TIH 639: Gabino Iglesias on The Devil Takes You Home, Mulholland Books, and Writing for the New York Times

Michael David Wilson 0:20
Welcome to This is horror, a podcast for readers, writers and creators. I'm Michael David Wilson, and every episode, alongside my co host, Bob Pastorella, we chat with the world's best writers about writing, life lessons, creativity and much more. Today, we are chatting to Gabino Iglesias for the first time in almost seven years now, Gabino is the author of so many brilliant horror and crime books, including The Devil takes you home, House of bone and rain, Coyote songs and zero saints. And in addition to the audio, there will also very soon be a video version of this conversation. So if you haven't already do subscribe over on YouTube, youtube.com, forward slash at this is horror podcast. Okay, before I get into the conversation, a quick advert break.

RJ Bayley 1:46
It was as if the video had unzipped my skin, slunk inside my tapered flesh and become one with me.

Bob Pastorella 1:53
From the creator of this is horror, comes a new nightmare for the digital age, the girl in the video, by Michael David Wilson, after a teacher receives a weirdly arousing video, his life descends in a paranoia and obsession. More videos follow, each containing information no stranger could possibly know, but who's sending them and what do they want? The answers may destroy everything and everyone he loves. The girl in the video is the ring meets fatal attraction for the iPhone generation, available now in paperback, ebook and audio from the host of this is horror podcast, comes a dark thriller of obsession, paranoia and voyeurism. After relocating to a small coastal town, Brian discovers a hole that gazes into his neighbor's bedroom every night she dances and he peeps same song, same time, same wild and mesmerizing dance. But soon, Brian suspects he's not the only one watching. She's not the only one being watched. Their watching is The Wicker Man meets body double with a splash of Suspiria. Their watching by Michael David Wilson and Bob Pastorella is available from this is horror.co.uk, Amazon and wherever good books are sold.

Michael David Wilson 3:04
All right, here it is. It is Gabino, Iglesias on this is horror. Gabino, welcome back to this is horror.

Gabino Iglesias 3:18
Thank you for having me again. It's been way too long.

Michael David Wilson 3:23
It has been over six years, so in a way, it feels almost disingenuous to say, welcome back, as if you know I was talking to you a few minutes ago or even last year. But yeah,

Gabino Iglesias 3:38
say we're not the same people. So it's, it's, it's good to be back and to see both of you again.

Michael David Wilson 3:47
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, normally I would ask, what have been the biggest changes for you, personally and professionally since we last spoke? But where do we even begin with that.

Gabino Iglesias 4:02
I stuck with the with the writing thing, and it, it sort of started working out, which is, that's good, so, oh, wow, six years, that's half a dozen. I want a Stoker, like in the in the process of this whole thing working out, I won a Stoker and was nominated to other things that sell your your rights almost immediately in other countries. So you, you take that amazing foreign money and that helps the whole thing work out, because you get paid for things, and getting paid is absolutely fantastic. And, yeah, nothing else has changed, because I still haven't figured out exactly what I'm doing. So all the other parts are still the same. I'm just not six years high school teacher, probably at the time we last spoke, yeah, not the.

Michael David Wilson 5:00
Yeah, yeah, and I know now that you're working with Mulholland books, so let's talk about how did that come about.

Gabino Iglesias 5:13
I was had a zero saints and coyote songs were out, and I was constantly trying to get those everywhere. Both of you are very well acquainted with with indie publishing. There's a lot of limitations in terms of, like, what you can do with marketing and who will carry your books and who won't that. I'm not gonna say six years, but in the last eight to 10 that has changed a lot. So I started when that that wasn't part of the indie scene, so I was trying to what's the next step? And then, yeah, I wrote the devil takes you home, probably a year before the pandemic. Then I got fired, so I pretended that I was a full time writer, and finished Devil takes you home, and that landed me an agent. And that is, I know it sounds like a cliche, but if you do the exact same thing for a very long time, and it works out, if you can add the right agent, you don't have to. It wasn't you all those years you were struggling. It wasn't you. You just needed this one person that can work some some kind of literary miracle. And that's what happened. So she got me a two book deal and off to the races, and now I'm lighting candles so that she likes the next one, and then that she can also sell it, so that we both get paid. So that's yeah, that about sums it up, yeah.

Michael David Wilson 6:44
And I think there are a lot of people who are listening, who are looking to get an agent, and are seeing that as the next step on their journey. So then I wonder, with you specifically what that process looks like, and then how you decided to go with the agent that you ultimately went with.

Gabino Iglesias 7:05
So I should start that story. 2008 to about 2010 I spent those two years just trying to get an agent and maybe got, you know, 300 400 rejections or or ignored emails, or, you know, sometimes you would get, like, a partial request or a full request, and that went nowhere, even though those things get you very excited. Hindsight is 2020. Obviously the writing. It was not the strongest. It wasn't a wonderful, amazing novel that truly deserved to see the light of day. It was, it was me trying to write my first, my first novel in English, and trying to switch languages while merging horror and crime. And it was 120,000 words. And it was a mess. So I didn't get an agent, and I did start a career without an agent. If you're struggling and you feel like the indie scene is for you now, I don't recommend trying to see it as a platform. I'm just saying that for a lot of us, that's just the way that things panned out. So you can spend a bunch of years as an indie and then, you know, you get the break that you were waiting for, whatever you want to call it. In my case, it was relatively easy the second time around, because I already had a career. I had three, four books out coyote songs had, like, a Stoker nomination. So it was on a couple of radars. He won the Wonderland Book Award. So that was like, oh, you know, you get free publicity, like you don't get paid for winning awards, but people talk about the book, so yeah, this agent reached out and I said, I have a thing if you're willing to wait. So the first time was two years of rejection, and the second time was basically fate knocking at the door and asking to see what I was working on, and she told me to change absolutely nothing. And that was like, I didn't need to see anything else. It was like, you you see what I'm trying to do, and you don't have a problem with it, with the violence or the politics or the Spanglish or the gay characters, and none of that you're you're on board. Yes, okay, fantastic. That's all I need. Let's work together. So just stick with it, you know?

Michael David Wilson 9:36
Yeah, I recall in a previous interview. I mean, when you talk about all of the elements, such as the Spanglish and the gay characters that you said, you know you, you kind of have embraced, in a way, some of the Lovecraft references, but then what you're doing is making it uniquely your own by throwing in all the things. That Lovecraft would have absolutely hated. So you're kind of taking it back as it were.

Gabino Iglesias 10:07
It's a it's, you know, if you're American, you can be the most amazing, liberal, loving person who works with with children and feeds the poor. There's, there might be a lot of dark stuff in your DNA. So if you start going back, you know, don't go back one or two generations. Go back 3456, generations. You might find, you might find some, some dark stuff in there. It's, it's exactly the same when you're writing. It's this weird process where the stuff that you've read is part of you. So when I was 12, I didn't know Lovecraft was like a horrible racist. I didn't know the name of his cat. I didn't know anything about anti semitism. I didn't know any of that. I just knew monsters and and the way that it made me feel, and learning all this, this pronunciations of words that I'd never read before. So it's part of my DNA. But then you grow up and you you learn, you know what that means, so you either try to hide it and don't talk about it, or, you know, oh, he's problematic. Or you accept it, he's his part of horror's DNA. The same way that that Clive Barker is whether you like his work or not, or Stephen King, whether you like his work or not, they're part of our DNA. So it was like, if I'm going to be using some of that stuff anyway. I might as well go hard on making him, you know, do turns in his grave. So I'm gonna fill it with all the people. They would hate it. And that's sort of a, you know, we'll celebrate your legacy while also pissing in your grave, sort of combination that I think works.

Michael David Wilson 12:00
Yeah, I think there's a number of people who kind of deserve that reaction, as it were, and, you know, I mean, sometimes we say people are complicated, but HP, Lovecraft is another level that is beyond complication.

Gabino Iglesias 12:18
It's, you know, and I get all the excuses the it was a different time, and he didn't know any better, but there were other people who were alive at the same time. We didn't have the same thought. So it's not around excuse, but he's dead and buried, so we can't we can't slap him around now. So we we insult him by using his work in the in the best way possible,

Michael David Wilson 12:44
yeah, and when people say it was a different time, I mean, historians have said yes, but HP Lovecraft was not good for his time, so it was a different time. But he took it, you know, to the next level with his I mean, who, who decides to call their cat that racist is probably the answer.

Gabino Iglesias 13:11
But exactly, yeah, a bad person.

Michael David Wilson 13:19
But in terms of your journey with the agent. I mean, I think it's a very optimistic story. I think it's one that kind of goes to show that look, if you just keep working hard, if you keep putting in the hustle, if you keep showing up at the keyboard, you get the words down. I mean, that's what you have to do. There are no guarantees, whether we will make it or not with writing, whatever that even means. But you know, the nearest way to guarantee or to enhance your chances is to just keep putting the work in. So I mean, I think there are a number of people who they're just writing and they're waiting for somebody to pick them, but we need to pick ourselves. So if you can't land the agent, you put your work out another way. And I mean, it's not just happened for you, but this seems to be the journey that a lot of people have taken, if I didn't give Eric larocker and yamara more, they put their work out there in a more kind of independent mode, and then the bigger publishers discovered them when they'd already been discovered, when they were already proven as it were, yes,

Gabino Iglesias 14:39
Yeah, it's a, it's a it's a conversation that I like to have, because I think it gets very murky, because I heard, when I started, I heard a lot of the only thing that matters is the art. So you write the best that you can, and then you let the audience find you. And I was like, All right, that sounds awesome from artistic viewpoint. You just focus on the art and then, and then you realize that if you're gonna get involved in publishing, that's not art, that's a business, so there's marketing involved. And he's like, all right, I I did the art part, but now I want to share it. How do I go about doing that? And people still tell you, like, no, no, no. Keep focusing on the art, and then your audience will find you No. Do what Eric did, just be as loud as possible and get those fantastic covers if you, if you go that route, just, just be as loud as possible. Everyone is screaming into the void. So how are you going to make that scream of yours special? So figure out what what works for you. But yeah, it's Don't, don't be quiet. Don't wait for the audience to come to you, because you can, you can live 10 lives as an author and not gain 10 readers if you don't talk about your work.

Bob Pastorella 15:58
It's the same for any type of artist, like, prime example, I've got, everybody knows me as a writer. I can draw. I don't draw that much because drawing is painful for me. I have carpal tunnel, and so it's, it's very it's, it's hard to be able to try to finish a project, because you get in, like in writing, you get in the zone, and you get to the point to where you can't even physically hold the pen or pencil that you're working with to draw. And so it's very frustrating to have to put work aside those binders that I have with photo with, you know, with my drawings and everything that that I have never finished, or anything like that. Let's say they're finished. If I don't put them out there, no one fucking knows about them. So it's like the same thing. I if I want to sell those art, those drawings, I have to get loud about it. I have to put it out there. The Arts, the art, if you do the art, they're not going to come to you, you have to business it, sorry, just you have to whatever level that works for you. You're going to have to figure it out. And for some people who especially the more that you want, you need, someone who knows the business better than you do, yes, but you know, shoot Dude, get your stuff out there. Get it out there, and ain't going nowhere in the closet, and it's just not gonna sit it's gonna

Michael David Wilson 17:25
sit there. Preach. Yeah, we've spoken to writers who kind of have all sorts of different breakups in terms of the, I suppose, percentage of writing versus promoting. You know, there are people like Jason pardian Who is way on the promotion side in terms of how he divides his time. You've got others like the British author David moody, where it's much more the writing. So I'm wondering, What does your balance look like in terms of marketing and writing, is it even something you're conscious of? And it might be worth noting too that you know, the social media landscape has shifted dramatically since Elon Musk bought Twitter, or essentially messed it up. So how has that affected things? For you,

Gabino Iglesias 18:24
it's when you use it changing. Yes, I've been there for the whole gauntlet. In some cases, it's getting a little better. I like blue sky a little bit. In other instances, it has just gotten worse and continues to get worse. And every time that I learn anything new about a new platform, it's usually Nazi related, like they're allowed to, you know, carry Nazi content or so, it's like, I always feel like I'm running to catch up to know what's going on and how is the world of social media horrible in a different way today. But I many years ago, when I was, you know, starting out, I decided I cannot look at this. You literally acquire a new job that you didn't apply for. You you apply to the writer gig, and then they're like, Oh, you're now a public speaker. You're now a person who, if more than 50 people read your book in a community, you're going to end up writing a blurb for someone. So you have to read the whole book and, and you're gonna have to do this other thing. And you Hannah, you're gonna have to do interviews and, and if it works out, you're gonna do podcasts. So those two hours you were going to write or rest, you're not doing that. You're doing the writer thing. And you're like, but, but the writing thing was just me writing that did not involve, like, traveling or not being able to write. So that's the that's that was the mental thing. If you allow marketing to become so huge. It cuts into your writing time, so you change gigs without even knowing it. So I made it, I made it part of my life, just fun, like we're gonna do Friday reads every Friday. That's a lot of fun. I find a lot of a lot of new books to me every single Friday, which is fantastic I might speak about something that reminded me of a story from from serial saints or coyote songs to sell those reissues, but I'm not. I'm constantly thinking about, how can I do more for the books? But I'm not constantly on social media talking about the books, because that's an easy, easy way of just breaking connections with people, because you're not a person anymore. You're just, here's the Amazon link. Here's the Amazon link. I'm not going to reply to your questions, I'm not going to tell you a joke, I'm not going to comment on the news or politics. But guess what? Here's an Amazon link to my book. And I don't, I don't want to do that. I think that's, that's, it's horrible when I see accounts that do that is just like, there's, it's not a human it's, it's, I feel like it's another crypto bot slash book market or social media, just here's the link again and again, four times per day. And I don't, I don't want to do that ever. If I can fight

Michael David Wilson 21:21
it somehow. Yeah. I mean, even the last time we spoke with you, one of the things that you were doing that, of course, other people do, but perhaps not to the level, is just promoting other people's stuff, you know, relentlessly, and being like, what? What have you got, let me signal boost it. I mean, that is kind of raising all ships, as it were. You know, you've built up this pretty big audience, and then you're like, Well, let me help you out. What have you got?

Gabino Iglesias 21:55
It's a anytime as an author that you get invited to an event. Getting that invitation is that's the goal. Someone contacted you because you wrote this thing or because they know your work. That's it. That was your that was your job. You. Someone contacted you because of your writing. You're gonna go to a place, or you're going to do an interview, and you're going to mentor your books, and the host, or the person who brings you, or the university who brings you, or the book show who brings you, are going to have your books out like, that's it. That's the job you're done the rest of the time. Sure, talk about your book, but maybe you write a book. In my case, it might take a year and a half, sometimes two years. How many other books am I enjoying in those two years? I'm not gonna constantly talk about my crap. Let me tell you about the stuff that I'm loving right now. Let me tell you about the most amazing book that got me out of a writing slump. It's not even just like, remember to plug everybody else. It's just, I think it should be just a normal part of your conversation. Like, hey, we're here to talk books, right? Check out this books. And then you start, you know, like we've already done, like Eric La Rocca, Haley, Piper, yada yada. So you keep adding names, and it's like, it's, it's my community is what I love. Let me talk. Yeah, we'll mention my books later. But have you read about and then you're like, Oh man, the new double, Stephen Graham Jones. And then you're like, off course. I mean, Steven doesn't count as someone who might need our help, but you still talk about him, right? So it's all good. It's about talking the stuff that's about the stuff that you love.

Bob Pastorella 23:40
It's just funny, because every time I bring up, like, I'm telling friends and co workers and stuff, they found out, you know, that I write and I read and things like that, and then I find out they read and they read horror, and I'll bring up somebody like Stephen Graham Jones. They go, yeah, yeah. That new guy, yeah, he's, he's already written two books. While you said that he's pretty prolific, the publisher has slowed him down, but he still writes, oh, yeah, but the whole signal boost thing is that I tend to follow people on social media who do a lot of signal boosting. It's easy. That's an easy follow. It's like, I like what you're doing. You're not You're not boosting yourself. You're boosting other people. You're boosting other people's art. You know, like, great example is Trevor Henderson, if he likes it, if he thinks it's cool, fuck he's all over it. He's gonna tell you, hey, this shit is fucking cool. You need to check it out. This is the new book I read. This is a new movie I saw. I do that, and I don't expect anything in return, because if I think it's cool, then I think other people too. And sometimes I get really, really excited, and sometimes I get not too excited, like ice cube doing a war of the wolves movie. You know? Know, but with, like, we really fucking need that. But, uh, you know, it's like, sound like, you know, I might complain about things, but it's you. You've got to get other voices out there and never, don't if you're listening to this and you're like, I'm gonna do it. So though, uh, they'll quote me, and they'll, you know, they'll post about me. No, it don't work that way, man. And you cannot, you cannot expect you should only just do and you should do it because you think their shits cool. That's the only reason it's just, I think this is fucking badass.

Gabino Iglesias 25:39
And I think the there's a, I'm a music fan, and I think the horror community is like the music community in the sense that it's like, Oh, if you dig this, and then it's like, it's constant, like, oh, you read this author for the first time. You didn't know this kind of horror existed. Oh, you're getting into, like, liminal space stuff. Oh, come here. And then you're always, it's like, you have a stash. No matter what people are getting into, you just want to share the goods, because then you're not forced to nerd out by yourself, you know, like, oh, did you need that part? So it's, yeah, it should be part of the ecosystem. You should constantly be talking about, you know, the stuff that you're consuming, and the movies that you're watching, and the, you know, whatever is keeping you alive that week, because God knows we all need it. So share all the good stuff constantly.

Bob Pastorella 26:32
Yes, yes, I got into Charles Mingus because you posted about Charles Mingus, yeah. And I was like, I go, who? Who is that? I'm like, okay, jazz, I'm in. He plays bass. Oh, he's really, really good. I'm like, okay, yeah, I love that stuff, man, keep it. Kelly, yes, I like that.

Michael David Wilson 26:55
But I mean to go to your writing routine. What does that look like now? And I mean, you said that you don't have a day job at the moment, so I mean, the writing it has become the day job. So how has that shifted since we last spoke?

Gabino Iglesias 27:15
So it's I still do teaching. I taught for a while at Southern Hampshire University's online MFA, and then for two years, I've been teaching with Todd Goldberg at UCR Palm Desert low residency MFA. And the I think stuff that's low residency was just built for me. It's it doesn't even feel like work. I'm just at home. So I'll prioritize reading students, you know, writing. Once that's done, the main change now has been, usually, I can schedule my life so that between 10 or 11am and two three in the afternoon. It's just, it's me and the dog, it's, it's me and the dog and the music, and then that's it. I don't want to I'm not going to answer emails, I'm not going to pick up my phone, I'm going to ignore the news for a little bit. That allows me to have more time to write, which I thought was going to immediately translate into me writing more. It just it has so far translated into me struggling for longer to write, to write, probably the same amount of words that I was writing before when I had to force myself to write at midnight or with one hand through, you know, through my lunch. I do think the stuff is better now, because I spend the same amount of work, same amount of time to produce at the same pace. But I think the structures are a little bit more challenging, and it's, you know, every time every book, as you know both of you know, the every book you write, you get just a little bit better. So the chaos and the relying on just like deadlines and adrenaline is not and then I'm also doing the books for the New York Times, and I never stopped reviewing for locus. So there are days where I'm just doing more reading than writing. So it's those days don't count. It's it's still chaos. I just have a little bit more freedom with my time to maybe have lunch while in the in the midst of chaos and not doing what I'm supposed to be doing, I can just relax and try to steer myself back on track.

Michael David Wilson 29:44
Well, I did want to ask, in terms of the New York Times gig that you now have where you're reviewing horror books, has that changed your reading habits at all? And how does that aspect fit into your life? You know, knowing that you've got to produce this column on a regular basis,

Gabino Iglesias 30:06
it's a the main thing that it's added because I was, I was reading like a maniac. Anyway, the main thing that it's added to my life that takes time is the first thing is selecting the books. It's every, every month, it's, it's almost an impossible task. I'm not gonna say there's, there's 250 amazing horror books coming every month, but there might be 150 books out of which maybe 75 you know, might bring the goods. And then there's, like, maybe 25 authors in there that you're like, wow. The last one was really good. So this one is probably really good, and I get to pick four. It's in you want to have stuff in there that's working translation, and you want to have short story collections. And you want to have a few anthologies here and there, because it's just like, and then from time to time, if you're doing horror, you gonna throw in one YA novel, because there's ya horror, and you have to cover it. That's the main thing, just like the mental space that occupies. And then you throw in, like, if there's a if there's a big book, a new Josh Malerman, I probably know that Josh is going to get his own review. Stephen King usually gets his own review. So you take those, but I still cover some very big names. So you struggle. Do I want to go big name, and then try to find the smallest indie out of the bunch to sort of balance that, because this is going to be a best seller whether I review it or not, but for the Indies coverage might mean, you know, little bump on the needle and just the mental space that All that stuff occupies every month, and then at the end, I turn my, my my columns in on the first of every month, and then writing it, it's about two days of just I'm not doing absolutely anything else. I'm focusing on the column. I've been doing it almost two years, and it still feels daunting when I sit down and I'm like, I'm gonna write a column for the fucking New York Times, and he better be good, because my editor is fantastic, and he catches everything. So this thing better be good. So that's about two three days of my life that I don't do any other writing. I'm just working on the column so it affects my life at the beginning of the month, in the end and in the middle, I read the exact same amount I was reading before. In fact, I was missing crime so much that I started a column at crime rates so I could talk about some of the crime that I was reading, while also reading horror for the New York Times. So always reading, always reading. That's why I'm always behind on movies.

Michael David Wilson 33:07
So, yeah, there's so much that you've just said there that really resonates with my life and different aspects of it. I mean, I've done a lot of reviewing in my time, I don't review so much anymore, although just hearing you talk now, it's like, God, I should do more reviewing, because it's not, it's not just about me, but it's about bringing that kind of exposure to people that really need it. But when I, when I review, like the amount, what was that?

Gabino Iglesias 33:43
Sorry, you do this. This also accomplishes that. So you're good.

Michael David Wilson 33:51
Okay, good, good. I really I don't need to add more to my but I'm the type of person that I'm me and Bob have had this conversation a lot. I'm always trying to add more. I'm always burning out. Yeah, there might be a pattern here, but, I mean, I would say whenever I was reviewing, like it, it took so much longer than it will for me to write my fiction, because if I'm going to review, I'm going to really do it a good service, and so that will probably mean reading the book multiple times, being really selective on each passage and it I don't know that the time constraint is why I don't do it as much. You know, if I just kind of read a book for pleasure, then it's quicker. It's less pressure as well. I'm just enjoying the book for what it is. I'm not having to think about how I'm going to talk about it. Yeah.

Bob Pastorella 34:56
See, I know exactly where gabinos are coming from. Because. Yes, with the with the exception of reading the book, because I do look out for and so there are multiple sources I go to. I try to have a good at least a month, month and a half lead time. And I can't just go, Well, I mean, shit, I could just go to Best Sellers and just see who's gonna be doing a new book. Everybody's got something coming out. You know, I can do that. So I have to balance it, and I have to to, okay, I have to do an indie. Oh, look, there's a ya, I'm really interested in this one and do the rare comic book, because I think one, it's not getting enough attention to people. I think it's cool. And three, I don't have to read the fucking thing now. I'm going to read it. I'm probably going to buy it. I'm probably the first one who's going to actually use my pre order link to get it. You know, the link that I put in the lookout for column. But I don't have time to review. I just don't. I got tired of trying to figure out different words for buy this book. I meant thesaurus going buy, okay, purchase and purchase. No, they don't sound right, you know, because that's all it was doing. It's like, this book's fucking badass. I don't want to spoil it. You should just buy it. That was my review. I'm done.

Gabino Iglesias 36:21
It's, I always think, it's, how can I be a lot more eloquent to say, Dude, check this shit out. It's like that sometimes that could be the column. It's like, there's a fucking new Juju Ito. That's the review. I'll have to tell you why you should check out junji's work, right? So it's like, that's the whole review, but I can't get paid for that, and it doesn't sound smart, so I have to find new ways to tell you, you know, something's awesome without saying it six times in the column and just sounding like a surfer dude in a bad movie. That's, does take time, but it, yeah, but then I'm not doing this, because this is, like, set up, email, record, edit, upload. It's a job. You You gave yourselves jobs. Yeah?

Michael David Wilson 37:18
I mean kind of this is horror podcast came about, like a lot of things have come about in my life, where I want to see something in the world, it wasn't there. And I thought, well, I'll create it and and here we are, 12 years and over 600 episodes later, and it's still going but I mean, just to briefly, go back to you mentioning Junji Ito, what a fantastic, crazy writer who I'm so glad to see that like in the last few years in particular, he's really just kind of escaped only being known in Japan, and like the whole Western world is Picking up on his work. And I'm I think there's like many factors that have come into it, but probably just adapting a number of them for Netflix certainly helped. But if people want to see Goodness, what's almost like the HR Giger equivalent of a story, but through a Japanese weird fiction, almost bizarro lens, yes, junjito, right there.

Gabino Iglesias 38:30
Yeah, anything you're looking for weirdness or Gore or a little bit of poetry or just fantastic art, it's all there. And yeah, for many years it was, it was sort of halfway through the conversation about horror. Someone might drop his name as a, you know, I don't read this kind of book, but I do know Uzumaki, and then I would get the conversation started. And now you get on Tiktok, you know, Instagram. It's like folks with the the Junji Ito collection of hardbacks, and everybody's reading the new ones. So, yeah, more power to him. He's a he's a fantastic writer and artist. So everybody should go read Junji Ito right now, if they haven't done so yet.

Michael David Wilson 39:17
Oh yeah, definitely. And it's good to see. Like so many Japanese writers, obviously, I have a vested interest living in Japan, but there's so many I've noticed recently getting, you know, more recognition. But the most absurd thing I saw was when an encoded Suzuki was given a Lifetime Achievement Award for horror, you know, the person who wrote the ring and dark water. And there were some people who were saying, and we know the sort they're like, Oh, this is, this is a diversity pick. Why did they put. This obscure writer in his like, Are you fucking kidding me? The ring is the most famous. And any fucking book from Japan,

Gabino Iglesias 40:11
anything you don't know is very obscure to you. So it's, yeah, it's, I guess it applies if you don't know it, it's, very obscure, so it's very telling when you call certain things obscure.

Michael David Wilson 40:27
Yeah, would it? The word woke has been redefined because it used to mean enlightened, and now it seems to mean anything that I don't fucking like. It's woke, ridiculous.

Gabino Iglesias 40:42
It's a virus, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bob Pastorella 40:47
I hate that word. I hate, I hate hearing it because I know, I know where they're going with it. When people say it and I hear, I hear it at work, you know, and being in Texas, this had a customer the other day that, you know, we have, we have to help these people. We don't. We don't have to listen to them, though. And this guy, it's obviously with the tattoos and everything you could tell where, where his allegiance was and everything. And one of our, one of our top sales people, is big, giant black man. He's great, he's, he's, he's who I go to for stuff, you know, he's, he's been doing it as long as me. So we put our heads together. We make things happen. And he called him big black I said, Well, he's got a name. It's Donald, and I'm sitting here trying to fix this guy's phone. Do you know this guy's like, he's like, Oh, well, you want them bleeding heart liberals. I'm like, No, I'm the guy who's fixing your phone that you could have done yourself. Yeah? And he was like, Yeah, carry on, man. You know that's the thing when you're in tech and you're gonna act like that, I can make your phone never work again. Just remember that. Hey, I don't know what happened, man, here's your phone back. You can get sorry.

Gabino Iglesias 42:12
Most of the time. I think they're thinking,

Bob Pastorella 42:17
No, yeah, you're right. There's no thought involved.

Gabino Iglesias 42:19
Yeah, I've seen a lot of screaming matches, but I like more when people just reply with questions, like, yeah, so I don't know. They drink the blood of the children. Okay, where do they get the babies? Did you just start asking questions? Just don't yell all names. Just ask questions and see, see where the whole thing goes, and laugh at how quickly the whole thing just gets dismantled. Yeah, I don't know. I have so much from the moment I wake up, I just try to develop tricks throughout the day to not say the most horrible things constantly online. But it's, it's, it's a barrage of stupidity from the moment we get up now, and it takes a lot of and, you know, reading good shit and smoking a joint under a tree and watching documentaries and listening to Charles Mingus and, you know, doing the type of things that you can

Bob Pastorella 43:25
Yeah, you're right, man, it's like you wake up and it's like you can avoid the news and you can check out. Hey, you know what I'm gonna look at, bloody disgusting. They're not gonna have anything bad on there. And you're drinking your coffee and you're happy, man, you find out a movie's coming out that you heard about, and then they finally got an announcement date and everything like that, and you eat your breakfast, and you get in your car and you go to work, and you're still really happy. And then everything goes downhill. As soon as you encounter another human being, it's like, I should have just stayed home. I was slightly happier at home. I was like, Man, can I go back to where I was? Okay, yeah, I don't get no beanies. Okay, sorry,

Michael David Wilson 44:10
since we're talking about anger and injustice, that is a good segue to talk about your books. And I think we should talk, you know initially about the devil takes you home. And, I mean, you've got loss and heartbreak from page one, but I understand that this came from a real life event. So, I mean, let's talk a little bit through that.

Gabino Iglesias 44:43
The I was probably 15 or 20,000 words, I can't remember right now, into the devil takes you home, and I moved to the US in 2008 between 2008 and me writing this novel, I don't know, 20 and. 1920, 20, at least half of that time I'd been uninsured, you know, unemployed or underemployed, or whatever, if I wasn't at UT Austin because I had health coverage. Back then, it was mostly gigs that had no health coverage, which was kind of weird and scary in a certain way, like I got bit by a spider and I had to buy antibiotics from a drug dealer because I couldn't afford them at the pharmacy. It led to a couple of weird experiences. So I wanted to talk about those things, and I was going a little bit into how messed up the healthcare system does not work in this country. And in the middle of that writing that novel, I was pandemic hit. I lost my job at the school because they were not bringing the classes that I was teaching back online in August, which meant I got my last paycheck, and I got my last month of health coverage, and then I was out of a job and not covered it during the pandemic, and the fear and the anger and the why is, you know, why are we all going through this situation? And then always that gets you thinking of, you know, if I have this situation, but I'm young and I can move around, and I don't have diabetes. It's like, what happens to the people who can't do those things? What happens to people who can no longer work, or who are physically not able to leave their homes and you're not covered, and where's the help? And you know, I was, I was just very angry, and all of that went into into the story, and after the main character loses his daughter, it's, I think the healthcare system trying to get paid for the death of the daughter, sort of becomes another invisible monster that kind of haunts the whole narrative from start to finish, just because I was angry And I couldn't afford therapy, so that just went into the book, right?

Michael David Wilson 47:05
And, I mean, from the start, like the protagonist, Mario, is doing so much to try and be a quote, unquote, good person and to do things the right way. He doesn't want to take these over avenues. But slowly, we just see things getting more and more exhausted. And, yeah, the injustice that you feel is kind of the reader like it really carries through from the weight of the words. And I think it kind of brings to mind, you know, the question that I would say is, at the surface of all of your novels, all of your stories, perhaps, of life in general, it's like, when does doing bad actions make you a bad person? You know, what's the line between a bad person and bad actions? And if a good person is doing bad things for the right reasons like that, the world is so morally gray.

Gabino Iglesias 48:09
Yeah, I think you just absolutely nailed it. It's I, I love to write about people doing the worst possible things for all the right reasons. We're all flawed and we're all violent in different ways, or, you know, vengeful in other ways. You don't know how it's going to come out. You don't know when you're going to reach someone's breaking point, but everyone has one. So how desperate do you have to be to do that first thing that you thought you were never going to do, and then, if that doesn't work, how desperate do you have to be to do the next thing that you told yourself that you are such a good person that you are never going to do this. But now maybe your life depends on it, or you cannot feed your children if you don't do that thing. So it's like when you're outside and you see those, those stories of someone who had a nice job and a nice car, and then they started gambling, or they started drinking, or they tried a little bit of cocaine, and then you see that stumble all the way down from afar. It just, it looks very clear. It's like a clear cut, you know, story that you've seen before. When stuff happens to you, you don't, you don't see it coming, like it's one thing and then it's another. And then you make the decision that you thought was right, and then what you did was just fucked it up severely, and now you have to make another decision, and then you're the one who's stumbling, but you don't see that. And I like to write about those characters, but we all stumble, and then it's like, what am I going to do now? And that that decision says a lot about not necessarily, you, it says a lot about you, but also about your circumstances. Would if you had different set of circumstances, would you make the same decision? And playing with those characters is always a lot of fun.

Bob Pastorella 50:09
I went through something like that years ago, where I had decided that I wanted to change careers. I didn't like what I was doing, and I ended up leaving that career, and I went through unemployment. I managed to get unemployment applied for it, and they granted it, and so, and I had some money in savings, and I went through all of that. And I'm, I'm here to tell you that you can get up every morning and try to change your career. You can get up every morning. You can have every all your applications out and everything like that. You can do every single thing Monday through Friday, at 7am and still in knock on people's doors at businesses. I need to talk to the manager I'm trying to get a job and data. And you can do all that. And one day, you're going to find yourself with an eviction notice in one hand, and the people coming to get your truck on the phone on the other hand, I think everybody is 72 hours away from a bad decision that could put you out in the fucking street. Yes, sir. And it's like, and trust me, it's because I was there, you know, and it I had to make the hardest phone call ever in my life, and it didn't call mom, I called dad, so that's because that's how bad it was. And I was like, hey, I need help. And he's like, Okay, so what's what's going on? And I explained it to him, and he said, I will help you, but you have to get a job. I'm like, Well, I've been trade. Goes, No, I pre and I can appreciate that. He goes that, but, man, he goes, You need to go where you can get you a job tomorrow. And he goes, and if that means selling cars again, then do you start selling cars again? Yeah, because you can get a job selling cars as long as your driver's license is good. Yeah, you know, and that's what I did. But yeah, he had to bail me out, and I made a promise myself that he would, that they would never gonna bail me out again, and they haven't, so it's but yeah, I was, I was within minutes of not having a place to live and not having a vehicle to drive. And if you don't have either one of those, pretty soon you ain't got a phone to use because you're out of money, and then you're starving and you're out on the streets, yep, and what I've done turn to crime,

Gabino Iglesias 52:42
you're out. That's not the bottom. You still need money. You still want all those, yeah, you still want to get your phone and you want to, you know, maybe not spend the night out. If you can scrape together 60 bucks for motel, that'd be fine, right? So it's you keep digging. You're not done yet. So how do you get out? Imagine about criminals, yeah, exactly, exactly.

Bob Pastorella 53:13
They're desperate, unpredictable. And that's, I mean, yeah, you know it. I know it. We Michael knows it, because we all kind of blend the, you know, the way. Weird, weird crime, as I call it, you know, it's, I love criminals as protagonists, because they'll fucking do anything and they react to supernatural shit, like, fairly strangely, there's like, I shot it six times, and it's like it's still and it's still moving. Something's something's not right, you know?

Michael David Wilson 53:51
And of course, the other thing that we see is then the deeper mario gets into this criminal world, the more he's sucked in again and again. And then, you know, as well, with this question of morality, he starts justifying the things that he's doing, and he's like, whoa. These are terrible fucking people. There are injustices that are happening. They they deserve to die, or they deserve to suffer. And I mean, it's difficult to argue with the logic, but it's like, well, should you be the one to be delivering that suffering? And kind of a personal question, some people are probably like, no, but I don't know. It depends on the situation and when he knows as well that he's going to rid the world of a monster and he's going to benefit himself and thus help good people. God, it's then difficult to say that crime is the bad choice. At that point, it's.

Gabino Iglesias 55:00
Yeah, it's a, it's again, it's those. Those characters are the ones that I enjoy the most. Are you going to do the bad thing? Sure, but why? I think that's what makes them interesting, right? They're, they're criminals, so we know they're probably going to take the wrong choice. But how interesting can you make the taking of that decision, the making of that decision, taking taking that route of, how does that work? I I started teaching romance when I started teaching creative writing at universities, and I had never been a fan of the genre. I understood how the formula worked, but I had to study it to understand, you know, a little bit more so I could help my students write better romance. And the formula goes, you know, they start, they can't be together, and then they have a happily ever after. You can change a few things along the way, make them both women, a guy and a ghost, whatever you want. But the point is, they all have the same formula. It triumphs or it fails based on how you complicate things. And in that way, I think a bunch of genres that we love horror and crime and sci fi, they tend to behave in the exact same way. It's like, you kind of know that if you're watching a sci fi movie about some folks stuck on an alien planet, it's not going to be a happy movie, something is going to show up. There will be blood. You already know that, but you don't stop watching if the movie's good, like, how many times can we have aliens and still make it good? That's, that's what we know, the crime. We know pulling the trigger. We know demons and werewolves and and haunted houses. We know all of it, but we can keep it fresh, like we can do new things with it. Let's let's play with with form. Let's play with the way that we approach this thing. Breathe new air into it, and then we have what we have.

Michael David Wilson 57:22
And I mean talking about breathing new air into it and presenting things in a fresh way. I mean on the surface and the way that a lot of your stories start, you could think, okay, you're gonna get a straight crime novel, particularly house of bone and rain, I would say. But then, you know, you introduce the supernatural and you show these other more overt horror elements. In a way, it reminds me a little bit of when Chuck Palahniuk said that you can tell the truth through fiction better than you can through non fiction. So I'm wondering if there's a little bit of that going on here. And at what point did you know that you wanted the supernatural and horror to become part of your crime stories, and was that always the way that you've done it?

Gabino Iglesias 58:19
I started, I think I fell in love. I know I fell in love with horror first. So I always thought I was going to be a horror writer. But then, when I discovered crime, it was, it was that, that revelation of like, I'm kind of having the same feelings, I'm anxious, I'm excited, I'm laughing. Sometimes there's a lot of blood and violence. Like, I like these two things just as much. And then it took me, you know, maybe 20 years to figure out that I can write a horror story, I can write a crime story, or I can write a mix of both. And that's a lot of fun, because you just pluck elements from each one of those genres and then you do whatever the hell you want. There's like, no rules. You like demons. You can give them guns. It's like, it's this idea of, like, just giving yourself permission to do stuff, which I think a lot of young writers, we just don't, because you know the rules, you know the books that made you you know how those work. So you're, you're sort of tied to all those rules and regulations. I mean, if you study writing, which thankfully I didn't, but if you study writing, then they're, they're going to give you even more rules and regulations that you than the ones that you pick up from books and that you're not you're not willing to go to those places. And it's actually the opposite. Just go to those places. You want to make it horrific and very gory and also funny. You. Please do it. Give us that. Are you a super fan of what's the term spicy novels, but you also love horror, and you want to do spicy horror? Please do that. Do whatever makes you happy, make it weird, make it kinky, make it political. Play with the genre. Have a lot of fun

Michael David Wilson 1:00:19
with it. Have you found that since being picked up by Mulholland, that you've had to be more concerned with genre? Or has this ever come up in conversations? Have they wanted to know like, look, are we marketing more crime, or are we marketing more horror? What are we doing? Where are we put in this book?

Gabino Iglesias 1:00:42
Mulholland is very weird because they have certain books that I would call horror, but they're a crime imprint. I think they've, they've done this combination of not telling people what it is, calling it a dark thriller, but then being very clear about we call them dark thrillers or whatever. But it's, it's from the guy that that writes horror. So whatever the marketing team has been doing so far, I think it works. They might mention the surreal elements as being more literary, depending on where they're pitching the book. So I think they've done a good job of we just we signed the weird guy, and every novel is going to be a weird mix, and we don't know what it is, but it'll be dark and hopefully thrilling. So it'll be a dark thriller, and yeah, and then I don't have to worry about genre at any point in time. I don't, I don't think about genre when, when I'm writing. I don't think about genre when I'm editing. I often think about it when people ask or when I start thinking about marketing, because then, if you do the wrong kind of marketing, like I picked, you know, the publishing is very, very, very slow. So I picked the title for House of bone rain. Before everything was house of blah, blah and blah, yeah, it's it was before that. So I got caught up in that, in that thing, and you're like, Hey, listen, I it's not, there's no dragon fucking This is not that book. Don't pick it up because you think it's one of those houses, and then find underwater monsters. Don't get mad at me. So it's always a challenge. They call it one thing. The horror community knows what it is. I'm always calling it barrio noir because it's easier to not have to explain it. Yeah, genre's just funny like that. Never think about it until it's done, and then you obsess about it for a little bit.

Michael David Wilson 1:03:10
Yeah, that's interesting to hear because I remember, I mean, back in the day when your first two books were with broken river books, I would think of them as more a kind of, I guess, like transgressive and kind of between the margins. I mean, they certainly liked crime, but they were always reluctant to kind of say, like, this is crime. It was Barry and noir was essentially the label. But then now you've gone to Mulholland, and every time they've sent me an email, my impression is they're marketing you more as a horror writer. So actually, when when I picked up house of bone and rain, I wondered if it was going to be more overtly horror. Okay, Gabino shifted. Well, actually, you're kind of doing the same thing that you've always been doing, but then the bit of fuckery with Mulholland is, but you're, you're a crime imprint, but then your marketing game was horror. And, yeah, yeah. I didn't know what to expect, but I was not disappointed, because it was, it was kind of business as usual, but taken to another level, like there's certainly been a progression in terms of what you're doing.

Gabino Iglesias 1:04:29
It's a, I think it was the first it was the first novel, not short story, but the first novel that started and I had maybe 10,000 words, and I was convinced it was probably going to I was convinced that I could force it to be a crime period, a crime novel. I was like, the whole thing started with me. Think. Saying, if this event, the shooting of the mother, that happens at the beginning of House of bond rain, happened to me and my friends, if we had an opportunity to quote, unquote, make things right, let me tell that story, and as soon as I hit the you know, how do I help this kids because they are kids. They're not men, they're not bad men, they're kids. How do I help them get these done? And then immediately it was like, you have to talk about storms, which will give you an opportunity to talk about colonialism. But also, hey, storms are weird, and the Tainos have what I can and immediately was like, No, you you can't do straight crime because you know you want to do all those things and you want to be having monster babies in the middle of the storm, because that's how you have your fun writing. So it for about 10,000 words. It was, it was, it was 100% a crime novel, and then it just went downhill, and the other mayhem began.

Michael David Wilson 1:06:10
Thank you so much for listening to this is horror podcast with Gabino. Iglesias join us again next time for the second and final part of the conversation with Gabino. But if you would like to get that and every other episode ahead of the crowd, become our patron@patreon.com forward slash, this is horror. Not only do you get early bird access to each and every episode, but you can submit questions to the interviewee, and coming up soon, we will be talking to Joe Hill, and then we will be kicking off next year with a returning appearance from Dean Koontz. So if that sounds good and you want to support all that we do at this is horror, become our patron@patreon.com forward slash This is horror. Okay. Before I wrap up a quick advert break

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Michael David Wilson 1:08:30
Well, that about does it for another episode of This is horror. And my final ask of you is that if you have a guest that you would like to see on this is horror podcast, or you have a short story or film that you would like to hear myself and Bob Pastorella Analyze and unbox on story. Unbox the horror podcast on the craft of writing. Send me an email. Michael at this is horror.co.uk. Let me know who you want to hear us talk to, and let me know what you would like to hear on story unboxed. So until next time for part two with Gabino Iglesias, take care of yourselves. Be good to one another. Read horror, keep on writing and have a great, great day.