We chat with author Ronald Malfi about The Hive, which is an epic, otherworldly horror novel in the vein of Black River Orchard and American Elsewhere about a wave of collective obsession and paranoia taking over an American suburb.
Hi, Ronald! Welcome back! How have you been since we last spoke for the release of Senseless?
Thanks for chatting again! Things have been hectic as always, spending a lot of time on the road. The paperback of Senseless was just released and I kicked off a brief promotional tour starting in Philly, then had to swing back to Maryland to demo some songs that my band is working on for our next album. It’s a bit of a schizophrenic shuffle, but it keeps me out of trouble. Mostly.
Your latest novel, The Hive, is out April 14th! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Collective obsession meets cosmic horror.
What can readers expect?
A 768-page monster of a novel with a big cast of characters, each one overcome by an unseen presence that compels them toward this idea of obsessive groupthink, of a linked hivemind, where they each serve as a singular part to a greater whole.
Where did the inspiration for The Hive come from?
Pretty mundane, actually: years ago, I was out for a run at night, it was the middle of summer, and I turned down this one particular street where I noticed there were still Christmas lights up in someone’s windows. It got me thinking, hey, what’s going on in that house? Could someone be lying in there dead for months without any of the neighbors having come to check up on them? For whatever reason, this was the seed that turned into a story about a neighborhood overcome and manipulated by some otherworldly, unseen force. That particularly tidbit about the Christmas lights didn’t make it into the final novel, but that’s what kickstarting the story machine in my head.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
All of them, really. They’re all so different—when we first meet them, anyway, before they’re linked by this idea of the hivemind. Yet even then, parts of their individuality still struggle to poke through. There’s this one character, Brian Russo, who’s an out-of-work radio disc jockey, but also an addict struggling to stay sober, something I have an affinity for in my writing, and I suppose a compassion for, too. There’s a local handyman who moonlights as a beekeeper while also serving as a mom keeper, and he was pretty fun to write. When the collective obsession takes hold, it exacerbates aspects of everyone’s character, so it was fun to see how each character would bend—what their dark predilections were, how monstrous and murderous they were willing to become to support their own endgames.
Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?
Yeah, I did, back about twelve years ago when I wrote the first draft of this novel. It was too big and I wasn’t a confident enough writer at the time to wrangle everything neatly into place. At the time, my agent agreed with that assessment, and the manuscript sat in a drawer for over a decade. But the story never left my mind—I would always think about it whenever I was driving or out for a run and happened to see a water tower poking above a distant tree line—so, in a way, I suppose I had become part of the obsession I’d written about. I was never able to shake the story from my mind; it was only a matter of time before I took it out of that drawer and set about rewriting the whole thing from scratch.
Where did your interest in horror stem from?
Who knows? I was terrified of everything when I was a kid. Maybe it’s my mind’s way of trying to understand that part of me.
Your debut novel published in 2000. What are some of the key lessons you’ve learned as a writer and about the publishing world over the years?
Publishing has changed so much since that first book was published. I learned the necessity of balance—that writing is art but it is also a business.
What’s next for you?
I’ll be on tour throughout the U.S. once The Hive comes out, which will take me straight until the end of the year, while my band, VEER, plays some intermittent shows on the road. Again: that nonstop juggling act.
Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up this year?
I was lucky enough to read an advance copy of Rebecca Rowland’s upcoming short story collection Unsettled Score, which proclaims itself to be a “mixtape of arthouse horror”—basically horror stories inspired by rock music. So, I mean, come on—is there anything cooler than that? That one drops in June, I believe, and I highly recommend it.
