your hands… that kind of stuff.
HGL: Have you considered writing a slasher screenplay at this point in your career?
Stephen Graham Jones: I love writing screenplays. I’ll probably keep doing novels, but I have gone and played in Hollywood for two or three years, and it’s wonderful, but it’s a wholly different process. It’s much more of a collaboration. You’re taking notes from a bunch of different people, and you have to be professional enough to engage those notes seriously and still produce something that’s close to your heart, and I’m not confident I have that skill set.
I think I’m more of a “I’m going to blast off for eight weeks, you’re not going to see me, and I’m going to come back with a novel. If you like it, great, and if you don’t, I’ll write a different novel.”
HGL: Lastly, do you have anything on the horizon that you would like our readers and your fans to keep an eye out for?
Stephen Graham Jones: Yeah! On March 18th, I’ve got The Buffalo Hunter Hunter coming out, and I’ll be going on tour for that, and then in July, I have Killer on the Road coming out. I also have a whole slew of reprints through Open Road coming out this year, and I also have the Earthdivers Omnibus in October around Columbus Day.
We thank Stephen Graham Jones for taking the time to meet with us for a great interview. You can follow Jones on BlueSky, Instagram, or on his website.