Here are at Your Favorite Author’s Favorite Author, I’m always thrilled whenever a new conversation opens up exciting firsts for myself and you, dear readers. Somehow, some way, this seems to happen with every column though! This month’s conversation is no exception, as it’s the first time that one of my past interviewees has been selected as the favorite of my current interviewee.

This time around, I’m chatting with Richard Thomas about YFAFA alum Stephen Graham Jones. Richard Thomas is the award-winning author of nine books: four novels—Incarnate, Breaker, Disintegration, and Transubstantiate; four collections—Spontaneous Human Combustion, Tribulations, Staring Into the Abyss, and Herniated Roots; and one novella of The Soul Standard. He has been nominated for the Bram Stoker (twice), Shirley Jackson, Thriller, and Audie awards. His over 175 stories in print include The Best Horror of the Year (Volume Eleven), Cemetery Dance (twice), Behold!: Oddities, Curiosities and Undefinable Wonders (Bram Stoker Award winner), The Hideous Book of Hidden Horrors (ShirleyJackson Award winner), Weird Fiction Review, The Seven Deadliest, Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories, Qualia Nous (#1&2), Chiral Mad (#2-4), PRISMS, and Shivers VI. He has also editedfive anthologies.

On a more personal note, Richard is a friend and long-time mentor of your humble interviewer. Through his Storyville classes on short fiction, dark fiction, and novel writing and writing conversations over the years, I’ve learned a great deal about craft, finding my voice, and finding my place in the market. As a teacher, Richard embraces the notion of life-long learning. He cares deeply about craft, taking stories apart to find why and how they work. There are many other writers who have come through the Richard Thomas school of writing and I suspect the next generation of favorite authors may well be filled by the ranks of Storyville students past.

To that end, it’s always a pleasure to talk about authors and writing with Richard Thomas. His appreciation of art and craft from the classics to contemporaries is apparent in every considered and impassioned answer.

Who is your favorite author and why?

Stephen Graham Jones. When I think back to the origin of my career, when I went to The Cult to read all of Chuck Palahniuk’s work after seeing Fight Club, there were a number of authors I studied with—Chuck, of course, Max Barry, Monica Drake, Craig Clevenger, Jack Ketchum, etc. The Cult got me to The Velvet—a website for Craig, Will Christopher Baer, and Stephen Graham Jones. Stephen is a voice that has stayed with me over the years, showing me what can be done, and with such range. He’s also one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet. He blurbed early work of mine, invited me to be a guest author at the University of California-Riverside, and has been an informal mentor for the past 15 years. What he does with his stories and novels—it has taught me a lot.

Before we delve deeper, could you give  a little more background on both The Cult and The Velvet? What exactly were these websites/resources? How did you benefit from and learn from your exposure to these online hubs?

The Cult was originally part Chuck fan club and part workshop. Eventually the classes and workshops moved to LitReactor. The Velvet was mostly just for fans of those three authors, and they’d hang out, chat, and talk about writing there. Both places were rabbit holes of advice, with a ton of talented authors hanging out, chatting, and taking classes, evolving. It was a blast.

When were you first made aware of this author and when were you first drawn to their work?

LOL just kind of answered that in the first question. So, it was via The Velvet, and then reading his early work, we eventually got to a place where I published his collection  After the People Lights Have Gone Off (Dark House Press). What drew me to his work was the originality, the emotion, the weirdness, and the depth. So many of his stories go beyond where most authors would stop. He has a great mind not just for horror, but for humanity, and that creates some powerful experiences.

Is there one particular piece of work from this author that you are especially fond of or that’s had a significant creative impact on you? What is that piece and what makes it so appealing or affecting for you?

My first thought is his story, “Father, Son, Holy Rabbit,” but what truly stands out for me is his early novel, All the Beautiful Sinners. The opening to that book still haunts me to this day. It’s No Country for Old Men meets Silence of the Lambs with a Native American slant. It’s darker and more serious than some of his current slasher work, and that always appealed to me—the weirdness, the uncanny, the surreal. It’s a dense, complicated book. I love it. 10/10.

“Father, Son, Holy Rabbit” is a piece you teach in your writing classes and it lives up to that characterization of SGJ pushing stories beyond their natural end-point. Over the years, what have you found student reaction to be when covering this piece? Have you noticed any specific differences in student work following the unit on that story? And, as an aside, wouldn’t a new edition of All the Beautiful Sinners be a wonderful thing? Such a dark, uncompromising piece that does for serial killer/true-crime lore what SGJ later does with the slasher in the Indian Lake Trilogy.

“FSHR” is such a great story, I see new students read it and have those “AHA moments” all the time. The first time I read it, I didn’t like the ending, but the more I dug in, and realized that the twist was not what happened in the woods, but the consequences of those actions, how they kind of broke the kid—that’s what made that story special to me. Pushing beyond where most authors would have stopped. As for ATBS, I do believe there is a new edition coming and it’s going to be back in print soon. I can’t find details about that, but I’m 99% sure that is happening. It’s an amazing book.

How often do you revisit that particular piece or the author’s work in general? What lessons have you learned at various times from the work?

I used to teach All the Beautiful Sinners  in my Contemporary Dark Fiction classes, but found it was too much to go from Annihilation to ATBS to Perdido Street Station. Since I was already teaching two of his stories in that class, I swapped it out for Sara Garn’s Come Closer. But this is one of the books that I’ve probably given away more than any other title. That and Baer’s Kiss Me, Judas. I’ve given away dozens of copies of each. It’s a case study on crime, horror, thrillers, surrealism, and has really pushed me to do more with my longer work. I think all of my novels after Transubstantiate benefited from it—Disintegration, Breaker (a Thriller Award finalist), and my latest, Incarnate.

Are there any pieces in the author’s oeuvre that have not worked as well for you? If yes, which ones and why do you think that connection was not as strong?

I always struggle with horror that infuses humor into it, and I’m not an expert on slasher horror, so those are places that I struggle sometimes. But the moment I say that, I think about a story like “Wait for Night” at Tor [now Reactor.com], which I love, and that proves the exception. With the slasher stuff, it’s just that I’m not an expert or a huge fan of that sub-genre, so it doesn’t always connect with me the way some of his work does.

What writing lessons have you taken, purposefully or accidentally, from your favorite author?

 I took a class with Stephen, at LitReactor back in the day, and the thing I think I took away from that time together was to really do my research, and then to push myself, beyond the easiest choices, the most obvious character and plots, into darker, weirder, more impactful places. The end of “Father, Son, Holy Rabbit” is an example, a similar technique that Brian Evenson uses in “Windeye.” So I’m conscious now, probably in all of my work going back 10-15 years, of pushing beyond, going deeper, really working hard to be original, different, layered, deep, and intense. It’s body, mind, and soul—action, emotion, and thought.

It’s interesting because you’re the first author to pick one of my past interviewees as your favorite. And now, by mentioning Evenson, you’ve brought up another YFAFA alum. Could you talk a bit about the value of reading, studying, learning from those authors who are either contemporaries or who’re one, two steps above on the proverbial ladder? Are there different lessons to be found in this work versus, say, the “classics”?

I think it’s important to read the “classics” in whatever genre you write. So, if you’re a horror author, you have to read Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Shirley Jackson, Jack Ketchum, Clive Barker, etc. But our contemporaries, they may be even MORE important. SGJ and Evenson both had a huge influence on my work. Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation changed me as an author. So many people, stories, and books helped me to evolve as an author—A. C. Wise’s “Harvest Song, Gathering Song,” Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, Mary Gaitskill’s collection Bad Behavior. The list is endless. I think I’m the author I am today as much because of King and Palahniuk, as I am because of Steve Toase, Livia Llewellyn, and Rich Larson. It’s crucial, IMO, to not only read the top publications in your genre (such as Nightmare, Cemetery Dance, The Dark, etc.) as it is to read The Best Horror of the Year, edited by Ellen Datlow. It keeps me inspired, and it keeps me current—what’s selling, what’s winning awards, what’s resonating.

Are there any works in your bibliography that you feel are closest to the work of your favorite—whether in terms of style, subject matter, length, etc.? Talk a little about those similarities.

Oh man, where to start. I mentioned that I think all of my novels after Transubstantiate benefit from Stephen’s voice. With almost every story I write, but especially when I struggle, I often think, “What would Stephen do?” LOL, I need to get WWSGJD tattooed on my wrist or something. Stephen and Brian [Evenson] have both pushed me to do more, and I think that resonates in my last collection of stories, Spontaneous Human Combustion (a Bram Stoker finalist). Whether it’s the climactic erasure of the protagonist in “Repent” or the horrific reveal in “Battle Not With Monsters,” they benefit from Stephen’s voice and work. OH—I can think of a direct connection for sure. I reprinted his story, “Faberge” at Gamut, the original iteration. It wasn’t until I was editing that story that I realized it was 700+ words, and one sentence. That blew me away. I was so impressed by it, that when Sara Read had an open call for an anthology—Gorgon: Stories of Emergence (Pantheon)—I decided to take a run at it and write my own one-sentence story. The minimum word count was 1,500 though—but that eventually netted me the story, “Undone,” which got into the collection. That was a very hard story to write. This was a direct reaction to Stephen’s story. I wrote a similar story last year, entitled, “Sunk” that was 2,001 words, also one sentence, and it got into the Off Season: Coastal Horror anthology (Dark Matter), edited by Marissa van Uden. So, he continues to influence my work all the time.

Where does your writing diverge from your favorite author’s? Are there any elements from your favorite author’s work that you would like to incorporate in your own? If yes, what are these?

I think we’re pretty similar, in many ways. In fact, when we were shopping my latest novel, Incarnate (an arctic horror, sin eater book) one of the comps was Stephen’s The Only Good Indians. I guess we diverge in the slasher fare, I don’t know it well enough to really write slashers. The emotional impact, the surrealism, the humanity—I try to do that with all of my writing, and I owe a lot to SGJ for helping to show me how to do that.

Talking with other writers about writing is something you do on a fairly regular basis as a teacher and mentor. (I should know!) But what’s that experience like for you when it’s from the other side and you’re talking craft or even sharing work with someone like SGJ? How do you navigate that balance between being reader, student, and contemporary?

Any time I can hang out with an author I admire (such as SGJ, Brian Evenson, Benjamin Percy, Cynthia Pelayo, or Mercedes Yardley for example) I try to listen as much as I talk. They have so much to share, and I just try to be a sponge. Quick example—I was at Stokercon this year, and I ran into Brian, and we got to sit down and have a drink and chat about his next book, a possession story, similar in vibes to Come Closer. It was a fascinating conversation and I can’t wait for that to come out. I also got to pick his brain about a book I’m trying to write, about new age holistic medicine, and vibrations—and how that might be horrific, tapping into the unseen entities around us (everything from angels and demons to aliens and ghosts). I really valued that time. I try to get over my fears, and insecurities, and just have a conversation, not get too intimidated by these authors that I look up to, and just open up and digest what they have to say. It’s always enlightening.

If a reader wanted to start reading your favorite author, what piece would you recommend they start with?

Oh man, so tough. For novels, I’d start with something easier like Mongrels or really any of his short story collections. Then, progress to All the Beautiful Sinners. I, of course, love “Father, Son, Holy Rabbit,” since I included that in my anthology The New Black (Dark House Press), but I could list dozens of stories that blow me away. He has a lot of work up on Reactor.com, so that’s some free access as well.

If you could ask your favorite author one question about their work, what would it be?

Oh man, tough question. I know it sounds stupid but, “Where do you get your ideas?” I’d love to be a fly on the wall of his brain when he comes up with these ideas. Is it from the world around him, his travels, his childhood, the news? Beyond that, I’d love to talk about what he believes in—monsters, aliens, demons, angels, cryptids, etc.

What do you have coming out next on the writing and publishing front? What are you working on now?

Well, Incarnate, my fourth novel came out in September, so that’s my latest book. I had stories out in Lightspeed and The Off-Season this year, and will have stories in 3-Lobed Burning Eye, and the And One Day We Will Die: Strange Stories Inspired by the Music of Neutral Milk Hotel anthology (that you’re editing) next year.

Thank you for taking the time to chat with me about your favorite author.

My pleasure! I think Stephen is one of the most powerful authors in horror today, and I encourage everyone to check him out.

Where can readers find you online?

You can find me at my blog (What Does Not Kill Me), my online classes (Storyville), as well as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.