Libro.fm Podcast – Episode 38: “Interview with Stephen Graham Jones”

On today’s episode, we interview renowned horror author Stephen Graham Jones. We delve into his latest book, I Was a Teenage Slasher, and explore his passion for the horror genre. Additionally, we discuss his journey from aspiring farmer to successful writer, and pick his brain for book and movie recommendations!

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About our guest

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Audiobooks by Stephan Graham Jones

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Audiobooks we discussed

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Full transcription

[Intro Music]

Karen Farmer:

Welcome to the Libro.fm Podcast, where we talk to authors, narrators, booksellers, and more. I’m Karen.

Craig Silva:

And I’m Craig. On today’s episode, we had the pleasure of interviewing renowned horror author Stephen Graham Jones.

Karen Farmer:

We sure did. This was a big deal for us because as you may have picked up on, we are big horror fans. We read a lot of that type of content, and so we were so excited to finally get to meet him and talk about his brand new book, which I think at the time of us recording this conversation, has just come out.

Craig Silva:

I think it comes out tomorrow.

Karen Farmer:

Oh, it’s tomorrow?

Craig Silva:

Yeah.

Karen Farmer:

Amazing, amazing. Perfect timing.

Craig Silva:

Also, the time of recording is July 15th, so the book comes out on July 16th, 2024, just in case someone’s listening to this in the future.

Karen Farmer:

We have the great privilege of advanced listening copies, so get a little confused, but perfect timing. You can go get his new book as soon as this podcast hits your ears.

Craig Silva:

Yes. I was a huge fan of Stephen’s book that came out in 2020, The Only Good Indians. So when I saw this book coming out and it’s called I Was a Teenage Slasher, I was very excited because I’m a huge fan of slasher movies since I was a teenage.

Karen Farmer:

This is one of those episodes where I do regret that it’s not a video recording because Stephen is just so fun and wonderful to talk to, but also his office was one of the most incredible things we had ever seen. Would you like to describe it?

Craig Silva:

Sure. It was full to the brim with books and maybe movies of the horror genre. He was wearing a Stephen King ball cap, I believe, and had a Scream Ghostface mask on the back of his chair, and it was like a horror fan’s dream office. In fact, I remember being like, “Oh my God, my gray walls in my office are so boring,” that I immediately painted my office, got a new bookshelf. I had office envy. So been trying to do little upgrades here and there.

Karen Farmer:

All right, that’s Stephen Graham Jones inspiring renovations. I love this.

Craig Silva:

He’s also going on tour now for this book starting tomorrow, July 16th, at the Strand in New York, being interviewed by Grady Hendrix. If you’re a horror fan, and in New York… Also, this episode’s coming out after this, so hope you were there. We’re not giving you the news. But yeah, I think he’s going to Texas and Colorado and Seattle and L.A, so he’ll be all over, hawking this new book.

Karen Farmer:

No Ypsilanti Michigan isn’t on the list?

Craig Silva:

I don’t see it on the list. It’s weird because it’s usually a hotbed of entertainment.

Karen Farmer:

Well, I’m going to… Spread the word everybody. Spread the word. I’ll travel to see Stephen Graham Jones.

Craig Silva:

Yes.

Karen Farmer:

Awesome. Well, I think we will roll a clip of the new book so that you can hear a little bit of that. And then as always, if you’d like to stay after the interview, Craig and I will share a little bit more about what we’ve been reading and enjoying.

AUDIOBOOK CLIP OF I WAS A TEENAGE SLASHER:

It was the best of times, high school. And it was the suckiest of times, High School. Would I trade it though? If I could unkill six people, not make the whole town of La Mesa, Texas, gnash their teeth and tear their clothes and have to go to funeral after funeral, that searing hot July. Okay. I may be exaggerating a bit about the clothes tearing. Though, I’m sure some grieving brother or friend or conscripted cousin split a seam of their borrowed sports jacket, heaving a coffin up into a hearse, and I bet a dentist or two paid their golf fees with money earned spackling the yellowy molars. A whole town of restless sleepers had been grinding in their sleep, not sure if it was over, not sure if I was gone. And yeah, golf fees, I don’t know… People who wear plaid pants and hit small balls aren’t exactly the crowd I run with.

The crowd I do run with are… Well, we are the ones with black carts and red hands, masks and machetes. And until I was 17, I never even knew about us. My name is Tolly Driver, which isn’t just this grimy keyboard messing my typing up. Tolly isn’t short for Tolliver and Driver was just my dad’s random last name and probably his dad before him. And I don’t know where it comes from. And even if I did, even if I had my whole family history back to some fancy mustached dude raining mules this way and that, it wouldn’t change anything. In 1989, a thing happened in La Mesa, Texas. No, a thing happened to La Mesa, Texas, and to me and to six people of the graduating class, some of whom I’ve known since kindergarten, it also happened to my best friend Amber. She’s why I’m writing this all down at last. I don’t know where you are anymore, Ambs. Maybe we weren’t meant to ever see each other again after we were 17, in real life, I mean. Because I still see you every night.

Karen Farmer:

Hello everyone, welcome to the podcast. Today, Craig and I have the honor to sit down with award-winning author, Stephen Graham Jones. Welcome to the podcast, Stephen.

Stephen Graham Jones:

Man. I’m happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Karen Farmer:

Yeah, it’s our pleasure. Craig and I are both big horror fans, as you may have gleaned from our conversation before we started recording. So you can also imagine we are huge fans of your work, so I’d love it if you could just take a moment to introduce yourself to our listeners and talk a little bit about what you’re up to in the book world.

Stephen Graham Jones:

Sure. I am Stephen Graham Jones. I write horror novels. I write as many horror novels as I can. My most recent ones are The Angel of Indian Lake. Before that, it was The Babysitter Lives, maybe. Don’t Fear the Reaper, My Heart is a Chainsaw, The Only Good Indians, Mapping the Interior, Night of the Mannequins, Mongrels. And then probably about 20 more before that. I’ve been into horror for as long as I can remember. I do comic books as well. I live in Boulder, Colorado.

Karen Farmer:

Awesome. Thank you so much.

Craig Silva:

That is actually a great transition. So in addition to being an author of many, many books, like you mentioned, you are also a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. So I guess… First off, as a writer of so much and you’re making so much content all the time, how do you also find the time to be a professor?

Stephen Graham Jones:

Man, if I have any kind of secret, it’s that I don’t watch NBA basketball until the playoffs. That’s my only time saving secrets. Wish it to say right now, I’m watching a lot of playoffs, so I feel like I’m getting less work done, I feel guilty. When I’m not writing, I feel like I’m stealing air. Other people should have this air I’m breathing if I’m not producing work. And I think that’s probably why I do kick out so much stuff, it’s that I don’t know what else I’m good for other than putting words on a page. And if I’m not doing that, then why do I even bother to breathe?

Craig Silva:

Wow. Speaking of your students, do you feel that your conversations and lessons with students influences your work in any way as an author?

Stephen Graham Jones:

Yeah, it does. I hear myself… With my students, I’m trying to instill in them a sense of narrative ethics, I guess you could call it, and kind of like just a… I don’t know, an ethical relationship to punctuation too, because so many people let that slide, and I don’t think you can let stuff like that slide. I’m not saying I want to freeze it in place and lock it under glass and have it die. I want it to change and adapt to the world, but I hear myself telling my students to be good basically. And then two or three hours later, I’m sitting at this keyboard and I’m kicking out some stories, some novels and comic books or whatever, and I kind of hear myself saying to them, “Be good,” and I realize I have to be good too. I can’t just say it. I have to live it. And so teaching, I feel, keeps me honest.

Craig Silva:

Wow. Slightly silly follow up question, but do your students ever bring in books to be signed?

Stephen Graham Jones:

They do at the end of the… They usually say it for the end of the semester, and sometimes they dress it up like, “My mom is your biggest fan in the world, can you please sign this?”

Karen Farmer:

I love that. I would do the same thing, I’m too shy. I’m really interested in the path you’ve taken to get where you are today. In preparing for this, I learned for the first time that when you were growing up, you wanted to be a farmer and that you were really interested in manual work. How did we end up with Stephen Graham Jones of today?

Stephen Graham Jones:

Oh, I know. It’s such a wild ride, right? It’s such an unlikely eventuality. Yeah. Well, where I grew up in West Texas, in the Permian Basin, you had two life paths for guys anyways, and that was… You could…

… paths for guys anyways. And that was, you could be a farmer or you could go to the oil fields. And I saw a lot of people coming back from the oil fields missing fingers because chains yank your fingers off, and I wanted to keep my fingers, and so I figured maybe I’d be a farmer. And I had people in my family who did both, of course, and also ranched as well, but I knew that ranching was on the way out unless you had a lot of land, because you have to have a lot of land to make any money ranching, and I knew I wasn’t going to have that. And for farming, you need to have land too. I knew I’d never have land to farm. However, with farming, you can be what’s called a custom farmer, which is where you lease a tractor and your half tractor will plow. It’s like that, and you do plowing for other people.

That’s what my plan was. I just wanted to somehow get out of high school, lease a tractor and get a trailer out in the pasture and drive a tractor for 10, 12 hours a day and have that be my life. But then when I was set to go off and do that, I finally got my diploma around the side. I got kicked out of school, so I had to do it a different way. But my mom brought me out to eat and she gave me two things. She gave me a suitcase. Because she said, “You got to get out of town. The town’s going to kill you,” and she also said, “You’ve always been reading books. I think you need to be among people who read books.” And she had saved up enough money for me to go to one semester of college at Texas Tech, which was two hours away, and I figured, “I can put off driving a tractor for four months for a fall semester.”

And so I went up there and I sat in a classroom, and for the first time in my whole life, I never knew this was even a possibility, I was in a room with 17 other people who had read the assigned book, and we all talked about it like it mattered. Growing up, I was always the only one who read the stuff, and I mean, I love to talk about books and I was always reading, but I was always getting dragged across whatever social coals there are for being the nerd. But suddenly, at college, it was like I found my people. It was wild. I didn’t know there were my people in the first place, so finding my people was amazing.

But then that little Cinderella story of four years finally went over and I figured a time to go drive a tractor, and then my professors said, “Hey, you should go to grad school.” And I kept saying, “Nah, nah.” And finally I asked them, “What’s grad school?” And they told me it’s more school and harder school. And I was like, “I don’t know about that.” But they got on my case so much that solely to satisfy them, I put out two applications. I was a dual major, English and philosophy. I put out one application to philosophy school and one to English school to a writing program. And the writing program got back first, and so I went to be a writer, and so I could just as easily have been a philosopher. It’s totally arbitrary that I ended up writing.

Craig Silva:

Wow.

Karen Farmer:

That’s an incredible story, and the philosophy still shows up in your work that you do, so it’s a little bit of both.

Stephen Graham Jones:

Thank you.

Craig Silva:

Wow, that is amazing. Have you ever had a chance to sit down with your mother and discuss how that dinner you had completely changed the trajectory?

Stephen Graham Jones:

Yeah, I’ve told her, and it’s neat, because I say she gave me two things. She gave me a T-shirt also, which was a painted cow skull that was all turquoised up, and it was a cool shirt. And a couple of years ago, digging through some old boxes, I found that shirt and my daughter wears it all the time now. She’s what, 21? She’s 21 now. And it’s so cool to see her wearing my shirt that I got when I was 17, when I graduated high school.

Craig Silva:

Wow. That’s amazing.

Stephen Graham Jones:

My son would wear it, but he’s taller and bigger than me, so it wouldn’t fit him.

Craig Silva:

That’s funny. So although you primarily write novels and short stories under your own name and alone, obviously, I saw that you collaborated with another author who I love, Paul Tremblay, for a YA titled Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly. I had a couple of questions about that. Did you know Paul before this happened or is this some matchmaker in the publishing world was like, “Hey, you two should meet”?

Stephen Graham Jones:

Yeah. No, Paul and I have known each other… What is this, 2024? We’ve known each other nearly 20 years, I guess, and he first got hold of me after my novel Demon Theory came out. We got to talking about that and then I think I blurbed one of his early, early books. What was it called? The Harlequin and the Train. That’s what it was. We just became friends and we’ve been really good friends ever since then. So when Paul kicked up this idea of a girl who could float and he said, “Listen, let’s do a YA novel together,” I figured of all the people in the world, he’s the only person I could possibly write a novel with, and the reason… But I was still nervous about it because I’ve heard so many of these collaborations end up with the people no longer being friends, and so I was worried that we might be cashing in our friendship. We might end up hating each other or something. But we didn’t. We’re still good friends and it was a fun process and I learned a lot too.

Craig Silva:

Speaking of the process, what is it like, where you’re just throwing ideas back and forth via email, or what did that actual working process look like?

Stephen Graham Jones:

How it worked was Paul wrote Chapter One and sent it to me and I rewrote it and wrote Chapter Two and sent it to him. He rewrote my chapter and wrote Chapter Three, and we just went back and forth like that, like a volleyball, to get embedded back and forth. When we read each other’s chapters, that let the voice not be too jarringly different in the chapters.

Craig Silva:

That’s really cool. It reminds me of that game you play in the car when you’re a kid where you say one sentence of a story and then the next person says the next sentence, so on and so on.

Stephen Graham Jones:

Yeah. Yeah.

Craig Silva:

I was curious. Why did you guys decide to use a pseudonym for the book versus having it just written by Paul Tremblay and Stephen Graham Jones?

Stephen Graham Jones:

I think later additions of that book have our actual names on it, but yeah, when we first were publishing it, Paul had A Head Full of Ghosts about to come out and we didn’t want to have too much of his name on the market, if that makes sense.

Craig Silva:

Yeah.

Stephen Graham Jones:

That’s never that great. And so we told the publisher, “Hey, we’re going to do a pseudonym,” and immediately marketing in microseconds, it felt like, got back to us with a list of 40 names we could use. And those names, we realized, were all names that situated our book right by Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games or Stephanie Myers’ Twilight. They wanted us to have shelf proximity to big hits so that we get snatched up, and we didn’t feel like that was an honest move, so we just pushed our names together into PT Jones. Yeah.

Craig Silva:

Wow, that’s so interesting.

Karen Farmer:

Oh, that’s fascinating. I didn’t know that was a thing.

Stephen Graham Jones:

Yeah. I didn’t know it till then. I didn’t know it either.

Craig Silva:

I’ll come clean. While I was writing this question, I had a follow-up. I was going to be like, where did you come up with the pseudonym? And as I was saying it out loud to myself, I was like, “Wait, it’s PT Jones.” I was like, “I’m so glad I didn’t ask this question,” but I did want to come clean about this ridiculous epiphany I had.

Stephen Graham Jones:

Yeah. Yeah.

Karen Farmer:

My next question… You are not going to believe me, but this is true. On Tuesday of this week, I happened to finally pick up Eric LaRocca’s book, Things Have Gotten Worse Since Last We Spoke, and I opened it and on page one, the first thing is a blurb from you, so could not be more perfect timing, and I wanted to read the blurb and ask you about it. You wrote, “Some horror walks you down a dark corridor where there’s whispers and laughter, sobs and screams. Other horror starts down at the end of that corridor where there’s a door that opens onto you don’t know what.” That stuck out at me as such an interesting way of thinking about the different approaches to horror, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you approach it and why this genre has become the place where you love to spend all your time.

Stephen Graham Jones:

Yeah. That’s a really good question. I mean, with horror, Stephen King used to get asked, “Why horror?” a lot of the times, and he would always just say, “Some of us are wired that way,” and that’s basically my answer is I’m just wired for horror. I cut my teeth on genre stuff and I just never really left, but what I particularly like about horror is that it can provoke a visceral response from the reader that the reader is not necessarily willing to get. They don’t sign a contract to be terrified in their bed with the lights on at 2:30 in the morning, and I love that horror can take it that one step further, that uncomfortable step further. It’s really cool. Psycho makes us afraid of showers. That’s made-up stories impacting the very real world, and I just love that horror is in that kind of dialogue with reality.

Karen Farmer:

Oh, that’s so cool. Yeah, and thinking about this, I think a lot about genre fiction and I’m just curious what role you think horror as a whole plays in our society. I think genre fiction gets not forgotten about necessarily, but just not considered in that way as much, and-

Stephen Graham Jones:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can look at it like Rod Serling with The Twilight Zone. He was using his-

Rod Serling, like The Twilight Zone, he was using The Twilight Zone, all those episodes to critique society, the society of his time most definitely, and that’s definitely one use of horror. Another use of horror is like a funhouse mirror to reflect back to us in distorted fashion our own anxieties and fears and issues and all that, of course. I think horror was the first genre of story ever told around the campfire. When the hunting party comes back after eight days gone from three valleys over, in the shadows, they reenact killing this big bear or something, and they do the sounds and that’s a horror story and the people are scared that are listening to it.

And so when we engage horror, I think we’re engaging our most human center, ourselves. It’s a really honest genre to me. Really, I’ll never not be writing horror. I do science fiction, I do fantasy, but when I look at it, I’m like, “Oh, so this guy eats centaurs. That’s kind of a horror premise.” That’s just where my impulses go.

Craig Silva:

And speaking about your writing, you’ve acknowledged that you feel indebted to other indigenous writers that came before you, such as Gerald Vizenor, writers who have influenced your work when you were getting started. I’m curious, what writers or artists are inspiring and influencing your work now that you’ve progressed in your career?

Stephen Graham Jones:

Oh yeah, that’s a good question. Well, Louise Erdrich continues to. She is one of my heroes, my models. As for people on the contemporary scene, Paul. Paul is always somebody whose stuff I read very closely and am both impressed by it and challenged by. And let me think. Gemma Files. Gemma Files is pretty amazing, if y’all have read her novel, Experimental Film, and I mean, she’s got a lot of, a lot of stories too. She really just has a good sense of how horror works, and it’s good to read people who just have a really tight understanding of the mechanical aspects of horror and can do it in such a way that it doesn’t feel mechanical.

Karen Farmer:

Well, Craig and I, and I’m sure all of our listeners who are fans of yours, appreciate how prolific you are. We’re like, “Thank you. Please keep more books coming to us.” Really excited to see that I Was a Teenage Slasher is going to be out this summer on July 16th, I believe. So what can you share about that to help folks know what to get excited about?

Stephen Graham Jones:

I Was a Teenage Slasher set in 1989 in La Mesa, Texas, which is maybe 50 miles from where I grew up in Stanton, Texas. And it’s a kid, Tolly Driver, and his best friend, best friend Amber Big Plume Dennison, and they get involved in a slasher. This is a first person story. I see people calling it autobiography. I didn’t think about it like that when I was writing it, but I guess that kind of fits. It’s Tolly Driver, this slasher telling the story of why he did what he did and he’s telling it from a much later time.

So yeah, it’s hot. It’s July in Texas. There’s no rain. It’s farming. There’s a whole lot of me on the page, to tell you the truth, because I was 17 in 1989 and I had really good friends. What’s that Stand By Me line? You never have friends like you did when you’re 12 years old. That’s the kind of friendship that I believe in anyways. And a lot of people die, not as many as The Angel of Indian Lake, but this is a much smaller place too.

Karen Farmer:

Oh, I can’t wait. I can’t wait.

Craig Silva:

Speaking of slashers, were you doing any research for this by watching some of your old favorite slasher movies? Is there anything, any influences that were kind of impacting you as you were writing?

Stephen Graham Jones:

Probably. I mean, really when I wrote I Was a Teenage Slasher, I was supposed to be writing The Angel of Indian Lake, and Jade Daniels, the only lenses she had, the only goggles she has are slasher goggles. And so to get myself in her frame of mind, I always am watching slashers when I’m gearing up to write a Jade Daniels book. And then instead of writing The Angel of Indian Lake, I thought, “I’ll just write another novel right quick,” and so I had all that in my head for sure.

Craig Silva:

As one does, just writes a novel right quick.

Karen Farmer:

Well, you probably figured we need to talk a little bit about the audiobook as well since we are an audiobook company. Craig and I saw that the new book this summer is narrated by Michael Crouch, and we’ve really enjoyed his narration on other books as well. What is your experience like with the audiobook process in your involvement there?

Stephen Graham Jones:

It’s been really… I feel like I’m really fortunate. Michael Noble, the guy who directs all these audiobooks, he involves me at the very beginning. We pick the voice actors together. He’ll ask, “Who’s your dream cast? Who’s the perfect person I can get?” But for The Angel of Indian Lake, it was his idea to get Stephen King, and he made that work, which I don’t know how in the world he pulled that off.

But yeah, Michael Crouch for A Teenage Slasher is perfect. When Michael Noble sent me his audition tape, it was like Tolly was speaking from my machine, and it was just amazing. Evidently, Crouch has some Texas in him, so it wasn’t a reach for him. He’s not having to put on an accent.

And what’s really nice too is that Michael, as a director, he combs through the book so, so closely and sends me a list of words that can be pronounced two or three ways and he has me record how they are in my diction anyways. And since this is exactly where I grew up and when I grew up, we let the way I would say the word be the guide instead of the right way to say the word, if that makes sense.

And they’re always calling me very last minute too, because when you’re doing the audio, I’ve found a lot of typos that have slipped through copywriting, proofreading, all that stuff. They surface. And Michael asked, “Did you really mean this?” And 99% of the time, I did not really mean that. I tell Michael, “Yes, do it the right way,” and then we have to get ahold of production with a physical book to fix it in that book as well if there’s still time.

Karen Farmer:

I never thought about that. That makes so much sense.

Stephen Graham Jones:

And there’s also some song lyrics in I Was a Teenage Slasher, and I haven’t heard it yet, but Michael and I agreed that if Crouch can kind of do those in the melody in which the song is, that that might land them a little better.

Craig Silva:

The pressure is on.

Stephen Graham Jones:

Yeah, yeah.

Craig Silva:

At the end of all of our interviews, we do a lightning round where we ask you some kind of quicker, sometimes sillier questions so you don’t need to think about them too much.

Stephen Graham Jones:

Great.

Craig Silva:

So I’ll do the first one, and it is self-serving as a horror fan. I want to know who your favorite slasher is and who your favorite final girl is.

Stephen Graham Jones:

Favorite slasher is Jason Voorhees, and favorite final girl, Nancy Thompson from A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Karen Farmer:

What’s your favorite breakfast food and why?

Stephen Graham Jones:

Favorite breakfast food, I just had it this morning, Soylent. I love vanilla Soylent. Do you know Soylent?

Karen Farmer:

Yeah.

Craig Silva:

Yeah. So zombies, vampires or werewolves. Which would you least like to encounter in real life and why?

Stephen Graham Jones:

Probably a zombie, because zombies don’t come from a single spy. They come in battalions and they’re going to coat the world. There’s a chance I can put a vampire down or a werewolf down, but I kill one zombie, who cares? There’s going to be six million more.

Craig Silva:

Very logical. I like it.

Karen Farmer:

So true. This is my most ridiculous one I’ve ever asked. What are you doing this weekend?

Stephen Graham Jones:

What am I doing this weekend? Hopefully just riding my mountain bike all over the place. That’s what I’m doing this afternoon. And when it’s hot like it is, I just can’t stay off the trails. That’s all I do. So this month is a bad month for me to try to get riding done. I’ve got a lot of deadlines, but between watching the NBA playoffs and riding my bike all over the face of the earth, it’s hard to steal away two or three hours.

Craig Silva:

If you could rewrite a classic horror story, but with a modern twist, which one would you choose?

Stephen Graham Jones:

Probably W.W. Jacobs’ The Monkey’s Paw.

Karen Farmer:

Oh, why do you pick that one? I’m so curious.

Stephen Graham Jones:

I think that story is maybe one of the one or two, maybe three most important horror stories of the 20th century. And it’s like to me it’s in the kernel of horror, and so to get to go into that kernel and maybe do it in a different way, an unexpected way…… kernel and maybe do it in a different way, a different and unexpected way would just feel like touching the grail.

Craig Silva:

We’ll look forward to it.

Karen Farmer:

Yes. Before we let you go, we would love to beg you for some book recommendations. Is there anything you’ve been reading and enjoying recently that you would like to share?

Stephen Graham Jones:

Probably the scariest book I’ve read this year is Nick Robert’s Mean Spirited. That novel really made me be very judicious and strategic in the way I turn the lights off on the way to the bed at night.

Craig Silva:

Well, if it could scare you, I mean…

Stephen Graham Jones:

Yeah. Well, I mean, I wish I was a high threshold. I am easily scared. Like this morning my wife, 7:00 in the morning, she was walking out of the bedroom and the door was locked and she turned back to me and said, “You locked the bedroom door?” And she didn’t even pause, she said, “You were scared, weren’t you?” And I said, “Yes. I was scared.” And the reason I was scared was last night I was watching basketball downstairs and I muted it for a commercial or something and I heard my wife sneeze and so I texted “bless you” to her and she never texted back. I thought, oh no, that means that somebody’s hiding in a closet and they sneezed and so they’re going to come kill us in our sleep. And so I had to creep to my bed and lock the door.

Craig Silva:

Oh my God.

Karen Farmer:

I’m so glad it’s not just me. This is very comforting to hear actually. That’s how my mind works too.

Craig Silva:

Oh my God. I’m going to sneak in one more recommendation question that isn’t in our script, as we usually ask for book recommendations but as such a horror fan, I would be curious if you’ve seen any good horror movies recently that you could recommend to us?

Stephen Graham Jones:

One that I would recommend that… I mean there’s been a lot of really good horror lately. Of course like Infested and what is that Late Night with the Devil? There’s been a lot of good stuff happening lately.

Craig Silva:

Oh, I thought that was so good.

Stephen Graham Jones:

So did I, yeah. I was really impressed. But one that may not be on people’s radar is all the way back from 2004, which I just saw maybe six weeks ago, five weeks ago, Hellbent. It’s a LA slasher, it’s a slasher targeting the gay community. But it’s not targeting these guys because they’re gay, it’s just targeting because it’s the reason slashers target people because walking on two legs. I really appreciate that. It’s just a really tight, well done slasher and it reminds us that a slasher can work, it doesn’t have to have all these layers of referentiality and stuff on top of it and it doesn’t have to interrogate the genre. It can just do what Halloween did in ’78.

Craig Silva:

I’m so glad I asked now. I have something to watch tonight.

Karen Farmer:

Yeah, I can’t wait.

Craig Silva:

Well, that is it. That is all we had for you. Thank you so much for taking the time. I know you have lots of basketball and biking to do, so we appreciate you giving us a half an hour of your time today.

Stephen Graham Jones:

Man, it was great talking to you. This was a wonderful conversation. Thank you all for having me.

Craig Silva:

Thank you.

Karen Farmer:

Thank you so much, Stephen.

Craig Silva:

Well, thanks for listening to that episode everyone, we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. And you should go pick up Stephen Graham Jones’ new book.

Karen Farmer:

Absolutely. Craig, is there anything else that you’ve been reading and enjoying lately that you’d like to share?

Craig Silva:

Yes. I picked up a book over the weekend in Rochester, New York at Bookeater, which if you’re ever in Rochester, New York, go to this bookstore. It is a cafe bookstore in an old house and I was smitten immediately and spent like three hours there. And of course I had to buy some books. I bought a book based off its cover or rather I picked it up based off its cover and then read the jacket and I was like, yep, you’re coming back to Boston with me.

Karen Farmer:

I get it. I get it.

Craig Silva:

Yeah, the book is called Please Stop Trying to Leave Me by Alana Saab. And it is her debut novel and I’m about halfway through right now and am loving it. It’s the story of this woman who keeps trying to leave her girlfriend, and this story is told through therapy sessions. So she gets a new therapist and she’s going back and forth with the therapist and she says that she’s in Oblivion, you’ll learn more all about Oblivion when you pick this book up. It is so interesting, and it’s unlike anything I’ve ever read. The closest thing I could relate it to is maybe Big Swiss, but it’s even stranger.

Karen Farmer:

How is that possible?

Craig Silva:

I know, I know, I know. It’s so good. So go pick that book up just like me.

Karen Farmer:

Gold. I’m on it.

Craig Silva:

Oh yeah. What are you reading right now?

Karen Farmer:

Oh, I’d love to tell you. I thought you’d never ask. I just finished mere moments ago, a great debut novel as well. It is called Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs. Transparently. I had to figure out how to say her last name because it’s spelled T-O-R-Z-S, and there is an umlaut over the O. So hopefully I said it right.

Craig Silva:

I feel like you were just looking for an excuse to tell us that you knew the word umlaut.

Karen Farmer:

I don’t know how to pronounce them though, so this is not a net positive for me.

Craig Silva:

It’s O on your word of the month calendar.

Karen Farmer:

It starts with a U.

Craig Silva:

Shh.

Can I edit that out? My guess is no.

Karen Farmer:

Absolutely not. Let me tell you about this book. So it is a contemporary fantasy in which we’ve got a really interesting cast of characters, primarily two sisters who were raised by a family that practices magic. And in this world that we live in, magic exists only in the form of books. The spells are all in individual books, one book can contain one spell. And some of the spells are the big things you can think of three, the reader of this will live forever, and some of them are small things like the power will work for the next 60 days or until the spell is a deactivated type of thing.

Craig Silva:

I think you need that one.

Karen Farmer:

I do. There are some other really charming small ones where it’s like the reader of the spell can see through the eyes of the nearest bird for the next hour. I loved it. It is very thriller-y. There are all sorts of things going on with people trying to steal the books and trying to use them for nefarious reasons and battling for power. And so through the lens of these two sisters, we are just completely embroiled in the world of what’s happening with magic and lots of interesting people that become part of it. I loved it. I loved it so much.

I also must say I bought the paper copy to read and then started doing my usual song and dance number where I was switching back between the paper book and the audiobook. And I got to say, I ended up reading this 90% via audio. The narrator is absolutely incredible. Her name is Saskia Maarleveld. The audiobook is incredible. I can’t recommend it enough.

Craig Silva:

So you hated this book it sounds like. No, this sounds amazing.

Karen Farmer:

10 stars out of 10.

Craig Silva:

It sounds the most up my alley ever. It’s been a while since I’ve done a fantasy, so I think you’ve sold me.

Karen Farmer:

Great. I hope you enjoy it. I’d love to discuss it with you once completed.

Craig Silva:

Sounds good. Maybe on the next episode.

Karen Farmer:

Great.

Craig Silva:

All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed the interview and enjoyed our recommendations. Let us know, and if you are not a Libro member yet, you can use the code SWITCH and get two extra credits when signing up for a new membership.

Karen Farmer:

I love that. And as always, thank you for listening.