Eat the Dark: Horror Author Joe Schreiber
By: Elaine Lamkin
In October of 2006, with little to no fanfare, a new horror novelist, Joe Schreiber, was “released” upon an unsuspecting horror-reading public. His book was “Chasing the Dead”, a terrifying excursion about a mother searching for her missing child on the longest night of the year, being led around snowy New England by a horrifying entity. Now Schreiber has just released his second walk on the VERY dark side with “Eat the Dark”, a fast-paced, white-knuckler set in an all-but-abandoned hospital that has to deal with one last patient. That’s where the trouble begins…
Bloody-Disgusting recently interviewed the enthusiastic and very funny Schreiber about his love for horror and what the future holds for his growing legion of fans.
BD: Thank you for taking time to talk to Bloody-Disgusting about your exploding career. Now comes everyone’s favorite question – tell us some, if not all, of The Joe Schreiber Story. Where you are from, where you got your education, whatever else you want to share.
JS: I was spawned from the guts of Flint, Michigan, home of Michael Moore and Autoworld, but my dad was a surgeon with extremely itchy feet—we moved a half-dozen times. I lived in Alaska, Wyoming and northern California before coming back to Michigan, which is where I started writing seriously, went to high school, fell in love, lost my virginity and got arrested for loitering in front of the local frozen yogurt stand. I headed off to college at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I studied English but spent most of my winters staying warm in the used bookstores that sold paperbacks for under a buck—you could walk in with ten dollars and leave with an armload of mass markets by everybody from Richard Stark to Donald Barthelme to Guy N. Smith. That’s where I got my real education at the hands of the greats.
BD: What's the first book or story you can remember that knocked your socks off?
JS: Now you’re really going back. The earliest story I remember in a very visceral sense, I don’t even remember the name of. It was in one of those old Alfred Hitchcock anthologies—I was probably ten years old—with a title like Pardon My Ghoulish Laughter, and there was a scene that took place completely in the dark, a character walking barefoot through a cave and steps on top of a dead body. I realized as I was reading it that I could actually feel how the pulpy still warm corpse felt underfoot. I was stunned. It was like sticking a fork in an electrical socket. I was instantly hooked and it wasn’t much longer until I thought: I could do this. I want to do this.
BD: What were some of your first influences to want to give writing a shot as a career?
JS: Influences? I was all over the place. At first I loved the guys who wrote stories because they almost seemed like they had to. Writers like Harlan Ellison, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, people that seemed to write about writing almost as much as stories themselves. Some of the EC comics were coming out as reprints, the old Russ Cochran ones, and I devoured them too. I had a big hardcover book called Horror Comics of the 1950s, which I still have and it has become one of my prized possessions. I watched that Dan O’Bannon World War 2 bomber/zombie segment of the Heavy Metal movie about a dozen times and spent a long time listening to Iron Maiden tapes. Threw it all into the mix and spewed out the results.
BD: How old were you when you wrote your first story? And do you remember what it was about?
JS: I sure do! My first story that I actual remember writing was called “Fish Food.” I wrote it when I was probably, I don’t know, thirteen. Basically it was the not-exactly-subtle tale of a gluttonous snooty food critic who berates his wife in a fancy restaurant, then devours a bellyful of fish eggs, which then spontaneously hatch in his belly. He splits open spewing hundreds of tiny silvery fish across the horrified diners. Just a few pages long but I was grinning the whole time I was writing it. Like the guy in the story, I couldn’t get it out fast enough. I remember sitting there writing it out longhand with a big foolish grin on my face the whole time.
BD: Your first book, ”Chasing the Dead”, just seemed to come out of nowhere and blew people’s socks off. Another dreaded author question – where did you get the idea for the story?
JS: “Chasing the Dead” was written under some fairly intense personal circumstances. Since college I spent a long time bumming around the country, working in bookstores, not making much money. My big break supposedly came when I got hired as a writer for a dot-com company in New York—you can see where this story’s heading, right? The bubble burst and not long after, my wife was pregnant with our first child. I found myself in my mid-30s, living in Pennsylvania, going back to school, in this case radiography, so I could support my coming family. I’d get up in winter mornings while it was still dark, scrape the frost off the windshield of the Olds 88 that my parents had given me, and drive forty minutes to class and come back that night. It was somewhere along that dark, desperate ride that I imagined a hand reaching up from the back seat of the car to grab my shoulder. Every other part of the story came out of that one moment.
BD: Please tell me that someone has shown some interest in optioning “Chasing the Dead” for a film. If someone has, how much control would you like to retain over the story and the setting especially?
JS: Yes, there’s been a bit of interest—mainly from independent filmmakers and smaller companies. I’m not one of those guys that need to keep iron-fisted control over the results. I’ve done some screenwriting, adapting other people’s work, and it turns out giving the filmmakers some freedom when adapting a book is a good idea. Slavish devotion to the source material…I don’t know, it never really seems to work out. It’s tricky. Plus, I’m a big believer that, when you sell a thing, you say goodbye to it. If the movie version comes back to you in some recognizable guise, great; if not, the book is still on the shelf, exactly as I wrote it.
As far as the setting specifically, I’d obviously love to keep it in New England—to me, that’s Crypt Keeper country—but what can you do? Elmore Leonard said they couldn’t have made a worse movie than the original film version of “The Big Bounce,” but when he saw the one with Owen Wilson in the Hawaii setting, he was like, “Oh, I guess there’s one worse one.”
BD: Now your second book has come out to amazing reviews and it truly is scary as hell. I read that your “day job” is as an MRI tech at a hospital in Pennsylvania so obviously that knowledge was helpful. But how much of the story would you say MIGHT have been inspired by something that happened on the job?
JS: First of all, thank you for the kind words about Eat the Dark. I certainly hope it’s scary. I still work the midnight shift down in the hospital basement from time to time, and I’m all alone down here. It never happened to me, but one of the techs was working at 3 AM and a patient from the psychiatric ward wandered downstairs, just completely disoriented, and found their way into the department. Nothing bad happened—security just came and took the patient back up, I think.
This last summer, though, there was a much more serious incident in Salt Lake City where a convict was brought in for an MRI. When the guards removed his handcuffs to take him into the magnet, he grabbed the guard’s gun, shot him in the head and escaped. He was eventually caught but—this guy, you should have seen his face. He was covered with tattoos, white supremacist and otherwise. Way worse than anything I could’ve invented. Fiction gets trumped by reality once again.
BD: I thought I detected some Lovecraftian elements in “Eat the Dark”. Am I imaging that or did you indeed add a touch of old Howard Phillips to the stew?
JS: Confession time: I’ve actually never read much Lovecraft—I think I missed that bus, back in high school, when some of my friends were carrying around the re-released paperbacks with the cool Michael Whelan cover art. But I think it’s pretty hard to read and write horror without some of the mythos creeping up around you. My exposure to Lovecraft has been pretty much secondhand, through stories like Stephen King’s “Crouch End,” Peter Straub’s novel Mr. X and the guy at Comic Con wearing the SpongeBob CthuluPants T-shirt. I did read Dan Simmons’ The Terror, last winter, freaked for it, actually, and it made me want to go back to H.P. again—just to revisit those things far up in the white void.
BD: Since you did seem to burst on the horror scene out of nowhere, how did you get your start writing horror? And was that the genre you were attracted to?
JS: I don’t know if I burst out as much as I kind of leaked. I wrote a lot of stuff, one big ugly trunk of it, and most of it was horror because that’s what I love. But not all. There were some weird little side tributaries along the way…the Jesse “The Body” Ventura autobiography, I Ain’t Got Time To Bleed, portions of which I ghostwrote over one crazy weekend in the late ‘90s. Which is, I guess, its own form of horror.
As far as the genre proper, yes, I’ve always loved the whole down and dirty “It could happen in your backyard” feeling of a lot of the original paperbacks of the ‘70s and ‘80s, novels with packs of rabid dogs attacking off-season resort islands, rats, Jack Ketchum’s cannibal kids….really pared-down, hardcore hot rod stuff with characters I felt like I could identify with. King’s The Stand was the first time I’d felt that on an epic scale. It was big and dirty and magnificent at the same time, a giant blood-soaked map of America, uplifting really, and a total head-trip for a fourteen year old. Once I read that, I was like, why would I ever want to write anything else?
BD: Dare I enquire what other horrors await your fans in the coming months or years?
JS: I’ve actually got two things in the hopper right now, in various stages of incubation. The first is a longer novel called The Black Wing, about a family curse and an old house with an entire wing that can only be seen from inside. The second one, called Stillwater, I finished this summer—another real-time book, about a dysfunctional family on a pontoon boat in Maine, under attack from something in the water. I’m calling it Jaws meets Ordinary People. Jaws wins.
BD: Trick question: Where do you see the horror genre going in the near future? Any other new writers out there you think people should pay attention to?
JS: Dang it, that is a trick question! Horror, by its nature, is its best while spilling outward in a hundred different directions at all velocities. In that sense I see it as something has just literally exploded, sending off all different sized steaming shrapnel—psychological, supernatural, religious stuff like Michael Laimo’s been doing, hardcore noir horror, Ed Lee gorefests, Mark Danielewski’s transgressive cut-and-paste antics, and the truly awesome Big Daddy Roth style man-eaters of Norman Partridge, who just happens to be my favorite horror writer de jour.
BD: What are some of your favorite horror works?
JS: Of all time? Sheesh! Poe’s tales—specifically “The Black Cat,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The tales of ETA Hoffman. Kafka’s story about the penal colony. William Lindsay Gresham’s novel of Nightmare Alley. Good old Shirley Jackson and Hill House, which raised the bar so high that nobody’s met it to this very day. Robert Aickman’s short stories are incredible…”Ringing the Changes” set me on my ear. Stephen King’s The Shining and Different Seasons, Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, Clive Barker’s Weaveworld and Imajica, most recently Norman Partridge’s Dark Harvest and some of his short stories. J.F. Gonzales’ unforgettable Survivor, which gambles literally everything and comes out winning.
BD: Favorite horror movies?
JS: The most thrilling time I’ve had at the movies lately was drinking a six pack and watching a DVD of the movie Feast. If you haven’t seen it you should. It won the Project Greenlight award a couple years ago. It’s so good because it’s so cheap and the filmmakers knew it and had nothing to rely on but their wits and humor and characters—it reminded me of the first time I watched Evil Dead 2.
Otherwise my choices are probably not going to surprise anybody. I really liked The Old Dark House, from James Whale, way back. The Thing, both the original and the remake. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Halloween. The Val Lewton movies. I liked Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror quite a bit, particularly the ragged way the footage cut in and out, made me feel like I was twelve.
BD: What is one thing no one knows about Joe Schreiber that you think they should?
JS: One summer in college I hitchhiked to Cape Cod, hopped on the last ferry of the night and spent the night on Martha’s Vineyard out to a cemetery, sleeping on the grave of the late great John Belushi. I like to think that his antic sense of the perverse infected my sensibilities, hopefully permanently.
BD: Thank you so much for you time, Joe! And thank you for the great scares!!
November 2007
