Michael David Wilson 0:29
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, I chat with the world's best writers about writing, life lessons, creativity, and much more. Today, I am chatting with Max Doty, the author of *The House That Eats the Dead* Max Doughty is a veteran game writer who served as the head of content for Choices Stories You Play and Surviving High School, for which he also wrote two spin-off novels. His screenplay Almost Kings won Netflix's inaugural Find Your Voice Award, and was made into a feature film. He regularly contributes to Reddit's No Sleep Forum, where his work often appears at the top of the charts. His debut novel, The House that Eats the Dead, was published by Tor Night Fire in the UK, and by Bantam in America. But before we chat with Max Doty, a quick advert break.

Bob Pastorella 1:51
House of Bad Memories, the debut novel from Michael David Wilson, is out now via Cemetery Gates Media. Denny just wants to be the world's best dad to his baby daughter, but things get messy when he starts hallucinating his estranged, abusive stepfather Frank. Then Frank winds up dead, and Denny is held hostage by his junky half sister, who demands he uncovers the cause of her father's death. Will Denny defeat his demons, or be perpetually tortured for refusing to answer impossible questions? Clay McCloud Chapman says, "House of Bad Memories hit so hard you'll spit teeth out once you're done reading it. House of Bad Memories by Michael David Wilson available now in paperback, ebook, and audio. From the host of this isorra 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, and she's not the only one being watched. Their watching is The Wicker Man meets Body Double with a Splash of Suspiria. They're 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 3:14
Okay, with that said, here it is. It is Max Doty on This This Is Horror. Max, welcome to This Is Horror.

Max Doty 3:28
Thanks so much for having me.

Michael David Wilson 3:30
Yes. So to begin with, I want to know what were some early life lessons that you learned growing up.

Max Doty 3:39
Oh Man, well, I thinking back, I think I watched the TV movie version of it at way too young an age, like when it first aired on ABC. I must have been eight or nine, and maybe 10. But my neighbor had a giant drainage pipe at the corner of his yard, and we would always just be like at sleepovers, daring each other to like go down there and whisper for for Pennywise to come pay us a visit. Sometimes people would do it. I guess like I don't know if we were very smart kids, so maybe that's why I was able to become a horror writer because I wasn't scared enough.

Michael David Wilson 4:23
Yeah, no, that that is an interesting reaction. Having watched it, most people would probably stay away, but you were like, "No, we're we're gonna try and summon Pennywise. But on the basis that you are here, I guess you probably didn't summon much at

Max Doty 4:43
all, or or I'm the one survivor of the sleepover who gets to live to tell the tale that Horatio.

Michael David Wilson 4:50
Yeah. Well, I mean, so you were watching horror movies from an incredibly young age, then I imagine.

Max Doty 5:00
I was very advanced in terms of my horror watching, yeah, and I also loved horror comics. I would just rummage around the 25 cent bin when I was a kid and just like grab every horror comic I could find. So I was just devouring, you know, Tales from the Crypt or all the knockoff brands too, and yeah, I just couldn't get enough of it.

Michael David Wilson 5:23
Yeah, I understand too that you were watching the likes of Evil Dead from a fairly young age. So

Max Doty 5:32
that's yeah, totally accurate. We loved loved Army of Darkness, Evil Dead Two, original Evil Dead. I must have watched Army of Darkness 100 times by the time I was like a middle schooler,

Michael David Wilson 5:42
yeah, yeah. And were you writing stories around the same time? Did you kind of get that horror bug or that creative itch, early doors?

Max Doty 5:53
Jeez, you know that's a good. I think I wanted to be a writer since sixth grade or so, but for whatever reason, like I, I never, I don't know how to put it. Like, like all throughout middle school, you know, people are like, "Oh, you're so good at math, like do that. Or, and I guess I, as I got older, I had this kind of pretentiousness about me, I guess, where I was trying to write more literary things, and I don't know if I really tried horror until I was, you know, more in my like late 20s, early 30s, and here I am, 44 with a first novel. So I guess I'm a late bloomer.

Michael David Wilson 6:36
I mean, you could say that on the basis of the way you've described it, but I think it would be doing you a bit of a disservice, really, because despite this technically being your debut novel, you have been in writing and creativity since university, possibly before. I mean, you majored in creative writing, you have done screenwriting. You have written hundreds of video games. So, you know, yes, is it your debut novel technically? But it's not really the full picture.

Max Doty 7:15
That's accurate. Yeah, especially. I mean, really, the bulk of my career has been in video game writing, and and I I don't know I've spilled a lot of digital ink over the years. Like I I've probably written millions of words for mostly phone games. Like the biggest one was called Choices, and is sort of like a platform for interactive fiction. And I was the head writer there for a long time. And the cool thing there was not just getting to write a lot, but also I got to have a giant team of I think 40 ish writers, and got to learn so much from working with so many other people, and you know all sharing each other's tips and tricks and everything. So, so yeah, late debut as a writer, but I've certainly been around the block.

Michael David Wilson 8:00
So I want to put this creative puzzle together and get a picture as to your journey. So, in terms of the video game writing, when did that come about, or how did you get into the video game writing industry?

Max Doty 8:16
Oh, this this is when everyone has a different story. But for me, I honestly I was on Craigslist in the Bay Area, and this was pre iPhone days. A company on was developing a game called Surviving High School for flip phones, and it was like literally a black and white Samsung phone, you know, with like I don't know, we had to cram the game into like 50 megs or something. And anyway, they they needed a writer to tell the story, and they hired me. And I think they liked. I'd had one year of computer science at university, so that probably they're like, oh, he can he can do this a little better than the other writers and yeah, that ended up becoming this like two decade career where I that little company got acquired by Electronic Arts. Then we like formed a little startup, and then that got acquired, and I kind of had this like Silicon Valley success story. Yeah, and now I'm done with all that, and kind of like just really excited to be writing horror.

Michael David Wilson 9:28
You said that you did a module of computer science, so that that is vastly removed from creative writing. So in America, is that kind of path for the course that you can do something so drastically different from your major, because in in the UK where I went to university is all very much related. As someone who was in the English literature and creative writing department, if I say, can I take this module in computer? The science, they'd be like, "No, are you are you a madman? What are you doing? You are an art student.

Max Doty 10:08
Oh well, I think this might be evolving. I do hear about people applying to universities, even as a freshman, and kind of locking into being an engineer or whatever. But at least when I went, yeah, I I got into college, and pretty much you just pick what classes you want, and and then you eventually pick a major after a year or two, and then specialize. I I started thinking I could be a computer scientist and a writer, and this was at Stanford in like 2001, and my very first computer science class, they had this like very basic coding language they taught us, and I I thought it was like hot stuff because I used the basic coding language to make like a chess simulator where you could put in chess notation and and have it do moves, and it was there's like this kind of like competition of who can make the coolest thing with this very basic code, and the person who won made a fully functional graphing calculator, and I at that moment I kind of realized I'm way outclassed and I'm not going to succeed in this major. So I think fairly soon after that, I pivoted, and honestly, creative writing was what I wanted to do all along. Is just computer science had been the kind of like practical thing that people pushed me toward.

Michael David Wilson 11:33
Yeah, that makes sense, and I can see in the context why you might have decided to pivot towards creative writing when you saw the competition and what you were up against,

Max Doty 11:45
but the one thing I will say is like I think creative writers have like a bad reputation of being like the the lazy ones at university. Like maybe you're reading some poetry and like gazing at your navel under a willow tree or whatever, and I did like when I left computer science and started doing writing. I made this vow that I would work at least as hard as the computer science majors because, like, I wanted to really make it and and not be that navel gazer. I wanted to be someone who who really wrote every day, and you know, went on to to publish, and and so yeah, I I did like I kept to that, and I like kept that work ethic up as I became a professional,

Michael David Wilson 12:34
right? And I understand too that by the time you had finished your MFA, that you had written two novels. So it sounds like you certainly did, you know, put your money where your mouth was, as it were. So, what was that like? And will those novels, or will an iteration of them, ever see the light of day?

Max Doty 12:58
Oh well, one sort of my very first novel was like a it's kind of like a gritty YA story called Almost Kings, and a friend liked it, and we ended up adapting it into a feature film, and it got produced, and it you could go watch it on Amazon. Although I would strongly suggest reading The House That Eat the Dead instead of doing that, because I've come a long way as a writer, and I think the thing I made today is a lot better than the thing I made when I was, you know, in my 20s. Yeah, and then yeah, I've written a couple other novels that are going to be forever in the drawer and have no desire to ever revisit, but probably taught me a lot as I crafted them.

Michael David Wilson 13:44
And I mean, talking about lessons, what would you say were some of the lessons that you learnt through your creative writing course, both what to do and perhaps also what not to do?

Max Doty 13:58
Hmm. I guess one thing I would say is like when I was younger, I was I was chasing like this kind of like literary novel. I wanted to write like a very like highbrow literary book, and maybe I just never cracked it. And like I don't know if I ever loved it. Like I love horror because when I started writing scary stories, like it honestly just felt like coming home, and like I, like I'd been wandering in the wilderness without a map and just trying to do stuff, like whatever, to seem smart or whatever it may be. But maybe because I'd read like 10,000 horror stories, like between like no sleep and books, movies, comics. Like I just consumed so much of the genre that I felt like I knew what to do. Just like a little bird suddenly flapping its wings and like eureka! Here I am. I'm flying through the air. So I think I think maybe I was just in the wrong. Genre for my whole life, and when I actually got back to something I was enthusiastic about, and yeah, the metaphor I always use with my wife is like, you know, in the Matrix when Neo says like I need guns, lots of guns, and then like a zillion racks of guns like come flying through the screen, and he's got all these pics. Like that's how I feel about horror tropes. I'm like, if I need a horror scene, I'm just like, I need horror tropes, and it's like, I've got, I've got a lot to pick from, and and I think I never had that feeling when I was trying to trying to be more like highbrow. So yeah.

Michael David Wilson 15:37
And did you have a moment where you thought you have to return to horror, or where you just realize, "Hang on, I'm writing in the wrong genre. I need to come home.

Max Doty 15:49
I think the moment was like when I was doing the game writing. The cool thing about that job was we were writing stories for a platform that needed every genre present. So, doing that, I got to try romance, historical, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, all those things. And definitely, when I was in those horror brainstorms, I felt like the most alive I had in a long time creatively. And then when I left the job, well, one thing I've been doing just having a baby was like, you know, you're stuck with a baby rocking it for a long time. Sometimes it's hard to even like have a book, or also you could be in the dark. So, anyway, I was just reading no sleep story after no sleep story and got really into it. And when I left the job, I was like, I I should try writing some of these because, like, I I I understand this world and I would have a lot of fun doing it. And man, like throughout that like two decade career in games, I'd been writing like story ideas in a Word doc, and I had like two pages worth of one line story ideas, and I just started going like bang, bang, bang, and and also is kind of like I was in this sort of yeah, like I was basically a stay at home dad at that point, and was spending my whole day with my little son, and the whole day I'd just be kind of like thinking through what kind of story I wanted to write that night. Then it'd be like everyone went to sleep, and it's my like magic daddy writing hour, and I just like boom, the whole thing I've been that had been sitting in my brain all day. Like I'd write it, and I think for the first time in maybe two decades, I just gave myself permission to write bad stories. I was like, if it if it sucks, like if it's if it totally sucks I won't do I'll just throw it away but if it's like pretty pretty bad I'll still publish it and I'm just gonna like just just do that and I think in the course of 90 days I wrote 60 stories and put them all in no sleep and and I think the 48th of those stories was the series that became the house that eats the dead, and I got an agent, and we turned it into a book.

Michael David Wilson 18:06
And writing 60 stories in 90 days-I mean, that is certainly a prolific workload. But I imagine that a lot of that discipline and just, I guess, in a way, that rigidity is going to have come down to what you were doing in the video game industry because you had to produce the stories. You can't say, "Oh, sorry, inspiration didn't hit today. It's like, oh yeah, no,

Max Doty 18:36
it was like I also I was like the one telling everyone like, guys, we got to get our stories in, or like we don't make money, and then we all lose our jobs. So like that was like ingrained in my head of like, yeah, we got to produce, and like at some point, fans, you know, if if you show up to watch your favorite TV show and it's not there, like you're like, what the hell? So it was the same with with the game we were making. So, so I mean, we really had to deliver on a weekly basis, or else our fans were going to have a revolt. So I was used to it, and I think the second thing was just like, you know, our brains are all trained now to whatever post on social media and get your likes. I hate that about myself that I like even enjoy that. But I had kind of like co opted my own dopamine addiction at this point, where I was like, I'm gonna instead of you know whatever posting a picture of dessert, I'm gonna I'm gonna post a scary story and get some likes. So so I was kind of like feeding that weird dopamine addicted loop in this weird manic way, and it led to a giant productive time for myself.

Michael David Wilson 19:50
Yeah, I think that dopamine loop is a particularly troubling one now as well because social media has become so fractured. That even if you're posting things for likes, actually everyone's divided in terms of the platform that they're on. The algorithm has gone crazy, and so you're probably not going to get a lot of these likes anyway. So, I think it was better to go over to Reddit and to just post scary stories. And hey, even if you hadn't got any likes, which thankfully wasn't the case, at least you'd have written some stories.

Max Doty 20:28
Oh yeah, is absolutely. I mean, social media is essentially like a hellscape, and and like to at least like go straight into it and be like, we're going to be horrifying on purpose. Like felt like a lot more honest than engaging with whatever else is going on on Instagram and and Facebook. I

Bob Pastorella 20:48
think that as much as we don't like the internet, like I work in the tech industry, that's my day job.

Max Doty 20:53
Yeah,

Bob Pastorella 20:54
and so as far as the internet goes, there's there's a lot of problems in there. But I would say that there's some really great things that that have happened, especially concerning books and literature and things like that. Without the internet, we wouldn't have the novella back where it is. And so, you know, at at the time that the internet was was launching, the novella was considered a dead format. You had to to you know Stephen King was the only person who could do them, and he had to group them in you know threes and fours to get them out. And so, also with things like no sleep, and in Reddit, and in social media and things like that, there there have been some great things that have happened in in in reading and in books and in writing and literature because of the internet. So yeah, the internet is I I feel like it's a necessary evil. Social media is definitely a necessary evil, but a lot of a lot of great things have happened. I think we've got probably one of the most Diverse writing group, a roster of writers that we've never seen before, and Hard's definitely having a moment. And so, and I, I don't see, I see some some signs that it's it's it's going to go on for next couple years. But you know, like everything else is cyclic. So, but without the internet, I don't think that these things would have happened. So, as much as I hate the fucking thing, I gotta kind of love it too. You know, so yeah, that's where I'm at.

Max Doty 22:34
I totally feel you, man. Yeah, I mean, like I said, like without the internet, I wouldn't have written a single story. I don't think, or they never would have seen the light of day. So there is definitely it's just it's just a double edged sword, and I at least felt glad I I was able to kind of trick myself into being productive with the way it's constructed.

Michael David Wilson 22:58
Now before we get into the house that eats the dead, I'd like to know if you've had any real life experiences with haunted houses, and what your personal beliefs are pertaining to the supernatural.

Max Doty 23:14
Well, I already told you that I went and whispered for Pennywise to come on out of the dark pipe. I will say I went through a phase where I was really afraid of the dark, and I would tie a rope to my light switch so that when I was in bed, I could like yank it down and not have to cross the darkness. I think that's when I don't know. I got into I got really into Christopher Pike for like a minute in middle school, and I read all his books in like a year, and something got scary in there, and I had to like turn the book covers face down and and do the that. I think as an adult, I don't really believe in any paranormal things, but I do believe in scary people, and I and I guess like probably that speaks to like in the house that is the dead. Probably the the scariest elements are actually the people and not the house itself, in in my opinion.

Michael David Wilson 24:13
I would certainly concur with that, and you know I think what makes it fascinating is that it's not necessarily, or not really at all, the house that is evil, but it's what you do with the house, how you wield that power and the house's ability. So I think before I start talking into obscure terms, this will be a good point for us to actually talk about the elevator pitch and the concept for the house that eats the dead.

Max Doty 24:47
Sure. Well, I guess the pitch is this: this couple, Tom and Claire, they're kind of like a well-to-do Silicon Valley couple, and they acquire a stunning Queen Anne at a bargain price. And they soon realize that it can consume any dead matter that is inside of it. It could be a wooden chair that's a dead tree, or it could be cotton stuffing out of a teddy bear. Anything that's dead, the house, if it chooses to, because it doesn't have rules, it has appetites and tastes. It can eat it. And then, furthermore, if something is consumed in that manner, the rest of the world forgets it ever existed. So Tom and Claire might remember the beloved childhood teddy bear that got eaten by the house, but the kid who previously had loved that teddy bear like nothing else doesn't remember it anymore. And then, of course, as the book goes on, a teddy bear is like the the least of our worries. Like we have, you know, there is a dog. Everyone should know because I get I get some one star reviews about this. A dog does die and is eaten by this house and is forgotten by everyone except Tom and Claire, and then later we start moving on to people.

Michael David Wilson 26:09
Yeah, I know that everybody hates it when a dog dies, but considering what else happens, it's like, come on, we're leaving a one star review over the dog. Now I'm probably going to get canceled just for saying that. It's like, yeah, of course we are.

Max Doty 26:28
Yeah, you must have not gotten to 10 pages later in the far more horrific stuff that happens.

Michael David Wilson 26:34
That's it. That's it. No, well, they stopped reading at the dog, I suppose, but

Max Doty 26:40
probably for the best, if

Michael David Wilson 26:42
that's. But I mean, in a world that is inundated with haunted house novels, you have landed upon a radically fresh take and a brilliant concept. So, I mean, I want to know what the genesis of the idea was obviously I know the Genesis, the origin story was putting these out on Reddit, but where did the idea come from?

Max Doty 27:11
It kind of came from a cocktail of things, and I guess the first I have to give big credit to my wife because she is the one who is always like talking about our real house as if it is a person or thing, like if we're going to discuss repairs or any aspect of the house that we don't like, she'll like shoo me outside and say, "Hey, we can't talk about the house in the house that can hear us. I think is mostly a joke, but I'm not sure. And that so that is definitely a part of the genesis of the idea. Probably second is that we were trapped in this house for so long during COVID that it became a much bigger fixture of our lives, and we were just-I guess that kind of like claustrophobia, like, is something that carried into the novel. And then I guess finally, like I, I just had this like kind of long discussion with my wife about how couples, you know, couples will kind of like complain about their problems to other people, and lacking the context of actually being in the relationship, you really can't understand like why people make the crazy decisions they do within the context of a relationship, and there's this whole kind of like scorekeeping that happens that only the two people involved in the relationship understand. And I started to have this idea, like, what if you know, really, the couple has a completely different understanding of their world than everyone else in the entire world, and so like that's kind of what happens as Tom and Claire go further in this journey, where they've at some point erased a lot of people and and things, and now they have a totally different context than anyone else in their lives or in the entire world. So, I guess that was like the third piece.

Michael David Wilson 28:56
Yeah, I love this thread of tension throughout between Tom and Claire, and you know their negotiations, their discussions, their inevitable moral deviations, and just seeing how that is managed, and you know watching their relationship progress or regress in in some ways, and so, how did you manage the pacing with regards to their growing tension within the relationship?

Max Doty 29:30
Oh man, I feel like when I write, I I like to have like a feeling of like a kind of a wave motion, like a up and down, you know, kind of like a sine curve that's like slightly increasing in terms of tension. And so, with with their relationship, one thing I wanted to do is like they have these wonderful moments where they're like, "Oh, we we did this awesome thing together, or maybe we did this horrific thing together, and. It brings them closer, and then you know, 10 pages later, maybe is like Tom wants to do one thing, Claire wants to do a different thing. Now they feel like they're farther apart than ever. And then 10 pages later is like, oh, but now another thing happened, and they teamed up again. and And I think you know, relationships are like that. There is that push and pull and ebb and flow. It being fiction, like I think there's more dramatic ups and downs than in real life.

Michael David Wilson 30:27
Yeah, and I love too that as things progress, us as readers, we are forced to ask, okay, well, how far would we go? What would we do if we were in this situation? I mean, this is the central question that the book is forcing us to ask ourselves, and so, seeing as you wrote it and you forced us to ask ourselves, I want to ask you: Where do you think you would draw the line? What are your limits? What would you do if you had this house? Yeah,

Max Doty 31:00
I mean, it's it's a good like one thing I wanted to do in this book is you can imagine a different book where someone acquires a house that can erase anyone from reality, and oh, you know, it could be say it's just like Tom is a single guy and he's trying to work his way up the corporate ladder, like he could go bananas and just like take out everyone in his way, and before you know it, he's he's you know running the law firm and having a great life. But like, I wanted to situate a character who, you know, she's not really she's not really ever like doing anything with the house for her own benefit. She's doing it to protect her family, like she's, she has you know a kindergarten age daughter, teenage son, both of whom experience various threats and obstacles in their in their way, and and she is, you know, for the most part, she's just like taking down threats to her family, and so of course, like for me, yeah, if someone came in to my house, you know, coming after my kindergarten age son, I feel like I would do whatever it takes to protect him, including feeding that person to my house. But then, you know, then then then I mean, the interesting part is like in the book, it pushes her in various situations to figure out where is her line, like because I don't think she's not just like some cold blooded killer who's like out to use this house for every advantage. Like she she has a moral compass, and so I don't want to get too spoilery, but like it's kind of like interrogating where that line is is is probably central to defining her character,

Michael David Wilson 32:43
and then related to that, we have the question as to you know if we could protect somebody from feeling negative things, if we could prevent someone from grieving at things pertaining to that, then would we? And you know, we mentioned the dog before, and it happens very early on, so it's not really a spoiler. So, of course, if Tom and Claire feed the dog to the house, then it because not only is the dog, but the memory existed, they protect their children from having to go through the grieving process and the loss, so it's an interesting one because I think, particularly to begin with, what they're doing it is always born out of good intentions. And actually, I would say the vast majority of what they do, they think they're doing it for the right reasons, even when they both morally diverge, both Tom and Claire think what they're doing is for the best. So, I mean, how did you navigate, particularly thinking about your own children, protecting them from, I guess, the evils of the world, while also realizing that sometimes some awareness is important,

Max Doty 34:04
man. I will say, like just this week, like we had a little kitten die outside my house. I live out in the country, and and I have kids that are 10, eight, five, and a baby, and it's kind of like all these questions emerge. Like, do you do you? Is it okay for the kids to see this dead animal? Is it should we lie to the five year old and not tell him the truth about what happened? What at what age like should a child understand that like an innocent creature died for no reason? It's you know and like you know part of me yeah probably wished we didn't have to have that conversation at all like or like we could have if we could have maybe would have been better shoot if I'd gotten home five minutes before the kids I could have disposed of the body before they ever saw it and we would never had to have the conversation but didn't happen that. I guess that's all to say that every parent probably has those moments where you're confronted with the reality of having to guide your child through a trauma, and and there are probably times where you wish you could just erase it all. I mean, personally, I don't think it would be the right thing to do to erase all the memories of a beloved childhood pet, along with the death, but I could see how you get there, and certainly that's where Claire and Tom get to. It's also, you know, there is a bit of selfishness in that you just don't have to deal with the stress of managing your children's emotions at a deep level. Like is, it's kind of like I think people would rather not if you could avoid it have have those deep conversations

Michael David Wilson 35:50
and I guess to another element is that these decisions that Tom and Claire make have to be made quickly you know because if if if you know that the dead matter, let's say, is is outside the house, then you know it's very much in this world. So you got to make a decision quickly: are you putting it in or are you leaving it out?

Max Doty 36:13
Oh yeah, yeah. There's times where there's like, oh, there's a there's a body 10 feet from the house, and it's like, are we going to drag this guy in, or are we gonna let him, or not? You know, and so you gotta, yeah. You don't always have time to play chess. Sunday, Sunday, if plays speed chess, I guess, and make your moves quick.

Michael David Wilson 36:33
I see, yeah. And I mean, I wonder how much of this book was planned out in advance, and how much did you pants or did you write organically?

Max Doty 36:47
This this is probably the only book that is written in the way it was written. Basically, like I said, I was on Reddit. I was posting stories every two days. Posted the first installment of this series, which I think in the very first story it was just I think Claire realizes she has this house and then ends up erasing a child's death and in a is a pretty like brutal decision to have to do this, but she does it because she's like wanting to save someone she cares about who who loved the child. So it was originally that was just like a little one off story, but it was like really popular, and I was like, oh, I'll do a sequel. I have another idea because like the I was like the most natural thing is you'd want to sell that house and get out of it. Like that's the thing in in most horror, but novels about a house that never seems to occur to anyone. Like, oh, we can just sell this place and get going. So I was like, I'm going to do it. And then that I was like, but it shouldn't be so easy to do. And then I had this idea that like, oh, maybe the house, if you try and sell it, the house wants to be fed, so it's going to attract some really bad people. It's got that power, and then in fact, I was like, "Oh, in fact, why did they why did they attract Tom and Claire in the first place? Maybe they're the kind of people it wanted to attract. And and that that became the second installment. Thinking through those questions, and then that was still popular. And I did this third installment that actually would be very spoilery to talk about, but but like basically, it always it was all these short stories that were kind of I was coming up with every couple days. Then like my agent reached out and said, "Hey, we can turn this into a novel. And there's this whole new process of reoutlining the book based on like the architecture that those three stories had provided, and then basically coming up with like the the biggest difference I think between like a novel that comes out in the bookstore and the short stories I was writing on Reddit is the novel requires intense characterization, whereas a Reddit story is more like, what would you do in this crazy situation? Is like not as character focused. So the cool part was when I went back and got to think like, why exactly would the house attract Claire and Tom? I really got to go deep into their characters and give them these much more fleshed out backstories, like change the ages of some of the kids, introduced side characters that hadn't existed before, and so basically, yeah. Then I guess you could say that the thing got pamped, then architected, and then like pamped a little bit more as I went back through, and is is a little more chaotic than I was used to in my professional job, but it ended up being something I'm really proud of.

Michael David Wilson 39:44
What I love too is, as you said, you know, in a traditional haunted house novel, the people are looking to escape the house; they're looking to get away. But here, it's actually attracting nefarious people. They want to get in. So you've completely reversed or inverted the trope. Rather than you know trying to get out of the house, they're trying to protect the house. You know, even if it's simply protecting them from people with bad intentions, because that's that's the other moral element. Yeah, you have to decide what you're going to do. But if you sell it to someone knowing its power and knowing what they could do, you know, it is moral wrongdoing in terms of a type of complicity, I suppose.

Max Doty 40:38
Right. Well, yeah, if you know you could give a serial killer access to a house that erases all memories of his victims. Then that's not a very good thing to do. And also, in fact, once he has the power, he might even erase your knowledge of this happening. So, so really, it's almost like, yeah, it's not that easy to sell this house to someone. I. I I I I like that aspect of it, and I always like want to make things hard on my characters and not give them easy outs. So that seemed like a fun thing to do. There's a couple things that one one thing that probably inspired me is there's a Simpsons episode where Homer guards a pile of sugar and like everything's coming out. I, I that's not a horror reference, but I I always thought it was hilarious and it probably played into this. And then there's this Stephen King movie called Sleepwalkers where cats are just surrounding this house where these bad people live and they're always trying to get to them. And and I I again thought that was like kind of hilarious and probably inspirational for what happened here.

Bob Pastorella 41:47
You know, I've read I've read hundreds of haunted house stories, and yours, I wouldn't even say it's a haunted house, just a disturbing house. There's there's only one other book that that even gets to the level, and I think you surpass it, and that's Ann River Siddons to House Next Door, and I don't know if you're familiar with that or not, but basically it's from the POV of a neighbor, and a brand new helm is built, and terrible, terrible things happen to the people who move into that home, and as you witness these events that happen, you you start to realize that that it's from the house, and how complicit is this neighbor who sits there and just lets this stuff happen, and it is it is just very and there's some very very disturbing scenes in there, and so I don't I don't know if you were familiar with it or not, and I think Anne River Siddons went on to write other other type of like almost like I don't know kind of went like the the route of like Pat Con Pat Conroy, you know, writing family history stories and things like that. But this this novel here is like definitely horror. And then you take you come along and you take this idea that's like straight out of the evil fucking dead that makes it's like a house that eats thing-it literally eat. Come on, man! And then after like the first chapter, I'm like, "Whoa, the implications are insane! And you, you, you, you knocked it out of the park. And so, I guess I'm just commenting on that. There's you, you, you've hit on something that we haven't really seen in quite a long time is that you you've got a house that is that is different, and that's you know very very powerful, and it's done in such a way that the reader becomes complicit in just wondering how far things could go. Oh,

Max Doty 44:01
I totally appreciate that. Thank you so much. I guess, like you know, if you go back to like neo metaphor of him calling all the tropes in, like one thing is like when I got to writing horror stories, I'd read so many, especially no sleep stories, that I was like, I can't just regurgitate like another haunted house story that's exactly like every other haunted house story. Like I, I, I've read them all, so I guess I was kind of like anything I write. I want to feel a little different. Like I like to use the existing tropes as like my my toolset, but I don't want to just do another haunted house story. I want to. I want to do something different. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 44:43
and I think the title as well. I mean, it really grabs you just hearing the house that eats the dead. I mean, I think for any horror fan, having dead in a title is a good start, but it gives you the concept and. You know, I, I, it really surpassed expectations. I didn't think that anyone could deliver something so wholly original. Like I don't know what I was expecting, but it, it wasn't this. And I love too that, in spite of it being a horror story, it is as much a drama about relationships and dynamics in human beings. There are questions of morality. There are questions of philosophy. There are questions, really, of what makes us who we are. So, it it you know it's in my top books of the year, for sure.

Max Doty 45:43
Oh, I really appreciate that. I, I, you know, the the cool thing with me being an older debut novelist is like, I like like I said when I talk about those old horror novels, like I'm so ashamed of them, and I like never want anyone to read them. But this time, like I actually had the 44 years to read a bunch, to like watch a bunch, to write a bunch of bad stuff, and like I actually is like is my favorite novel of the year myself because like I I wrote it. It was the novel I've been waiting to read, so I I totally not not to be like I'm like the best writer of all time, but just like I actually wrote the book that I, as a fan, wanted to read, and I feel good about that. So, I appreciate that. Thank you.

Michael David Wilson 46:28
I love that you say that, but I also think you probably shouldn't write my novel of the year, Max Doty on the House That Is the Dead by Yeah, the

Max Doty 46:40
blurb about it, like best novel of the year, deserves Pulitzer Prize, says Max Davie.

Michael David Wilson 46:45
Yeah, I I would love it though. You know, you're like I've got I've got a blurb. Let's put this on the front. It's like Max, you you can't fucking do that. I'm I'm the best.

Bob Pastorella 47:02
Like literally,

Max Doty 47:05
yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I'm sure I'll probably read something in December that's better. So I can't say anything yet.

Michael David Wilson 47:14
Yeah, yeah, we'll have to wait for the reissue for for that blurb. But I mean, one thing you said was that your agent was discussing what to do after seeing the Reddit story. So I wanted to clarify: Did you have your agent beforehand, or did your agent pick you up via seeing your Reddit post?

Max Doty 47:40
Yeah, that that pretty much the latter. Yeah, I was you know just in my house writing story after story, like I said, in this like weird manic state for like 60 stories worth. And then at one point, you know, I I would get messages from Reddit people like, "Hey, good job, buddy! Like this is a scary one. And at one point, I just opened my message and it was like, "Oh, hello! Like, I'm an agent. Have you ever wanted to turn something into a novel? Like, we could do that. And I was like, "Oh, I mean, it was like you know, basically my lifelong dream to publish a novel and to have someone just kind of say, "Hey, should we do that? Like it was, it was incredible. And so I said yes, and then, then you know, I think was able to carry some of that like momentum forward. And within a few months, had a had a draft that you know, for me, I'm like the kind of writer. I write short, and then we add stuff in. So I, I guess I, I must have given her draft as something like 45,000 words, and this novel is 90,000 words. So then it became a game of her saying, "Oh, I think you need to add some stuff, and so she kind of give me like a wish list of like, oh, maybe the teenage son could have a whole story of his own, or oh, maybe we need another, you know, red herring, so it's not so obvious who the big bad is, or all this kind of stuff, and and all of those added and added until it turned into the finished product that we have, and of course, once we acquired editors at both Bantam and Tor Nightfire, they had their own advice, and and that was also extremely helpful.

Michael David Wilson 49:35
Yeah, so this is a route to getting a literary agent that a lot of people don't talk about post hundreds of stories on Reddit and then have one reach out to you. It is definitely one of the more unusual stories, but I love that it happened for you.

Max Doty 49:53
I definitely, when I was younger, send a bunch of query letters into the void for those aforementioned bad. Novels and never heard back from anyone. So yeah, it felt like a magic thing that had happened to me when this happened. And you know, I'll be forever grateful to Maria, my agent, for signing me and having faith in me and working so hard with me to to develop the concept into something greater than it was. And I will say, it's not like actually another of her clients is Bonnie Quinn who does the How to Survive Camping series again Reddit to mainstream novel pipeline and so yeah I think it's you know if you look at the whole ecosystem of course you see the success of something like backrooms or like the the whole internet to mainstream horror pipeline is happening in a big way right now,

Michael David Wilson 50:44
and so obviously Maria saw your stories and she saw huge potential in terms of what you were doing. But then I'm wondering what it logistically looked like from having that initial conversation to deciding, okay, she's going to sign you as a client, and then from your perspective, you want to make sure that she's a good fit for you too.

Max Doty 51:08
That is true, and you know, I mean, I think this is like a this is kind of a story where two people are taking a chance on each other because I think I was one of her very first clients. She's actually based in London, I'm based in Oregon in the U.S. So, but like I said, it just felt like so magical that any agent would reach out and want to represent me. And I, of course, did my research, and it seemed like she's a legitimate agency, and she was enthusiastic and wanted to work with me. And I just kind of took that leap of faith, and it really worked out. Like she, I think she subsequently signed more clients. Seems to be doing really well, and we obviously published this book. You know, Bobbi has had a lot of success with hers, so it's it's been. I guess I'm really glad I took the chance.

Michael David Wilson 51:57
And am I right in thinking the deal that you signed is a two book deal.

Max Doty 52:02
That is correct, and I have another book coming out with the same publishers a year from now. It is not a sequel. It is a kind of a similar. I think if you liked The House of Eats the Dead, you will also like this other book, but it is a different story, and it's it's I probably can't tell much about it, but it will be scary and fun.

Michael David Wilson 52:29
Okay, well we'll have to wait until next time for the scary and fun reveal. But I mean, I I imagine you know you have a lot of ideas, a lot of story ideas, a lot of story concepts. So, I'm wondering, working with Maria, what does it look like as you decide which idea to pursue or which idea to write next? I mean, is this something where you have a lot of creative freedom and you go to Maria and you say, "This is the next one. Or now that you have an agent, is there, I guess, more of a strategy towards it, and thinking what is the best follow up, what is the best career trajectory?

Max Doty 53:17
I think Maria generally like wants me to pick and pick my concepts and and you know, but I want to succeed. So we is a discussion, and I think ultimately what it looks like is probably something like I'll say I have these five ideas, and like I would be happy to write any of them, and like legitimately, I I think I could. I think these are five that could be a good book. Like of these, do any resonate with you, or do you think would be the most likely that we could sell, or you know would succeed in the marketplace? And then and then generally, I think she throws it back to me and is like, oh, I'm sure you'll do great on any of these, but maybe this one, or or you know, like it's we try and come up with something that we're both happy with, I guess. But but for the most part, no, she's not pushing me to do something just for commercial success. Is kind of like something that she knows I'll be passionate about.

Michael David Wilson 54:17
So we have spoken about you landing the literary agent. We've spoken about the house that eats the dead being picked up by two publishers, but I want to know how many drafts it went through, both before and after submitting to the publishers.

Max Doty 54:38
Oh, oh, that's. I mean, we kind of went over how it started. Short stories. We did some outlining, short first draft, and then we were kind of adding on. Is I mean, in a way, it's like hard to put a number on because, say, it's you know you added 10 new scenes to a. A draft like it doesn't quite feel like you're a vision. It's it's almost more like stacking on like you had a little kernel and you're putting clay on top of it to make a bigger object. So I don't know. I mean, I would say I was working continuously on it for you know about maybe six to eight months or something, and then it was done, and and then there's probably little little tidbits later of change. Yeah, as you go through the editorial process too, you'll hit like a proofreader who goes through, and you know, oh man, well, this one poor proofreader, I had this phrase, of course, that I there must be some verbal tick in in me. They flagged like 200 instances of it in 300 pages, and every every line in it was so polite, saying, "Oh, Max, like I wonder if maybe in this instance you might want to use a different phrase or cut this all together. And I was just like, by by like the 200th time they pointed this out, I felt so bad for them. But the good news is that that was all corrected, so that I sound much more intelligent in the final draft of the book than in the first.

Michael David Wilson 56:20
Yeah, there's always some sort of verbal tic that you don't notice often until someone else points it out, and it's like, how, how did I do that? But

Max Doty 56:32
oh man, yeah, and luckily it's not while I was speaking because then I just be totally paralyzed and unable to even form a sentence for.

Michael David Wilson 56:41
Yeah, no, that is true, and I wonder too. Having two publishers was one of the publishers the primary editor, or were they collaborating together on the edits? What did that logistically look like?

Max Doty 56:57
In this case, Tor Nightfire UK was the first acquiring editor and had the bulk of the notes, but my U.S. editor Wendy at Bantam, she she came in with more notes later in the process, but is a little bit of a lighter touch. For the next novel, they both had a lot to say.

Michael David Wilson 57:19
So, what happens if their notes are slightly divulging or deviating from one another? What happens in that instance? Do they have to get on a call in and crash it out together before they decide what to ultimately advise you to do?

Max Doty 57:39
Kindly, yes. They they had a separate phone call without me in the room and must have agreed on the set that they sent me. And then so so yeah, that that would be a nightmare talking to two editors across time zones with different notes. I don't know how I deal with that.

Michael David Wilson 57:59
Yeah, this seems to be something that we're hearing more and more often that the UK rights and the US rights are picked up by two separate publishers. So I wonder if this is going to be more the norm going forward, and and hopefully, luckily for the editors, if it is, then they're now going to get into this dance or this groove in which they know how to work together.

Max Doty 58:26
Yeah, I mean it's honestly been wonderfully collaborative. Like for example, I think they both both publishing houses started with their own ideas for what the cover should be like, but by the end, there's one that everyone just loves so much that they're like, "Oh, well, let's both use it, and so even even though it's two separate publishers, it the cover looks the same in the UK and the US, and really, I I feel like everyone just wants to make it the best book possible. I've certainly been in situations like in my MFA program where you get 10 different opinions on a short story, and there's like you just leave the room feeling hollowed out and lost, like and just wanting to throw the story away because you have no idea where to go from there. That has been the opposite of my experience working with with my current publishers. They've been super supportive, great notes. I feel like I know what to do next after we talk.

Michael David Wilson 59:25
And in terms of that cover art, were you involved in terms of selecting which piece of art to go with?

Max Doty 59:34
Sorta. I mean, I think they. I cannot take very much credit for this, except for a couple things. I sent them some pictures of Queen Anne houses because I'd done a pretty good deal of architectural research as I was writing the book. Like Queen Anne is like a very specific sub style of Victorian architecture that's is kind of like is not symmetrical. There's like weird anomalous appendages at. To houses, and I kind of liked that for my house. So anyway, I sent a lot of pictures to the cover team, and then the other thing is they sent they sent a picture that looked a lot like the final cover, except in the final cover, the whole family is kind of standing in the house's mouth like their silhouettes, and in the original cover it was just sort of some like white blocks there, and I it was my idea to put the family in the mouth, which I thought was awesome, and everyone thought was awesome, and and I'm so glad it made it into the final design.

Michael David Wilson 1:00:33
Yeah, I like too that you know just looking at it, you've got with those two lanterns, those are almost the the eyes. You could have the the detail below is the nose, and then there's the family in the mouth. So you know, I mean, it's really came to life quite literally.

Max Doty 1:00:52
I was so it was you know when I worked in my games industry job, we had to look at a lot of cover art, and I it was my job to approve the cover art, so I have been through the experience of like iterating endlessly on something that is just not working. In this case, is like I got you know the attachment, and I was just like, "This is it. This is so good. Like it was just like, just on the first try. Like like I said, we we made some small adjustments later, but I was just like, oh yeah, this is amazing.

Michael David Wilson 1:01:27
Now I want to know, broadly speaking, what does your typical writing routine look like? When are you doing it? How long are you doing it? Is it a rigid thing, or do you find, of course, having your children that there's quite a bit of flexibility to

Max Doty 1:01:48
it? I have, yeah, like like he said, I have four kids, ages 10, eight, five, and baby, and so one has to be a bit elastic in that kind of situation. When I did House the East the dead is mostly bedtime. Like my wife kind of took that over, and she'd be either putting the kids to bed or they'd be sleeping, and I kind of come downstairs at night and pound out words for a couple hours, and then and she was really good about you know getting me time just wherever we could find it throughout the course of the day because I think there's such a fire in me. Like all my life, I wanted to be a novelist, and then to suddenly have someone, and and then I'm just like writing all these stories and posting them for free on no sleep, just for the joy of it, and then to suddenly get the opportunity is like an agent wants you to turn this into a novel and thinks we can really sell it. Like it just felt like if I didn't do it at that moment, like I would have wasted the best opportunity my whole life to to to actually do this. So so I was just like any scrap of time. Like I I was like not reading books. I was not wasting time on my phone. I it was like if I had any scrap that was like 20 minutes or more, I was sitting down and doing this, and it's just kind of like I wanted it that badly, I guess. Now we have a new a new baby and stuff. It's harder. I'm so I I'm again reaching for the scraps of time is mostly at night, and that's probably perfect for a horror writer.

Michael David Wilson 1:03:24
And I mean, how many novels, or how far ahead are you in terms of what you have drawn out? Because as we said, you have a second book that you have to deliver. So I suppose, as well as having the family life that you have to manage-you've got to navigate the writing career, and when you have the agent, and when you have the publisher and the book deals, the stakes have risen. There's an expectation for you to produce a certain number of words every year.

Max Doty 1:03:57
Oh man, yeah! When I was in the games industry, it's like there's a stage where you're a scrappy startup and just any money you make feels great or like any success, then like you know maybe you're doing better, you get investors or a parent company acquires you and suddenly good the bar has changed and like you're you're not oh like any profit is good is like no you have like some expectations here buddy and like you got to hit this. So, so like I always say, like the journey up is a lot more fun than trying to like stay stay aloft. Anyway, I guess that's all to say how far am I ahead. I have a second book written and going through editorial, like sort of the last major stage of editorial right now, and it should be out around the same time next year. So it's getting close, and I think I have two or three more weeks of serious editing to be done with it. I have another book after that that is kind of like the kernel, like I told you about. Like I wrote. It's like 70,000 words. I've got a lot of notes from my agent, and it's going to be a lot of work to fix it up. Hopefully, some point this year I'll get to it and make it better.

Michael David Wilson 1:05:14
So you said the second book is in the horror camp. Is the third book also in the horror camp,

Max Doty 1:05:22
yes, the third book is also in the horror camp. I think I think this is my happy place, and like I, I just love watching horror movies and reading horror comics and reading no sleep stories and reading other people's horror novels. So I think I just have found where I want to be, and I don't intend to leave if I can stay.

Michael David Wilson 1:05:45
Yeah, and and this is you know it's fast paced, it's cinematic horror fiction in the best possible way, and so on. That note, you mentioned previously screenwriting, so I'm wondering, is that something that you're still doing, or is that a kind of phase that you know is is gone now? And if you are still doing it, well, how on earth does that fit into your life?

Max Doty 1:06:14
I haven't written a screenplay in maybe 10 years, and I did write I wrote a couple horror screenplays that again never saw the light of day, but we're I thought we're pretty good. But I think to to make it in that world is so much about connections and being able to work a room and convince people to give you money to make a movie, and probably yeah, I don't know. It just I like I live in the middle of nowhere in Oregon, and I don't think I have it in me to to be a successful screenwriter. But I hope that the books I write will turn into movies, and whether it's me or someone else who writes them, that would be amazing.

Michael David Wilson 1:06:58
Yeah. Well, I I assume in terms of potential movie news that that is something that is secretive and you are not able to talk about just yet, as there's been no announcements as far as I can see.

Max Doty 1:07:14
I am sworn to secrecy, but but but some good stuff is happening on that side for House. So I hope one day we're talking again, and I can tell you more. But but yeah, I don't want to get myself or my agent or anyone in trouble. So,

Michael David Wilson 1:07:30
well, that sounds like a good idea in terms of sticking with that relationship with your agent and everyone else, not getting anyone Into trouble,

Max Doty 1:07:42
but no, I think good things are happening. It's awesome to see enthusiasm in that respect. So hopefully, I have something good to share down the road.

Michael David Wilson 1:07:53
And I wonder too. I mean, are there any lessons learned from both screenwriting and video games writing in terms of the logistics of the writing that you could then transfer to writing fiction and writing a full novel.

Max Doty 1:08:11
Well, yeah, I mean, I think one reason probably I failed so spectacularly with my earlier novels is I didn't have as good a sense of structure when I composed them, you know. When I got into screenwriting for a while, and we did like basically the journey for that feature film we made is I had this novel. It was pretty rough. We turned it into a screenplay. It was we entered a contest and like won the contest, and suddenly it was like Netflix was going to put up you know half a million dollars to film this movie, and at the same time was like, oh, your movie is completely structurally unsound. You need like to fix it. So so we got like a we got a mentor who is this awesome screenwriter, Meg Lefrouve? Sorry, butchering the French pronunciation, but she she would go on to work at a number of Pixar movies, and like she did Inside Out too, for example. She was an awesome mentor, and she she made us read Save the Cat, which kind of everyone in Hollywood was reading at that point, which you know is pretty prescriptive in terms of its structural teachings, but it was like the first structure book I ever read, even having gone through an MFA program, and really taught me a lot, like how to do act breaks or how to how to handle like kind of like the major architecture of a book. I definitely have drawn that into the House that East the Dead, but at the same time, I mean, House the East the Dead it doesn't really play by like a standard Hollywood kind of formula. It it is a little more episodic, for example. If it was turned into a movie, I'm sure they cut a lot of subplots and like changed the pacing of certain places.

Michael David Wilson 1:10:06
It's interesting too that when you won the competition, Netflix simultaneously said we've got half a million dollars to make the movie, and they also said, by the way, structurally unsound. It's almost like a paradox. It's like, well, hang on a minute. How did I win when you got so much that you want me to change?

Max Doty 1:10:31
It did feel that way. Yeah, I mean, and I guess actually a lot of the I don't know a lot of the feedback is like triangulated through various levels of people, so it might be someone thought it was amazing and wanted to pay for it, and someone else thought I needed to change. And both, you know how when I think when you work in that in that field, there's a lot of advice coming from various stakeholders, and and then it comes back to the writer, and you feel like, oh my god, what do I do? Like I'm just-I think I was only in my early 20s at that point too, so I was probably just ill-equipped to to handle it. But that's the beauty of age is like getting a second try and and and being able to do things better. I

Michael David Wilson 1:11:15
mean, the writing world and certainly the movie world is such an up and down roller coaster that, in a way, it feels like they were just preparing you for the highs and lows. Yeah, this is amazing. We love it. Also, completely fundamentally broken. Also, here's half a million dollars. It's like changing personality all the time. It's like, do do you love me? Do you hate me? Do you just want me to have some sort of dependency on you? What is going on here?

Max Doty 1:11:50
Gosh, I yeah, I mean, I don't know. And honestly, like my my partner, the and co-writer Phil, who directed it, like he probably took a lot of the brunt of the criticism and just kind of gave me the oh the digestible part. So in a way, I was protected probably from a lot of the politics of it, and just got to be kind of back in my apartment writing. The other the other crazy thing when you're writing films is like the actual logistics of making a movie kind of can influence the story in weird and unexpected ways. Like when we were doing Almost Kings, we had a whole scene where these guys are kind of daring each other to jump off rocks into a lake. And on filming day, like Phil called me and said, "Oh, we couldn't get a permit to do that, so you have to write a whole new scene that's something similar, but there's no water involved, and so you know we're here. We are like making this movie and like trying to figure out what to do at the last minute, and I'm just like in my apartment scrambling to come up with anything that hits all the same emotional beats and advances the story in the same way, but doesn't use any of the actual action sequence that you created, whereas like you know, with a book, there's no limits. I could just there's no budget. I can I could have a Cthulhu esque monster appear on page 200, and it's free. So it's it's been kind of liberating in that way.

Michael David Wilson 1:13:17
So how long did you have to provide this scene to fill, are we talking hours? It's like we're ready to shoot. You better hours. That one was

Max Doty 1:13:28
hours. Yeah, that was like. I think I may have had to skip work that day to to get that to like. Oh, a cough came on, and I'm yeah in my apartment. Like, oh my God, what am I doing?

Michael David Wilson 1:13:43
And so that that was when you were working in the video games industry, just to get us. Yeah, I was still,

Max Doty 1:13:50
I still at Electronic Arts at that point, kind of working on it. I was working on a game called Surviving High School, and it was like it was almost sort of like RT comics with a little interactive element, just kind of like grinding out episodes for that game. But but then at night, be writing this like gritty teen drama.

Michael David Wilson 1:14:11
And I mean, I should have asked, but was it easy leaving the video games industry, or was that a tough decision? I mean, you'd been doing it for two decades at the time, and you didn't have presumably the offer for the house that eats the dead at that point. So it feels risky, but at the same time, you know, you were starting a family, and you had these aspirations to write full time, so I I don't know what was that like. What was the mindset? What were the logistics?

Max Doty 1:14:48
Oh, I don't know if I ever would have had the courage to say, you know, I'm going to quit my job and write this novel. And I've like I said, I've done in the past where I'm working on my project while I have a day job. This was actually leaving the games industry is a lot more about my family. Like I think we had just reached a point. It was during the middle of the pandemic. I I had become the executive producer of the game. I was leading a team of 75 people on this game. It was like emotions were running high, and I just felt like I was spending my day on the phone talking to increasingly unhappy people about how to kind of like just make it like just life wise, like surviving in the pandemic and trying to stay sane. And I and at the same time, my own family felt was feeling like under increasing pressure. Like I mean, like basically, like all the kids are at home, and I think they needed me, so I I think I quit for my family, and then you know, then this unexpected, like beautiful, like creativity kind of blossomed on the side, and and now it's becoming a bigger thing. So it just-I guess-like I feel very lucky with the way things worked out. But I wouldn't have had the courage to just say I'm going to quit my game job and be a novelist. Like I don't think I could have done it.

Michael David Wilson 1:16:11
And I mean, while this isn't obviously a pandemic novel, once we find out, you know, that you wrote a lot of this during the pandemic, it makes sense because there's almost a claustrophobia within the house. There's a dependency. You are anchored to the house, so I can really see how an experience in a global pandemic and what's going in on in the house that eats the dead they mirror one another.

Max Doty 1:16:43
Yeah, I think you're right. I think Claire essentially only feels safe in the house at some point, and that's kind of like where many of us got to during the pandemic. Like it was like you just feel like the world is a dangerous place, and only your house can protect you. And I guess there's a lot of that in this book,

Michael David Wilson 1:17:02
and I mean the pandemic itself. I mean, what kind of challenges, unexpected challenges, were you facing beyond you know the the obvious?

Max Doty 1:17:17
For me personally, like the pandemic is a really different and destabilizing time. Like I, I've been living down in Silicon Valley with my family, and then we basically like with all the young children, it was just seemed totally untenable. So we came back to my hometown in rural Oregon to have more space for the kids to like play in the yard, and and then we're just doing these jobs remotely. There had been in-person jobs before. Everything, like in a way, like the family started to feel like the only real thing. Like the jobs felt like illusory in some way. And I will say, like, there's the aspect where, of course, the house erases memory. Like my memory of the pandemic time, is like way fogier than any other point in my life. Like I think if I try and remember something from like my 20s, it's more clear than the pandemic time. Partly because the days were so repetitive and we weren't forming like new neural pathways or whatever. But I think that must have played into my thinking of the book. Like, I think in a way, like the, and even to this day, like I think no one like even talks about the pandemic anymore. Like it's been erased from our collective consciousness. It's like so, just probably just this collective trauma that we all carry and don't want to revisit.

Bob Pastorella 1:18:41
I feel the same. It's like I think I had I had COVID before it became cool, like in January of 2020, and and then I recovered from that, and then we one day was told not to come into work. We were going to decide what we were going to do, and then a couple about a month later, I got offered with my own company to go work at a call center, and then I turned that down because I talked to a coworker who was doing it, who was like, dude. I take I took two calls yesterday. I was here for eight hours.

Max Doty 1:19:24
Oh,

Bob Pastorella 1:19:26
so I'm like, he is. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not going to do it again. So I trusted his his judgment. And then we went back to work. And during that time, there was like, I don't remember nothing. I remember I remember those three events. So it was like basically the pandemic was only like three days, you know, because because everything else. I mean, I get exactly where you're coming from. It was it was a blur. It's just like it's because you're right, and we had no way to make new memories. We were stuck doing the same thing. Over and over, you know, masking up, gloving up, going to the store looking for toilet paper. Everybody was doing it, you know, and it was just, just the same thing over and over.

Max Doty 1:20:11
Oh yeah, it was just. Oh man, I like look at pictures from that time. I'm like, oh my god, I, I don't remember taking this one. Or yeah, it's just yeah. So yeah, I think that kind of eating a memory it must have played into like the concept of this book and like yeah, I don't know. I mean, maybe it's our way that our brains protect us from having to go through something so difficult, but it's still like disconcerting.

Michael David Wilson 1:20:41
Yeah, it's interesting too because I mean memory in general is so unreliable, and I know that you know people say that when you're remembering something, you're actually just remembering the last time that you remembered it. So with each memory, it becomes a blur, and yeah, I I hadn't really thought about my own experience of the pandemic until you were saying you don't remember a lot, and I thought, yeah, you're you're right. I guess I don't because every day is so repetitive, and it's almost like memory is like a highlights package, so you've got these like really high points or these different points that anchor you. But if every day is the same, then you know it's like what do you remember? Well, I remember I was in my apartment a lot, and that's about

Max Doty 1:21:38
it. It's like yeah, you can imagine. It's almost like the poor editor looking through hours of footage trying to find something cool to put in the show, and it's the same footage on loop for like two years. And like, how do you make a highlights reel out of that? Like you're saying, like there's there's nothing to make.

Michael David Wilson 1:21:57
Yeah, probably the highlights for me were having these "This Is Horror Podcast conversations. So. yeah.

Max Doty 1:22:03
Oh, that's you got that going at least. Yeah.

Michael David Wilson 1:22:06
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I mean, genuinely, because you're getting so little social interaction, it's like, oh, great, we're gonna call someone up and actually talk to them. That will that will be good. You know, as long as you're not talking about what have you done, it's like oh, I've stayed in my house. How about you? Yeah, I stayed in my house too. Happy days.

Max Doty 1:22:31
Oh,

Michael David Wilson 1:22:32
well, switching away from the global pandemic, I want to know what is the best and what is the worst writing advice that you have ever heard.

Max Doty 1:22:45
Oh, I think you know. One thing I have been on lately is just that, like, I I do think writing those 60 stories in 90 days in this like weird manic episode was transformative for me in terms of my quality of prose writing, and so you know I've been just singing the praises of like just write a bunch and like don't like I I'll say this like I I went through a creative writing undergrad and an MFA later, and and those are super editorially focused. Like in a given semester, you might write one or two stories and then edit a lot. I do think it's really good for a writer to have that kind of like foundational prose quality that comes out of an experience like that. But then I think without just like going balls out and writing 60 stories, I never would have gotten to a publishable work. So, like, I think there's something about just like, you know, write a story, write another story, write another story, write another story, write another story. Don't look back. Like, don't don't edit. Just write the next one. Write the next one. And like, you are learning so much every time you do it that I think like that can't be dismissed. So I guess like to that, and I say once you get to like that kind of foundational level where you're writing good enough, I think people should probably just write more and not not edit so much.

Michael David Wilson 1:24:17
Yeah, I mean a lot of that resonates with me because I think something that was transformative for me was in 2017 when I decided to write a story a week, and I did that on the basis of Ray Bradbury's advice. It was like it's very difficult for you to be able to write a story every single week for a year, and for every story to be a bad story, and I thought, well, either there's going to be at least one good story, or I'm going to have proven Ray Bradbury wrong. Either way, it's an achievement. So, and and I think that comes back to what you said, much. Earlier about giving yourself permission to write bad stories. I think when we decide, like you know, we're writing a story and this has to be the best story I've ever written. That's a lot of pressure in many ways. It's paralyzing, and then you can't do it. But if you say, "I'm writing a story. I'm having a fun. I'm having fun. Maybe it'll be good. Maybe it won't. And you know, then you can do

Max Doty 1:25:28
it. Well, yeah, it's it's like this. You know, the rookies who win the NBA championship, and they just like they say like they're so loose they didn't even like think about it. Like they're just they're playing basketball, and if you keep that sense of play, and you're just like, I'm just having fun. I'm going to do this, and if it's bad, then there'll be another story to follow, and maybe that'll be good. And you know, like I said, like I wrote 60. I I don't think they are all great. Like I think, but I think you know, if I had spent the whole year, you know, polishing five stories, I might have gotten one good story out of that whole process, and I think writing 60 just like super fast. I think I got like a dozen good ones, so you know I think it was probably a more effective use of my time.

Michael David Wilson 1:26:14
And so that begs the question, and we've hinted at it already, but how do you keep your sense of play, and ensure that you enjoy, you know, what you're doing creatively, whilst the stakes are now higher. Whilst you now have the publishing deals and the agent, how are you balancing that?

Max Doty 1:26:37
Oh, that's interesting. It it does feel different, and like it's not, especially now. I'm editing is just not as fun. Like I straight up, like it's just there's there's good things about it. Like you could feel the work improving, and that is rewarding. And but but yeah, I mean, I I will say when I write sit down to like write a rough draft, like I just still love storytelling, and I try and like put all thoughts of success or people pleasing out of my mind, and I just like I just want to tell a story that I would love, and it's gonna be fun. One cool part of my journey is like when I was writing video games, I got to see the quantitative data about like when people stop playing a story. Or also, we would make our money by selling these things called like premium story elements. So like in like a dating story, it might be like, oh, you're on a date with a cute guy. If you want to, like, oh, you know, ride the roller coaster together, you have to pay $1 of real money, and we would see like the data of like how many people chose to pay for that choice. That all kind of informed me so that like I, I think I have a good sense of what a reader would pay for essentially, and there's not too much difference between I would pay for it and I'm going to really enjoy reading it. So as I'm going, I'm just like I feel like I have a sense of like this is going to be fun, fun to write, fun to read, and it you know I'm just going along and typing and having a good time, it's not you know that that's the initial creation and has always been fun and always will be. Like I said, I'm in editorial right now, so it's not fun, but it is rewarding.

Michael David Wilson 1:28:32
How much did the story fundamentally change when they paid that dollar to ride the roller coaster? I hope they had an amazing journey.

Max Doty 1:28:41
You you really here's the thing. Like, you find out the next time they come to a paid choice. Like, did the percentage move on that? So, if you deliver a terrible experience in that roller coaster scene, they might stop playing your game altogether. So, yeah, it's not it's not just like there's there's multiple elements when you're writing a game of that sort. Like you have to create a hook that makes them really, really want to engage with that paid choice, and you have to make it worth it so that they don't drop you as as a like they're a customer. And like if you really make an awesome roller coaster scene, and they feel good about it, then they're going to come give you another dollar tomorrow. So, so yeah, that is like what I drill into my junior writers all the time. Like, make it make it worth it because someone paid real hard earned money to ride that roller coaster. If it if it's a sucky scene, like we we just lost a a good Paying customer,

Michael David Wilson 1:29:41
yeah. So probably not the time to change the genre. It's like you roll the rollercock. You ride the roller coaster. It stops. It's broken down. You're gonna die. Your date is crying, or it it gets off the track and. Your date is beheaded, hereditary style.

Max Doty 1:30:05
Oh my goodness! Well, yeah, I'd pay $1 for

Michael David Wilson 1:30:07
that, but I guess the people who started, like just the story, by the way, not in real life. I wouldn't pay $1 to be decapitated, but yeah, just I I kind of love it when films and when books decide to change genre, just a hard cut, and that would be the ultimate hard cut.

Max Doty 1:30:30
Oh man, well you know so much of the latest boom in horror has been comedians becoming horror directors, like you know both Zach Kreger and Jordan Peele are the the two main examples. Like, yeah, but but yeah, I mean, if you look at something like Barbarian or weapons, there's like so much humor interlaced with the horror that I I I love that. And I mean, I think House has a lot of like thriller elements. You know, there's a lot of like funny bits, even though it's scary. But I like I like to play with the genres as well.

Michael David Wilson 1:31:04
Yeah, yeah, and if if not necessarily funny in the sense of House being a comedy, it is unquestionably fun. There is a lightness to it. There is a playfulness to

Max Doty 1:31:18
it. Yeah, I mean, there's a very dark thing. I mean, there's like some of the darkest things, like you're picking out an urn for a child or whatever. Like it is about as dark as it gets. But I wanted to stay fun the whole time too. So like, there's a lot of like just like I don't know. I feel like Claire has like kind of a sense of gallows humor about the whole thing, and just like when her and Tom's repartee is like is pretty snappy. So I think I think it's like even though it has this dark bit, like I think people are going to just like I hope they read it and just think it's it's fun and they want to keep turning the pages.

Bob Pastorella 1:31:59
Yeah, you can definitely see the evil dead influences in it, you know. Just the in in the initial concept, you know, and I always joke about that too. It's but it's true. It's like Evil Dead really doesn't have any type of rules or anything like that. You're too busy trying to survive to try to figure it out. Yeah, and you you have a story that's you know with like this as well is that it there's a lot that leaves to be desired about why the house does what it does, and is it seems like going trying to to investigate that leads to more questions than answers, and I love that. I love that because it just it just builds the intrigue and all of that. But it's Michael's right, and there there is a playfulness to this that is is, but it's also very dark, you know. And we're we're seeing we're seeing more and more of that. Like you said, you know, with Jordan Peele, Danny McBride, you know, he he wrote he wrote the Halloween movies, the the recent ones. So you know, the comedy and and horror is kind of like crime and horror. It's like they're you know the the same coin, just other sides. So I kind of see that happening.

Max Doty 1:33:23
I think

Bob Pastorella 1:33:23
comedy has the same beats, almost.

Max Doty 1:33:25
Yeah, yeah. A lot of like horror kills or like punchlines in the comedy movie, or and the sense of playing with tension. I think is like there's a lot that they can learn from each other.

Michael David Wilson 1:33:37
Well, we are coming up to the time that we have together today, but I wonder before we go, what advice would you give to your 18-year-old self?

Max Doty 1:33:50
Oh, oh my! Well, this is like using the house to change reality in unexpected ways. I don't think I want to play with that, but I mean, I'm really happy with this journey I've had and and getting this moment of of this of feeling like just like with one of my kids, like I am proud of them and wouldn't want to change a thing. And and I think like with the house, I'm like I I really like this book and I'm so glad I got to have this moment. I think I think that 18 year old like kind of needed to take the journey to get here, but I guess if I could say anything, I would just say to to write more, write faster, and don't don't look back so much. Like I think maybe I would have gotten to this moment a little sooner.

Michael David Wilson 1:34:40
Well, we're just happy that you've got to this moment now and enjoy the hell out of it, and we can't wait to read what you put out next.

Max Doty 1:34:51
Oh, thank you. I hope I hope it's good. I'm trying to make it so. We will see.

Michael David Wilson 1:34:58
All right. Well, where can. Our listeners and viewers connect with you.

Max Doty 1:35:03
I think probably the best place is Reddit. I'm Scary Max with 2x's, and all those stories I mentioned are up there. And in a way, I think the best way to interact with the writer is to to read what they wrote. Like I don't, I don't have. I feel like probably the the house the book itself, is much more eloquent than I could ever be in an interview or a conversation, and the same with the stories. Like they're probably better and more nuanced than than I am, and so yeah, go there and check out check out those stories. You might find some gems.

Michael David Wilson 1:35:38
Yeah, these conversations are just a first draft, and unfortunately, we don't get a second draft. This this is it for better. You guys

Max Doty 1:35:47
are very good at this. I I'm a rookie.

Michael David Wilson 1:35:51
Well, I I think you've done pretty well, and I love all the knowledge that you've shared with us, and I love your writing, and I hope we can do this again sometime.

Max Doty 1:36:03
I would love that we could do it in a year and tell you all the secrets I couldn't tell you now.

Michael David Wilson 1:36:08
Sounds fantastic. Well, do you have any final thoughts to leave our listeners and viewers with?

Max Doty 1:36:18
Oh man, just I just hope people take advantage of this kind of boom that's happening in horror. You know, I mean, just obviously, like everyone's watched, like Obsession and Back Room is they're so good. You know, I I saw I saw the TV glow recently, and it just like wrecked me. I I think check that out. You know, for people who like laid the groundwork for us no sleepers making it into the mainstream, like check out Pen Pal by Daphne Auerbach. Like that's like kind of the first one, and it's just like such a cool book. And and when you talk about structure, like it's so unique. It's not it's not a Hollywood structure. It's like a weird episodic structure that just somehow sings in a weird, discordant way. Anyway, I hope get out there, read, watch, enjoy, enjoy the boom.

Michael David Wilson 1:37:12
All right, thank you for chatting with us.

Max Doty 1:37:15
Thanks, you guys.

Michael David Wilson 1:37:20
Thank you so much for listening to Max Doty on This Is Horror. Join me again next time when I will be chatting with Marcus Cleaver, the author of The Caretaker. But if you would like to get that and every other episode ahead of the crowd, please do become a This Is Horror podcast patron at patreon.com forward slash This Is Horror. Not only will you be able to get early bird access to each episode, but you can submit questions to every guest. So once again, that is patreon.com Forward slash. This Is Horror. Okay, before I wrap up, a quick advert break.

Bob Pastorella 1:38:11
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, and she's not the only one being watched. They're Watching is The Wicker Man meets Body Double with a splash of Suspiria. They're Watching by Michael David Wilson and Bob Pastorella is available from This Is Horror.co.uk, Amazon, and wherever good books are sold. House of Bad Memories, the debut novel from Michael David Wilson, is out now via Cemetery Gates Media. Denny just wants to be the world's best dad to his baby daughter, but things get messy when he starts hallucinating his estranged, abusive stepfather Frank, then Frank winds up dead, and Denny is held hostage by his junky half sister, who demands he uncovers the cause of her father's death. Will Denny defeat his demons, or be perpetually tortured for refusing to answer impossible questions? Clay McCloud Chapman says, "How's the bad memories hit so hard you'll spit teeth out once you're done reading it. House of Bad Memories by Michael David Wilson available now in paperback, ebook, and audio.

Michael David Wilson 1:39:33
Well, that almost does it for another episode of This Is Horror. A quick reminder that the second edition of my Guardian J horror novella, The Girl in the Video, is now available in paperback, ebook, and audio book. So if you would like that, you can buy it from Amazon, This Is Horror, or order it in from your Facebook. Favorite book shop. Well, that's it for another episode of This Is Horror. So, until next time, for one of the hottest new voices in horror fiction, Marcus Cleaver. Take care of yourselves. Be good to one another. Read horror, keep on writing, and have a great, great day.