Excerpt: Ghosts Both Loud and Quiet - an interview with Grady Hendrix

by Michelle Souliere

NOTE:  This post is an excerpt from a longer interview which you can read in its long-winded entirety at https://greenhandbooks.blogspot.com/2023/01/ghosts-both-loud-and-quiet-interview.html -- I wanted to leave room here on Mystery Detection Club for Sharon's post about How to Sell a Haunted House!

On January 22, 2023, I was able to chat to Grady Hendrix about his new book, How to Sell a Haunted House while he was en route to his performance in Savannah, GA.  Don’t worry, I think we did really well avoiding any spoilers!!! 

ANOTHER NOTE:  You may well ask why this is on our mystery blog.  There will definitely be some bleed-over into ghost stories here and there because both Sharon and I loooove ghost stories.  But in the case of How to Sell a Haunted House, the story really does turn into a mystery, but I can't tell you any more because I don't want to ruin it for ya!  👻🔎💕

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GH: Do you want to dive in?

MS:  Yeah, let’s do this!  I guess we could start with a little check-in, because How to Sell a Haunted House came out just a week ago.  How’s it going so far?

GH:  It’s weird, because this is a book my editor and I really thought was going to be sort of a miss.  So it’s been nice to see people respond to it.  It was a really, really hard book to land.  There were three radically different versions of this book before I got to the one that’s the current version.  My editor and I had a pretty frank conversation.  Both [of us] felt like it’s a really weird book, it’s a really personal book, and we really felt that – you know, it would be okay, but we’d do better next time.  That’s what you’ve got to do, right?  We were pretty prepared to write it off. 

The response has been really nice.  And it’s really nice to see people get invested in a book this weird.

MS:  From my own experience reading it, yeah, it’s a lot.  It came out great!

How did the book start?  What was the little germ that kicked it off and seeded it? 

GH:  It was definitely Covid.  My mom had a couple of health scares, and I was down in South Carolina, staying with her for a while in 2020.  I think Covid really made a lot of us hyper-aware of our parents’ mortality.  I was standing out in the garage, looking for something, and she has all this junk out there.  There were all these garbage bags full of fabric scraps that she keeps saying she’s going to make a quilt out of, for the last … twelve years?  Longer than that.  And she’s never going to make a quilt.  She’s never made a quilt in her life. 

I was just realizing, I’m going to have to sort through it all, and throw it out when she dies.  What do you do with all this stuff?  There’s the easy stuff, when someone dies, and you’re cleaning out their house.  There’s stuff that’s clearly garbage, and stuff that’s clearly family heirlooms, but … there’s a lot of stuff that falls into a gray area.  There are clothes, there’s shoes, collections they have that you’re not very interested in, and don’t have much value. 

It just got me thinking about the weird kind of relationship we all have with inanimate objects.  We talk to our cars, and we beg our phones not to crash, and we surround ourselves with dolls.  With Funkos, and action figures, and… beanie babies!  Our kids have dolls, and our dogs have dolls.  It made me really realize that we all have this strange relationship with inanimate objects, that I hadn’t really seen many people write about. 

And I wanted to write about family, because that was a challenge.  I hadn’t really written about a family with siblings, and family stories are usually ghost stories -- are in general haunted house stories. 

All those pieces started adding up.  And that was where things started rolling. 

MS:  In your own life, do you have any particular doll or toy experiences from your own past that kind of drove Louise and Mark’s experiences in the book?

GH:  Oh sure, sure!  I really had a lot of stuffed animals as a kid, who I was very concerned with.  You want to make sure they’re comfortable, and not bored, and have something to do when you go to school, and things like that.  Pupkin is definitely inspired by my wife’s childhood stuffed animal Snocchio, who’s this guy who has been with her since she was probably two years old.  No one’s quite sure where he came from, he kind of just showed up one day in her crib, probably a gift?  He’s pretty terrifying, but he’s also – he’s a cool guy, he just takes a little getting used to.

I always feel like Toy Story, the movies that deal with this, really let Andy off a bit too easy.  The toys have an obligation to him, but he doesn’t seem to have any obligation to the toys.  And that’s sort of what drives The Velveteen Rabbit, and why I always found that such a horrifying book.  These animals so want to serve this kid, and the kid seems to care less.  I always thought that was such a crazy unequal relationship.  The dynamic is so warped.

MS:  At the start of How to Sell a Haunted House, some sort of very mundane, but creepy house moments occur.  You talked about your mom having some house scares [NOTE:  I thought he had said “house scares” earlier, but he in fact said “health scares,” ha!], and stuff like that. 

Are there moments where you’ve experienced stuff that make you wonder if something’s going on?  Because How to Sell a Haunted House rides a tandem track between all these toys and puppets, and also the house, and what that means, the haunted house.

GH:  Absolutely.  It’s not even stuff that made me wonder.  I think everyone, to some extent, has experienced that feeling of being in the house where you grew up, and it’s the afternoon, and maybe you’re home from school early, or you come home and no one’s there, and … this feeling of just… unease.  You know? 

You’re all alone in that house, it’s afternoon, it’s getting towards evening, and the house – you know, you definitely don’t feel like all the rooms are empty.  You definitely feel like the house is listening, and paying attention to you.  I think that’s a really common experience.  My parents were divorced and my mom worked, and so I’d come home and be alone until evening.  My sisters were all older than me, and were moved off to college, and living on their own. 

There’d be times I’d just leave the house and sit in the front yard and wait for someone to come home because it got overwhelming.  And I would be surprised to meet someone who hadn’t had that experience.

MS:  I think my youngest brother also had a similar experience, which we, the older kids, didn’t have, because the house was always full.  That gives it a very different feel. 

Do you remember any particular moments that sent you out into the front yard?

GH:  Oh sure!  You’d hear things fall over in the attic… we definitely had squirrels up there, but…  so you’d hear that.  Or it would just become overwhelming.  The feeling of unease.  Because I think it’s really hard to be anywhere by yourself as a human being, and not start to populate it.  Whether it’s hiking, or when you’re in the woods on your own, or you’re in a house by yourself.  Anything.  We just start to insert sentience into our surroundings.  So for me it would hit a point where I just couldn’t handle it any more, I would just have to get out of there.

MS:  Returning to writing – what is your process like?  I know it’s long.  I also know you posted about your Wall of Crazy which I hadn’t known about before, so – could you talk a little bit about what your process is like, now that you’re through writing How to Sell a Haunted House?

GH:  I write a lot of drafts.  And generally I’ll have a first draft, and I’ll have a lot of stuff I want to get in there, a lot of set pieces, a lot of moments.  And generally that kind of overwhelms it.  So I’ll kind of drag myself through that last third, and then I’ll put it aside a little bit.  Then I’ll go back and do another draft.  Really what it becomes is getting rid of all this stuff I think is so cool.  And focusing more and more on the characters.  And really narrowing down on them. 

And then I always have a big wall ahead of me [the aforementioned Wall of Crazy] that has a lot of visual reference on it.  Some of it is images that have stuck with me, and some won’t even be for that particular book.  There’s an image of a kid wearing an old man mask, walking up a flight of stairs, and I’ve had that up since… probably My Best Friend’s Exorcism.  No – We Sold Our Souls.  I think that went up when I was writing We Sold Our Souls.  In about 2016, 2017.  And that image is really part of the impetus for How to Sell a Haunted House.  So its moment has come around. 

GH:  One of my big influences from a writing point of view is Elmore Leonard.  And there are a couple other writers, like Charles Willeford is one, George V. Higgins is another, Ed McBain’s a little bit of one, in the sense that they really pare things down to the absolute minimum.  It’s more work to write the minimum. 

MS:  [laughs]  It is!  And people don’t realize that.  Returning to your Wall of Crazy, I notice it has a lot of food on it for this one.

GH:  Yeah.  Yeah.

MS:  My friend Sharon that I’m doing a mystery fiction blog with, she’s super food-obsessed, and she wanted to know if there were any of those recipes or food-related things – if there was a recipe you wanted to share that tied closely to the book.

GH:  No, not really.  I mean, those were all … me trying to get my head around 90s food. For me, the way into Nancy, the mom, and her character, was really the fact that she was a very enthusiastic but very baaad cook.  And that’s always a Southern tragedy, because if you’re a mom in the South, you’re expected to not only cook, but to love it.  And to cook a certain kind of food.  I think there’s a lot of pressure on people, on moms, for that.  

 So that was why the Wall of Crazy was so food-focused.  This idea of – she’s cookin’ and cookin’ and looking up new recipes, and getting exotic, and experimenting, and treating it like this creative outlet, and the family is just dreading eeeeverything she produces, because it’s awful.  Those recipes were more like, “Let me get in that headspace.” I would feel like I was causing a health hazard to share any of them.

MS:  With the exception of maybe My Best Friend’s Exorcism, your covers don’t generally follow the Paperbacks from Hell model, but have you noticed because of reading all of those crazy novels from the 70s and 80s, especially horror novels – have the Paperbacks from Hell influenced your own writing?

 

GH:  Yeah, I guess they have, in two ways.  One is – and mostly they’re examples of what not to do – but the big thing I’ve realized is just how many of those books, especially when you get to certain publishers like Pinnacle or Zebra, how much those books were padded, and how much the cover was designed to sell the book, but often had little to do with the interior.  And you realize that so violates the contract with the reader.  And you realize that some of these books really get wild, in terms of what happens, but without being emotionally engaged with the characters. 

 

They were all in an arms race, how to be bigger and more over-the-top and more extreme, but they left behind the reader.  And since not much happens, in terms of scale, in How to Sell a Haunted House -- there’s not a big body count -- but I found if you get readers really emotionally invested in the characters, then even the small things feel big, because they feel big to the characters. 

I will say the positive thing I got from the Paperbacks from Hell, is that there are some writers like Elizabeth Engstrom, or Michael McDowell, who are really, really good stylists.  They really helped teach me what I can get away with, and that’s always good to see.

MS:  I know your family has teachers in it, and you’ve obviously grown up reading from a young age.  How did you wind up starting to read as a kid?  Did you have any favorite early books that you started with?

GH:  My family were big readers.  All of them.  Even my dad, who only reads hardcover non-fiction about World War II.  He is always reading.  And that probably comes from his family.  He grew up pretty poor in upstate South Carolina in the country.  But his mom was a schoolteacher, and so reading was always a big deal in that family, and education.  And my mom’s family – she was a big reader from the time she was a kid.

So for my family, from the time we were all kids, you always had a book with you, and you weren’t allowed to be bored.  If you’re waiting in the doctor’s office, you’re expected to be reading.  If it’s a long car trip, you’ve got a book.  To this day, my sisters and I don’t go anywhere without taking a book, because you might wind up in line, and then you’ll read! 

The real big one for me happened because my dad worked in England in Guy’s Hospital for about a year and a half when I was 6 turning 7, so we lived in Dulwich, sort of south London, during that time.  And we rented a house from these folks, and this was in the 70s, so this was very brown corduroy damp London.  And the library at this house had this big, black fake leather book, and it took me forever to figure out what it was.  I only learned it a few years ago.  It was the Reader’s Digest book called Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain. 

I never want to see it again, because I’m not sure it would live up to my memory of it. 

As a kid, I was fascinated by it.  It was heavily illustrated, it was full of really gritty gothic kinds of legends, and it made England make a lot of sense to me.  There were pictures of witches being hung, and people in gibbets, and I remember really vividly a woman who had her hands tied to the clapper of a big bell, and it was being rung.  All this stuff!  And I knew that I shouldn’t be reading it, but I would take it and hide it and read it every chance I got. 

It just really made England make sense.  Because my parents were really into the whole, “Okay, it’s the weekend, we’re going to drive to this country home, or this circle of stones, or this church.”  We were always doing these cultural things.  Reading the book, it was like, “Oh, this cultural home?  It had priests’ holes, where Catholic priests would hide, and then the agents of the queen would drag them out and torture them to death.”  Or this circle of standing stones where druids would go.  It just made the country seem not the gray, rainy place I was looking at, but this place that had all of this amazing bloodshed and history. 

MS:  For my very last question, and then I’ll let you [laughs] continue on your route to Savannah – As I was reading the book, I had moments where I was just like, “Oh my gosh, he’s putting me through the wringer, I can’t handle this, AAAHHHHH!!!” One of those points happened when I was reading the parts where the possibility of possession is examined, and I actually scribbled down on my scratchpad, half-angry, half-exasperated, half-genuinely-wondering, “Do you ever get possessed by your books as you’re writing them?”

GH:  Um, I wouldn’t say “possessed,” but when writing a book, you focus very intently on something entirely made up, and bunch of imaginary playmates, and you do that for 10 months, 12 months, 13, 14 months.  There does come a point where that, and the stakes of the book, seem a lot more real than the world around you.  The book becomes the lens you see the world through. 

It really does become this strange and difficult-to-describe process where there’s a back and forth between the book and your life.  When I wrote My Best Friend’s Exorcism about those high school friends who disappear, my best friend from high school out of the blue got in touch with me.  We hadn’t spoken in fifteen years, maybe longer? We see each other a lot now. 

We Sold Our Souls, which is sort of the book about not giving up and keeping going, was really around the time I was thinking about quitting writing.  It was just not going well.   And that book, writing that book, really got me through that. 

Writing How to Sell a Haunted House got me through the pandemic.  I was away from my family, I missed them, and so I had an imaginary family I could spend time with and think about, and focus on.  My parents both had really serious health scares, and my siblings and I, as I was writing this book, hit a point in our lives where we had to sort of start figuring out, “What are we going to do when our parents die?”  Do we stay a family?  Do we stay in touch?  Do we … what do we do?  How does a family look after that? 

Every single one of these books has been such a part of my life that it would be very hard to give that up. 

MS:  Talk about a sea change, right?  Each one has an effect…

GH:  Well you know, it’s funny.  I wrote These Fists Break Bricks with this guy Chris Poggiali.  It’s a non-fiction book about kung fu movies coming to America, and that’s very much a story about black martial arts and Latin martial arts and Asian martial arts in America, and what that meant in the 70s.  Chris and I were doing the most amount of writing on that book during the George Floyd protests.  So it was like we were back in the 70s and watching that history still moving around us. 

It’s such a huge part of my life now, I’d have a hard time giving it up.  These books are me.

MS:  Well I hope you never do, because after you write them, they become part of our lives, and we get to partake in that too, so … thank you!  Thank you for writing, and thank you for putting them out there and getting them into our hands.

GH:  Oh yeah!  Well I love it.

MS:  Thinking in terms of your new show, do you have any warnings or promises for the audience of your April talk here in Portland?

GH:  All I’ll say is that it’s going to change your life.  It will supercharge your selling abilities, and you will really, really come away from it knowing that if a situation arises, you will be fully capable of putting a haunted house on the market.

MS:  Hey, everyone should join us!  Grady will be coming back to Portland, Maine, to appear at SPACE Gallery the evening of Wednesday, April 26.  Keep your eye peeled for event info!  And meanwhile, if you haven't yet, you should grab a copy of How to Sell a Haunted House and read it for yourself!

NOTE:  This post is an excerpt from a longer interview which you can read at https://greenhandbooks.blogspot.com/2023/01/ghosts-both-loud-and-quiet-interview.html -- I wanted to leave room here on Mystery Detection Club for Sharon's post about How to Sell a Haunted House!