Josh Malerman on writing horror stories

Josh Malerman is thinking. He’s pondering, considering. I’ve just asked him what kind of fans his debut novel Bird Box might attract.

‘It might happen. I’m sure Stephen King gets that sometimes. But I think horror fans – and I’m one myself, I’m obsessed with it – are generally intelligent and open-minded. It’s just that we haven’t lost that childlike sense of imagination, or wonder. This is fiction. And it’s a lot of fun.’

Critics agree. A post-apocalyptic tale of humanity going violently insane at the sight of a mysterious creature, Bird Box was released last year and has been receiving glowing praise since. The New York Times described it as ‘beautifully told, a must-read’. The respected This Is Horror website made it their book of the year, while Universal Studios has bought its movie rights.

Even social media critics have been relatively positive. ‘I had a message on Facebook saying, “Dude, I love your book but that’s a cheesy ending”,’ recalls Josh. ‘I was like, “Man, cheesy isn’t what I was going for”. But I don’t agree, really. And, he said it himself, he loved the book.’ 

But, in all that time, the songwriter has also been penning horror novels. He’s been doing it since he was a teenager. He now has, he estimates, 20 roughly completed books sitting at home.

Bird Box was completed in 2011. The first draft was knocked out in just 26 frenzied days. He wrote it on the roof of an old Detroit mansion where he was living at the time. At top speed, he was hammering off 4,000 words every coffee-fuelled morning.

The original manuscript didn’t bother with punctuation, paragraph breaks, indentations or fact-checking. Characters weren’t given names. Major details – like what a group of people barricaded in a house for nine months eat – were left out. At that point, he just sat there hitting his keyboard, trying to get the words on to the screen as fast as they came to him.

‘It was a gorgeous, fluid experience which, as an artist, you dream of,’ he recalls. ‘I’d get up at 7am, start writing about 8am and be done for the day by noon. The prose just came to me. When I finished I had this vast ream of text. It was like a brick of words.’

The only distraction came from five finches. He owned the little birds and every morning, he would let them fly about the room while he worked. But they have nothing to do with the book’s title. Josh just didn’t like to have his pets caged all day. The feathered friends in the book form an alarm system. They warn a group of characters holed up in a Michigan home when someone or something is outside. 

‘Then I thought, what if infinity was a creature and looking at it had that effect? From there, the idea just exploded.’

The publishing deal happened by chance. A friend asked if he could show Josh’s work to a lawyer, who loved it. He then rewrote the initial manuscript into a more palatable debut novel. ‘I really loved the original, though,’ he says. ‘It had an almost dream-like quality. Maybe one day I’ll release it as an accompaniment.’

For now, he’s working on a completely new second novel, which will be released next year. He also published two short stories – Ghastle and Yule last year, and A Fiddlehead Party on Carpenter’s Farm in January as part of the Shadows Over Main Street series. 

Horror writers are perhaps a peculiar breed. They spend their 9-5 imagining death and destruction, torture and terror, hurt and worse. And then, they go downstairs and ask the kids how school was.

Doesn’t the darkness seep into the everyday? ‘Maybe it could do,’ muses Josh. ‘You submerge yourself in dark matter, in these weird things that I suppose you could drown in. A friend once warned me of that.

‘Imagine that,’ says Josh. ‘I mean, gosh.’

Having been a musician and now a burgeoning writer, if he had the choice, what would Josh Malerman choose to be?

‘It’s such a difficult question, man,’ he says at length. ‘I had a magnificent time on tour. But being a writer has been my dream since I was a kid. Books and horror stories were my first love. Doing this is the best thing I could imagine.’