We chat with author Stephen Graham Jones about The Angel of Indian Lake, which is the final installment in the series and picks up four years after Don’t Fear the Reaper as Jade returns to Proofrock, Idaho, to build a life after the years of sacrifice—only to find the Lake Witch is waiting for her.
Hi, Stephen! Welcome back! How have the past 2.5 years been since we last spoke for My Heart Is A Chainsaw?
Last two and a half years have been full of book events. Just wall-to-wall. Which is how I like it. My favorite places to be are: with my family; on the trail on my mountain bike; bookstores and libraries; walking my dog; and on the floor of a convention, under the tents of a festival, in the halls of a conference, and, okay, a most favorite place is also the big, smooth concrete floor of a roller-skating rink—especially when Van Halen’s cranked loud and the lights are down low, and somebody out there has glow-in-the-dark wheels on their skates, and anything can happen.
Quick lightning round before we dive in! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: Where the Red Fern Grows, by Wilson Rawls. Fourth grade. Took me three check-out periods to get through it. Changed me forever.
- The one that made you want to become an author: The Wolfen, by Whitley Streiber—specifically, those chapters in the voice of the grandfather wolf. They were my bible, when I was twelve years old. I’d never been as amazed by anything.
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: Probably Bastard out of Carolina, by Dorothy Allison. I come back to this one regularly, to, you know, use my mind, my brain, try to figure out its magic. But each time I just fall in, ride this story, forget I’m even reading at all.
The Angel of Indian Lake is the final installment in your Indian Lake Trilogy and it’s out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Fast, bloody, full of heart.
What can readers expect from this final installment?
The third installment of a trilogy always has to up the stakes and kill people we thought couldn’t die. I knew this going in, knew I’d have to do all that. In Chainsaw, Jade was fighting for herself. In Reaper, she was fighting for her friends, for this family she’d cobbled together. In Angel, she’s having to fight for her community—for Proofrock. And of course I had to adhere to Randy’s rules for the third in a trilogy, too. They were very helpful. This is my first time doing this, I mean. I needed a lot of help.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring one last time?
I was surprised that Lemmy was back, yeah. It was so great watching him move across the classroom, stand on the dam, lean over the railing of this next yacht. I mean, it’s always great hanging with Jade and Letha, and it’s wonderful just to remember Mr. Holmes with them—I miss that guy—but I think Lemmy was the real surprise for me, this time around. I looked away from him long enough that he grew up, became his own person. It’s like that James Dickey poem, “A Birth,” where, “Inventing a story with grass, / I find a young horse deep inside it.” I’ve been inventing this story with blood and water, snow and machetes, but, fording through all that, I never expected this six-and-a-half foot tall lumbering dude in a curl-brimmed cowboy hat to be smoking a cigarette and glaring up at me, more there in his eyes than I ever planned.
Was there anything you cut from the trilogy that you would have love to have kept in?
Oh, man, so much was cut. For good reason. But I do miss it. What I miss most, probably, is, in Chainsaw, there used to be fifty pages or so—as I remember it—that was all about the Founders doing this big media event where they swim the lake, to show how remote and inaccessible Terra Nova is. And how cool they are, of course. It finally didn’t earn its keep, had to be left behind. But it’s still there, for me. There was also a version of Reaper where Gal, like Jade and Letha and Armitage, was a slasher expert. So, she wrote this paper detailing the formula, the conventions. She ended up having to be re-rigged such that she didn’t know any movies. But I miss that chapter.
What was it like finishing the trilogy? How did you celebrate?
My ritual for finishing a book has been, since 1998, to go out into the world and find some fried zucchini to celebrate with. That’s one of my favorites. In the early 90s I worked at a seed-research facility, so me and a crew were always driving up and down pump roads, through cotton and sorghum and wheat. For a while we had this guy with us who had the best, most amazing eyes—he could see way out in the fields to where the farmers hid their gardens. You have to hide where you’re growing vegetables, as everybody steals them. But this guy on our crew, you couldn’t hide your vegetables from him. He’d spot them, we’d stop the truck, and we’d hunch over low as we could, run out there, and then crash back at top speed, holding all the zucchini and squash and okra to our chests we could. And when the farmer was on our heels, that just made it better. I think that’s why I celebrate with fried zucchini. Because it reminds me of getting away with something . . . just barely, by the skin of my teeth. That’s what finishing a novel is, for me. Maybe someday I’ll grow up and, I don’t know, be better, less a kid stealing vegetables, running away with the biggest grin on my face. But, no time soon.
What do you love about writing within the horror genre?
I really like the visceral response horror can elicit, provoke, extract. Being able to mess with how someone turns the lights off on the way to their bed? Man, that’s the highest honor. And letting them laugh along the way, and cry, and grin, and both wish they were in this story and be thankful they’re not—I love it so much. I’ll forever be writing horror. In horror—I think Bryan Fuller says this somewhere?—the stakes are cranked high from the get-go, to operatic proportions, which is always verging on melodrama. But, like Richard Hugo says, you’ve got to toe that line. Leaning over it, that’s where the good stuff is.
What’s next for you?
I Was a Teenage Slasher in July. It’s set in 1989 in Lamesa, Texas, maybe forty-five miles from where I grew up. And, Lamesa’s where I did a lot of growing up. The narrator of Teen Slasher is this guy Tolly, who’s seventeen—my age in 1989. This is a very personal novel, to me. I mean, they all are. But this one, it feels a lot like autobiography. Except for all the killing. But, too, we all leave bodies behind, don’t we? People we hurt. People we should have been there for better. People who tried to help us, and finally couldn’t. That’s where Teen Slasher lives and tries to breathe.
Lastly, are there any book releases that you’re looking forward to picking up this year?
Was gonna say Nick Roberts’s Mean Spirited, but it just came out. But, if anyone hasn’t got that one yet, I say get it. The velocity it moves at is, to me, just how a horror novel should move. It grants the story this momentum that just carries you along. But, as for a book still on the way: Rebecca Roanhorse’s Mirrored Heavens, the third in her Between Earth and Sky trilogy. I’ve read it, but I’m so anxious to see other people reading it, and living it. This, to me, the best fantasy trilogy since Katherine Arden’s Winternight.
