When Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts came out in the summer of 2015, Stephen King tweeted that it scared the living hell out of him. Suddenly Tremblay went from an author beloved mostly by those in the small press world, to a sort of horror fiction demigod. Even people outside the usual horror circles recognize his name now, which is something that’s becoming rarer and rarer these days. He followed A Head Full of Ghosts up with Disappearance at Devil’s Rock and The Cabin at the End of the World, both of which further proved Tremblay is a master of the genre and will have a long, respected career ahead of him.
This year he published a new collection titled Growing Things and Other Stories, which included the first story I ever read by Tremblay: “The Getaway”. I’d discovered the anthology it originally appeared in (Supernatural Noir) while attending my first writer conference, World Horror Convention 2012 in Salt Lake City. Revisiting it in Growing Things brought back fond memories of the convention, and reminded me this wasn’t Tremblay’s first venture into the world of crime fiction. His first novel, The Little Sleep (2009), featured a narcoleptic private detective named Mark Genevich, as did its sequel, No Sleep till Wonderland (2010). Both of these novels have kinda been forgotten with the rise of his horror titles, so I thought now was an appropriate time to reach out directly and speak to Paul Tremblay about his roots in crime fiction.
Imagine my surprise when he shared some exclusive news concerning the future of his Mark Genevich books.
Max Booth III: I was introduced to your writing with “The Getaway”, which was published in an Ellen Datlow anthology called Supernatural Noir. It tells this great story about these small-town crooks attempting to escape a heist gone wrong, only it takes a direction into something a bit more…cosmic. A mysterious, unstoppable force begins taking each goon, one by one, and plucking him into…non-existence. I was hoping you could talk a little bit about how that story came about.
Paul Tremblay: At the start of it, Ellen approached me and was like, “Hey, the title of the anthology is Supernatural Noir. Can you write me a story?” At the time, I had just published my first crime novel, The Little Sleep, so I was definitely thinking a little more about a noir, hardboiled feel to things. And, uh…geez, I can’t remember the origin of the story, other than I think I was just in a notebook, fishing around for ideas.
MB: That ties in with the theme of the story. Almost like the origin vanished, much like the characters.
PT: [Laughs] Yeah, it’s like that for a lot of my stories, but I think the starting point was I definitely wanted to have it set in Worcester instead of Boston. I knew I didn’t want to do another crime story set in Boston. Not that I’m from Worcester, but being from this area, you know, Worcester can have some rough parts to it. It has…I don’t want to say like second-class citizen status to Massachusetts, but it definitely can feel like that, where people shit on Worcester as not being a cool place. I haven’t been there many times, but I have friends who live there, and it is kind of a cool place. I wanted to play with all right, here’s a place you typically don’t see. Certainly in a crime story—you know, if a crime story’s written in Massachusetts, it’s typically Boston or even specifically South Boston.
I started off with the character in the first opening paragraphs, where he’s talking about how the hipsters call it Wormtown, and he’s deriding these attempts to make it sound like a cool place when it isn’t. In some ways, it’s a simple story—a hold-up gone wrong—but it goes cosmically wrong.
MB: Is the nickname you used—Wormtown—something you gave it, or something the locals actually call it?
PT: No, that’s a real thing. I don’t know how many people call it Wormtown, but I would say definitely the younger people might have, or still do. It’s just sort of a fun nickname.
MB: I was watching some interview you did a while back, and you mentioned living in South Boston for three years in the ’90s.
PT: I did live in South Boston for three years. Yes.
MB: And that’s when and where the P.I. novels take place. Can you talk a bit about what South Boston means to you, and how setting can shape a story?
PT: I will freely admit that I choose a setting due to convenience. Like, I live there, or I know the place. But, as a writer, if that happens, I know that I have to make the setting work for the story. It has to be there for a reason. I was really excited. The Little Sleep in particular was all about trying to almost take as many of the P.I. conventions as I could and mess with them in some way. My detective isn’t a very good detective. He’s not a tough guy. I flipped all that around.
“In some ways, it’s a simple story—a hold-up gone wrong—but it goes cosmically wrong.”And even the town itself, South Boston—there’s been so many movies in particular and the [Dennis] Lehane novels set in South Boston. I think most of Western culture, particularly in America, has an idea of what South Boston is like—at least in a pop culture sense. I wanted to say hey, here’s a South Boston story, you know, it’s not all Irish-Catholic, here’s some Lithuanians. There’s a large Lithuanian population in South Boston. There’s a school, a church, there’s a Lithuanian club. It’s probably the number two—or it used to be, I don’t know if it is anymore—the number two population behind your stereotypical Irish-Catholic.
Part of that came from living in Southie for three years with Lisa—who is now my wife. Half of her family are Lithuanian, and they grew up two-to-three generations in South Boston. Whenever I went to a family gathering in South Boston, we would go to the Lithuanian club. Every time we’d visit her grandparents, aunts, and uncles, they would have Lithuanian food, and all this other stuff that I had no idea about. For me, it was perfect fodder for the story. The name of the detective, Mark Genevich—Genevich is a Lithuanian last name. It’s the last name of many of her family members.
MB: I get the feeling Genevich is closer to you than most of your other characters? Meaning, you guys share the same sense of humor, which I suppose is why it’s written in first person. Plus, while you don’t have narcolepsy, I did find out you struggled with some sleep apnea at one point.
PT: Yeah, I did, and I had surgery to help correct the sleep apnea. While I would never claim that I experienced the horror of the worst shades of narcolepsy, which is just a terrible infliction to have, I do remember just being constantly exhausted and on the verge of sleep, and the kind of space that puts your head in. I was able to draw on that a little bit. But, honestly, the best piece of research that I did, for what it felt like to be someone like Mark—who suffers from that shade of narcolepsy—I found a self-published book on Amazon. At the time I was writing the book—which was 2007—there really wasn’t a whole lot out there. Certainly not first-person accounts on people who suffered from narcolepsy.
I was actually quite gratified after the books came out to get letters from people who had narcolepsy, and they were really thankful for portraying a character who saw them, who knew what they went through. I was nervous about that and I definitely didn’t want to make Mark Genevich the butt of a joke. I didn’t want him to be Beetle Bailey. I don’t know if you know that reference.
MB: [Laughs] No, I do not.
PT: Beetle Bailey was an old cartoon—a strip cartoon in the newspapers—and he was in the army and, essentially, he had narcolepsy. The gag was, he was in the army and falling asleep at these inappropriate times. I knew I never wanted Mark to be that sort of caricature. What humor there was in the book, hopefully people were laughing with Mark, laughing at the general existential awfulness of the situation.
MB: Yeah, the humor really comes from Genevich’s observations instead of, “Oh, I fell asleep at an inappropriate time. How funny!”
PT: Right, yeah, that was definitely the hope. Here he is, speaking like a tough guy, hard-boiled definitely. The title itself refers to Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Most of his quips were really not against the bad guys, per se, but just observations from his living with daily absurdities and his daily challenges.
MB: When I was a kid, my speech therapist had narcolepsy, and she’d be in the process of showing me how to pronounce a certain sound and she would kind of just…nod off in front of me.
PT: Oh wow. And how long would she go out for?
MB: Just, like, maybe twenty seconds at a time and then she’d snap back awake. I don’t know what the normal length usually is, do you?
PT: Again, this is a while ago, so I’m sure there’s better research now, but there was quite a range—or rainbow—of symptoms that people could experience, and a range of severity. I gave Mark the worst kind. There are people who, for when they do fall asleep, it’s probably for a little bit longer than twenty seconds, and they instantly fall into a REM state, a dream state. And they’ll have a difficult time discerning was that dream real or not.
MB: The biggest surprise I experienced when reading The Little Sleep—concerning narcolepsy, at least—was the hallucination factor of it.
PT: Yeah, sure, the hypnagogic hallucinations—I think most people have experienced the time where you’re half-asleep and it feels like you can’t move. That’s a protection thing that the brain and the body do when you fall asleep, to keep yourself from thrashing around, especially if you’re having a terrible dream. Some people have narcolepsy, and it almost happens in a waking state, where their body will have that sleep paralyzation while being conscious. It’s been a while, but I remember reading about some narcoleptics who, unfortunately, laughter would be a trigger that would put them into that state.
MB: Oh my god.
PT: Yeah, if they started laughing hard they would basically just…it’s not like fainting, because they’re conscious, but they would just drop to the floor, unable to move, unable to talk.
MB: This is terrifying.
PT: Yeah.
MB: Even before you published The Little Sleep, you were releasing some pretty messed-up short fiction in magazines and anthologies. I want to know how a humorous crime book ended up being your debut novel.
PT: It really wasn’t planned that way. It was weird, for most of my early writing days, every time I went to write short fiction it almost invariably became a horror story, or maybe a shade of speculative fiction, but certainly dark. And then my earliest attempts at novels tended to be more humorous…probably with a dark edge. I wasn’t quite sure why that was. Humor and horror are two sides of the same coin. You can have one of two reactions to the horrors and absurdities of daily life. You can either laugh at it satirically, or you can be afraid of it.
The first chapter of The Little Sleep occurred to me as a stereotypical big-city private eye first chapter where a beautiful woman walks into his office, but she has a really strange case or problem. She holds up her hand and there are bandages wrapped around her fingers and she tells the detective, “Someone stole my fingers and replaced them with someone else’s fingers. I need you to find them.”
When I first had that idea, I was gonna try to play it straight, like her fingers actually were missing, and have maybe a weird horror Philip K. Dick thing going on. But I had no story to go along with it, so I put that chapter idea away. Then, like a year later, I stumbled across narcolepsy. I was researching some other medical condition for a different story, but when I started reading about narcolepsy—in particular, the hallucinations part of it—that P.I.’s first chapter instantly occurred to me. I was like, “Oh, her fingers haven’t been stolen. He’s narcoleptic.” That was a cool random discovery, and I was like, “Well, it’s not a horror novel anymore!” [Laughs] For me, because not so much was known about narcolepsy, I feel like I had to do a lot more research on the crime aspect of things. I certainly read a bunch of crime novels, but if I was gonna call it The Little Sleep I felt like I better make sure I know a little bit more than I did.
MB: That title’s awesome. I bet it came pretty early on, right?
PT: Yeah, thanks. [Laughs] It was funny, I was part of a writing group, and one of my best friends who was in that writing group—and who’s a really good reader—he kinda groaned at the title. But, uh…that’s okay. I think it worked out.
MB: [Laughs] Yeah, it did. So, then, I’m dying to know the evolution of Paul Tremblay, Author of Funny Detective Novels, to Paul Tremblay, Author of Books that Make Stephen King Piss His Pants in Fright.
PT: [Laughs] It’s funny. I more had a dissociative feeling with the crime novels, just so when people were introducing me as, “Here’s crime writer, Paul Tremblay,” I was like, “Oh, who’s that?” Because, deep in my heart, I still thought of myself as a horror writer. And I think even back in 2009 when the books came out, I said obnoxious things like, “I wrote The Little Sleep with a horror attitude.” Whatever that means. I think I meant that, you know, that anything-could-happen kind of thing.
I enjoyed writing the crime novels and I like crime quite a bit. My experience is very anecdotal. I found it to be quite frustrating. I think part of it was, I don’t think the publisher [Henry Holt] served me or the books very well. In their defense, my editor left and they were going under some big transition, so things weren’t great all around. It probably wasn’t the best time for those books, either.
“Being jealous of other writers is in no way ever going to help you. Someone described jealousy as ‘drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.'”Those two books, their lack of commercial success really messed me up for a couple years. I had a hard time writing. I spent a couple years pretty much having a pity party, being jealous of other writers. Luckily I emerged from that and figured out some truths that, you know, being jealous of other writers is in no way ever going to help you. Someone described jealousy as “drinking poison and expecting the other person to die” and—
MB: Oh my god. [Laughs]
PT: Right?
MB: That’s a great way to think about it.
PT: That’s so true for writing. That’s not to say that even now I still don’t feel those pangs of jealousy, but I can identify them and ask myself, “Why do you feel that way?” I acknowledge it and then move on. Once I got out of that fog, I was really happy to discover that I could write a horror novel, and A Head Full of Ghosts sort of fell into my lap. And, yeah, I’m talking my way around the answer to that question because, to me, the stranger part is that I wrote those crime novels at all, as opposed to eventually making it back to horror, because I feel like that’s where my heart has always been.
MB: Yeah, I think most people would be even surprised now to find out you wrote these two books.
PT: Yeah, definitely.
MB: So I guess we should quit beating around the bush then, and bring up some news you have.
PT: [Laughs] Oh, yeah, sure. I don’t know an exact date, but I think in a year and a half—probably late winter of 2020—William Morrow is going to reissue The Little Sleep and No Sleep till Wonderland. I’m not sure how soon they’ll be published back-to-back, or if they’ll be like four or five months in between each one, but I’m very excited they’re gonna reissue those.
MB: That is awesome. I like The Little Sleep and I want more people to read it. It’s really good and it’s a nice, like…okay, sometimes you fall in love with a band, and you go through all of their albums and you find out holy shit, they had this old…like, not a demo tape, but an earlier record nobody really bought, and it’s just as good as their other stuff but it’s also a slightly different sound than what you’re used to hearing. And that’s kind of what The Little Sleep is.
PT: Well, thank you, yeah, I appreciate that. I’m quite proud of the Genevich character—and the first book in particular. So, hopefully people get a chance to rediscover those books. Even though I said I wrote them with a horror attitude, I do think there’s some truth to that. They’re not horror novels but I do think people are going to find that there’s some similar themes and interests being explored, similar to maybe A Head Full of Ghosts and some of the other books, where the idea of memory and identity and reality are a lot more amorphous and malleable than you would like to think they are—it’s definitely present in those detective novels.
MB: Yeah, I would agree with that. There are some terrifying themes mixed into these books. When did interest in reissuing these novels begin?
PT: I really—I don’t want to say championed it, but I really wanted it. With my agent’s help, Stephen Barbara—who has been by my side since 2006, he’s awesome—we spent a year and a half trying to get the rights back from Henry Holt. Stephen was persistent and we were able to get the rights back and I figured, once we had the rights back, we’d be able to sell them somewhere. Of course I wanted my current publisher, William Morrow, to have the first look. And we didn’t have to have anybody else take a look, because they were super excited to reissue them.
MB: Are you doing any additional editing on these new editions, or are you letting them remain untouched?
PT: Ah, geez, I hadn’t thought about that yet. If I do any editing, it’ll probably just be copy-editing things. I don’t think I necessarily want to go back and mess around with things too much.
MB: Any chance you might be dipping your toes back into the P.I. genre?
PT: Certainly no plans at the moment. I had—again, this was almost ten years ago—I had a vague idea for a third novel. To me, The Little Sleep was about Genevich’s past, No Sleep till Wonder was really about his present, and I figured if I was gonna do a third book I’d make it thematically about his future. I was going to call it Sleep at the End of the World, but I’ve already sort of used that title now for Cabin at the End of the World. I didn’t get very far into it. The vague idea for the book would be oh, Genevich is going to try to solve his last case as a Category 5 hurricane is coming up to wipe out Boston. Ben Winters has since published his The Last Policeman books, where a detective is essentially doing the same thing. I would obviously not do that third book as I described now, so the Genevich saga will just have to be a two-book thing. But never say never, I suppose.
MB: Yeah, one day we might get…I don’t know, Sleepless in South Boston.
PT: [Laughs]
MB: That’s awful—
PT: Yeah.
MB: —and I apologize for saying it.
PT: That’s quite okay. [Laughs]
MB: [Laughs] Now, before we end this, I would hate myself if I did not ask you a certain question. What the hell is the status of Charles Manson Doesn’t Answer My Letters? Please tell me I can read it soon, and maybe let those who are not in the platinum elite Paul Tremblay fan club know what the hell I’m talking about.
PT: Charles Manson Doesn’t Answer My Letters was the novel I was working on before I wrote A Head Full of Ghosts. It was going to be about an eighth grader who was the son of a writer—a son of a bitter writer—[Laughs]—’cause that was me at the time. This eighth grader wanted to end the world. It wasn’t because he was an evil little bastard. He was actually quite compassionate. He thought there was too much suffering. In his exploits, the novel was going to be told through his letters to Charles Manson. All this eighth grader knew about Charles Manson was he was sorta part of an apocalyptic cult—that was all this kid knew, so he was looking for advice. He was going to figure out Manson really did some awful things, that was going to be part of the story. I’d only gotten a hundred pages in after about a year, so the writing wasn’t going very well. I was getting very bogged down, and that’s when A Head Full of Ghosts sorta fell into my lap. I haven’t really thought about going back to that book, and actually I did send it to my editor after they bought A Head Full of Ghosts, and she thought how I approached it was too YA. Maybe I would go back, but that book’s so far away now—Manson’s dead, so I’d have to put the story in a different timeline.
MB: Call it Charles Manson Didn’t Answer My Letters.
PT: Yeah, yeah, I guess it’s not necessarily a hurdle. It could just be a story set in the mid-2000s.
MB: Well, okay, that was mainly the reason I wanted to interview you, to ask about the Charles Manson book, and we got that out of the way…
PT: [Laughs] I’m sorry it’s a disappointing answer, maybe.
MB: I will find another way to ask you again in like six months, so it’s all good.
This conversation was conducted via Skype.
Growing Things and Other Stories is out now wherever books are sold.
