Stephen Graham Jones
Stephen Graham Jones
Stephen Graham Jones is a Blackfeet Native American author of experimental fiction, horror fiction, crime fiction, and science fiction. He shares a fan base with fellow authors Will Christopher Baer and Craig Clevenger known as "The Velvet"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
CountryUnited States of America
actual human solve
Most zombie stories, the problems they solve are not the actual zombies. The problems they solve are the human interactions.
audience comparison difficult easy endings fiction jaded laugh people sad
Making people laugh is so much more difficult than making them sad. Too much fiction defaults to the somber, the tragic. This is because sad endings are easy in comparison - happy endings aren't at all simple to earn, especially when writing to an audience jaded by them.
grew home west
I feel very at home in L.A., I think, because it's dry, and there's sun, like the West Texas I grew up in.
faces haunted house money people scare steals
You have to want the haunted house to scare you. It completely steals your money to go through with one of those people who shrug it all off, who touch the monsters' faces to show they're fake.
stake
With slow-moving zombies, what always comes at stake is our humanity.
behind books bring hall looked onto opened reader uncle walked wall
When I was twelve, Uncle Randall looked up long enough to see that I was a reader as well, so he walked me down his hall to a linen-closet door and opened it up onto a wall of paperbacks. There were books behind books, as deep in as I could reach. He told me to take three, and when I was done, bring them back and take three more.
life natural ourselves remind seek stage stories third zombie
We tell ourselves zombie stories to remind us we shouldn't live beyond the natural boundaries of life - or seek a third stage of life in this world.
ellen mind opened running saved wonderful
When Ellen Datlow was running the fiction at 'Omni' in the late '80s and into the '90s, I had a subscription. It was one of two subscriptions I'd saved for, the other being 'Spider-Man.' And they each opened my mind and my heart in wonderful ways.
comedy erase five hard hit last life might minutes moment romantic watch
We watch a romantic comedy because we want to cry, say, or an action movie so we can participate in heroics. Horror's different. It can hit you with a moment of revulsion so hard you might want to erase the last five minutes of your life, please.
itself legitimacy thus
Where 'Paranormal Activity' really comes into its own is its rhetoric of legitimacy - how it uses itself to authenticate itself, and thus furthers the pretence of being real.
whatever
With the Romero zombie, you usually did not have a reason for the infection, the plague, the virus, whatever it's called.
impulse
You can't negotiate with a zombie. They have only one impulse - that's to eat us or our brains.
absolutely rational seem stories stupid thrown time
Stories need stupid decisions that, at the time, seem absolutely rational and necessary. Without stupid decisions, the world isn't thrown out of balance, and so there's no need for a 'rest of the story' to balance it back.
christmas counting people until
Some people are born for Halloween, and some are just counting the days until Christmas.