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[Interview] Joe Hill Talks AMC’s “NOS4A2”, Shared Universes and Upcoming “Locke & Key” Series
Joe Hill’s sprawling epic that pits superpowered heroine Vic McQueen against the chillingly superpowered Charlie Manx hit shelves six years ago, in a novel that he’d described in interviews as his answer to his father’s massive tome It, and its series adaptation is poised to convert new fans on AMC on June 2, 2019. With the inaugural season premiering just months apart from It Chapter Two, Hill reflects on NOS4A2, Stephen King shared universes, and the approach to adapting his work.
“First of all, I’m just so psyched for It Chapter Two. I feel like they’re [Andy and Barbara Muschietti] two creators who really get what my dad has been all about. I think the thing a lot of filmmakers’ miss is how warm and affectionate a lot of my dad’s work is. It’s scary; terrible things happen to people, but there’s tremendous warmth for the characters. You feel that from Andy and Barbara.”
“NOS4A2 is not actually terribly like It, although it does have this thing where our hero faces evil once at the end of youth,” he explained.
“In It it’s children, in NOS4A2 it’s a teenager. But they face evil once and don’t quite vanquish it. They’re forced to deal with it again after they’ve had to make some of the compromises and endure some of the disappointments of adulthood. I think mainly when I compared the two, it’s that at one point my dad had said he thought It was kind of his dissertation on horror. So, he’d thrown everything he knew about horror into a single novel, and that’s probably also true with what I’d done with NOS4A2. That I’d try to pile everything I had figured out about the genre into a single book.”
In terms of the central villain, NOS4A2 shares more in common with the likes of Dracula. Hill wanted to see if he could take a new approach to the vampire story, and chose certain aspects of vampire mythology to keep and discard in his story. It sparked the question on adapting novels for television series or movies; because of the huge difference in medium, not everything contained in a novel will be able to make the cut. Hill uses the upcoming adaptation of his massive novel The Fireman as an example.
“I just did some work on the screenplay for The Fireman, which is being developed as a movie over at Fox. I think one of the big challenges is, at the center of The Fireman there’s a 400-page section where our heroine Harper winds up in this place called Camp Windham. It’s both a place of shelter and hope, but there’s also darkness there, and betrayal. Tensions that eventually erupt and endanger the whole community. The thing is, in the book I developed all those ideas over 400 pages, but in the screenplay it’s like, what’s the 30-page version of that look like? How do you capture that, but capture that in 40 pages? Those are the kind of compromises you think about, the kind of changes you think about, when you bring something to TV or to a different media. What worked on the page won’t always work on screen. You have to think about what’s the opportunity here; what can we change that will make this exciting and fun yet still true to the source material.”
“With NOS4A2 we had an exquisitely talented writer and showrunner in Jami O’Brien. She had a really good sensibility for what to keep and what to lose. An example that comes immediately to mind is, in the book, when we first meet my heroine Vic McQueen, I think she’s only ten or eleven. She’s just a kid. She discovers she has this occult power, and we follow Vic as she learns about this power and develops it. And often lies to herself about it through her teenage years. In the TV show, Vic discovers her power when she’s 18, and all the stuff that happens to her throughout her childhood really happens in the first couple of episodes of the show. The reason to do that is because Jami thought about it and she thought, ‘Do we really want to have a child actor play Vic for a chunk of screentime and then introduce Ashleigh Cummings? Or do we just want to start with Ashleigh?’ I think she made the correct decision that it was best to begin with Ashleigh since that’s the lead character we’re going to be staying with throughout the series.”
Fans of the novel know that Hill left the door open just a smidge for sequel possibilities. The author laughed and explained that, “I feel like all of my stories take place in the same universe., there’s plenty more to explore there beyond just the events of the novel and the graphic novel.
“We have talked about some stuff beyond the novel, and I made a suggestion to Jami. If she takes me up on it, it would go beyond the events of NOS4A2 and I would consider it essentially canon. There are a couple stories I have that are tightly connected to Vic and Wayne and Maggie that I never told. But at least in my imagination they already exist. We do have about a third of the book in the TV series. If we’re fortunate enough to get a second season, there’s plenty more story there.”
Expanding on the idea that all of his works exist in the same space, especially noted in both the NOS4A2 novel and series premiere, he stated, “They all came from the same few quarts of gray matter that are sitting inside my head. So yeah, they all take place in the same universe, how could they not?” But it’s not just his other works that were referenced in the novel, there’s a clear reference to King’s stories as well.
“When NOS4A2 came out, my dad was working on Doctor Sleep, and he stuck Charlie Manx in Doctor Sleep. I stuck the True Knot in NOS4A2. One of the reasons we did that is because Charlie Manx and the True Knot both operate along similar lines. We realized in the process of me writing my book and him writing his, that the two books had some similarities. I think when that happens, when you realize there are echoes in your story of another story you love, or other stories out there, there’s two choices: you can run from it or try to hide it, or you can have some fun with it. I always think it’s a better strategy to have some fun with it.”
More succinctly, Hill sums up our adoration of the shared universe concept with, “All the stuff you love- Stephen King novels and Marvel Cinematic Universe and C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books and Law and Order– all of that stuff exists together in your head. In that shared universe inside your brain. Maybe the reason we love shared universes is because we all live in them.”
With NOS4A2’s series premiere almost here, there’s one more series based on Hill’s works on the way; Locke & Key. When asked if Hill could give any insight on how this Netflix series is shaping up, he gushed emphatically, “I’ve seen the first three episodes; it’s amazing! It completely crackles, and it’s super Netflix-y. And by super Netflix-y I mean super binge-y. You can already tell that when the little clock starts ticking in the lower hand corner saying ‘next episode will begin in 5 seconds,’ most people are going to want to let it begin. It’s really, really fun. After two other passes at it, first at Fox then at Hulu, to me it’s unbelievable that it’s actually happening and it’s so good! It’s so good! I’m very excited.”
NOS4A2 premieres on AMC on June 2, 2019.
Chuck Tingle‘s writing is embedded with a particular tonal trick that makes him perfectly suited to horror. “Propulsive” is the first word that comes to mind when I think of Tingle’s energetic prose, and when his books start wrapping themselves around characters and digging through their various complexities, it’s easy to be pulled along, absorbed in the feeling that an old friend is simply telling you a story.
Then Tingle will drop one of the single creepiest bits of imagery you’ve ever read, and you’re right back in the horror space. It’s not always a jump scare, but it is always a pulsing feeling of dread that keeps you hooked through the rest of the book.
Fabulous Bodies, Tingle’s latest horror novel, carries on these gifts, and the promise Tingle showed on books like Camp Damascus and Bury Your Gays. His fiction’s growing ever more confident and precise, and his eye for horrific detail hasn’t dimmed in the least, making this a summer reading delight for horror fans.
Poppy is a single mother determined to make a better life for her daughter, particularly after growing up in group homes and foster systems. By day, she works hard to keep up the flow of upbeat, enthusiastic content as a fashion influencer, and while that’s going well, it’s not yet making ends meet. To make up the difference, she moonlights as a grave robber, lifting bodies from morgues and funeral homes and selling their pieces on the black market. It’s grueling, dangerous work, and it’s about to pay off big. Out of the blue, Poppy gets a call to transport the newly dead body of her musical hero, the legendary Eddie Michaels. It’s a weird gig, but the payout is big enough that she could walk away from her macabre side gig forever. Poppy takes the job, and things get complicated when Eddie turns out to be, well, only mostly dead.
From the moment Eddie’s corpse enters the picture, Fabulous Bodies takes on the vibe of a road novel, as the grave robber and the undead rock star make stop after stop, and Poppy tries again and again to wrap her mind about what she’s gotten herself into, and how she might get herself out. It’s a delightful premise, and Tingle never loses his grip on the fun of it. No matter how dark the novel gets, and it does get quite dark, the narrative keeps barreling forward, delivering macabre laughs and moments of beautifully gruesome invention along the way.
Because he’s set his protagonist up as a fashion influencer, Tingle has lots of room to play in the space of how we view human bodies, both alive and dead, how we use them, and what we value in them. This is the emotional core of Fabulous Bodies, and while it’s sometimes overshadowed by the runaway train of the plot, it remains a potent source of thematic exploration throughout the book, and it gets more complicated when you consider certain gifts Eddie’s been granted in his strange supernatural state.
In essence, we’re looking at a story about a grave robber who discovers a body that not only fights back, but takes control of any given situation. That throws Poppy for repeated loops and keeps the plot moving, but it also makes us consider on a deeper level exactly what we value about our own physical form, and what might happen when we lose our grip on it entirely.
The book’s themes and emotional concerns hum through the whole narrative, but the overwhelming impression I got while reading Fabulous Bodies was just how much damn fun this book is. I couldn’t stop reading it, not just because it’s so filled with sudden swerves and ghoulish setpieces, but because Tingle has honed his horror storytelling down to a fine, very sharp point. Fabulous Bodies moves like a roller coaster, complete with a tension-filled ramp-up and a finale that’ll leave you breathless by the time the ride is over.
If you haven’t been reading Chuck Tingle’s horror work up to this point, it’s time to get on board, because he’s just getting started, and he’s already mastered the art of the scary page-turner.
Fabulous Bodies is available now.
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