Stephen King’s favorite children

María Pérez de San Roman, The editor of the private label La Biblioteca de Carfax detects a good moment and an increase in “production, translation and publication in Spain, in quality and in the interest of readers”. Even though we are relative. “I wish all horror movie enthusiasts would turn to literature…” In this beautiful period, it is also important that fantasy genres are increasingly included in the works of ‘mainstream’ writers. something pointed out by the greatest work of the genre in the Spanish language Mariana Enriquez The festival, which was recently held for the 42nd time, has its dangers. “It has become a prestigious genre, and now there are many writers who have no idea about the genre and start writing in it without reading anything. When you see these novels by ‘literary’ horror writers, they are a shame.”

This is not the case for the five authors we were able to talk to whose work has recently been published in Spain. Four of these have taken off thanks to praise from King, a prolific writer who first writes ‘bad write-ups’, rave reviews for bands or covers, and then tweets. “Young writers and filmmakers need help (…) and I have always felt like an evangelist when it comes to popular culture.”

Stephen Graham Jones

Stephen Graham Jones (Midland, Texas, 1972) collects Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson trophies, the kind of badges of honor that make the reader hesitate to turn off the light before bed. Although his popularity skyrocketed when he turned his career around with his last novels, ‘The only good Indian’ (2020), ‘Night of the models’ and the book recently published in Spain (like its predecessors, by La Biblioteca de Carfax and translated by Manuel de los Reyes) ‘My heart is a chainsaw.’ This member of the Blackfoot Indian Nation has just passed through Madrid and Barcelona. Professor of Literature at the University of Colorado, he also has a lot to say about the genre he developed and the horror that is its raw material. It’s been part of our programming since we were crippled apes on the savannah, he says, so “that rush makes us feel human” and more so that it’s not real, “that feeling of being alive, of being alive.” ”

Summary of this feeling ‘final girl’, The girl who survived the chain of murders is the prototype of the ‘slasher’ cinema, which obsesses the protagonist of the movie ‘My heart is a chainsaw’, a girl who is out of place, self-destructive and lives by a lake. A secret inside. And he writes a guide to the genre for his teacher, which is an interesting ‘bonus piece’ of the novel.

Stephen Graham Jones started with books that were overshadowed by their relationships with Native Americans. He reacted by writing either more experimental literary novels or more “pulp” horror novels. It wasn’t until recently that he decided to “combine this literary education with writing horror novels.” “I used to write twice, then I became a writer again,” he admits.

His book features an underwater Christian cemetery (he wanted to subvert the Indian cemetery cliché, seeing it as a metaphor for “the US’s guilt over its past”), but it’s also a luxurious development. Gentrification is something he sees as a parallel phenomenon to the colonization or ownership of an individual: only the scale changes.

Catriona Region

With four books published in Spain in the last two years, Catriona Region It turns out. The King received great support when he said: “rising expectation ‘The Last House on Needle Street’ This is true (…) I haven’t read such an exciting series since ‘Gone Girl’ and a month before its release. ‘Sun clock’ He warned his fans in capital letters: “DON’T LOSE THIS BOOK. “It’s truly terrifying.” We talked to him about these two books and ‘Little Eve’, During two visits to the Celsius Festival, where he will return this summer to present his recently published new work. ‘Mirror Bay’ (like the previous ones, published in Runas, with translation by Cristina Macía). And in this book he continues to perfect the formula that worked for him: technical jewelery to reveal an unexpected ending that questions everything read up to that point, and a persistent confusion between memory, reality and madness. This time, it’s memories of teenage summers on the Maine coast, with a killer on the loose and a disturbing cave.

How he tells us about his beginnings in the genre could be a novel in itself. He spent every summer on a manor house on Dartmoor on the Devon moors. “This experience I’ve had since I was 13 years old is the deepest fear I’ve had. I feel like I’m adding this to all my novels. While I was in bed, I actually felt a hand grab me from behind and lift me out of bed. “He made me walk. “I still experience these hallucinations, but by the time I was 30 I was already diagnosed with something like hypnotic hallucinations and I still feel the same fear.”

Thomas Olde Heuveld

Thomas Olde Heuveld (Nijmegen, Netherlands, 1983) experienced a creative block for three years; The success of ‘Hex’ His first novel to be translated internationally. This is a particular form of fear that he creates in his next book. ‘Echo’ (Ed. Nocturna, translated by Ana Isabel Sánchez) is currently available in Spain. ‘Hex’ was the terrifying tale, with touches of humour, of a town in inner New York (the first version is in Dutch) that has coexisted for centuries with the ghosts of a witch with sewn-on eyes and mouth, a clearly visible secret. . All. Inside ‘Echo’ Force the machine to confront the spirit of a mountain in the Alps.

“When ‘Hex’ broke, when Stephen King tweeted about the book [«Una bruja maldita mantiene prisionera ciudad del interior de Nueva York. Es total y brillantemente original»] “All my dreams have come true,” he says of himself, adding that he is “a great storyteller and a very generous person who has influenced many generations.” He explains that this puts a lot of pressure on him. «I didn’t want to write a ‘Hex 2.0’. I wanted to reinvent myself and do something different. I tried to bring a new perspective to a classic archetype. Witch in ‘Hex’, possession in ‘Eco'”Heuveld explained this to us in Barcelona last week. This pressure also led him to seek a more complex, less linear narrative.

In his latest book, Heutveld draws on his experiences as a mountain climber. “I am not a religious person, but most importantly, when you go there, you feel that the mountains have a soul. Which are living things? And each one is different. Some are comfortable, some are the opposite. Hostile notes, they don’t want you there. Logically, storms, cold, falling rocks can kill you. Human error is actually the deadliest thing because they are giants and will always be stronger than you. But I wondered what it would be like to describe a mountain as if it were alive. ‘Eco’ is the story of a mountain climber who had an accident on the mountain and became a slave to his soul. It’s like ‘The Exorcist’ but no demons or priests, just a force of nature.”

Supernatural elements have infiltrated daily life. One of the foundations of the narrative of Stephen King or Shirley Jackson. “Horror literature is when there are beautiful touches on both supernatural fears and superstitions, practical fears, and deep fears like losing your sanity and the person you love. Fundamentally, the things we all fear,” he concludes.

Grady Hendrix

WITH Grady Hendrix As far as we know, Stephen King didn’t give him a pat on the back. Maybe it’s a little too meaningless for him. But Hendrix respects Porland: he undertook a marathon review of the works for his publisher’s portal Tor, which led him to read and review over five years in order of publication “38 novels, 15 novellas, 111 short stories and 5 Poems” by the King. In his last novel, ‘How to sell a haunted house’ (Minotauro, Translated by Pilar de la Peña), presented almost at Halloween in Barcelona, ​​the haunted house in McGuffin, which takes us to a possessed puppet used in Christian-themed puppet shows. Hendrix always has humor in his toolbox, but as a tool “to get the reader to let his guard down; you have to make him forget that this is a horror novel and suddenly remind him.” In all his books he unapologetically takes revenge on pulp culture (confused with “Southern Gothic”; he was born in South Carolina) (‘Horrorstör’, ‘The Book Club Guide to Killing Vampires’, ‘My Best Friend’s Exorcism’) recreates how disturbing dolls are in the last one.

Paul Tremblay

This chain of recommendations would be incomplete, although, unlike the previous four, we did not have the opportunity to talk to him about his book recently. Paul Tremblay The one who offered to sing the praises of Hendrix. His relationship with the master, who was catapulted to fame with another lavish tribute in 2015, is much more direct (“‘The head is full of ghosts’ It scared the hell out of me and it’s pretty hard to scare. His last novel published in Spain ‘Pallbearers Club’ (Nocturna, Translated by Manuel de los Reyes). Like Hendrix’s novels, it’s full of pop references to childhood and adolescence in the ’80s and ’90s, and it’s filled with a group of kids obsessed with funerals (and leaving graves).