Question 1: What was the initial catalyst—whether that be a short story, a novel, a film, a video game, an event—that made you want to be a writer?
My initial catalyst is probably the most boring and typical one imaginable — reading Stephen King growing up. Particularly his short stories in Nightmares & Dreamscapes. For some reason, the teleplay “Sorry, Right Number” always stayed with me and became tied up in my idea of writing as I left childhood, thought about one day being an author, and eventually gained the emotional intelligence to try. It’s far from my favorite King story, but something in it really hooked me. Interesting that I’ve never felt the urge to write a screenplay!
I had the one and only nightmare of my life when I was eight years old or so, after watching the old TV miniseries ‘Salem’s Lot. (Yep, King again.) As I grew up and failed to experience that terror following that one dream, I think it was inevitable that I would be drawn to horror fiction and want to recapture that feeling.
Question 2: An aspiring author has written a 70,000- to 100,000-word debut horror novel and doesn’t know what to do next; what advice would you give them? Should querying literary agents be the first choice of action, or is self-publishing becoming a viable option?
A short, rote answer feels so inadequate here. But at the same time, I’m reluctant to offer a shiny nugget of advice because every author has their own path, and every novel has its own path, too. The first novel you write might take a very different journey than the next one you write. But the path you choose — how long it is, how difficult it is, etc. — will often begin with your goals. What do you get out of writing and publishing? What do you want your terrifying horror novel, bled out of your own nightmares, to achieve?
Some people dream of a traditional book deal with a “Big Five” publisher. If you’re in this camp, and you believe your horror novel has a high level of both literary merit *and* commercial appeal, I would personally recommend querying agents. Find out who represents your favorite authors and/or favorite novels (story collections, too, though these are far less likely to be published by a big imprint; there’s just not much money in them, to my eternal despair) and put them on your query list. You can often find out who an author’s agent is in the acknowledgments sections of their books.
There are far, far more authors than there are agents, and good agents are flooded with manuscripts, many of them novels that deserve to be read. I’d start with a short list of your “top” agents — five to ten — and spend some time putting together great query letters to send with your polished manuscript. Then…you wait. (This path involves a lot of waiting.)
It could take multiple rounds of querying to find an agent. I know an author who signed with an agent after nearly 100 other agents passed, and that novel sold to a Big Five imprint for a huge advance after their agent worked on revisions with them. And, of course, there are plenty of writers who are unable to find an agent who wants to represent their book. That doesn’t mean it’s not good, or that your *second* novel won’t make an agent fall in love, so don’t feel too discouraged if you don’t luck out here. Publishing is often about playing the long game.
But if you do sign with an agent, they’ll be able to guide you from this point forward with more grace and wisdom and marketplace knowledge than I can or should. But I can tell you that what comes next will involve…yep, more waiting (possible revisions, working up a submission list, the submission itself, long stretches of cold Lovecraftian silence, and the potential for heartbreak). Then, if you sell the book, you’ll have to do a bunch more waiting, editing, etc.
Is your goal simply to publish your novel and have it out there in the world? Self-publishing gets looked down on pretty often, but it shouldn’t. There’s real value in the DIY approach, as well as a lot of benefits (such as getting a much bigger share of the sales). However, there’s a reason it doesn’t get the respect it deserves, and that’s mainly because anyone can do it. And when anyone can do something, there’s a higher chance that much of it will be subpar, which creates an understandable negative impression. But that just means that your book — if it’s great — will be the needle in the haystack, and it will be up to you (and only you, because you’ll have no publisher behind you) to help readers find that needle and sift through all the bland hay.
Because the hard, nail-studded truth is that when you self-publish, you’re essentially a small business with one employee — yourself — and you’re responsible for everything, including professional-level editing and art and design. For every self-publishing success story, there are 1,000 books that pull in sales in the single or double digits.
More and more in the Big Five world, though, authors are responsible for a large share of promotion, so it’s not all roses and kittens in the “big leagues,” either. In the end, there are major pros and major cons for each of these two paths. Personally, I prefer traditional publishing by a wide margin. That’s partly because I don’t enjoy being a salesperson and mainly because I have a busy day job that would never give me the free time to write and be a business selling that writing and doing all the admin work. So your lifestyle and life circumstances and personality can all absolutely play a major role here, too.
In between these two options is the small press. Unfortunately, success is often measured by the press itself, so I wouldn’t just sign with anyone. Look at what their track record is, how much they promote on social media, what you think of their cover design and production values, etc. Because an inferior small press can exist just one short rung above self-publishing but with fewer of the benefits of self-publishing. A great one, though, can be amazing to work with, as I’ve been lucky enough to experience.
Ask peers what they think of the small presses you’re interested in, especially if you know any authors who have worked with a particular publisher. Small presses have only a fraction of the distribution and marketing reach that Big Five imprints and the big indies have, but this is a highly viable option. And you can always aim at an agent and the NYC publishing houses with your next book, if you choose.
Question 3: With massively successful video game franchises like Resident Evil and The Last of Us, horror films consistently performing well at the box office (not to mention carving out their places in mainstream culture), and the sheer cultural popularity of iconic horror figures such as Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, and the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King—why do you think that horror literature, from local bookstores to big 5 publishers, isn’t taken as seriously as other genres? Horror, as mentioned above, thrives in other mediums, so why not in literature? And is there anything writers and readers can do to change this? If so, then what?
We’ve certainly seen respect for horror grow in the last decade, with “elevated horror” films racking up box office sales, online fervor (with some vitriol, too, sure, but what doesn’t have vitriol in this unhappy world we currently live in?), and think pieces in magazines. Horror is being acknowledged, at least a little, as having Important Things to Say.
But to answer the question(s), I might have to say something that gets a little closer to rude than I’d like. Horror in film is immersive and visual (duh), so the filmmaker can manifest the desired feelings of terror, unease, etc., really easily and effectively, assuming they’re talented.
Meanwhile, horror in video games is immersive and participatory, the latter of which is particularly perfect for this genre.
Horror in literature might not be participatory, but it can be even more immersive than film…when it’s really well-written and focuses on creating the feelings of horror. Unfortunately, so much of today’s horror literature isn’t crafted that way. It’s my opinion that a lot of modern horror novels are just trying to be thrillers/suspense novels with supernatural or extra-bloody elements that receive the horror tag. They’re written with similar narrative beats that can eventually lead to a same-y type of feeling, which is also how the thriller genre is thought of by a wide swath of the reading public. (For the record, I love a well-written and well-constructed thriller.)
There are certainly exceptions. There are many wonderful horror novels being published in the mainstream today. There are horror novels with rich literary prose that I get excited just thinking about. But because the large majority of them lack that atmosphere and immersive prose that pull the reader into the sensations and building dread of horror, and the large majority forget to make the reader care deeply about the characters in the stories, the public is left with this sense that horror literature is less deserving of respect. The great horror novel becomes another needle in the haystack next to the one I mentioned earlier.
I do think we’ve been edging into a phase of “elevated horror” in literature that’s similar to what we’ve seen in Hollywood. Books like Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts, Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians, and Kristi DeMeester’s Such a Pretty Smile, just to name a few, are showing people that horror can be literary in all the varying shades of that word. I’d love to see this go further.
Question 4: What are your general (or extensive) thoughts on AI in literature?
I could write 5,000 words on this, hardly taking a breath the whole time, but I’ll try to keep it short.
AI is theft. AI is plagiarism. AI is terrible and should be shunned by anyone interested in calling themselves an author or a reader. I’ll give AI one shallow alcove to stand proudly in: If someone wants something approximating art that only they alone will experience, then by all means, grab your prompt and have your AI program generate it. But once a person crosses the threshold and asks/expects others to experience it, it becomes art, and AI simply is not art. Go back to the beginning of this paragraph and read the first two sentences again.
Art is based on human experience, human messiness, human weaknesses as much as human strengths — it requires experience and emotion and thought through a human lens, not a computer stealing experiences and emotions and thoughts from a range of humans. It is, to belabor the point, theft and plagiarism. There’s no way around the unethical core of it. Anyone who reads up on how AI generates its approximation of art will see how it scrapes and mines all the real human art that’s been bled out of real humans.
But AI isn’t going anywhere, and there are plenty of people who will use it to call themselves artists, not caring that they’re acting unethically. So we, as human creators and human consumers, will have to recalibrate if we want to keep art genuine.
Ultimately, in the next decade or so, I predict that we’ll see much greater value placed on humanity. In characters. In literature, a big example will be placing greater emphasis on prose quality and less value on plots whose only jobs are to nudge you forward without lingering on the uninspiring writing. But even in the “plot is all that matters” arena, I don’t think AI will be able to match simple humanity in our lifetimes.
Question 5: What are some novels or collections that deserve more exposure?
I’m so behind on my reading, and when I do read, I am not often able to read all — or even most of — the books on Mount TBR. That said, I’ll highlight Daniel Mills’s Among the Lilies — pastoral, eerie stories that dip into weird fiction and horror in interesting ways and with accomplished prose no AI could replicate. A.C. Wise’s The Ghost Sequences is wonderful and creepy. Bernardo Esquinca’s The Secret Life of Insects takes a British horror sensibility and places it in fascinating Mexican contexts. For novels, Marie NDiaye’s My Heart Hemmed In would make Robert Aickman and Shirley Jackson blush with pride.
Question 6: What is one book that every aspiring horror writer should read?
That’s tough, so I’m going to choose two out of the twenty or so I’d like to list: Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and MR James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. The former is the most expertly written horror novel of all time, with some truly chilling passages and atmospheric depictions. The latter is a masterclass in how to unnerve readers using minimal ingredients, with the added bonus of being perfect for cozy winter reading.
Question 7: What’s next for you?
2024 is a bare-cupboard year, but 2025 will see the publication of my debut novel, which takes place in the world of my short stories “October Film Haunt: Under the House” and “The Pine Arch Collection" with heavy overlap. I’ve also started writing my second novel, which is sort of kind of my take on the Great American Haunted House Novel. Family moves into house, terrible, awful, dreadful things happen, etc.
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Michael Wehunt is a semi-reclusive creature living in the trees outside Atlanta with his partner and their dog. Together, they hold the horrors at bay. He is the author of the collections Greener Pastures and The Inconsolables, and his debut novel is forthcoming from St. Martin's Press. His work has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award, shortlisted for the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts' Crawford Award, and published in Spain, where it garnered nominations for the Premio Ignotus and Premio Amaltea, winning the latter. Find him in the digital woods at www.michaelwehunt.com.
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