As constant visitors to Cemetery Dance’s site, anyone reading this conversation (you are reading this aren’t you?) are unlikely to need much of an introduction to one Wrath James White. So, I’ll keep it brief so you can get what you came for and delve into what makes the man of extreme storytelling tick the way he does.
Wrath is the founder and showrunner for the KillerCon horror author’s convention in Texas, which is home to the annual Splatterpunk Awards. An accomplished professional MMA fighter and trainer, Wrath is a splatterpunk and extreme horror novelist with such critically acclaimed titles as The Resurrectionist, Succulent Prey, The Ecstasy of Agony, and his collection of poetry, If You Died Tomorrow I would Eat Your Corpse.
On the heels of the recently published Rabbit Hunt, Voracious, and The Bug Collector, Wrath took some time out from taking names and kicking ass to reflect on his life since being forced to shut down his gym while shedding some much needed light on the future of our genre, his writing process, and why being true to yourself and your stories matter most despite what the uninformed haters try to tell us.
(Interview conducted by Rick Hipson)
CEMETERY DANCE: Thanks so much for jumping in here and chatting with me today Thank you very, Wrath. I really appreciate that, man.
WRATH JAMES WHITE: Wow. Thank you for inviting me.
Absolutely. I’m going to get right to it because I know you’ve got so much stuff on the go right now.
Let’s start off with one your newest books, Voracious. The first thing I noticed when you posted about this one is that cover which is absolutely bonkers. It made me wonder what kind of illicit substances might you have fed the cover artist, Justin Kuhn, for him to have come up with such a killer cover.
Justin Kuhn is one of my favorite cover artists, and I specifically asked for him on this project. And the funny thing is, as he was sending in suggestions, and I would make suggestions on his suggestions, I really didn’t have a clear concept of where he was going. As it started to come together, I was like, this is so much better than what I had envisioned.
I thought: That’s why you are the visual artist and I’m the writer.
Were you able to snag an art piece of that to put on your wall as well?
No, you know what? I actually have to mail him his copy of the book. Maybe, I’ll hold that book hostage for a print of that cover.
No judgment here. I think it’s safe to say, too, especially for anyone whose read you before, we can safely assume the stuff that’s inside is just as juicy, gory, and over the top awesome.
When did you first become aware of the awful nature of pygmy shrews? I’d love to hear about the proverbial rabbit hole you went down.
The interesting thing is I first heard about how vicious pygmy shrews were on a TV show back in the ’80s called That’s Incredible. They did this whole thing where they follow this pygmy shrew around as it was just killing things. There were the size of a quarter. They’re tiny. And they were attacking praying mantises, attacking birds and lizards, and just killing everything and then they would go to sleep. Every 30 minutes, they have to eat it, if I remember correctly. So, they would kill something, eat it, and then immediately dig a hole, go to sleep, and then emerge voracious and just attack whatever was nearby because they had to eat again.
Because their metabolisms are so fast, they don’t actually store fat cells. They have to eat, or they die. And I thought, that is amazing. What if human beings had a metabolism like that? And then as I was researching for a project that I was doing with my son on naked DNA and different types of things, because there had been some discussion with the Olympics about the possibility of gene doping and how they were afraid that athletes were going to start tinkering with their DNA. I think it was around 2012 they started requiring that athlete DNA tests so that when gene doping becomes a thing, they’ll be able to test it against their original genes. And I thought, wow, this is the story. Gene doping for weight loss using pigmy shrew DNA. So that’s amazing. And obviously the horror story of that is, it kind of writes itself.
Yeah, nature is such a fascinating thing. I had no idea. I thought pygmy shrews, when I first heard of them, I thought they were like these little. mole rat creatures that you typically would see with the shrews. I mean, they’re nasty and gnarly looking, but I had no idea there is a difference between a typical shrew and the pygmy shrew.
Their fangs even have a little neurotoxin in them that partially paralyze their victims. They’re just killing machines, these things. it’s a good thing they are only the size of a quarter. If they were the size of a dog, we’d all die.
My God. Yeah. Here’s hoping they don’t evolve beyond what they’ve already evolved into. They better not read your story and start getting crazy ideas. That’s awesome.
Speaking of reading this book, a lot of your long-time readers might already be familiar with this title since was previously published back in 2013, I think it was, from Sinister Grin Press. Obviously that kind of lends itself to its own question as to why release it again and why now?
Sinister Grin Press, when Shane McKenzie left, they didn’t survive without him. I loved that story when it was written, and I never thought that it got the audience it deserved.
When Cemetery Dance came knocking and looking for a novel — they may have specifically asked for that one, I don’t really remember exactly how it went. A lot of my old Sinister Grin titles I republished with Deadeye Press, but I’d never republished that one.
So, it just seemed like the right time and the right publisher.
Perfect. Makes a lot of sense. And this might be more evidence of what a nerd or how anal I can be sometimes, but I noticed that the difference between the Cemetery Dance edition and the Grin Press. I think Cemetery Dance has it listed as being about 13 pages shorter than the Sinister edition Is that just a matter of layout or was there something different about the two editions?
No, it was just the layout, the font type, and things like that.
And here, I thought I came across some sort well-hidden secret that nobody was supposed to notice.
As cool as it was, Wrath, how you came across shrews and tied them into a badass story like this, your book involves more than just these ferocious little creatures who only live to feed, sleep and fornicate. At what point did you blend in the ravenous shrews with an anti-dieting approach to the plotline?
Again, I think this story almost wrote itself. We have an obsession with beauty and a specific kind of beauty paradigm in this country, and I’d say in the Western world, (where) beauty equals being skinny. There is a billion dollar weight loss industry around it. So, when you think of the mad scientists — this is perhaps my cynicism — I don’t imagine that there are a lot of brilliant scientists with altruistic intentions these days. I think they have very capitalistic intentions. I could imagine if this technology became available, it would be used to maximize profits and the weight loss industry. The beauty industry itself is a profit-making machine that preys on primarily women. Basically, their whole business model is make people feel shitty about themselves, my language, but to make people, hate themselves in order to sell their products. It’s already a predatory and pretty awful industry.
Why wouldn’t they take this horrific technology and use it for profit?
Right? Everywhere you look, you’ve got a young girl that might look at some health and fitness things because maybe she wants to get in better shape and have that ideal physique so she can be the envy, or at least not the laughingstock, of her friends and whatnot. And because of that, of course, the algorithms start shoving these diet things in her face and now she’s thinking, you mean, instead of joining a gym and doing all these exercises at home, I can just take a pill? This is fantastic! But really, it’s terrible.
Our mutual friend, Dean Italiano, wrote a whole book all about that as well. The Starving Queen, about the sinister aspect of the commercial side of beauty ideals. It certainly does tie in well with the pygmy shrew.
Not to give too much of the book away, but you know, I also kind of tied in some social media stuff because we have been so programmed by media to think of beauty and fitness and health as only one image that, if technology like this were to be made public to the masses with all the side effects…like if they stated hey, there’s a possible side effect that you might cannibalize your loved ones, there would still be people who would opt for it just to be beautiful.
Sure, I mean, if my family really supports me, they’ll lay on the dinner table and take it. It really is awful when you think of it. I mean, look at all the warning labels they put on cigarettes of torn up lungs and cancerous mouths. Apparently it only serves to make people think they’re bad ass and able to laugh in the face of danger or some nonsense. Obviously, those warnings didn’t do much to stop people from smoking.
Back to Voracious, I think it clocks in about 125 pages. Before you delivered it to Cemetery Dance, did you consider expanding it in any way, or did you feel pretty solid about its original length?
No. I think the novella is the perfect format for horror. I always have.
Most horror novels tend to read, in my opinion, like bloated novellas. And the only difference is what they use to pad it with, whether they use gore or whether they use pages and pages of backstory that’s unnecessary or whatever. That’s in my opinion. The only difference between one author and the next is what they used to add to a story that could have been told in 115, 120 pages, and what they used to blow it up to 300 pages.
I didn’t want to do that. I never want to do that. If you see a novel from me. It’s because that story needed to be told in a novel. I never sit down and say, I’m going to write an 85,000 word story. No, the story is the length that it is. Whatever the story demands, that’s what I write.
Yeah, and I think readers are pretty intuitive as well. I think that if there’s any room for them to expand on what you’ve written, they’ve got all the direction there. They know exactly what’s going on, and however their personal experiences might play into it, I think their imagination is going to take over without you having to spell out all the exact colors and textures and everything else.
I think the novella now has a lot more marketability than it used to because people aren’t really buying books off the shelf very much anymore. They’re buying on Amazon and other platforms, whether it’s eBook or audio book, whatever.
So, it’s not necessary. The whole idea of a novel being 80,000 to 90,000 words. You know where that came from?
Please tell me.
It’s because of the thickness of the books. That was it. That was the whole reason they came up with that, is because when a book is on the shelf, they wanted the spine to be a certain thickness so people would see it.
Oh, interesting.
That’s where the 80,000 word novella length came from; it made a thicker spine so that when it’s on the shelf, people notice it. Most people aren’t buying books off the shelf these days, so it’s no longer necessary to have this arbitrary number.
And I would think for newer authors too, it’s less risky for the small press publishers too. It’s less cost for printing, maybe less time spent on the formatting, et cetera.
Yes, absolutely.
The fact that this one is a bit of an older title of yours, Wrath, what do you think newer fans of yours or fans who are longtime readers of yours are going to take away from Voracious when they compare it to some of your more recent titles?
Well, I don’t think it’s any less vicious than what I’m writing now. I’ve always had a harder edge, and I certainly haven’t gotten any more subtle these days either. I think they’ll find it very seamless between what I’m writing now and what I was writing then.
And even the socio-political messages that I put in my work; I was always doing that. Most of my story ideas are inspired by arguments. I get pissed off about something and I write a whole book about it to illustrate my point. Like, they’re hypothetical situations, usually like a slippery slope type argument. Like, oh, you really think this will work? Well, this is what could possibly happen.
That’s awesome. Some of my favorite books have been written that way too. Our late friend, Jack Ketchum — Dallas Mayr — was pretty famous for that as well.
People would complain how Dallas would exploit all these controversial topics and stuff. No, these are things that just really pissed him off that he had to talk about so the people can fully understand the weight of these horrible events that would happen. Hell, that’s how Red got written. A bartender told him about a dog who got pointlessly shot and killed by someone just because they could. Dallas thought, well, son of a bitch, what happened if that was Clint Eastwood’s dog they killed? And then he wrote that book.
My next question, Wrath, may have a little bit of unavoidable, selfishness to it in a sense. While I, and certainly a lot of folks that follow you, are saddened by the news you had to close your gym, where the lives you affected are no doubt going to continue to thrive off from what they gained, I would assume you’ve got a lot more time for writing now. Hopefully that’s a safe assumption.
Yes, absolutely.
Okay, good. I mean, while we’re certainly grateful you’ve got more time to do the writing, I can only imagine that was a tough transition for you to shift your focus from doing so much writing, then to put all of your focus primarily into your gym schedule while writing when you could, to now while you no longer have your gym schedule you’ve had to write around.
Obviously, you’ve got other things in your life, but did you find that not having that particular focus caused a shift to your writing or the way that you’re able to approach it now?
Well, certainly. The thing with the gym, it had become strictly a labor of love, but also feeling obligations towards everyone, you know, my fighters, the kids that I was training, their parents.
I had parents who called me almost like I was their kid’s father to complain about their kids not doing their homework or their kids getting in trouble at school or whatever. And I would step in. Put him on the phone, let me talk to him. It’s more than just the hours I spent in the gym. It was meeting up with some of my fighters on the weekends to make sure they were actually running when they were supposed to be running. It wasn’t just the hours in the gym. It was all the other time traveling to fights when I have three or four fighters fighting on an event and I have to travel and put up the, you know, get a hotel room and spend basically my whole weekend.
Doing that took a lot of time away from hard writing, so the change was immediate. When the gym closed, it was a ton of time. I would come home and I’m just, I have absolutely nothing to do right now so was sitting writing. When I decided to self publish and I wrote Rabbit Hunt, man, I think I cranked that out in about two months, and I think Rabbit Hunt’s one of the best things that I’ve written in years. I had that idea floating around in my head for about a good five years. I just didn’t have the time to write it.
Yeah, that’s amazing. It’s gonna be such a weird thing to let go of something that was obviously such a passion project for you that you love so much and, and how can you also not feel like a lot of these kids and their families are part of your family. That must have been such a weird, bittersweet thing to have to say goodbye to, but also maybe in a sense, like a weight lifted off your shoulders so that you can put the weight of writing back onto it.
Yes. There was definitely a sense of weight being lifted off my shoulders. It made closing the gym easier, not easy by any means, but it softened the blow.
One last question regarding your gym, if you don’t mind. Is there any experiences you gained from your gym, whether it’s anger or maybe even frustration at not being able to help some of these guys out or whatnot, that you think is going to find its way into some of your stories moving forward?
I mine all of my experiences in life for characters, for stories. There was a kid who, when I announced that the gym was opening on October 20, 2021, something like that, his mother contacted me and was like, uh, can my kid start now? I said, well, the gym isn’t built yet. She said that he was having some issues with depression, and he really needed something to do now. So, I started meeting this kid in the park and training him in the park before the gym ever opened. And we became really close to the point where his mother treated me like a parent and would call me whenever he was in trouble or anything like that.
I definitely think of that kid often and I wonder because I don’t get those calls anymore. Now I would hope that the influence I had on him has continued and that he could stay in the course because I really wanted that kid to make it to college.
And that’s the tough part, right? It’s not knowing, but at the same time, at least it sounds like you made a positive impact while you had a chance to do that. I suppose whether or not he went on to other things outside of your gym or not, at this point now he’s got to make the decision of what he’s going to do with those lessons and that positive influence that he got from you. Hopefully he runs with it. I’m sure he probably will. Maybe he’ll be afraid that you’ll pop up out of the bushes one day and tell him he’s not doing what he’s supposed to do and to get back on the path.
Yeah. I used to always be able to tell them, because we would get fathers and sons and mothers and daughters who would come and train with us. And I used to always tell them, hey, if your parent hits you here, it’s not child abuse, it’s training.
That’s awesome. But it goes both ways though, right?
Yeah, that’s true too.
RH: Ok, I lied. One last gym question. Honest. What do you think is the one experience as a gym owner and trainer you think is going to sit with you and make you look back and think no matter what, that’s the reason why you did it?
So, there was a one young lady, and she would come and kind of sit on the sidelines. And then one day her mother came up to me and said that she wanted to train, too. This little girl was painfully shy. In the beginning I had to be very careful about how I spoke to her because she would break down in tears. This little girl wound up, a year later, competing in two or three matches. She surpassed her brother, and it was just beautiful to see.
And then there was another, a young boy who was about 10, and he was autistic. His parents were a little bit in denial over it, and kind of pushed him a little too much. And one day I was training him and his parent. His father was getting upset because the kid wasn’t listening and wasn’t doing things right.
I asked his father to leave the gym for a little bit, to give me about an hour, just go sit in the car or go for a drive. When he came back, I had this kid throwing combinations on the mitts and his father’s mouth is just dry. Crap, it’s me, he said.
It’s like, I could be nice, but let’s be honest.
That’s another one I wonder about because he made tremendous strides and became a lot more…the other thing was that he was laughing. The kid was laughing with me, and his father said, I’ve never seen him laugh with anyone else.
That’s huge. Wow. That’s massive. I’ve got three kids as well that are ASD. My son is five years old and we got him into boxing, and it’s just incredible to see the difference it makes, but it also makes it, you know, incredible to see the difference that the right person can make as well, because not everybody can come up and just tell him to do this or do that. It really takes that balance of knowing that you’ve got fairly rigorous boundaries for them, but that you also have the flexibility of letting them stay in those boundaries on their own terms. It’s also a lot of patience, because sometimes they’re just done. They’re overwhelmed or who knows what happened that day. Or maybe they skipped lunch because it didn’t have the right texture or something or any number of things that can cause them to get to the gym and their focus is off.
Yeah, it makes a difference when you’ve got a coach that’s got the right patience, has a bit of fun with them, and still has that expectation of doing at least a little bit of work so they can be proud of what they do. So, that’s amazing, Wrath. Hopefully you do end up coming back to coaching to some degree. Sounds like a great way to make a good difference for you.
Well, maybe sometime in the future. I would if I had a fighter that really needed my help and had a lot of potential. I think I would come out of retirement because that’s how I consider it. I’m a retired boxing and Muay Thai trainer, but I would come out of retirement with the right fighter.
As you mentioned before, you’ve also got a new book that’s hopping down the lane towards us. What can you tell us about this one as far as where we can catch it, when, and I guess what we can expect it of a Rabbit Hunt.
Rabbit Hunt is available on Amazon, but if you want an autographed copy with some extra little goodies, stickers, bookmarks, temporary tattoos, other things, plus my signature on it, you can order directly from me at wrathjwhorror.com and yeah, that book’s a lot of fun.
When you’re writing something, especially when you’re injecting humor into it, you never know if the reader is going to share your sense of humor. Or it’s going to become so off color that people are just going to cancel you or something. It could happen. So, it was really good to see that people appreciated the things I did with dialogue in that book. That was the other thing I wanted. I wanted everyone in the book to sound like they were having real conversations because, particularly in the splatterpunk genre, a lot of times the dialogue can be bad. I call it splatterpunk dialogue where the dialect is way thick and it’s like, you know, nobody talks like that. You don’t know how many books I’ll pick up that are written with a character from Texas or in Texas, and they are talking with this Texan accent that no one has used since the ’60s and I’m like, no! No one in Texas talks like that anymore.
It’s as if the author has been locked in their mother’s basement for the last 30 years.
It’s because people write based on movies rather than actually going to the place and meeting people and writing it authentically. They’ll go, oh, well, this is how they sound in movies, so this is correct. Splatterpunk is kind of known to be over the top anyway, so there’s a certain amount of dialogue that’s deliberately over the top. I just didn’t want to do that. I wanted dialogue that sounded authentic and real to the ear. I also wanted that humor, right? And it’s been really rewarding to hear people mention how realistic the dialogue was and how many times they laughed reading the book.
My idea, how I described it when I first started writing it, was if Dave Chappelle were writing an extreme horror novel. I think I nailed it.
I can just imagine what someone must be thinking if they’re familiar with you and they see somebody on the bus reading it — maybe they haven’t heard of that title — and they just see your name on the title and somebody’s laughing at it. Especially if their most vivid memory of your work is from The Resurrectionist or Succulent Prey where there’s nothing to laugh about.
That’s typically been my MO, that there’s an awkward humor in my book. My books tend to be very dark and bleak and, you know, almost nihilistic. I wanted to shift from that and show some growth and some range.
After all the stuff you’ve been through and with the gym closing, maybe it was time to laugh at some of the craziness of the world.
Yes, absolutely.
When you first described Rabbit Hunt, — which, essentially, is six college kids go into the woods, drop acid, eat mushrooms, smoke weed, be in with nature and have sex, but of course they’re not alone — I had to wonder if this was a typical night out for young Wrath. Considering you’ve no doubt exorcised your demons with some of the more intense stories you’ve told, did you find you still were able to draw from your personal experiences and the world around you when you sat down to write Rabbit Hunt? You mentioned it’s hard for you not to put some personal experiences into work and I imagine Rabbit Hunt wasn’t much different.
Absolutely. What always drives me crazy about the way our authors, and extreme authors in particular, are perceived is that we’re always identified with the villains. But we also wrote the victims. We also wrote the heroes. I mean, all of that is us. I draw on all my experiences, not just my personal lived experiences, but even my observations of other people. When I was in high school and I went to creative and performing arts high school, I went to high school with a lot of famous people. I went to high school with the guys from Boys To Men, and the guys from the group The Roots. I went to school with a lot of people and writers were kind of the red-headed stepchildren. No one cared what we were doing. We were doing some cool stuff. I had friends with one in particular. We would go to the mall after school and just sit and watch people and make up stories. After a while, we would get other people from the school who weren’t writers, who just thought it was hilarious to do that and just sit and listen to the stories we’d make up. We’d see a woman walk by and we’re like, “Oh, that’s Martha. She lives in South Philly. She’s got three kids. Two of them are Italian and one of them looks sort of Puerto Rican, but nobody talks about it.” And we would do this whole thing, and everyone would crack up.
Well, I still do that to this day. When I see someone who looks unusual or looks interesting, I make up stories in my head and then they’ll just wind up in my novel. When I hear an interesting piece of dialogue, I store that because probably I’m going to use that in a story or a novel or something.
So, what I was doing back in the ’80s, I’m still doing today. Only now I get paid for it.
And getting a better sense of the way people talk in your mom’s basement is completely different than how people talk in the mall or a café or what have you. I think I remember even reading somewhere that Elmore Leonard used to do that quite a bit, where he would listen in on people’s conversations and find a lot of times it was the things that they didn’t say that spoke more volumes than the things that they did say.
Even just the organic humor. That happens like a lot of times when you’re trying to write humor; you think of it in terms of jokes. Most people don’t talk in jokes, right? They kind of evolve naturally from the conversation. It’s so much easier to do that when you have a real conversation.
Exactly. You’re not going to overhear a conversation where someone just spontaneously says, wait a minute, did you hear the one about…? It just doesn’t work that way. That’s too stilted.
Wrath, I love how you talked a little bit about how Splatterpunk doesn’t have a great reputation for the most natural dialogue. I read not too long ago too, I think it was a thread on Reddit, where folks were bashing the genre for being gross and extreme just for the sake of being gross an extreme. What kind of advice would you offer writers who write extreme horror, but they’re maybe afraid of being seen as trying too hard to be a kid in the back of the classroom who’s just making noise for the sake of making noise?
What’s interesting to me is you never hear someone who has written a tearjerker accused of, oh, that’s just sadness for the sake of sadness. You never hear someone who’s written a romance be like, oh yeah, that’s just love for the sake of love. The idea that you’re going to pick up an extreme horror novel and complain about violence for the sake of violence or gore for the sake of gore is just ridiculous to me. It’s the dumbest argument ever. Now, I don’t like when I feel as if the violence has just been shoehorned in and it doesn’t evolve naturally from the plot, or when there’s gross elements that feel like they just come out of nowhere unnaturally. I think that is evidence of bad writing, and I have seen a lot of that.
When people say that extreme horror or splatterpunk is easy to write, I point to those books, because if it’s so easy to write, why are there so many people doing it badly? Right? Those things prove, at least in my mind, that it isn’t easy to write.
Absolutely. I’m sure many readers felt, for example, that Succulent Prey was gratuitous shock.
Succulent Prey was a metaphor for addiction. That was really the whole point of that book. It was basically this guy struggling with an addiction and struggling to get over it for the sake of the people that he loved.
His addiction just happened to be cannibalism. Oops. But that was what it was. It was a metaphor for addiction. And Prey Drive, when I wrote that, it was kind of an indictment on the justice system and the penal system in America. It also continued the theme of addiction. But, what we do with addicts, especially when they commit a crime, is we lock them up and forget about them.
I mean, all of those things I was trying to work out. Now, there are a few books that are novel length that I’ve written, that don’t have some other meaning to them because I have a hard time writing fluffs, you know, I have a hard time writing just escapism because it bores me, honestly. I was a philosophy major, so I read intense books in my leisure time. I watch documentaries on crazy stuff. I crave intensity, and if the book doesn’t have that intensity, it doesn’t have the social commentary, it doesn’t have that deeper meaning, I get bored reading it, and I definitely would get bored writing it.
I can appreciate that, because if you’re not looking forward to reading or to writing the next chapter, why should you expect your reader to look forward to reading the next chapter?
Exactly.
I think a lot of, certainly newer writers, try a little bit too hard to write for the audience as opposed to writing for themselves and then drawing that type of an audience to them, and I think a lot of readers can see through that.
Yeah, and I think as much as I love this new resurgence of interest in splatterpunk and extreme horror, I think just like the paranormal romances of the ’90s and the sexy vampires and then the zombies in their early aughts, all of these people who are rushing to jump on that bandwagon are, in my mind, diluting the genre and leading to those criticisms of gore for the sake of gore and not being, you know, no talent involved and so on and so forth. They’re perpetuating that by jumping in just because it’s what’s hot right now and not what they’re passionate about, not what they actually have an interest in, but they’re writing it just because it’s what’s hot right now. They’re kind of perpetuating that myth that all splatterpunk is writing this garbage. I wish that if this isn’t something that you love to write, don’t write it just to make a buck. If this isn’t something you’re passionate about, don’t jump on it just cause it’s what’s hot right now.
I wish people would try to write what they love, full stop.
Exactly. And I think they’re not just fooling the readers, but they’re fooling themselves too. It’s only inevitable that at some point they’re just going to end up losing integrity as a capable writer. Readers are going to see right through that.
It just does the genre a disservice. We already get enough slings and arrows thrown our way without someone basically proving the critics right by writing garbage.
There’s something else I was really looking forward to asking you about given your veteran status in the genre. Not saying you’re old, but you’ve been doing this for a little while. You’ve got a lot of experience, and I want to take more of a higher-level overview and ask you to look into your crystal ball for a moment. As far as the future of horror in general goes, there’s some among us — I’ve heard it from some very reputable veterans — who feel that an implosion in our industry is imminent. They suggest the signs were already there, just like they were during the Leisure bust, and the busts before that. One of those big signs points to the saturation that’s brought on by this huge influx of new and wildly talented batch of writers that have been cropping up over the last several years.
Wrath, I’d love to get your thoughts on this because I recently saw another new author doing extremely well saying it seems like there’s all these small press magazines and publishers coming out and that this is great. This is a sign of an awesome wave that we can all ride together. However, there’s other veterans going back and thinking, yeah, I see how this is going to end, you know?
Do you see the same thing, or do you think we’re having a readership that’s growing along with the implosion of writers?
Our readership is growing. We’ll always be a subgenre. We’ll always be kind of a literary ghetto. I don’t think that it’s going to grow enough to support all the people who are just jumping on the bandwagon. There’s been a recent trend where these booktalkers and bookstagrammers are, you know, they get a big following from their reviews and then they decide, I’m going to write a book myself. And I’m not saying they wouldn’t otherwise write a book, and I hope they’re writing the book because they always wanted to be a writer and not just because it’s what’s hot right now. But I have read a couple of books from a couple of people who were former book reviewers that just terrible. It’s clear that you have not been honing your craft all this time, that you just thought hey, this is hot.
I’ve got 20,000 followers and, to me, it’s kind of like you said, it’s the beginning of the end for the job. Like in the eighties, that’s what killed it, the inferior products hitting the market. That’s what led to the Leisure book implosion. Yes, we had the market factors with the great recession and all of that, but also there was a lot of junk being put out as well. The market cannot endure that, especially now when our intention spans are so much shorter. We want it fast, and we want it quick. If you’re feeding people junk food, literary or otherwise, eventually they’re going to get sick.
It’s funny you say that, about how all these reviewers and want to be writers as well. It’s a lot more work than most people think it is. I mean, I’ve got a nonfiction one coming out soon and just going through the editing process that is a lot of grinding work and it definitely gives you a lot more appreciation. I certainly hope that anybody who is a reviewer, by all means, go through that process. Hopefully they don’t self publish it so they get a fuller appreciation; they learn a lot more that way, and they get a fuller appreciation of working with the publishers and a deeper sense of the work that goes into it. As much as it’s a no barrier to entry with the whole self publishing thing that anybody can post upload their words to Kindle Direct Publishing and Amazon and bam, they’re an author. They should at least go through the channels of getting their initial work traditionally published first. Then, maybe down the road when they’ve learned the skills and developed their chops as a verified talented author with a sense of editing and basic grammar of that, then consider self publishing if you really want to go that route.
Yeah. Give it a shot and hire an editor. Get real beta readers who have experience at it, not your best friend down the street or your grandmother or whatever else. Get real beta readers who are also other writers or experienced, reviewers or editors. And hire an editor. Don’t get your fan, your friend to do it. I don’t care if your friend is a brilliant writer. Don’t get them to do it. Hire an editor who’s gonna be ruthless and rip your stuff apart. That’s how you improve. There are books that I’ve read recently where it’s very clear they did not hire an editor. Now, I’m not saying that your book is going to be perfect if you hire an editor. I pick up books that I’ve written, where they’ve gone through two and three editors and there’s still typos in it. Recently, I had one where I screwed up and I sent it to all three editors that I was working with at once, and when they sent their stuff back, I thought that I incorporated all the suggestions from all three in the one document, but I hadn’t. I’d only sent the edits from one editor and missed what everyone else had pointed out. That became a finished product. You know, so things happen, but I made the effort.
Like you said, it really does hurt the genre in that regard.
What advice you would give to somebody who wants to be prepared for any pending implosion that that may be waiting on the other side of this awesome wave? Do you have any suggestions you can give new authors who are maybe seeing some popularity in their stuff and are now grabbing at the proverbial oh shit handle and thinking, good luck to me?
If you’re serious about this genre, if you’re serious about being a writer, don’t imitate the other writers that you like, be authentically yourself. Write your story. Don’t try to be another Aaron Beauregard or Daniel Volpe or me or Monica O’Rourke or Jack Ketchum or Richard Lehman or whoever you’ve grown up reading. Don’t try to imitate them, all right? If you’re still imitating other authors, you’re not ready yet. That’s what you do when you’re starting out. We all started out imitating Stephen King. We weren’t getting published when we were doing that. Now because of small press and because of, you know, specifically self-publishing, people are getting published who are just imitating the other writers they’re reading and haven’t found their authentic voice yet.
Wait, find your voice, then publish.
And, if I can add to that too, Wrath, do you also think it’s a good idea to read outside of your genre so you’re not just always reading, say, five great authors that you love.
Absolutely. I love horror. I go through long stints where I’ll read horror, read horror adjacent things like true crime or I’ll read crime fiction or mysteries or dark romance. I’ll read that type of stuff that’s horror adjacent.
I also will read Psychology Today, Scientific American, those type of things, as well for ideas and staying up on current events. I think if you’re a writer, it’s kind of important that you read the news, if nothing else, If you’re stuck in the horror thing and that’s all you’re going to read as far as fiction goes, at least read the news.
Makes sense. I think there’s so many fascinating ideas from reading the news. I know Joe Lansdale is famous for that too, where he’ll pick a couple things from the news. Jack Ketcham did to a degree as well. Hell, I even read the news this morning talking about some sort of sub-sea level micro continent that they apparently discovered, and I’m thinking the possibilities for that are endless. The same goes for the latest asteroid, I swear every time I read the news there’s a new asteroid threatening Earth, and then you read it and it’s about three million miles that way, so we’re good, but the possibilities and the ideas are certainly there.
Absolutely.
Not to mention, for me personally after reading some of your books, I tend to gravitate towards a book that is more likely going to give me a nice warm hug when I’m done with it. I’ll read maybe some Mitch Albom or something similar that’s going to tell me the world’s okay before I dive back into my next literary hellscape.
Wrath, I cannot thank you enough for your time today, man. And for sharing your insight, your wisdom. This has been incredible, especially since I missed seeing you at the last AuthorCon in Williamsburg, Virginia. By the time I got to your table, you were completely sold out and were already in the wind.
Why don’t you tell us what you’re working on now that you’re most excited about?
Right now I’m writing a novelette, a little smaller than the typical novella. I call it The Bug Collector. It’s pretty much written. I don’t wanna give too much of the plot away, but it’s basically a guy who collects STIs. A woman who he had infected because it’s hard to acquire new infections and not also distribute the infections that you already have, basically kidnaps him and wants to know why he’s done this to her, and he tells his life story while being tortured.
I was hoping to have it ready for KillerCon, but life got in the way, so it won’t be coming out in time for KillerCon, but I will also be at TBR Con in Nashville and then I will be at Scares That Care in St. Louis. So, between those, I think it’ll definitely be out in time for Nashville, so I will have it in St. Louis as well.
Oh, I look forward to that one. And what’s the best way to keep up with you and your work?
I do have a Substack, Words of Wrath. If you’re a Substack subscriber, look me up. Whatever is pissing me off, that is probably going to show up in my Substack. Of course, there’s Facebook and Instagram and I am on TikTok as well.
Very cool. For anybody that not following you right now, especially on your Substack newsletter, 100 percent do that. It’s been such a pleasure seeing how the world works through your perspective and your anger. It always comes across eloquently, brutally, and honestly. That obviously carries through in everything that you do.
My next post will probably get me canceled, but thank you anyway.
