The 7Q Interview: Michael Patrick Hicks
AUTHOR BIO
Michael Patrick Hicks is the author of Broken Shells: A Subterranean Horror Novella and Mass Hysteria. He is a member of the Horror Writers Association and the Great Lakes Association of Horror Writers. Michael lives in Michigan with his wife and two children. In between compulsively buying books and adding titles that he does not have time for to his Netflix queue, he is hard at work on his next story.
QUESTIONS
#1. Looking back, what’s one fiction book that you feel truly made an impact on your writing? Do you still gravitate towards that author?
#1. Horror authors my age tend to answer with Stephen King, and there’s a reason for that. He’s the master, simply put. The first novel of his I ever read was IT, and I came into it at a pretty formative time in my life as an early teenager, in terms of both personal life stuff and discovering my own creativity. I remember reading that book in broad daylight and still having the pants scared off me, looking back over my shoulder every now and then, jumping as the house would creak and settle. King really opened the door for me on what the horror genre was capable of and how frightening and powerful words could be. IT was fucking powerful! Scary, and populated with actual, real-life, honest to goodness people, kids that I could relate to and, in some ways, were me. I could relate so much to the various members of The Losers Club. In my own writing, I try to capture that balance of real-life horror and those more fantastical, escapist horrors. I try to write about real people. King was most certainly an inspiration for me in a number of ways, and he’s certainly an author I still gravitate toward. He’s still The King.
#2. How do you feel about the use of sub-genres in the industry? How do you describe your work overall?
#2. I love sub-genres! I like finding those interesting niches bodies of work can fall into, like creature features or subterranean horror or occult horror. Horror is really a catch-all phrase, but as a genre it has so much breadth and depth to it. I’m all for having various, interesting flavors in my reading, so I like to sample all those various sub-genres and cross-genre efforts. I like crime thrillers well enough, but give me a well written supernatural crime thriller like John Connolly’s Charlie Parker series and I’m beyond ecstatic. Science fiction and horror can pair really, really well together, like the Alien movies or Event Horizon.
I’d say, currently, my work tends to fall under sub-sub-genre. Most of my stuff fits neatly under the creature feature umbrella, but if you drill down a bit more you can find some other labels to categorize it under. I’ve done Lovecraftian horror with Consumption, and Broken Shells is very much a subterranean creature feature.
#3. What about your writing process do you think is unique or quirky? What’s the worst writing advice you’ve ever received?
#3. A few weeks ago I had joked on social media that because of having a family and office job, my writing process basically involves me using word processing apps on my phone so I can write on the toilet because that’s the only free time I have! Writers do what they gotta do.
Obviously, my process is a bit deeper than that, but it’s not something I’m overly methodical about. I get an idea and it either sticks or it doesn’t. The ones that stick, I start obsessing over for a few weeks or months or years, or however long it takes me to finish whatever I’m currently writing and can finally clear the table and develop the new idea. I start telling myself a story, first. I get the idea, and then my brain starts filling in the characters and their relationships and how they tie into the plot, and how I can make everything go sideways. I don’t do formal outlines, but by the time I sit down and write I’ve usually got some mental benchmarks that define the general scope of the story and gives me a roadmap of how the book starts and how it ends, and maybe the middle and some of the smaller pieces of the acts in-between.
Worst writing advice I’ve ever received? Write what you know. This is a piece of advice that’s both meaningful and utter tripe, and if writers ever followed it literally we’d have an awful lot of fiction set in office cubicles, or poor grocery store clerks as protagonists. Don’t write what you know – write what you want to learn. Or write what you know by writing about those issues particular to you that you want to speak on. Come up with a brilliant idea, but infuse it with your own special brand of knowledge and interests. Not many of us know what it’s like to be an exobiologist on a far-flung planet, but that doesn’t mean you can’t write it.
#4. How does music and media factor into your writing? Do you feel it plays as much an inspirational role as literature?
#4. I’ll drop in some pop culture references, but that’s about as far as it goes. Having a full-time job, plus two very young children, on top of trying to find time to write means I don’t get to consume media as broadly or diversely as I would like to. I can squeeze in time to read, thankfully, but my life right now is at that point where I simply cannot fit in a movie or television show unless I forego some much-needed sleep. I’ve never been big on music, for the most part, so if I’m going to listen to anything it’ll either be an audiobook or podcast. Books are where it’s at for me, but dear lord I would love to sit down and watch a movie!
#5. As an author, how much do you engage in social media? Do you feel it is more for your own entertainment, or for marketing and networking?
#5. I kind of hate-use social media. It’s more of a soapbox for me, where I can rant and complain and, maybe once in a while, say something positive. More and more it’s for my own entertainment, Instagram especially, but along the way it’s been a good tool for networking and sometimes marketing. I would much rather have my career be in a place where, like Bentley Little, I don’t need social media and all the ancillary crap that goes with it. That’s the goal. The older I get the more of a Luddite I want to become.
#6. Where do you see the future of horror fiction heading? In turn, what changes would you love to see, either socially or technologically?
#6. Ha! Well, if the above answer is any indication, socially and technologically I would love to see less social media. I know it will never happen, not at this point, but it’d be nice if we were able to find a better balance between society and technology, have it intermingle a bit less. I tend toward being asocial anyway, and if we could keep socializing out of my technology, all the better. Not everything needs to be connected to the world at large. I don’t need my washer and dryer to be a part of the Internet of Things. I don’t want my fucking refrigerator talking to me. On the other hand, it’s a hell of a horror story, isn’t it?
I can only imagine how much technology will begin to drive horror fiction. A lot of time in horror we have to find ways of avoiding the simplicity technology can afford. You’re being chased by a serial killer? Well, why don’t you just call the police on the cell phone you spend all day staring at? Technology can open a door for horror, though, and we need to figure out ways of embracing it and using it for horror. There’s a lot of untapped potential there. Giant conglomerations like Amazon are certainly frightening and ripe for being put under the genre microscope. Our current president and his cronies are frightening as fuck, with all the racism and sexism and inhuman agendas that drive them. I do think horror will proliferate even further under Trump’s reign and we’ll be using our creative drives to resist and push back on current politics. Brian Keene took some flack after the 2016 election for noting that horror thrives under more authoritarian regimes, but I think he’s right. We have a few more years of real-life abject political horrors to get through, and it’s impossible that those issues won’t impact literature for the foreseeable future.
#7. What can you tell us about any forthcoming projects? What titles would you like to promote now?
#7. In 2019, I’m planning on releasing a trilogy of historical horror books set in the decade following the American Revolution. It’ll be two novellas and a full-length novel that wraps it all up. Those will be going off to my editors soon.
My latest release, which dropped in in early 2018, is the novella Broken Shells. I’m glad to say it arrived with a lot of positive buzz, with places like Horror After Dark, HorrorTalk, and Unnerving supporting it and reviewing it well. It’s been steadily finding an audience over the course of this year, too, and I’ve heard from a lot of readers who were really pleased with the story I had to tell. Hopefully you’ll check it out!
You can find more info on me and my works at my website, http://www.michaelpatrickhicks.com. I also regularly post book reviews to my blog, so hopefully you’ll find some interesting reads from other authors there, too.
AUTHOR PIC
