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A resolutely trepidatious kid, Ethan does not want to go to Kevin’s house to watch Demons of Death 4: Death Fingers with the rest of the gang Friday night. But little does he know that this Monster Movie! is going to come for him anyway. Below I talk with author Chuck Wendig about the virtues of scary stories.

Roger Sutton: I was struck by your anecdote in the afterword about your sister terrorizing you with stories of The Exorcist. I saw that movie, I must have been a junior in high school when it came out, and it scared the living daylights out of me.

Photo: Michelle Wendig

Chuck Wendig: But you survived, right? That's the nice thing.

RS: It was terrifying. I've never been scared by a movie to that degree. I still won't watch it again.

CW: Oh, it's still scary. It holds up.

RS: So how did you progress from a child who was easily spooked to an author who can write these incredibly grisly horror novels?

CW: One step at a time, right? When I was a kid, I was afraid of all these movies and different things. I liked science fiction movies, so when I went to the video store with my mom and saw a movie called Alien, I thought, That sounds great. This was at a time when parents and video-store clerks had zero interest in who was renting what movie. They let me rent Alien, and I was not aware of what I was bringing home. Then I watched it, and I was like, Ahhhh! But it was great; I was into it. Years later my sister, who tormented me with moments from The Exorcist, was also the person who first put a horror novel in my hand.

RS: What was that?

CW: Robert McCammon's Swan Song. A 900-plus-page nuclear-winter, devil-crossing-the-wasteland kind of thing. That was when we were deep into anxieties about nuclear war. One day you might not wake up — the bombs will drop overnight. That was a time when I read a book that contextualized my fear rather than heightening it. It did something cathartic for me, reduced my fear as opposed to amping it up. I took some comfort from that lesson and wanted to write that kind of story.

RS: Well, it's something librarians have said for generations: children can learn how to deal with fear through books in a way that is less scary, obviously, than real life, even less than a movie. You're pinned in your seat, but you control turning the page.

CW: While there's a heightened fear in your own mind, because you have this translation through your own prism, your own lens, that control factor is key. I think it's like a safe version of exposure therapy. You're afraid of snakes. I'm not going to dump a bunch of snakes in your lap. But here's a book about snakes — or maybe it's a book about dragons that look like snakes — and that gets you a little bit closer to your fear. It’s a space where you can deal with them in a more manageable way.

RS: I read horror fiction avidly when I was a kid. Stephen King was huge then. From Carrie on up. And now I find it more difficult, not because I’m scared, but because I sort of roll my eyes more than I did. I can’t get into the fear as readily. What do you think happens to our imaginations as we age?

CW: On one hand, we grow up. There’s this sense as you get older that we all think, You can’t surprise me as easily. Which is true. If you are a reader and/or a writer, I think it gets harder to scare or surprise and shock and delight. I think it does get a little harder because you're so immersed in how the sausage is made. I also think it's the times we live in; if I need horror, I'll turn on the news or look out my window and see what's going on. But I do think horror also offers a useful funhouse mirror of reality. Maybe that’s why horror is having a big moment right now — everything is so very strange outside of our doors.

RS: Do you ever scare yourself in your writing?

CW: More disturb than scare. I don't usually read horror and get scared in the way The Exorcist scares you. Once in a while something will shock me, but usually it's something unsettling, a creeping dread, a disturbing turn, a deep thought that  worms its way into my head. That is upsetting to me. Once in a while I'll definitely disturb myself with what goes on the page.

RS: What's the difference for you between writing it and reading it?

CW: Generally writing it doesn't bother me. As I’m writing, I’m loosely aware that as a storyteller it is my job to do some of these things. Sometimes you're there to mess with the reader a little bit, trying to subvert expectations and to pivot and twist and get readers in a way that they don't expect. Sometimes I think, Am I going to get emails about this? They're going to say, “What is wrong with you?”

RS: How do you keep readers engaged in the reality of the story? How do you calculate how much horror or otherwise fantastical element you can get away with so that people don’t start saying, “Wait a minute, this would never happen.”

CW: Horror is a strong spice, so you don’t want to pile it on. I think grounding it in something that’s real or almost real is meaningful. Real characters, people you care about and can understand. I would say there’s a way to write that’s like a two-truths-and-a-lie variant. You're going to get to this fantastical thing — and I think this is true in fantasy, science fiction, horror — you build in two realistic things to get you there. You pack in those real things, especially in science fiction where you're trying to convince readers of a conceit that's strange or alien or otherworldly. So rooting them first and then delivering that otherworldly hit, clinches the deal.

RS: And the way you give the reader so much empathy.

CW: Thank you. That was the goal.

RS: We really want him to get out!

CW: Exactly. Get out but don’t be scared, but also maybe be scared right now!

RS: Years ago I was on ALA's Best Books for Young Adults committee, which is a prize for the best teenage novels of the year, and Ender's Game was a nominee. I noticed that those of us who were not big science fiction readers loved it, and the people who were big science fiction fans hated it. How do you account for new readers in a genre as well as expert readers in that genre?

CW: I don't. I want the expert readers to read the book, but I think there's value in making a book accessible. It doesn't have to be so broadly accessible that it’s dull-witted, basic, and obvious. The bones of story are pretty universal. I always say it's as if you take a human being and a dolphin. They're obviously very different creatures. But if you look at a dolphin's skeletal structure, those fins bones resemble hands. And so there are shared common bones across all the genres, across storytelling in general. The goal is always first and foremost not to hit the genre tropes but to tell a great story. And if it uses the tropes, if it applies what the more veteran readers like, that's great. But if it doesn't, that's okay too. Someone like Spielberg has made such a great career on science fiction films that are not deeply hardcore science fiction films, right? He's making movies about Americana and families that happen to be trapped in whatever science fiction situation he's created. Stephen King does that really well. He roots his horror in very real family dynamics, friendship dynamics, or childhood dynamics. I think those are the things that reach people because we are very connected to that.

RS: Why did you start writing middle grade books? This is your second one, right?

CW: I’m working on my third right now. I wrote three official Star Wars novels called the Aftermath trilogy. My son was a big Star Wars fan at that time, but he didn’t care! He was not excited at all. He was like, eh. I'm like, but I write Star Wars, official Star Wars! He asked me about other Star Wars books, by people who weren’t even his dad, and it hurt my feelings a little bit. So I thought, I'm gonna try to write a book for his age. I wrote Dust & Grim and I thought maybe it would land well. To my absolute delight, he liked that book and was very complimentary. That made my day and my year.

RS: Do you have to approach things differently when you're writing for an audience as opposed to just writing? What do you have to keep in mind when writing middle grade fiction that you don't have to when you're just writing for people like yourself?

CW: Nothing. I know it sounds strange, but I keep nothing in mind because I'm still writing for me. Ethan is a character I implicitly understand, and he's entering some scary situations that I think are genuinely scary. I'm trying to be funny and light when it's appropriate in ways that I think are funny. You just dial down all the big person stuff, make a little less of that disturbing — the gory, the profanity are tamped down. I'm still trying to tell a story whether it’s for adult readers or kid readers. What’s key is to not talk down and assume that kids are not savvy enough. If we're to assume the bones of story are shared, then that's as true across age ranges, as it is across genres and so forth.

RS: I wonder if your experience as a speculative fiction writer helps in that sci-fi and fantasy have always had this huge crossover audience between kids and adults. Kids read Lord of the Rings. Adults read Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising, right? There's a fluidity to it. I would think that would be helpful.

CW: One feeds into the other.

RS: Ethan thinks “Scared is my superpower,” which I really want on a T-shirt for myself because I was a kid like that. Being afraid of things, on one hand made life hard, on the other hand, turned me into a reader, right?

CW: It turned me into a reader too. And sometimes the fear pays off. You don't want to do that thing that seems scary, and someone says, “I did it and I broke my arm.” You say, “See, that's why I didn't do it. Because I like these noodle-y limbs I call arms. I don't wanna break anything.” Once in a while you're rewarded for the fear. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes not good. Definitely, I vibe with the “scared is my superpower” thing. And as a horror writer it takes on a different meaning.

RS: Would you characterize yourself as having been a fearful child?

CW: Oh my god. Fearful and anxious and an anxious adult. Less so now, but I was a very anxious kid.

RS: I think I checked under the bed until I was forty.

CW: Sometimes I don't know if my foot should be out from under these covers. Just in case.

RS: How do you make that serve you then as a horror writer?

CW: It's a place to put that stuff. I'm trying to find an outlet for those anxieties and do something with them, make sense of them. My adult book Wanderers deals with climate change, the post antibiotic era, rampant out-of-control AI, political instability, and pandemics. It's a pandemic novel published before the actual pandemic. I could have written a book on each of those topics, but I put all of the anxieties into that book and made them one thing.

RS: How does writing your anxieties into a book change the anxieties in your head?

CW: It's like purging an infection. And I also think that when you read or write horror, what you're writing or reading is much worse than it would be in reality. No matter what's going on outside our door, it's not going to be as bad as these things. And if these people in this story are making it through and they're surviving, then maybe I will too.

RS: What do you/would you say to parents who believe that reading horror will lead their children down a dark path, whether it be smoking weed, having sex, or making a pact with Satan?

CW: My short and simple answer is that the only thing it might do, as in my case, is turn you into a horror author. To me that’s a pretty good gig!

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