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Tuesday 15 October 2019

Q&A with Hunter Shea


I have a guest on my blog today.

Hunter Shea writes awesome horror stories and has a very impressive backlist. And he's dropping in for a Q&A.

 
Hi Hunter. Congratulations on your latest release from Flame Tree Press.

Slasher movies are some of my favorites. Is SLASH a throwback to the 80s subgenre us horror fans know and love so much?

Absolutely. I’ve always wanted to write a slasher novel, but I needed to come up with the right killer. I was a teen in the 80s and feasted on everything from Friday the 13th to Maniac, The Slumber Party Massacre, and Microwave Massacre (a terrible movie, by the way). My ten best times in a movie theatre mostly involve watching Jason carve campers up while the crowd went wild. What people growing up today miss by watching horror movies at home is the shared experience. They were wild, wild nights. So, needless to say, a lot of ideas have been rattling around my brain pan for many years. Driving past the old, abandoned Nevele Resort in the Catskills, I suddenly had this concept of a killer called The Wraith. Wouldn’t it be cool to make a crumbling resort his home base? And wouldn’t it be fun to start the book through the eyes of a final girl who barely escaped The Wraith some years earlier? What would that do to not just her, but her friends and family and everyone associated with The Wraith’s victims? Once all of those questions started buzzing around, I had to sit down and write. 

When did you realise horror was the genre for you? 

Way too early. I mean, I was begging my father to wake me up when I was 6 so I could watch The Night Stalker with him. I’d been taken to drive-ins and local theaters to see every conceivable movie since I was a baby. Horror is the genre that stuck with me the most. As a teen, my walls were filled with either posters of girls in bathing suits (yes, I had the Farrah Fawcett in the red suit) or still shots of gory movies ripped from the pages of Fangoria. One wall would have a shrine to Victoria Principal next to heads being lopped off and Nazi werewolves from An American Werewolf in London blasting people away. I lived and breathed scary movies back then, and I still do now. 

I’ve noticed you have a thing for monsters and cryptids, when did your interest/fascination begin? 

Good old Leonard Nimoy and his series, In Search Of, got me hooked on Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. That show was both informative and downright creepy. I read every book I could find in the library about cryptids and monsters (there weren’t many). To me, it’s a natural progression from horror movies to potential real life monsters. It’s fun to write books about creatures people are familiar with and taking them to places maybe most people never even considered. 

It’s October, and for me that means celebrating Halloween all month. What do you do to celebrate the spooky season? 

First, I renamed the month many moons ago to Horrortober. Trademark pending. 😉 My goal each year is to watch at least one horror flick a day. When I’m done with each, I tweet out the movie and my rating system, which is x number of 9 tana leaves (for you Mummy fans). I also pick out certain books throughout the year that I save to read in Horrortober. My family and friends always meet up at the Chiller Theater con at the end of the month. And Halloween at the house is crazy. Last year, we got almost 600 trick or treaters. It’s a huge event for the neighborhood and the perfect way to cap off the season. 

What are you working on at the moment?

Right now, I’m working on my next Flame Tree Press novel, Misfits. It’s tense and it’s dark and it has a villain that I think quite a few people will recognize. It’ll be all complete and wrapped in a bloody bow by December. Your readers can follow my progress, and insanity, over at www.huntershea.com


Thank you so much for answering all of my questions. I look forward to reading more of your awesome books.

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I hope you enjoyed reading Hunter's very interesting Q&A as much as I did. 






Thanks for reading!


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