MM: Your writing is firmly rooted in both literary circles and the speculative genres. And though you have written horror, you are considered a literary author because of the quality of your work and your strong academic background.

SGJ: I'm considered literary still? Kind of sucks. But I understand, I guess. Only one, maybe two of my books are horror, so the scales tip towards that default 'literary' setting. I hope to remedy this soon, though. Oh, and being a professor, teaching in an MFA program, all that, it doesn't help me slouch out from under that 'literary' trick, yeah? Man. This is the horror story right here. One guy trying to be horror, science fiction, fantasy - even western or romance - but always getting mis-shelved. But. I mean, Samuel Delaney's done it, right? Brian Evenson? Could be the trick's just to write as best you can, about the stuff that interests you, and tell it however you want to so long as people are reading. Be Joe Lansdale, yeah. That's the goal, always. King's my hero, yeah, but when I aim for stuff, for some way to be down the line, it's Lansdale. Meanwhile, I just keep writing the stuff that interests me, writing it as best I can. And hoping.

MM: How do you feel about the label "horror author"? Our culture does like to label everything for convenience. Would you mind being called a horror author, or seeing your books in the Horror section of a bookstore?

SGJ: I'd be all over it, yeah. But, the labels, yeah, they can be a problem, definitely. Or, from the publisher's perspective, it's marketing, of course, it's targeting an audience, selling them a familiar-enough product. Which I understand - no way am I one of those people who think the market doesn't matter. If people aren't reading you, it's your fault, not theirs. The labels can definitely be a problem, though. Or, they become a problem when they keep somebody only writing within one genre. Because of editorial pressure, yeah, but because you start buying your Wikipedia page too, where it says you write horror. So dies this, I don't know, this One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest story you've got bubbling up the back of your throat. Can I call on Lansdale again, here? If so, then it's him, how he answers when somebody asks what genre he writes in: "The Joe Lansdale genre." That's the way it's got to be for everybody.

MM: You have a new collection of short fiction coming out later this year from Prime Books. In his introduction, Laird Barron says: "The Ones That Got Away is a slippery collection; it resists and gnaws at the bonds of genre, yet may be the most pure horror book I've come across." Later he adds, "Childhood lost. Youth corrupted is the touchstone, the recurring theme in The Ones That Got Away."

SGJ: Yeah, when I was putting this one together, trying to figure out the sequence of it all - you can't back-to-back first-person jobs, you can't lump all the present tense stories together, all that - I finally saw what Laird picked up on immediately: that childhood was an important component of the scare here. Completely not on purpose, too. Well, at least accidental in the sense that, yeah, everything I write, I'm probably trying to do King's IT at some level, but when the story voice pops into my head, starts talking, I'm not thinking King. I'm thinking Oh no, I don't want to have to write about this. But I do.

MM: Is the loss of childhood and innocence horrific, or is it simply part of the process of growing up? Is it possible to become an adult without losing one's innocence...?

SGJ: I'd never considered that, I don't guess. Like you get baptized into another place. I don't know. For me the most magical characters are always the one able to hold on to that innocence, even though they're living in hardly-innocent worlds. But I'm thinking there's not a lot of those trending-to-an-up-ending characters in The Ones That Got Away. Nona, though, in Demon Theory, yeah, she's that. For me, anyway. A Benjy the funhouse can't touch. And Nolan in The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti. Strange. Kind of seems the only way I can cycle a character through a story such that he earns some kind of happy-for-him end, it's to go novel length. Either that or happy endings in short horror fiction often feels too pat, such that it erases the scare it's supposed to impart. Or - wrong word there. 'Inflicted' is what I should say. It's from Evenson: "Truth cannot be imparted, it must be inflicted." Hope I got that right.

But yeah, to get back to the question some: there's a few kids in these stories. Probably because some of the most pure horror I remember, it's being a kid, not really knowing how the world works, sometimes seeing too far into it, and knowing you shouldn't reach your hand across, but closing your eyes and doing it all the same.

MM: Which of the stories in your new collection is your personal favorite? I know that's like asking a dad which of his sons is his favorite - but hey, you probably have a favorite, right?

SGJ: Man. Maybe "The Meat Tree," I guess. Because that's me in the story, yeah - it's me in all the stories, even "Lonegan's Luck," set in 1890 or whenever - but because writing that one, I've always kind of secretly suspected that, if I ever learned how to write a novel, it was in "The Meat Tree" that I learned it. Stories aren't just about cool things happening, about characters making hard decisions. You've got to have a voice to deliver it. Before "The Meat Tree" I'd done a lot of stories that had real and decent voices, but "Meat Tree," for me it's where voice synched up with a layered story in a way that still feels so right to me. But the lead story, "Father, Son, Holy Rabbit," aside from how different it is now from when it ran in Cemetery Dance, I still don't think I'm done with it. Really, I kind of suspect every story I've told, or will tell, it's there, in that. And I'm not done with it.

MM: I love your book Demon Theory, since it plays so cleverly with horror-movie concepts. Are you an avid horror movie viewer? Do you watch the latest releases, or prefer the classics?

SGJ: I'm an omnivore, I guess. Even on the selection committee for a horror film festival right now. Old, new, made for three thousand or wide-release. I pretty much love it all - though, I should say, I'm also terrified by it all, and almost always so grossed out I have to look away. My favorite genre of horror movie's of course the slasher. Just taught a class on them. Can't get enough - can't wait for Scream 4. I tend to shy away from possession or ghost movies, though. Just because I'm going to have to sleep eventually.

Love vampires and zombies, aliens and predators, and especially werewolves. Not so much into the gross-out contests, though. Or, I mean, I can't even watch Southpark while I eat, because it grosses me out. And also because laughter and macaroni aren't the best mix. But I love the old, say, Peter Jackson overgore stuff. And duct-taping a head back on in Decampitated, say. But Triangle, man, that was beautiful, wonderful, excellent. And so was Harpoon. And, tonight, if I get around to a DVD of my own, it's going to be either The Flesh and Blood Show or The Ant King. If I had the complete run of Harper's Island, though, then it might be another marathon like that. Just because I like to be happy.

MM: Demon Theory entertains on two levels: through the main story told in the body of the novel, and also through the many revelations conveyed through the footnotes. How did that project evolve? Did you say to yourself one day, "I'm going to write a novel with a heck of a lot of footnotes!"...?

SGJ: No, I originally meant for the footnotes to be just for me. To back up: I slammed Demon Theory out in 1999, right on the heels of finishing my first novel, The Fast Red Road. My plan was to write something the complete exact opposite of Fast Red Road. That meant different voice, different style, different content. But still about what I love. So, since Fast Red Road had been - still is, for me - about this one particular truck I love love love, then I needed to pick something else I loved for this next project: horror movies. It was obvious. Back then, to unwind from Fast Red Road, I'd been watching two or three horror VHS's a night, pretty much. Just going down the shelf, taking whatever was next. And - I don't think I've said this out loud, ever - Demon Theory, when I started it, my main delimiter for it was that all the dialogue be spoken. Because, back then, I thought that was my weakest non-trick, dialogue. I was always paraphrasing, doing it some indirect way. But the reader needs to be in-scene, needs to be involved real-time like that on and off. So I took this one guy Con to a party, to see what would happen. And, as it turned out, what would happen would be a three-wheeler wreck at the core of everything. Which, that's a trick directly from Fast Red Road, where, each time I hit that what's-next wall, I'd just mine my own life.

It's what I accidentally did with Demon Theory: that three-time-happening three-wheeler wreck? That's me. And I felt, really and truly, like I was dying then, thought maybe I was dead somehow, just walking around. Three times I went under those tires, though, like Jenny. But kept getting back up. So, yeah, Demon Theory started out being me trying to do the opposite, me trying not to get labeled an 'Indian' writer, me trying to teach myself dialogue, but, like with every story I write, it wound up being me trying to make sense of the world, me trying to shape my personal narrative such that it made sense.

As for the footnotes, though, they were originally my way of checking myself, of saying where I was stealing this from, why I was doing that - more Fast Red Road carryover: in that one, I embedded all these song lyrics, so, this time, I wanted to call myself on that - but then they just kind of warped into their own thing, this understory that was the real story. Can't imagine Demon Theory without them, though, if the story doesn't work without them, it's a failure, yes?

Anyway, what sucked was that I stole Thanksgiving from my warehouse job in 1999 to finish it, and did, and then, in January of 2000, my friend gives me an early look at this interview he was doing with this unknown guy, writing this novel with all these layers of footnotes, this horror novel that was going to change everything, bring scary stories into some kind of legitimate arena, all that. I read the same of House of Leaves he shot me and it kind of broke my heart. So I went back, stripped out all the fun apparatus I'd had on the original Demon Theory - all these levels of different-typefaced reviewers, and a whole another trilogy of nevermade Italian movies that Demon Theory was robbing, and on and on - and finally MacAdam/Cage took a chance on it in 2006, though by that time I'd already used the title I originally wrote it under, All the Beautiful Sinners. I kind of dig the 'Demon Theory'-title, though. And, though to me, Fast Red Road, it's practically autobiography, still, Demon Theory's where I buried my heart.

MM: Your most recent novels are The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti and Ledfeather, both published in 2008. In today's culture it seems like every novelist wants to get into screenplays and movies. Are you working on turning any of those novels into screenplays? Which of your novels would make especially good movies, and why? Hey, maybe a Hollywood producer will read this, ya never know...

SGJ: I have one novel, Zombie Bake-Off, which I've also written as a screenplay. And it works, I think. Another that I'm working on now, I wrote it as this huge-o novel, then decided it was too bulky, so used a screenplay transfer to try to slim it down, ferret out the dramatic line. And did, I think. So now the plan is to suck it back across to a completely different novel than the original. And, this one novel I have, Seven Spanish Angels, it'd be fun on screen. So long as Jennifer Lopez could be in it. And All the Beautiful Sinners, I sucked it into a graphic novel script, and, in doing so, kind of stumbled onto all this fun visual stuff happening, which kind of suggests to me that it might work on-screen. Nolan Dugatti wouldn't, though, I don't think, and Ledfeather, I'd have a hard time trusting it out, and Fast Red Road, it'd make a great Heavy Metal kind of cartoon. Not something I could adapt across, though.

Really, I think novelists are the worst for adapting their own stuff. Just because every little thing matters. They're too intimately involved with what pulling on this or that string means forty minutes later. Better to let somebody who hates the story have a go at it, I say. Maybe they'll fall in love with it along the way, even. If you've written it well enough in the first place.

MM: You maintain an active Facebook presence. Most successful writers these days work very hard to keep in touch with their readers by interacting more online. Has interaction with your readers changed any aspect of your writing - for example, the topics you cover in your stories or books?

SGJ: Hasn't changed anything, I don't think, though of course it takes discipline to write when there's so much fun stuff happening just an alt-tab away. Trick is to make the stuff you're writing even more fun, I think.

MM: According to your Wikipedia page, "At public readings he's said that his short story 'Bestiary' isn't fiction." Tell us about that.

SGJ: Just that where I grew up - outside Midland, Texas - you spend a lot of time shooting stuff. So that story, for me, it's just kind of an apology to all those buried and blown-apart animals. None of the eaten ones, but, yeah, all the ones that I just wanted to see closer, I don't know. Maybe it's what you were talking about earlier, that loss of innocence thing. At a certain point - way too late to undo any of it, of course - I kind of cued in that this really wasn't any way to live in the world. In any world. So now I just try to shoot things for the freezer, because getting that high-meadow grass secondhand, it's got to be better for you than all the glowing stuff in the food at WalMart. Unless of course elk have some secret discount store up on the mountain.

MM: Let's find out a little more about the man behind the books. Tell us about your early years. Did you grow up in the country ... a town ... a city?

SGJ: Country. Place called Greenwood, mostly. West Texas. Dry, hot, pretty fun. Grew up working cattle and plowing cotton and moving from house to house, trailer to trailer. And playing a lot of basketball. And building and unbuilding all these series of trucks. Riding pumpjacks, running from dogs, hiding sick rabbits in my bathroom, having all kinds of encounters with snakes. Having nobody live within bike distance, usually. Running through the pastures at night. Mesquite, barbed wire, quail. Old sheds with intricate drawings of prison floorplans in them. Sandhill cranes blotting out the sky once when I was twelve. Driving to town to stand behind Long John Silver's at nine on Friday nights, so we could have all the fish they were going to throw out. Copenhagen, Motley Crue, headlights in the dust that never settled. Sleeping on top of oil tanks, or in the cool furrows of fresh-plowed cotton fields. Meteor showers. Truckbeds spilling over with pie melons, to lob into caliche pits. Butane pumps popping all night. Coyotes everywhere. Racing trains, turning our headlights off in the fog, listening to old peanut-eating men tell stories at the gin. That kind of stuff.

MM: What's a typical day in the life of Stephen Graham Jones like? Are you married, and if so, does your wife get to read your books before everyone else?

SGJ: Yeah, married. And no, my wife doesn't read my stuff before it's published. She could, but, I mean, I write so many that what's the point, right? Best just to hit the stuff that makes it upstream, gets to be a real boy.

MM: You have a lot of demands on your time: your writing, your family life, fan interaction, and your day job at the university. What do you do to blow off steam ... or get away from it all? Or do you even need to do that sort of thing?

SGJ: Used to be it was basketball, but now my driveway's all stupidly slanted. Then it was hackysack, but that led to microfracture surgery for my knee. Now I guess it's road biking. Just because, on a mountain bike, I'm always trying bigger and less-sure jumps. So it's best if I just try to race the clock out on the asphalt, I think. Though I also love pawn shops, garage sales, anywhere there's junk. I want to draw it all close, hold onto it forever.

MM: I hear your story collection from Prime isn't your only new book coming out soon. What else do you have in the hopper?

Looking like It Came from Del Rio will be hitting in October, from Trapdoor, an excellent new publisher out here in Colorado. Some of the stuff they have in the works, man - I told Chris Matney [Trapdoor's founder] yesterday that I kind of suspect Trapdoor's going to be the Taco Bell of this version of Demolition Man we're living in. That they might be the ones to win the fast food wars, I mean, the ones who figure out how to move around in this e-book phase of things. Instead of being scared of it like most places seem to be, they're pushing it farther, harder, better. So excited.

And, as for It Came from Del Rio, it's an epistolary South Texas zombie novel. This touching story of a father and daughter finding each again, coming to terms with what one's done, what one now is. And, I say it's a zombie novel, but not the shuffling, brain-eating kind. Though I like to do that as well, of course. Who doesn't? But Del Rio, the 'zombie' in it, his own head kind of gets worn down, just by, you know, living, non-living, all that, so he has to fight this giant rabbit, steal that rabbit's head. Series title: The Bunnyhead Chronicles. I love this novel so, so much.

Also, just this week I'm signing a two-book deal with Dzanc, for some non-horror stuff. Hardly normal stuff, though. The first book, due out in 2013, it's Flushboy, a teen love story about this kid working the window at his dad's drive-through urinal, The Bladder Hut. We've all been there, right? Taking bank tubes of warm, sloshing urine, depositing it in the vats, knowing that if you don't keep the pressures adjusted, then those vats are going to boil over, wash you away.

The second book -- this is 2014 - is Not for Nothing, a second-person noir set not just in any small town, but in the small town I grew up in, Stanton, Texas. I've done a lot of fiction where I just make places up as I go, get all fast and loose with geography and history, all of that, but in this one, every building's not just real to me, but a kind of hyper-real, all laden with everything I know's happened there across the last forty years. Our grumbly hero here's Nicholas Bruiseman, an ousted homicide detective being forced to return to his hometown, solve some cases he wants no part of, as they're making him look into a past he thought forgot. But, in places like Stanton, the past is never gone. You live in it, day by day.

And, I guess that's four books on the way, yeah? Hopefully a couple more. My 2012's all empty right now. But I've got all these other novels too, each of which I love - Seven Spanish Angels, Zombie Bake-Off, The Least of My Scars, one I can't say the name of out loud (set in Stanton too), another with the best title ever, which I also can't say out loud as I'm right-now rewriting it for the third time, and another (werewolves, excellent title) that I just need to steal some months to get down on paper the right way. So, yeah, hopefully more'll be happening.

MM: Sounds like you keep busy! Where online should readers go to find out more about your work, and of course, to buy your books?

SGJ: I guess Powell's and all the on-line places have my books. And of course the different publishers (FC2, MacAdam/Cage, Nebraska, Chiasmus, and, soon, Prime and Trapdoor - Trapdoor's It Came from Del Rio - and one more that I can't quite say out loud yet). And my site's usually got links.

MM: Will you be a guest at any conventions in the next year?

SGJ: Yeah, MileHiCon here soon, in Denver. Doing a festival out in Minnesota in October. Probably more, and more.

MM: Is there anything you'd like to add that we haven't covered so far?

SGJ: A few weeks ago I was on a panel about writing, and the talk veered towards writing and community, and I realized - had known all along, I guess - that it's in horror that I've found the best sense of community. That best group of people all supporting each other, sharing the same cool interests, hoping each other makes it. Which, that's not why I write horror - I can't seem to help writing horror, even though it terrifies me each time - but it definitely helps. So, thanks to all the writers I've met out there, and'll keep meeting. Always an honor. I'm so lucky that this ridiculous thing I keep trying to do puts me in contact with such good people. I wouldn't be anywhere else.

MM: Thank you for taking the time to talk with me today.