Thrills and chills: Joe Hill and Linwood Barclay coming to Hamilton
Two bestselling authors make gritLIT appearance as part of Tour De Fear mini-tour. See them Nov. 10, 7 p.m. at the Playhouse Cinema.
Prolific horror author Joe Hill wants his readers to lose sleep over his work.
“I want to make it hard for you to go to bed at night, and then I want you to have bad dreams when you do.”
Hill will join Canadian thriller novelist Linwood Barclay at the Playhouse Cinema in Hamilton on Nov. 10, part of a three-stop Tour De Fear mini-tour. The two New York Times-bestselling authors will share their latest works with fans at an event hosted by gritLIT.
Hill has just released King Sorrow, a 900-page barnburner that his fans have waited nearly a decade for, ever since 2016’s The Fireman.
That book explored a plague called Dragonscale that sees afflicted people burst into flames. The infection spreads through their ashes, burning down neighbourhoods and throwing the world into chaos.
“There are some characters in the book who literally breathe fire, because of their infection. At some point, writing about Dragonscale, I began to think, oh, I wonder if the next book is going to be about a dragon. Because it's been my experience that each book has a trap door in it that leads into the next,” Hill told HAMILTON CITY Magazine.
So he had the idea for his latest epic novel King Sorrow, but put it on the backburner after he got married in 2018 and had twins. The 53-year-old Hill, who has three adult sons, decided to slow his pace for a while.
“I'd been writing every single day of my life since I was 13 years old. And I just thought I'm going to put my wife and the kids at the centre of my attention, and just ease off the throttle a little bit.”
(His wife Gillian Redfearn was his book editor on The Fireman and 2009’s Horns before they began dating.)
Hill didn’t disappear into domestic bliss. He wrote screenplays, short stories and graphic novels in that time and then when he was ready to return to his budding novel — his fifth — it just took off.
“I knew it was going to be a big book, but it just got bigger and bigger and bigger. I kept piling more and more things into it. There's an air disaster thriller with a dragon fighting F-16s in it. There's a building collapse and a desperate attempt to rescue survivors buried in the rubble. There's an Indiana Jones-style plunge into a troll-filled cave. There's a drunken brawl on roller skates. I mean, I stuck pretty much everything I know about writing weird tales into this one book.”
Hill’s novel spans 25 years, beginning with a deal-with-the-devil-type pact between six college students and an evil dragon through a sinister library book covered in the skin of its author. Their choice means every year one of them must offer a sacrifice to the creature or become its next meal.
“It’s not just about the dragon. It’s about what happens when you realize the price of your decisions. The dragon is just a symbol for something much bigger — the choices we make that have consequences we can’t anticipate.”
Barclay’s newest novel Whistle is his first foray into the supernatural, following a grieving mother and son looking who uncover a haunted toy train set that becomes the catalyst for a terrifying — and gruesome — series of events.
“The key is the hook,” says Barclay, who lives in Toronto and made a career as a newspaper editor and columnist before turning to writing twist-filled thrillers.
“Once I find something that excites me, I’m off and running.”
Because thriller fans expect a new novel each year, Barclay is always open to the next idea, but he can’t push for one, he says.
“I always figure these ideas are sort of floating out there in the ether, and I've just got to catch one a year that's really good. And they'll come out of nowhere. If you spend time consciously trying to come up with an idea, it won't happen. It's more like just let's let your mind just go and don't worry about it, and then something comes.”
The toy train is a metaphor for how something small, something innocent, could suddenly become terrifying, says Barclay, who is a self-described model train nut with a huge layout in his basement.
“In this case, the train is like the doorway to the nightmare.”
Barclay’s transition from humour columnist at the Toronto Star to novelist began in 2007 with the success of No Time for Goodbye, a bestseller that launched him into the international spotlight.
He’s written 24 thrillers since.
“It’s about creating a world where readers can’t look away. And it’s about always finding new ways to surprise them.”
Hill, son of King of Horror Stephen King, has built his own name in the world of horror with novels like Heart-Shaped Box, Horns, and NOS4A2. The three-season Netflix adaptation of his comic series Locke & Key has become a massive hit and his short story Black Phone and its haunting villain the Grabber has been turned into two supernatural serial killer films starring Ethan Hawke.
This won’t be Hill’s first trip to Hamilton. Elements of both Locke & Key and Black Phone were filmed in Hamilton, and a number of film and TV adaptations of King’s work have come to Hamilton, too.
“A lot of my dad's stuff is set in Maine. And, you know if you want to capture the timeless beauty of rural Maine, you have to go to Canada.”
Returning to crafting a book takes Hill back to his first love.
“There’s something pure about writing a novel,” Hill reflects during an interview from his New Hampshire home. “It’s just you and the reader, working together to create this world. I missed that.”
But Hill is an old-school guy. He wrote in his newsletter: “I try to keep the median temperature in my office set to about 1976. I mostly skip streaming my music and opt for vinyl. I don’t bring the cell phone in the office, if I can help it. And I wrote all of The Fireman longhand in a bunch of massive ledgers.”
He reluctantly concluded that he couldn’t keep up his desired writing pace that way, so he shifted to writing the first draft of King Sorrow on one of the typewriters in his collection.
“I wanted to cut out the constant editing,” he says. “It forces me to just write without second-guessing myself. I don’t go back to fix things. It’s almost like driving nails into a board — you just keep going forward.”
In King Sorrow, Hill took elements of The Hobbit’s dragon Smaug, which his parents read to him as a kid, an Arthurian legend course he took at Vassar College, and inspiration from Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel Secret History, and combined all of that with some imagination from an unexpected place.
“Secret History is a big touchstone for my generation. Every year, I think its reputation gets a little bit bigger. And it sort of launched the whole genre of fiction that's called dark academia, which is stories of the occult and the weird set in college. There's a little pinch of The Secret History in King Sorrow. But here's the thing, right? Donna Tartt’s a really good writer. She's on a whole different level from a guy like me. I can't do what she can do. The thing that King Sorrow is really drawing on is I watched a lot of Friends and I thought of King Sorrow as like a bonus season of Friends, if it was done as horror instead of comedy? Like what if Ross Geller was bitten in two in episode Six? What would that look like?”
Over the years, Barclay has developed a friendship with King, who was the first person to read Whistle, and with Hill, whom he convinced to come to Canada for a three-tour, including Toronto and Uxbridge, before Hill heads over to Europe for a book tour.
King Sorrow is an “astonishing” book, says Barclay.
“I feel like he just put everything he had into that book.”
“It’s going to be a great conversation,” Hill says. “Linwood writes such irresistible page-turners with such terrific hooks.”
Hill says he struggled with anxiety for years and still worries about how each new piece of work will be received. Using a shortened version of his middle name Hillström as his pen name, Hill initially hid his identity as the son of the most successful writer of our times until he earned some early success of his own.
He no longer frets about his lineage.
“There's a couple things I can say about my dad. For sure, his work, in my mind, is the gold standard. Reaching that level of quality is the thing that I try to aspire to in every single book,” he says.
“People are always going to look at me as Stephen King's son, especially because I write horror fiction, but doesn't everyone who writes horror fiction, aren't they all kind of Stephen King's kids? It’s not just me. Every other horror writer is writing under that shadow. So why should I especially worry about it?”
NEED TO KNOW
gritLIT Tour de Fear
Nov. 10, 7 p.m.
Playhouse Cinema
177 Sherman Ave. N., Hamilton
Tickets are here
Epic Books will be on-site with a selection of books from both authors and they will both be available after the event for a book signing.
