The very first horror film that I saw was The Eyes of Laura Mars, a John Carpenter movie from 1978. “I stayed awake and I wrote a lot of books.” What that did was it kept me from ever laying down on the keyboard and going to sleep, because any time I tried to do that I would maybe die.” “So what I would do is I would get out a lot of my knives and put them around my keyboard, balance them in a little clay so they would point up. “I had to start writing at about 10:00 at night, there was no time else to write, but I had been working all day, and I wanted to sleep, or my body did,” he recalls. Sharp objects have shaped his writing practice since he just started out, when his kids were young and he worked two jobs at a warehouse and a library. Why, pray tell, is Jones walking around with an axe? “If I have something sharp, then I feel more alert,” he explains. I don't want anybody to call the cops.” He takes the axe back inside. But I just now realized I'm carrying an axe, because I like to walk around my study with an axe. “It was too cold in my house so I came outside to pace in the front yard.

I’m on the other end of the line, and as he waxes poetic about the cultural impact of the slasher genre, he realizes that this might not be a good look. Or maybe it wasn’t a whole net of fish-they can’t do that here in inland America, can they?-but one or two of the really big fish, pulled up from the very bottom of the lake.Horror writer Stephen Graham Jones is pacing around his front yard with an axe. She coughs again, has to close her eyes to keep from throwing up. Some men from the town gutted a big haul of them over the side of their boat, the intestines and non-meaty parts adhering together with the congealing blood to make a gooey floating scab.

She covers herself with her arms, sits on her heels as best she can.Īnd now she knows what that smell has to be: fish guts.

“Sven!” she calls to the blackness encroaching from all sides, now. what? A mat of algae? Lake scum? At this altitude, snow still in the ditches? She dry heaves, falls to her knees from it. He slips in almost without a sound, just one gulp and gone.Īlone on the canoe now, Lotte stands unsteadily, the back of her hand coming instantly up to her nose, her mouth-the smell from whatever stringy grossness Sven dragged in over the side.

My heart was a chainsaw