Oh Boy I Hope People Like That Werewolf Story: Josh Malerman on Elasticity of Style, Characters as Tools of Horror, and Being Scared to Death

Josh Malerman is an American author of novels and short stories. Before publishing his debut novel Bird Box with ECCO/HarperCollins, he wrote fourteen novels, never having shopped one of them. Bird Box went on to become the inspiration for the Netflix film. He has since published the novels Goblin, A House at the Bottom of the Lake, and Mallory, among many others. He is also the singer/songwriter of the Detroit rock band The High Strung. 

On November 17, 2021, Josh Malerman joined The Interlochen Review editor Nicholas Bonifas, along with creative writing majors Ivan Pelley and Tyler Penfold, for a conversation about his work as a horror writer and musician.

Ivan Pelley: Our first question is: since horror and suspense are very old genres of writing and storytelling in general, is it ever hard to create your own space in the genre that doesn’t feel like you’re just re-hashing a time tested concept? And can you think of any major influences when it comes to your writing, be it other authors or just aspects of the genre you’re really attached to? 

Josh Malerman: The first part of that question is something that’s always on my mind because you want to be original, you want to be yourself, but not to a fault. You don’t want to be elastic just for the sake of being elastic, but at the same time that’s where I’m naturally drawn. It’s not necessarily a mash-up of genres, or like often on the back of a book you’ll see “this or that author takes tropes and turns them on their side.” Can we just not take the tropes? How about that? How does this work? You don’t really know your own style until you’ve written a number of short stories or books or whatever and then you see a style. One thing I’ve noticed is that I have a tendency to let a lot happen off page. So let’s take Bird Box, I don’t know if you guys saw the movie or read it…

IP: I read it. 

JM: So, literally the monsters are off page. I have another one, The House at the Bottom of the Lake. It's a haunted house, but it’s underwater. That’s a bit of a trope turning. There is a shot in Taxi Driver where Deniro is on a payphone and Scorsese pans down the empty hallway, and he just shoots the empty hallway while Deniro is off camera talking. That’s something that I’ve been really excited about. A possession heard downstairs, but you never see it. It’s happening upstairs, and to imagine what’s happening up there, that kind of thing. I think there are ways to be elastic, creative with the genre, more than just shaking up whether a vampire is mean or nice or something. There are other ways to do it which are thinking of it more as what angle are you coming at this story. So, I think the influences for me would be more like filmmakers. Like strange angles coupled with the soundtracks of my favorite horror movies. I think that for me when I look at it and come at it from more of a cinematic angle I can find fresh ways of doing it. Bird Box actually almost reads like stage directions. “Malorie stands in the kitchen thinking, she turns around, she exits the kitchen, she makes a right down the hall, she turns.” That’s how I do it, I suppose. But I do always look for that, and I do sometimes worry about going too far for originality’s sake. 

Nicholas Bonifas: Speaking of originality, Goblin is a very untraditional novel in that it’s written in novellas. What was that writing process like? Did you come to the idea of the town first then come up with the stories? Did the stories influence the town? Did you put the novellas in a certain order? Did the events all originally occur on the same night or is that a decision you made later? What was the writing process like with so many different stories involved?

JM: Awesome question, did you read Goblin? 

NB: I think me and Tyler have, yes. 

JM: Oh amazing. Thank you, first of all. Originally I was calling the book Rolling Hills. Then I was like this name, this isn’t right. One day I was driving down the street and I saw there was a subdivision called Rolling Hills. I’m like, “damn it, I got this name from the subdivision, the gated community down the street. Oh, this is terrible.” I was dating this girl at the time, and I don’t know in what context she used the word “goblin,” but she used it. I was like, that’s it! That’s the name of the city. It’s Goblin. I had this long talk with her about the name of the city, and the characteristics of the city, and that kind of thing. I realized that once I had the city I could write any story, any new or old character, I could spend as much or as little time as I want with each character. The main character would always be present, and that’s the city. That was the most liberating thing in the world because I don’t have to worry about sustaining character arcs for the duration of a novel, or I can if I want to, but either way Goblin is present the whole time. 

In writing it I had an original list of ten novellas for it, and I only got through six. I ran out of gas, to be honest with you. In hindsight I’m kind of glad because I feel like it works as it is. First you have the delivery driver actually enters the city, then you have Richard and Charles discovering the city, “there’s the Milky Way, there’s the Woodruff Hotel, there’s…” sort of introducing us to the city. Then you have the guy who’s the historian of the city. He’s my favorite. He’s sort of like the ultimate Gobliner, Walter Camp, afraid of being scared to death. He gives us some history of the city. Then you get sort of the opposite coin of Walter with Neil Nash. Neil Nash is sort of the opposite side, equally demented and deranged from the city, but in a boisterous “I’m going to conquer this” way. Then you have the outsider coming in with Roman Emperor. So, I feel like naturally you get to know Goblin in the order of those novellas. If they were in a different order I’m not sure it would work the same way, but how intentional was that? I don’t know. I did write them in that order. I think that’s probably more like a larger arc that I wasn’t even necessarily aware that I was doing. In the third story you’re like, “well we need to know more about Goblin. Well, maybe Walter is a historian.” You see what I mean? So, some of it was intentional, and some of it was not. 

Tyler Penfold: Zooming in on the different aspects of Goblin, there’s a lot of variety in chapter lengths in each of the novellas, and I was wondering if there was any particular reason, like to increase tension and what-not, what you did in particular to use the chapter lengths efficiently and how to make that turn seem purposeful. 

JM: The one that comes to mind is the latter half of “Presto.” Like I was saying before about listening to music while writing, I think the biggest bond that I've found between playing music and writing is the rhythm. I can just imagine a shirtless, weird drummer in the room with me. I’ve never seen him, but he’s behind me, and he’s playing. Whatever beat he’s playing—and it’s always like “come on, come on, let’s go”—I write to his beat. I think in a thing like “Presto” he was rolling at that point. To match that, it was like, we gotta break this up. And that doesn’t have to be chapter breaks. There’s a million ways to do that. With Walter it was more like the drummer was maybe just very quiet with mallets or something the whole time, so there didn’t even need to be a chapter break with Walter. It’s just one tense feeling the whole way through. In “Presto” there’s a meeting, a coming together. So, absolutely for tension, like you asked, and being married to that rhythm. 

TP: With the novellas themselves there seem to be a lot of different subgenres between each novella—horror subgenres obviously. Were there any freedoms you noticed with that, and on the opposite side were there any challenges with covering such a wide variety of horror subgenres?

JM: The freedom is, after a story with Walter you can get absolutely ridiculous with Neil Nash. It’s all a bit ridiculous in a sense, but you can go really over the top with Neil Nash if you want. You can get much darker with Dirk Rogers, the zookeeper, if you want. I’m a vegetarian, by the way, and that Dirk Rogers story really hits me in a weird way. It’s weird when you write one, your own, that hits you like that. Where you’re like, “do I even want to include this one? This is awful.” Anyway, the freedom of that variety is refreshing. The challenge is that you want it to all sound uniform enough to be a novel, or uniform enough to even be the same writer. Because if you had read Bird Box and Goblin and my name wasn’t on it I really doubt that you would say, “hey, this is the same author.” Same with Unbury Carol, Ghoul on the Cape, Inspection, and that goes back to this first question of the elasticity. Goblin epitomizes a career’s worth of that in one novel. If I had to side—just because it’s fun to think this way—if I had to side with whether it was more liberating or a challenge, it was more liberating for sure. 

TP: I have a much wider and much more fun question. In fictional horror it seems there’s a trope that characters must act very illogically and very irrationally. How do you work either in harmony with or actively against the trope that they must be exceedingly naive in order for the story to work? 

JM: I didn’t have a cell phone until I was thirty-one. So, in all the horror movies and novels I was reared on there wasn’t this easy way to call for help. You were cut off in almost every scenario in horror before the advent of the cell phone. Even if you went to a gas station, you’re alone, you know? So, it’s a hard question to answer because you would hope that you’re not writing—unless you wanted to—like Friday the Thirteenth. Where it’s like, “we gotta split up!” At the same time that stuff is kind of fun. Let’s take all the characters in Goblin for a second. It seems to me that each of them are obsessed with something. Walter’s obviously obsessed with being scared to death, Neil with the owls, and so forth. Even Pete is obsessed with Roman Emperor. They can be forgiven any dumb decisions, they can be forgiven any naiveté, because they’re obsessed with something. Neil Nash makes a bunch of bad decisions. Not necessarily in the way you’re describing, but he makes a bunch of bad decisions because he wants that owl. So, it’s not just a camper, and a masked man is running after the camper, where does the camper go? The worst place imaginable. Neil’s bad decisions are because something else is on his mind. I think that’s one way to deal with that, or to play with that. 

IP: Kind of going back to what we discussed in the first question, but zooming in, in “One Last Transformation,” you put your own take on a very very old type of monster story. Was it at all intimidating to put your own spin on a very well-known, sometimes oversaturated subgenre of werewolf horror? 

JM: Yeah, for sure. There was a weird moment where a lot of us horror writers were discussing what are the great werewolf novels? We couldn’t really name that many. We only came up with like two or three. We thought of The Wolfen by Whitley Streiber, Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones. So yes and no, I guess. I don’t usually play in those worlds, I can’t imagine writing a vampire story and stuff like that just because it doesn’t thrill me. But that was a fun story to write because, again, it’s kind of like the Gobliners too, he’s fixated on, “this last one is the last one I’ll ever do.” I guess of course it’s easy to equate monsters to addicts, to alcoholics, “oh, that’s the last cigarette, that’s the last drink I’ll ever have” and it’s like, no it’s not or else you wouldn’t be telling this story, so who’s in trouble right now in this werewolf story. I was a little, I don’t know if intimidated is the right word because it was just fun, but once it was done, and once it was out in the world it started feeling like “oh, boy I hope people like that werewolf story.” 

IP: Yeah that makes sense. Moving on from the subject of your work out in the world, and how it interacts with the world, some horror authors run into issues with some people being unable to separate the art from the artist. Do you ever have to deal with people judging you maybe unfairly because of the sometimes gruesome subject matter you approach? What is your mindset like in regards to that question? How do you confront these issues if they do arise? 

JM: So when you say “separate the art from the artist” do you mean “do you worry who you are and how your personal life will affect what people think of your books,” or do you actually mean “because you’re writing horror, people will think that you’re horrific in your personal life”?

IP: More the second part. Some people I’ve found wonder like, “oh, wow, this person thought up all these gruesome scenarios, they must be an evil person.”

JM: Yeah, I guess so, but first of all if you’ve read Bird Box and Goblin I guess there's some scenarios, but there are brutal horror novels out there. Even I have read a few where I kind of look at the author like, “why did this dude write this?” Jack Ketchum is one that comes to mind. It is so dark that I lent a friend The Girl Next Door—it’s literally known as the darkest horror novel of all time—and when my friend gave it back to me he gave it to me pinched between two fingers. Like it was a dirty rag or something. He was like, “don’t ever give me another book like that again.” I don’t think that I’m flirting with that. I think that it’s obvious between Unbury Carol and Goblin and even Bird Box, which is a colder book, that I’m more attracted to development and imagination than I am to brutality or gore. I think that’s obvious, so I haven’t run into that. I kind of want to answer—even though you meant the latter—I kind of want to answer the former a little. Again I never had a cellphone until I was thirty-one, so Twitter and all that, none of this stuff existed. Sometimes I do worry that there is no mystery. Stephen King to us was just this awesome name. Clyve Barker was just a scary name to us. We maybe saw his author photo, and that’s it. Maybe you read one interview, maybe. So, sometimes I do wonder that the mystery of the anonymity of the artists is gone because you’re on Twitter, you’re like, “the Cubs won.” Well shoot, dude, now your book is not so scary. You’re all excited about this baseball game. Then I also worry that, as you three can see, I’m an energetic guy, I’m effusive, I’m nice. So, then if you met me then went and read Bird Box I feel like that would somehow dent that experience. Sometimes I do worry about if somebody would not separate the art from the artist. Not that I’ve done something terrible, actually sort of the opposite, that someone’s going to think “oh, he’s a dandy,” or something, “how serious can his books be?” So, I do worry about that side of things. 

NB: Kind of spinning off that idea of the mystery a little bit, in A House at the Bottom of a Lake there’s no full explanation of this idea of how or why that you introduce. How these supernatural events occur, and why this house is at the bottom of a lake. When you were writing that book or just things like that–do you as the author have an explanation in mind for these supernatural events or do you stay just as much in the dark as the reader? 

JM: Ok, so, with Bird Box it was at some point like, “am I going to show these things?” I’m halfway through this rough draft. I was like, “what are you doing here? Are you going to show?” I’ve never read a horror novel where literally the monster is never shown, not once. And I’m like, “no, not yet, not yet.” I’m like three-quarters through, “no, not yet.” Eventually you’re like, “oh, that’s the point of this one.” Bird Box, that’s the point, not to show. 

A House at the Bottom of a Lake which was released originally as a limited edition in 2016, so it’s the second thing I ever put out. It too has this vague, unanswered sort of ending, which worried me. I was like, “everyone’s going to think I never show anything.” With Bird Box I could say, “hey, I only know what Malorie knows.” A House at the Bottom of a Lake it’s more like– well I guess it’s kind of the same. I only know what James and Amelia know, but it’s more like it’s a mystery to me too, I guess. Do I have ideas? Yeah, but anytime I hear a movie that’s like ‘Hannibal’s origin,’ I’m like “oh, god, I don’t want to know why Hannibal is evil.” That ruins everything for me. I don’t want to know the cause of this. I don’t want to know why Maleficent is mean, I just want her to be mean. Now she’s not scary at all anymore. 

Oftentimes while writing I’ll be like, “man, if I give some stupid backstory that this family killed each other and the house…” Well, actually I do have one good story for [A House at the Bottom of a Lake], I’ll tell you real fast. In the neighborhood that my dad lives in now there’s a lake a few streets over, and supposedly a long time ago someone tried to move a house from one side of the lake to the other when it was iced over, like literally just bringing it across the lake. The ice broke, and the house fell, and supposedly there is a house fully intact at the bottom of this lake. I met this one stoner dude once who was living in the neighbor’s house. He told me, “me and my friends are going diving looking for that house,” I’m like, “what house?” And he’s like, “you know, it’s at the bottom… It’s in the lake.” I was like, that’s a book. That’s good. That’s probably the most fun explanation, actually. Is that there was nothing nefarious going on, but that they just foolishly tried to move–speaking of silly decisions–they tried to move a house across a lake on ice that will never be strong enough to support an entire house. 

IP: Talking about the way you wrote Bird Box, there are multiple facets of terror. The promise of madness is ironically enough to affect the main character’s sanity, and then the sudden deprivation of one of the main senses heightens the suspense. It’s a very unique formula for horror. What concepts do you think make for the tensest moments? Beyond concepts, what are your favorite techniques within the writing to create the sense of terror you have in your books?

JM: Well, the latter part of that is something that I’ll bet you even the greats were trying to figure out to the end. One thing that I’m discovering more recently is giving no warning, but that doesn’t mean like a jumpscare. Let’s just take a small scenario, let’s say you’re at dinner at a friend’s house, and you’ve never been there before, and the book is describing that you’re like, “how many people at this table?” Then you look and there’s Mark, there’s his mom, there’s his dad, there’s his brother, there’s the old man behind the stove. Then you’re like, “Whoah, wait. There’s an old man standing behind the stove?” You just sort of usher it out or get it in an organic flow of things. “And then, dun, dun, dun… and then dun, dun, dun…” I mean some of your favorite horror stories if you go back and read them really are like “and then, and then.” I really try to avoid that because I think the real scare and the real tension comes from like, “oh, that was just slipped right into everything that was normal. What do you mean there’s an old man peeking out behind the stove? What does that mean? You’re just at dinner. Is that grandpa? Is he crazy? Is it something else?” 

So, organically bringing it up without a big show of it, without too much drama or flair, to me typically ends up being the scariest thing. I’m trying to think of one—I think there’s a few in Bird Box like that well scene when there’s a sense that something’s in the bucket as he’s bringing it up. That’s also something that in a lot of earlier books—of everyone’s and mine—you go back and read and be like, “aww, that was so telegraphed.” Everything doesn’t have to be a surprise, it’s fine, we all realize that we’re here, so—okay, this is one of the beauties of horror. Especially in this day and age because if you go on Netflix and you look up horror, you know that you’re watching a scary movie. There’s no reason anymore to scare someone right away. Horror itself, as a character, is always off screen until you bring it in. If you know you found this movie in the horror section, if you open on the beach, and there’s sunny music playing, you could keep that mood for twenty minutes if you want because we know that horror—whatever that is—is entering this movie sooner than later. We know it’s coming. There’s almost natural tension already just based on the classifications of it, the genre. And everything is super hyper-classified now. I think that there was a sense ages ago of going to see a movie and who knows, maybe it’s freaky, maybe it’s not, that kind of thing. Now, you know you’re getting a scary movie. Well, why don’t we play with that tension, the fact that we don’t have to go overboard. The first scene doesn’t have to be some bludgeoning. You can literally have a family driving, they get home, they eat, blah blah blah. They go to bed, they wake up. You’re like “oh god, when’s it going to happen?” And the longer you wait the more that tension builds. 

TP: What do you find compelling about horror as a genre? 

JM: Oh my gosh, everything. The arrested development, the fact that I have the ability to believe in the scenario for the duration of the book or the movie, and even often after. There’s a certain childish playfulness about horror that is like letting the imagination run free. I sometimes imagine myself and other horror authors as big kids sitting with an atonal orchestra, toys in front of them, like, “oh how’s this sound going to make Mom feel?” And that’s fun, you know? That’s dark and fun and mischievous. But I also want it to be mysterious at times. Bird Box is a very cold, serious novel. Whereas Goblin is not. Goblin is a colorful, borderline like Tim Burton, or something. 

TP: How do you feel differently about your own writing compared to others’? 

JM: Well, I think it’s that elasticity thing. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Most writers, their voice seems uniform through their canon. That’s not the case with me, and that’s not something I set out to do. I often get asked about it. Like, “how was Unbury Carol so different from Bird Box?” and that kind of thing. I think it’s just a willingness to stretch, to identify in numerous ways, to not feel trapped by what you’ve done before. So, Bird Box was like a big movie and a hit, a best selling novel. It would be really tempting to always write something like that, right? Because this did well for you, but that’s a real sleazy pathway to me. If you want to write something in that voice then do it. But if you don’t, if you’re feeling Goblin, then do that. So, I would say that probably differentiates me a little bit from others. I’m not saying that they’re all stale or something, but I do think a lot of other horror authors, their voice is uniform throughout their career. 

IP: In a very similar vein how does it feel to consume horror versus to create it? Do you ever get scared when encountering other books or movies? 

JM: Oh, yeah. I scare easily. That’s one of the most fun parts about it to me. You know when someone’s—and you’ve heard this before—when someone’s like, “I get too scared, I can’t watch that stuff.” To me that means you have a sense of horror. Just like I have a sense of humor, and funny movies make me laugh. You’re the perfect audience if it scares the hell out of you. Like, I want you to watch this so bad, and I want to watch it with you, and I want us to get scared together. I understand that fear is not as pleasant an emotion as laughing is, but you are perfect for this, and we can survive this experience together. 

There’s a handful of famous, like, “oof, I wouldn’t recommend these to friends,” kind of thing. I’ve watched most of those because I think at some point in every horror writer and every horror fan’s career there’s a moment of, “I’m all in, I’m Mr. Horror, I’m tough, I’m this, I’ll watch anything.” Then there’s a few you watch and you’re like, “no, no, no, actually I have a line I draw. Now I know where that line is because I just crossed it.” There are a handful of those that affect me that are almost exclusively brutality. And I don’t want to watch someone get overly hurt. I don’t want to sit here and watch someone get hurt for two hours, you know? That’s not fun, that’s not imaginative to me. Sometimes it can hit you in the wrong way, it can kind of make things dark. I had a friend that was like, “you’ve got to be careful out there, there’s some dark stuff out there.” And I was like “oh, stop it. What are you talking about,” but then I encountered some of those, and I was like, “oh, she was right.” 

NB: Kind of going back just a little bit to your answer to Tyler’s last question, we talked a lot about that elasticity. Have you ever found yourself wanting to branch out into other genres or are you happy to stay within horror and keep mastering that, and exploring the different voices you talked about, and different sub-genres, and stuff like that? 

JM: See, now that’s a great follow-up question to that because I don’t know if I have the guts to leave [horror]. First of all, I haven’t had an idea outside of it so I haven’t been presented with that question or that quandary yet. But if I did—let’s say I just had a really great, freaking hilarious idea, or something—I would be nervous about stepping outside the genre like that. I’d be a little bit nervous about it because I feel like once you do step outside of it then—it’s not that you turned your back on the genre, but there’s some allegiance thing that does happen there, I’m not sure what that is. Obviously we can do fantasy, sci-fi, this and that, but I’m thinking with a question like that that you’re really stepping outside, like self-help or a romance novel, or a comedy, something really—not just like cold science fiction, you know? I don’t know, but now that you asked it I feel like I should do something like that. 

NB: Kind of going in a totally different vein again, in A House at the Bottom of a Lake, James and Amelia really drive the narrative as characters and I noticed a lot of the novellas in Goblin as well have really strongly written characters that kind of drive your narratives. When coming up with these characters and premises for your horror, do you find yourself coming up with a premise to compliment characters you already have in mind or do you come up with the premise and craft characters to fit into that? 

JM: Both ways, but I do think I’m typically premise first which can be dangerous. It can be dangerous because you’re all attracted to this shiny object, the idea itself, right? And you can forget like, “oh, I actually need to populate this idea with characters.” Sometimes there’s a side of me that doesn’t care if someone else does character development well, or does pacing well. If the idea is brilliant sometimes that’s enough for me, but I also understand why someone would be like “there’s no character development!” I tend to conceive premise first then, “who would make sense in this.” But every now and then someone will strike you. I have a book called Pest—I guess it’s a little like Walter Camp—about a guy who’s always been really enthusiastic his whole life. This happens in like 1901. He comes home from selling typewriters out on the road, and his mom’s like “What’s wrong with you, Ed?” And his friends are like “what’s up with you?” He’s like “what do you mean? I’m fine.” It kind of comes to his attention that maybe he’s a little depressed actually, but he doesn’t believe that he is the kind of person to be depressed so he sets out to capture the entity that could be zapping his lust for life. So, that guy came to me just all at once. He’s so used to being an enthusiastic person, an upbeat guy, that he doesn’t believe it when something negative could be his own thought. So, he sets off to actually trap what’s doing this to him. Which is insane, the guy is setting out to trap depression. That’s kind of character and scenario at the same time. I will say that book is one of my favorite ones I’ve written, and that was character first for sure. 

IP: Probably the most clichéd thing you can call a book is a page-turner, but I think that’s a very apt description for Bird Box. The narrative never slows down too much, but the action and suspense never gets too old. How was the writing process when it came to crafting that sense of pace that seemed very particular throughout? 

JM: I think it was sort of a lucky break in terms of the alternating timelines: the house and the river. Because I could use them off each other. Not that it was such clean handoffs as in a movie if somebody shuts a door and then the door opens and we’re in a different scene or whatever. It wasn’t so much that as it was like, well, now the characters are worried about Tom and Jules going off to get dogs. If we then follow that up with the bar scene with Malorie with Victor, in the bar scene, then oh no, now we know that dogs are affected and Tom and Jules are out looking for dogs. So, when we get back to them it’s like, “oh, what’s going to happen to them.” So, there was some sense of using the opposite timelines to inform each other. I think that was just a lucky accident. I just started with the river and then I was like, “oh, I want to tell a little bit about what led up to this. Now, let’s go back to the river…” I wrote that book in twenty-six days. It was just an explosion, it was 43,000 words a day. It was great, it was amazing. I mean the re-writes were brutal, but 43,000 words a day for twenty-six days is one of the most thrilling runs I’ve ever had. 

TP: In the process of writing a collection of short stories, especially in the same general setting, how do you organize the plot? Do you ever find yourself not able to write a story you think fits into the rest of the stories? What in particular do you do to prevent this or get past it?

 JM: With Goblin at least there were four other novellas, as I told you, that I didn’t have the energy for. But I did try one of them. It just didn’t seem to have the same zest as the other ones. I was like, “okay, alright, now maybe it’s this or that.” Or maybe it’s because of where it was coming in the book. You know, if this story was first then it would have been okay. Charles and Richard’s story to me is—well I guess Walter’s is the slowest burn—but the least colorful or something. So, for that to follow Neil or “Presto,” it would have been just dead on arrival. So, that’s what this one was feeling like. It was like, “well, I guess this would have to go first, but I like Richard and Charles first.” I think one way to protect against that, or guard against that, is to just write it anyway, get through it, do it, whatever, and if it doesn’t fit, great, then you have another story that maybe you could use somewhere else. I wish that I had written that whole thing anyway. I could now obviously, but to me it’s more important that the story is done and that you can fix it later than that you didn’t do it for any reason. Just get through it, and then we can rewrite it. 

NB: We have heard that you write music for your band, so how do you approach that differently or similarly to writing fiction or novels? Obviously it’s an entirely different form, but besides that how do you look at that?

JM: Well, before Bird Box came out it used to be that a small idea was a song and a big idea was a book. Bird Box came out and these two editors asked if I wanted to contribute a short story to this collection, and I had none. I’d written like fourteen novels already. I was like, “man, I don’t have a short story.” Because every small idea was a song. So, then I started getting into it, and I still feel like it’s the—I don’t want to say like the weakest part of my thing, but the novel is home for me. I still want to get way better at short stories. There’s a delicacy to that that I do not know that I have yet, but I’m glad to be doing it. So, aside from what I was saying before about the rhythm link between the two, I think that. Then it started to become…how do I explain this? Because they’re almost like different spheres, right? If you’re playing piano all day writing a song, it’s not like you just get up and say, “I’m going to go work on my short story now.” It’s like a totally different state of mind. There is some push and pull, like give and take, and sometimes I feel like the song side of things has suffered through time because the book side is going so unfathomably well. And the worrisome part about that is that my best friends are in my band, and I love writing songs and playing, so there is this side of me that’s insanely grateful for everything going on on the book side, but I want to make sure that I’m taking care of the song side as well. 

IP: I think that a really fun question to end on is just what do you think is the scariest thing you’ve written? 

JM: Well, the first book I ever wrote, Wendy, is the scariest one. It’s kind of a witch story, I suppose. It’s a story about these two guys that hear that there’s a house in the woods in their area. It’s just like this shack, this gross shack of a house, but when you enter whatever is your ultimate fantasy is there for you. Supposedly it’s run by a witch named Wendy who does this maybe to lure you in or just because she likes messing with people. So, sometimes the fantasies she shows you are maybe something you didn’t even realize was a fantasy of yours, but you realize it when you’re in there. She likes to mess around with those fantasies too. Here you are thinking it’s the greatest thing ever, and there’s some really unnerving, unsettling stuff happening in the scene with you. So, I think Wendy is probably the scariest thing I ever wrote. And it has not come out yet.