Interview with an Author - Kevin Stadt
#3 In our Interview with an Author series is Kevin Stadt, author of the upcoming WARPED BROOD. Check it out!
What’s your background, what compelled you to start writing?
*It's the old cliché…as a kid I always had my nose in a book. Stephen King, Clive Barker, Dean Koontz, stuff like that. I think I wanted to write almost as long as I can remember. I dabbled with it a little in college, but then after I finished school I decided to go for it. And I've been super lucky, because my job gives me four (!) months of vacation a year—so there's plenty of time to write.
What’s are your top three books? Bizarro, or otherwise.
The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. Those three books are hands down my favorite reads ever. So perfectly, deliciously weird.
If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?
Join an online writing group right away! For the first couple years of writing, I just struggled with my stories on my own (Well, to be fair, my wife did give me lots of good feedback. She's always been a great beta reader for me, since she'll tell me to my face if she thinks a story is shit). But somewhere along the way I joined an online writers' group called Critters, and that was a game changer. Once I became a member of Critters, every time I did a new story I'd get detailed feedback from ten or twelve different people. That really helped me see my stories through readers' eyes more, and I only wish I'd done it earlier.
What sparked the idea for your latest book?
For a time I was really interested in Stoicism—but then I got drawn into dark, pessimistic stuff like Schopenhauer, Benatar, Dienstag, Cioran, Ligotti…and this book is kind of the manifestation of the battle in my brain between stoic and pessimistic worldviews.
Do you hide any secrets in your books that only a few people will find?
I wouldn't say I buried Easter eggs per se, but I definitely tried to craft the book in layers, so that different people might get different things out of it. Even if someone isn't into philosophical issues, I'd like to think the book still works on a straight bizarro horror level. But for people who do have a taste for the philosophical, there's that thread in the story, too.
What’s brewing? What projects are you working on?
As soon as I finished Warped Brood, I started on the next novel…it's a bizarro horror take on aging and dying.
As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot?
The emerald cockroach wasp! It injects venom into a cockroach's brain, a chemical cocktail that controls the insect's behavior. Once stung, the cockroach happily lets the wasp bury it with an egg, which then hatches and eats the roach alive. How cool is that?
And, lastly;
What advice would you give for any aspiring bizarro authors?
When I was writing this book, I had this constant voice whispering in the dark corners of my mind telling me that the story was just too weird for any publisher. But that's the great thing about bizarro (and Planet Bizarro!)—weird is king. Weird is good. Lean into the weird.
