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It’s Alive! by Julian David Stone is not a horror novel. It is indeed being published in the historical fiction category, appropriate enough because it does involve actual people and actual events. So why does Adam-Troy Castro think our readers will want to read it? Check out his review to find out!
One thing I like about short stories, or even, say, the long episodic novels I’ve been writing more recently, is that you can change voices and styles and genres with each one. I’m really interested in form. If you look at, say, By Force Alone, which is nominally an “Arthurian” novel, but I got to do one section as, say, this grand mythological thing, then the next will be hardboiled, then there’s a kung fu story.
If the devil is real, he is neither skulking in dark corners nor leering at the unwary nor hatching plots of unimaginable evil. If the devil is real, he is laughing. He is proffering a juicy secret and waiting, not to see if you’re tempted, but how much. He is waiting to see whether this is the temptation that, at last, proves irresistible. Whatever it takes for you to give in, whatever marks the tipping point—whatever that is, that’s the devil.
The last few summers here in Oregon have been pretty lousy. We’ve had wildfires, riots, threats against our governor’s life, and of course, a nightmarish heat dome that killed seventy people here in Portland. For those of us who once enjoyed summer for outdoor adventures, berry-picking, and Vitamin D production, summer has been transformed into a horror villain.
I didn’t really have any political thoughts when I was making this. I think I wanted this story to just take all of the juggalo stuff seriously—to take some pieces of reality and some pieces of batshit myths and create something that treats them like they are actually cool. Because they are actually cool. They looked at the world and were like, “Hey what if we made a magic carnival real?”
Taylor Grant has developed and written children’s series, including the animated Beetlejuice; he worked alongside the legendary Stan Lee at Stan Lee Media; he’s written short films (The Vanished and Sticks and Stones) that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival; and his work as a writer of short horror fiction has garnered him two Bram Stoker Award nominations.
One of my favorite cosmic-horror tropes is the suggestion that the awful thing the character experiences is basically, like, nothing compared to this immeasurable, even more awful horror that’s lurking just beyond. So that’s what prompted the “face,” this idea that there is an even greater, more malignant presence lingering deep below. And also of course there is some King James in there, too.
Much like The Last Unicorn in her woods, I one day set off to find my own kind. And by “kind,” I mean a community of Romanian Horror writers; something I thought I’d surely find within minutes. After all, what other country could be a better petri dish for all sorts of dark fiction? It’s hard to imagine a place more represented in Horror than Romania, except maybe suburban Maine.
Some stories are impossible to write when you’re too close to the events that inspire them. Your feelings can be so huge that they overpower fascinating situations or wonderful settings. There are places and events in my life I’ve tried to write about that simply refuse to be transformed into words. Despite my impatient nature, I’m learning to wait for time to rub the rough edges down so I can get a better grip on the material.
One of my favorite things about Stephen King is how so many of his stories are love letters to a time and place. Sure, there’s a plot, and somebody’s probably gonna get dismembered—but really, I’m there to soak up what it was like to live in Maine in the 1950s. For this story, I wanted to try to create that same sink-into-the-setting effect, and chose late-’70s/early-’80s suburbia.
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