Fan conventions can be a safe haven for many. Devoted fans find community and understanding at conventions, surrounded by people who share the same passions. But what if those passions go too far? The brand-new three-issue horror series True Believers aims to explore just that with a new slasher villain, Killr™. In the world of meta-horror, Killr™ emerges as the embodiment of evil terrorizing the Colorado Festival of Horror.
True Believers will delve into the intersections of identity, fandom, and horror in genre-pushing ways. The series is co-created and co-written by prolific author Stephen Graham Jones. Jones has emerged as one of the most important contemporary horror writers, penning more than 30 novels and receiving several awards, including the Ray Bradbury Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and much more. In an interview with CBR, Jones sat down to discuss the appeals of horror, the idea of meta in narrative, and more.
CBR: You're certainly no stranger to horror. What is it about the genre that you find so captivating?
Stephen Graham Jones: Horror and erotica are the two genres that can provoke a visceral, physical response. Other genres, in my estimation, require the reader to enter into a contract where they're willing to feel this or that. I think horror can lay dark eggs in your head that hatch at 2:30 in the morning, and you might tell yourself, "I saw the zipper on that monster's costume. It's not real," but things change.
There's an intense level of community in the horror fandom that True Believers is tapping into. Can you talk a bit about that?
Yeah, I'm part of a lot of different literary communities, and the sense of solidarity I find in the horror community is super strong. Everybody is supportive of each other. We want each other to succeed because we want horror to succeed. We might compete for this or that prize, or list or whatever, all that kind of stuff, our books might, but I think it's just the books competing. It's not like we are wishing ill on this or that writer or anything. Of course, no community is homogenous. Not everybody's going to be like that, but I found that to be the case in a lot of horror.
Fandom can be a safety net and a very dangerous space. What is it like exploring that dichotomy?
That was kind of what was fun about True Believers. When I step onto the convention floor, over everywhere I go, I always sigh like I'm home. It's like this is where I'm supposed to be. I'm among my own kind here. And yeah, and I'm no longer the weirdo. I'm a normal person for a while, and that's really, really great. So then, inserting something malignant into that place which I think is so nurturing, is real horror to me. It's corrupting something pure, and that's what horror does really well. Which isn't to say it ruins or messes [things] up or anything like that. It just has a lot of fun.
One of the other big touchstones in True Believers is cosplay. What made that such a fruitful area?
All the slashers I watch and read, there's always all these lengths that the story goes through to disguise the killer. Like in Scream, Ghost Face has that robe which hides the body, so we can't tell body type, gender, or any anything like that. It seemed a supernatural pairing to pair cosplay, this dressing up, with the slasher, and also to make it [at] a convention where there [are] so many people dressed like the killer, or like Killr™.
True Believers is set at the real-life Colorado Festival of Horror. Can you talk a bit about the choice to have it take place at a real-life convention as opposed to a fictional one?
In its earliest stages, True Believers was going to be a special for the Colorado Festival of Horror, so it seemed natural just to set it there as a way to magic up the space and the weekend. The next two issues we're having of it are also going to be set at the Colorado Festival of Horror. The trick is trying to make the stories different because it's easy to tell the same story three times, but to use the same space in a different story three times, that's a real trick. It's a fun challenge. I'm loving it so far. Setting it at a real place meant we could go to the hotel, take a lot of pictures of the spaces, and move through them in the story [in] a way that makes it feel good to people who have their feet on the ground at the convention.
True Believers introduces a new slasher character, Killr™. What can you reveal about them, if anything?
I can't reveal the origin story yet. But Killr™ is a badass. If I had to ally them with anyone on the scene, they're very Grendel to me -- Matt Wagner's Grendel, which is to say they're agile, they don't necessarily speak a lot, and [are] absolutely deadly, and driven too. I think that slashers are spirits of vengeance, and that is a force of nature.
Can you talk a bit about meta-horror?
Meta-horror can be wonderful in that it pulls the audience in. The audience already has a meta-association or relationship with all slashers. Because they know the genre, they've seen everything that came before and read everything before. They've talked to their friends about how this and that works. So, as the story unfolds, they're dissecting it in their head and trying to guess the next movement by the previous two movements. They're layering all these other movies, novels, stories, and characters on top of it. So, building some of that into the story, to me, it sounds like it's escaping it. Metafiction, in a larger sense, is usually where you say, "Oh, this is a construction. I'm going to make this character go over here," and it's like you're highlighting the scaffolding of the narrative to the reader. And it's just a fun critique to say, "This is made up, but you're going to believe in it anyway," or, "You're going to get [to] feel real feelings from the thing I'm telling you is fake."
I think in horror, meta works in a different way. It makes this world these characters are inhabiting the world that the audience is inhabiting. And it makes it more scary. My feeling about horror is that when it happens in the real world, it's a lot scarier. All those zombie films that happen in a world that pretends Night of the Living Dead never happened, such that these characters don't know to call these walking dead people zombies, are happening somewhere else. Those are not my world, you know? And that's what Scream brought to us in 1996. The characters know all the videotapes dragging behind their lives, and they can plug them in and play around with them and figure out what's going on, just like in Spaceballs. They can look at the script.
How different is your writing process when you're tackling a novel compared to a comic?
With comics, I have to think in terms of panels, tiers, and pages. And that is radically different. Because what that generally means is, I have a page cap, whether it's 12 pages, or 22 pages, or a graphic novel, like 144, or whatever. Also, there's all the grammar and syntax of comic books. You want a splash page on a page turn and want the lowermost right panel to be like the delivery pound that'll make people turn the page. There's just all these little tricks and stuff, which are wonderful. I love that comic books have developed this. But that's not how novels work. [With] novels, you get as many pages as you need, and you don't have to worry about what comes at the end of a page. You do still try to stage things, but it's so different. So the big difference has been that, in comics, I have to figure out ahead of time what is going to happen and where it's going to happen. And that's not how I think, so it's been a learning curve.
What has it been like collaborating with Joshua Viola and Ben Matsuya?
Oh, it's great. I've known Josh for 10 or 15 years. We're both Boulder people and are both in the Boulder area. And we're both at all the genre events everywhere. And we know all the same people. So we've known each other for quite a while, and he has a real good sense of story. What Josh has that I don't have is Josh also knows visual arts really well. I'll ask the artist Ben Matsuya, "How about if we make it look cool?" That's not really great for an artist. Josh will say, "Alright, let's make the outline look like this, and they have a belt or this kind of hood," and all this stuff.
Colora [are] one thing that my prose fiction is always lacking because I feel like it's black and white or sepia tone at best because I don't really ever talk about colors. I have to go back and try to wedge colors in. I just don't think in colors. But with True Believers, Ben does it all. He does pencils, inks, colors, [and] letters. He's like a one-stop shop. He's amazing that he can do that. True Believers has all these bright, wonderful colors. It really feels like I gave them a black-and-white outline, and they pour Technicolor into it, and it just comes alive. With Earthdivers, I scripted panel by panel, page by page, [but] for Ben, he works really well if you just go page by page, and you tell him X, Y, and Z need to happen on this page. He figures out how many panels, the layout, and all that stuff, and he is so much better at that than I could ever be. So it's wonderful to work with him.
True Believers has an accompanying soundtrack. How did that come about?
Josh is really hooked into good music, and he knows some of these artists as well. He is able to find stuff that fits the mood. It is a soundtrack, but in a sense, it's kind of a score, too. He's really good at that, like, [if you] leave me to do a soundtrack, it's all going to be Bob Seger and Waylon Jennings, and that's probably not going to fit for Killr™ or for True Believers.
What else can people expect to find on the True Believers Kickstarter?
There's all these tiers of rewards. They're the coolest. There are stickers, there are these Velcro patches. I didn't know these kinds of patches existed. I didn't know they could be this cool. I think you can get prints of the covers. You can get a mask. The mask is wicked. You know, that's about the coolest thing. I've never seen a mask be part of a comic book Kickstarter.
True Believers #1 will be available exclusively at the Colorado Festival of Horror from September 15 to September 17. Readers can support the True Believers on Kickstarter now.