American author Grady Hendrix – from Charleston, South Carolina – thought one day that if there were haunted houses, why not haunted stores? And took the “Horrorstor” (Hydra). Everyday terror led him to “The Exorcism of My Best Friend” (Minotaur) and immediately to “The Book Club’s Guide to Killing Vampires” (Minotaur): two horror novels set in the neighborhoods where the author lived in the late eighties. He was educated. These days Celsius talked about it all at 232 festivals of fantasy literature, science fiction and horror. He explains this in this newspaper with the help of the translator Virginia de la Fuente.
–Is the eighties scarier or these years?
-No, of course not. Now everything is much worse.
– What prompted you to write “My best friend’s exorcism”?
-Actually, I wrote this novel for an economic issue: I needed money. He wanted to publish another book and gave the publisher a few ideas, but none of them seemed to interest him. So all of a sudden I came across the title “Exorcism of My Best Friend,” but I had no idea. Just the title. And the editor liked it. The novel is built around the idea that faith is no longer what it was in the seventies. I think there is now more faith in friendship than religion. Friendship is a very powerful thing, and adolescence is the stage where they bond the most. That’s how I felt. The novel takes place in the eighties, when I was in high school. The second reason for writing this novel is that the person possessed in exorcism stories usually doesn’t have much to do with it, but rather a priest or saint. I wanted to change the paradigm of exorcism novels and highlight the holdings.
– In “My Best Friend’s Exorcism”, the parents are the bad guys, but he saves them in “The Book Club’s Guide to Killing Vampires.”
– In “My Best Friend’s Exorcism”, the parents must be the bad guys because I focus on the adventures of teenagers. In “The Book Club’s Guide to Killing Vampires,” the focus is on women, so husbands are the bad guys.
– Mixes the perfect mother and perfect urbanization with the perfect vampire.
–In the nineties life seemed idyllic: everything was perfect, the economy was incredible; living was easy. The truth is, nothing is further from the truth. There were a few things that were pretty bad and swept under the rug, but they didn’t want to spoil the economic boom. With that, everything else was ignored. The hidden problems of the past have come to deal a good blow to the present. It’s been happening since the war in Iraq, the attack on the World Trade Center, or the collapse of the big banks.
– Has a social bubble burst in the United States?
-There is always a premise in horror novels: the villains will return in retaliation. And that’s what happened to us. And this is what appears in the novel.