B&N Reads, Guest Post, Horror

My Retreat From the Mad and Maddening World: A Guest Post by Stephen Graham Jones

Rounding out his horror trilogy with The Angel of Indian Lake, Stephen Graham Jones joins us with an exclusive essay on the process of writing his latest book of chills and thrills, and the events that informed his process. Here’s Stephen, in his own words.

The Angel of Indian Lake

Hardcover $26.09 $28.99

The Angel of Indian Lake

The Angel of Indian Lake

By Stephen Graham Jones

In Stock Online

Hardcover $26.09 $28.99

Stephen Graham Jones ties a grisly bow on the storied horror series that began with My Heart is a Chainsaw. Jade returns to her hometown at last, but the generational horrors won’t get rid of themselves.

Stephen Graham Jones ties a grisly bow on the storied horror series that began with My Heart is a Chainsaw. Jade returns to her hometown at last, but the generational horrors won’t get rid of themselves.

I was a few pages into the prologue of The Angel of Indian Lake when the Uvalde shooting happened. Remember how, right after Columbine in 1999, a lot of the horror movies got dialed back, violence-wise? I never understood that until now, until trying to write this third book of the trilogy.  

After Uvalde, I was just walking around with my hands in my hair, because the world didn’t make sense, nothing would make sense, how can stuff like this even be? This is not a thing that should happen. It’s not a thing that should keep happening. Writing fiction, though, it’s always been my retreat from the mad and maddening world, the place where, if I can get all these spinning plates balanced just right, things can make sense. I hide on the page, I’m not too proud to admit that. But I couldn’t hide from Uvalde. And I didn’t want to. Pretending bad things aren’t happening doesn’t mean they’re not happening. Uvalde, like all the other things like it, are scars on our hearts, on our culture, on our world. I fear that soon we’ll be all scar tissue, too.  

Yet, here I am, this horror writer, right? Standing in the darkness knife-in-hand, to cut some characters up. It wasn’t easy. For the first time it wasn’t easy, I mean. I’m not saying life isn’t valued in horror stories, it is, it always is. But, writing a slasher—a slasher trilogy, at that—you also know that the two people at lover’s lane in the first few moments, they’re . . . probably not going to squeak through, are they? The genre has demands, the audience has expectations, and you have responsibilities, duties, obligations. I couldn’t coddle these two students The Angel of Indian Lake opens with. But I so, so wanted to. So, instead of preserving them, I did the next best thing I could: I made them actual people, as best I could. I couldn’t gift their lives back to them, but I could tell them that, for their brief time with us, they mattered.  

But it hurt, man. I’m not one of those writers who talks about how hard writing is, how grueling art can be—it’s all play to me, it’s recess, it’s fun—but I will say that the prologue for The Angel of Indian Lake, it was . . . different. The fun was there, but it was tempered by me asking myself if I even really was a horror writer anymore, if I had what it took to do what had to be done. I came out of Angel a different writer, I’m pretty sure. I don’t know yet if that’s for better or worse.