Wolf Worm will be your fourth horror novel set in North Carolina. What drew you to write about that region?
I was living there, and the first of my North Carolina horror novels, The Twisted Ones, was about coming to grips with what a strange landscape it was. I grew up largely on the West Coast, and I was used to forests being extremely tall trees and maybe some ferns, not this wall of green that you walk up to but can’t walk through. There was a lot of me processing the landscape I was living in, and sometimes having observations like, God, I really want to put this down where someone else can read it.
Is there a similar story behind Snake-Eater, set in the American Southwest?
I also grew up partly in Arizona, at a formative age where you imprint on the landscape and that’s what you think the world should look like. I’d always wanted to go back to the desert, and I started writing Snake-Eater about a decade ago, when I was living in North Carolina. While there were many things I loved about North Carolina, it’s about as far from a desert as it’s possible to get. I was writing partly out of nostalgia and also because it isn’t a setting you often see in horror.
How did the desert shape the novel as you were writing?
I wanted to include a lot of descriptions and show how this is, for a lot of people, a very alien and hostile-feeling landscape. And since there are gods and spirits in the book, I was able to use desert creatures as characters, which was a lot of fun. I’ve always liked javelinas, and Father Aguirre [a were-javelina], who is named after my fourth grade teacher, is based partly on some good Catholic priests I’ve known, sort of a compilation of what I thought was good about Catholicism. He’s straddling two worlds—his mother is a god, but he’s a Catholic priest, so it’s a complex theological issue to navigate.
What inspired the title character, the god of roadrunners?
The funny thing is, if you mention roadrunners to anyone outside the Southwest, they look at you blankly and go, “Like the cartoon with the coyote, right?” And if you mention it to anyone in the Southwest, they’re like, “Let me tell you a story about a horrible thing I saw a roadrunner do.” They are actually very fierce, entirely carnivorous birds that are not afraid of us at all, because they know they can outrun us. They do eat rattlesnakes as a regular part of their diet, and they really like when people put out bird feeders, because they can lay in wait and grab birds off them. They’re pseudo-velociraptors, and it seemed like nobody knew that.
Also, I had a friend of a friend who was a zookeeper in the Sonoran Desert exhibit at the North Carolina Zoo, and they had a roadrunner. The zookeepers were like, “Yeah, that bird is evil. We have to put on helmets when we go in, because he’ll run up the wall to try to stab us in the head with his beak.”
