Dead Dogs and Final Girls: An Interview with Stephen Graham Jones

Stephen Graham Jones is the award-winning author of more than twenty-three novels and hundreds of short stories. He is a riveting storyteller, the kind that makes the room go quiet. He’s a master of literary forms across many genres, the darker the better. His tales are brimming with wry humor, hurt and heart, and often gallons of blood. He explores the complexities of relationships between family and friends, and werewolves, and ghosts, and final girls. Time bends back on itself in his stories. It clings to characters who thought their futures might erase their pasts. His work is haunting, disturbing, full of wonder and awe. If you have a nervous temperament, then perhaps you’d better read Jones’s work in the daylight. But truly, his stories are best read in the dark, when they can work their way into your dreams.  Over the years we’ve reviewed and appreciated many of our favorite Stephen Graham Jones stories, and we’re all looking forward to his newest novel, The Only Good Indians, available May 19th. Recently, Fiction Unbound contributor C.S. Peterson had the privilege of sitting down with Mr. Jones to talk about his upcoming book, monsters, ghosts, and the writing life.

C.S. Peterson: Let’s jump right in with monsters and ghosts. What is the difference between them, and what makes a good monster?

Stephen Graham Jones: A good monster, yeah. I think ghosts and monsters are really different. Ghosts just generally startle you then deliver news, or exposition of some sort. But a monster, what makes a monster good, I think, is that it’s more than human. Oftentimes a monster can’t be killed by bullets; that’s one way you know it’s a monster. In The Only Good Indians, it’s Elk-head woman. She gets shot, but that doesn’t stop her. What makes a monster good is their implacability; the fact that they just don’t stop. They take damage, but they keep coming, they keep coming, they keep coming. That’s what makes them terrible.

CSP: Like in the movie It Follows. There’s nothing that you can do. It’s always going to be there. 

SGJ: Yeah, that’s a good monster.

CSP: But in your novella, Mapping the Interior, there’s a ghost that becomes something else. It starts as a ghost, one that the protagonist desperately wants to see, but then it becomes a monster.

SGJ: It does, yeah. That was my intention in Mapping the Interior. I wanted to know how to make a ghost scary, you know? And the only way I could figure to make a ghost scary was making it slowly become corporeal. To give it a body.

CSP: And then it becomes monstrous.

SGJ: Then it becomes monstrous. To me ghosts are scary because they have information that’s hidden. Either they have information, or they stand for that information, a past murder or whatever. They can be scary though, like the ghost girl in Stir of Echoes, if you saw that, with Kevin Bacon. That’s a pretty scary ghost.

CSP: A ghost that has information messes with time. That happens in a lot of horror. There’s the thing that you did in your twenties and it comes back. It’s like a moment that’s never finished, just ignored. A ghost can bring information that makes the past literally alive in the present. 

SGJ: They can.

CSP: So how do you manage time like that in your writing? All these nested stories and time repeating itself in patterns? There’s a moment in your new book where all time's kind of happening all at once. It was a deeply affecting moment.

SGJ: Thank you! That was what I was going for and I was worried that people weren’t going to be able to follow it, you know? I worried that I was just seeing a thing in my head but I wouldn’t be able to get that on the page. I’m glad it landed. A lot of my novels play with time. Mapping the Interior plays with time. My first novel plays with time, and quantum theory, and all that. But how to manage it? To me it really is just about me in my head. It all makes sense. The hard part is making it make sense on the page. That’s always the thing with fiction I guess. I do suspect that time is an illusion, you know? That's just the constraint we put on our perception such that we can order the world sequentially. I do think that you can erupt through that occasionally, and see the truth. Probably, in my fiction, I'm always trying to stage that eruption, those moments where you step outside, or above, or you see through. 

CSP: Like Gödel's incompleteness theorems—there’s things that are true, but you have to get outside the system in order to prove that they are so.

SGJ: Exactly, yeah, like the Barber of Seville cuts everybody’s hair but who cuts his hair— 

CSP: There are storytellers scattered through your work, very consciously telling stories in a story. There’s a feeling of nested narratives that bleed into one another. In this new novel, one character, Denorah, actually becomes a story while she is still grounded in the real world and the present time.

 SGJ: Yeah, and at the very end it turns out that she is kind of a story. They’re telling her story up in the the star-lodge or something. I think I get that impulse, to always be nesting narratives, or Russia dolling the narratives, from reading so much Philip K. Dick. In his later years, in the late sixties, in his novels anyways, he did that.  He did it in a way that felt to me like he was trying to expose the truth, if that makes sense. Like he was trying to use the nested  narratives as a way to trick realty into revealing itself. I don’t think I do it as well as Philip K. Dick, but I never lost that impulse to try.

CSP: It’s almost self-referential. You know you’re telling a story, and there are people in the story, telling the story of the story.

SGJ: Exactly. And really, when you say it like that, it’s probably a result of my twenty-year-old self. I was a huge John Barth fan: “Lost in the Fun House,” “Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor,” “Giles Goat Boy,” “The Sot-Weed Factor.” Philip K. Dick can nest narratives like nobody else, but tell you the truth, John Barth did it with much more sophistication, and much more playfulness. The trick is, when John Barth did it, it was like he was trying to figure out what this car does. Whereas Philip K. Dick was trying to drive the car into places where he’d never been. John Barth is amazingly smart and capable, but I never got the sense that he believed there was something else, you know? I think, with Philip K. Dick, that he suspected there was something, some bigger structure, that he thought he might figure out. 

CSP: Can we talk about your newest novel, The Only Good Indians? What was it like, writing this book?

SGJ: Yeah. I wrote the first part of it and I thought I was just going to write a novella. But then I got to the end and something happened, which doesn’t happen now in the book. The last line was “Thank you dad. I can take it from here.” I’d written the whole first hundred, hundred-ten pages with Lewis and Pita, in second person. So with the narrator, coming out in the last line, instead of being second person, it became a dramatic monologue. It was the story she was telling to her dad. So when she said that, it launched me into the rest of the novel, which happened really fast, organically, naturally. I’m talking about basketball and sweat lodges, you know, and killing people. That’s what I do. 

CSP: And still in the novel the second person voice sneaks in! 

SGJ: It does! I was able to let it live a little bit, and that was really fun to do. 

CSP: It caught me out the first time. I thought “wait a minute, is that her voice?! Is that Elk-head woman?”

SGJ: It was really fun to do. But I had to go back, and to make it actually land right, I had to change the whole first hundred pages to third person. Which is tricky, because a lot of things you can do in second person, you can’t do in third person. So it required a big overhaul. But it was worth it.

CSP: That’s a provocative title, The Only Good Indians. How did you choose that?

SGJ: You’re right. It is a provocative title. I don’t know if I have a good answer yet.

CSP: It’s a kind of title that carries a lot of hurt and history.

SGJ: I guess part of it is, well, who said that first? Roosevelt or Sheridan? Everybody was saying it in the late nineteenth century. Everyone except the Indians. Part of it is that everybody said “the only good Indian,” and so I wanted to make it plural. For some reason making it plural undercut it for me. I am not sure how. Also Denorah, Gabe’s daughter, the final girl in there, she kind of pushes back against “the only good Indian” with the spirit ribbons, you know? She says she’s going to be the best Indian. She's going to rise above that and not be the dead Indian like all the people want her to be. She’s going to be the one that lives. 

CSP: She changes everything. 

SGJ: Yeah.

CSP: That title really echoed throughout the book. I read it through the first time breathlessly, and then I had to go back and read the book a couple more times because I wanted to figure out what you were doing as a writer. But that title kept echoing through, like a question “Who are the good Indians in this story? What does ‘good’ even mean?”

SGJ: I’m glad it works like that. I was quite nervous with the title. I was afraid because, well, I guess the closest analogue I have is when Dave Chapelle quit the Chapelle show. He said the reason he quit was one of the sketches he was doing, an old black-face minstrel with stupid dances, he was doing that, and there was one member of the crew out there who was laughing. Everybody was laughing, but, he said, there was that one member of the crew who was laughing in a way that he didn’t want that person to laugh, you know? And in that same way I was nervous that making the title “The Only Good Indians” would allow people to say it in a way that I didn't want. So it’s a scary title for me to use. 

CSP: In the past you’ve talked about types of horror where there’s a closed cycle of justice, someone has made a choice, put themselves deliberately into a dicy space by hurting someone, or voluntarily walking into a haunted place, and others, where there’s an open cycle, the horror just comes at a character randomly, not as a result of a choice they made. The Only Good Indians doesn't seem to land neatly in either one of those. It’s in different places at different times on those two spectra.

SGJ: For me The Only Good Indians, most of it, is a closed cycle, because these four guys shot some elk they should not have shot. Those elk should’ve been saved for the elders. It comes back to get them. They did something in their twenties that they’re paying for in their thirties. We all think that we skate scot-free in our twenties, but we don’t, you know? You feel those injuries later. So they get punished for what they did, for sure. But Denorah, who was not part of that, she is able to fight it. She can push back and rehabilitate everything. The reason she’s able to do this is because she’s outside that system of justice. 

CSP: Louis, one of the four hunters, is inside that cycle. And his guilt makes him incredibly fragile. His fall is so sudden that I kind of tripped over it the first time. 

SGJ: You mean the way he crumbles psychologically?

CSP: Yeah. He seemed to be ticking all the boxes of a “stable life,” but there’s all this other stuff going on underneath. 

SGJ: Yeah. Of all of the four hunters, Lewis is actually the only one to feel guilt for killing the elk. For the rest of them it’s just another day hunting, you know? They just happened to get caught. Oh well ...

CSP: Still, there’s a sense that they know they are pursued. The hunters are being hunted from the first page. The book opens with one of the hunters, Ricky, running away because of the death of his brother, Cheeto, who overdosed on a friend’s couch.

SGJ: He’s running because of his brother. That scene, talking about Cheeto, comes from when I was riding in an elevator in Great Falls, or maybe I was in Missoula? I don’t know. I was in a hotel going up in an elevator, and another Indian guy got in and he said “You Blackfeet?” and I said “Yeah,” and he said he’s Blackfeet, and in the space of four floors we figured out that one of my cousins died on his couch. Overdosed, you know.

So that’s where that Cheeto thing came in. The funny thing is that the opening of the book now, with Ricky at the bar, originally that was right about in the middle of the novel. My editor had asked me to make some changes, and I thought “Why don’t I pull this to the front? That’ll be more fun.” So I cut-and-pasted it to the front and it changed everything. It had been starting too slow, with Lewis, you know? It needed some blood up front. 

CSP: But that first scene with Ricky sets everything up. There’s the eerie feeling of multiple times and places, layers of the past all present at once. The green-eyed elk is there, and then there’s more than one green-eyed elk.

SGJ: Yeah, the whole heard is there. It was lucky. It was a lucky move. I mean, I didn’t write that scene and think “it's going to be a great opening.” I just thought, you know, I gotta kill Ricky.

CSP: It’s that wonderful thing that happens sometimes when you’re writing a novel. You’re just shuffling things around, and then suddenly, pop!

SGJ: Yeah. It locks into the place.

CSP: You’ve said you write with your heart and revise with your brain. Do you ever have to turn off an internal critic to get back to your heart?

SGJ: Definitely.

CSP: What kind of things do you do to get there? To get past that fear and connect with vulnerability?

SGJ: Loud music. Loud music shuts up the critic in my brain; it's the only thing I’ve ever found. Used to be, in my twenties, I would stay up two nights in a row and then start writing. That would shut down the critic in my brain because he needed some sleep. But nowadays I need sleep, too.

CSP: I can relate to that.

SGJ: It’s got to be music that I know intimately, like the Footloose soundtrack, or Mötley Crüe’s Theater of Pain, or something that I’ve listened to thousands of times.

CSP: So the words aren’t pulling you out.

SGJ: Exactly, and, I think also, you talked about re-engaging the heart, I think it's because I have an emotional connection to driving around listening to Mötley Crüe. An emotional connection silences the rational thinking part, or the critical part. 

CSP: Any other good hints for writing?

SGJ: My big thing I alway say is read outside your genre. It’s too easy, if you only like fantasies, to read only fantasy. If that’s all you read it produces an inbreeding or incestuousness, you know? Read books on nutrition, or Martian landscapes, just different stuff. That stuff is like burrs, and it sticks on your pant legs. You track it back to your home country, your homeland, and then it takes root and grows up into a weird thing that's never existed. 

CSP: On your blog this week it was all about brain science. 

SGJ: Yeah, I love that stuff, brain science and anthropology. I'll read that stuff forever. 

CSP: And you’re right down the hall from the philosophy department, too. Do you ever hang out?

SGJ: No, I only know one person over there. I need to probably. And I should visit upstairs, too. We’re right under the history department; they’re above us.

CSP: You’re a famously prolific writer. When did you start writing The Only Good Indians?

SGJ: Let’s see. My original title was “Where the Old Ones Go.” Then it was titled “Elk-head Woman.” I think I wrote it last March and April actually. 

CSP: That’s so quick. The pace at which you produce stories is legendary. 

SGJ: Yeah, I just wrote a novel over December and January, a big one, a hundred and twenty thousand words, but just the other night now I cut it down to a hundred ten. Last year I wrote three or four novels. One of them’s a slasher, one’s a haunted house, and one of them’s a science fiction novel. 

CSP: That’s crazy fast to me. It blows me away, how fast you write. 

SGJ: You just gotta sit down and turn on the creative faucet.

CSP: What are you working on next, that you can talk about?

SGJ: Night of the Mannequins, which comes out in July. It’s a novella from Tor.com. It’s another slasher, like The Only Good Indians. This novel I wrote in December and January is another slasher.

CSP: One last question: Why are there antlers on that elk-like creature on the cover?

SGJ: That’s a mystery to me, too. When they showed me the cover I said “It’s about a cow elk not a bull elk.”

CSP: There’s one bull elk in the story, he makes an appearance and I thought, “Oh, he’s on the cover! He must be important!” But then, nope.

SGJ: I know. I asked them, at Simon & Schuster, if they’d ever seen a cow elk, or any elk, and they said the only animals they’d seen were pigeons and squirrels.

CSP Well, it’s a really beautiful cover.

SGJ: Yes, it is beautiful.

CSP: This has been so wonderful! Thank you so much for taking the time to talk today.

SGJ: I’ve enjoyed it. Hope we get to do it again!

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Crank it.

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