Contracts Are Dangerous: An Interview with Gabino Iglesias
Interview conducted by Jonathan Louis Duckworth, in-person, during the 2022 StokerCon Convention for horror writers in Denver, Colorado. The following is an edited, written transcript. You can listen to the full, unedited audio file, below.
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, professor, and literary critic living in Austin, TX. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs and the editor of Both Sides and Halldark Hallways. His work has been nominated twice to the Bram Stoker Award as well as the Locus Award and won the Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel in 2019. His nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Electric Literature, and LitReactor. His reviews appear regularly in places like NPR, Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, Criminal Element, Mystery Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other venues. In 2021, he received the Horror Writer’s Association Diversity Grant. Iglesias has worked as a mentor with the San Francisco Creative Writing Institute and the Periplus Collective. He is a member of the Horror Writers Association, the Mystery Writers of America, and the National Book Critics Circle. He teaches creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University’s online MFA program. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.
Jonathan Louis Duckworth: Gabino, congratulations on your recent deal with Sony Pictures for a future film adaptation of your newest novel, The Devil Takes You Home!
Gabino Iglesias: Thank you!
JLD: What’s the process of negotiating a deal with a major studio like, and would you have any advice for an emerging author who might find themselves in a situation like that in the future? And finally, how did it feel when the offer came to you?
GI: First of all, thank you. If you’re an indie writer—I had already gone through the process of an option, and my word of advice would be to get someone who’s been through the process to take a look at that contract, because contracts are dangerous. This time around, it was a piece of cake, because this time around my literary agent, Melissa Danaczko, hooked me up with a film agent. I basically sat back and waited for the agent to tell me who I was meeting and when, and then I went to those meetings and we talked about the book, and then he started filtering rejections. We received about half a dozen very kind notes saying that the book was “too brutal” to bring to film, and then eventually we got a few offers, and it seemed like going with Sony was the best option, because they already had attached (Argentinian film director) Alejandro Brugués to the film. They actually sent him the book and asked him if he was interested. Alejandro is absolutely an outstanding director—we made it happen.
Receiving the offer was a lot of fun. It was also scary. In publishing everyone says no, and then eventually someone says yes and you have a book. Apparently in Hollywood, it’s the opposite: it’s always “yes yes yes, this is a thing, this is gonna happen, this is great,” and then it falls through. So right now, I’m hoping in the next 18 months of the option that we can get something on paper that the studio likes, and then they will give Alejandro Brugués the green light to go ahead.
For me, I don’t do movies, I do books, so for me this was entirely new. I’m hoping it will be a thing where it drives people to the book. Like, knowing there’s a movie coming—“hey, check out the book first.”
JLD: And it might open things up for audiences who might not necessarily read.
GI: Yes.
JLD: Something I’ve been wondering—if you could arm wrestle one living writer, who would it be, and why?
GI: All right, so, by “writer” are we talking about someone who actually writes, or are we talking about someone who puts out books?
JLD: That’s a really good question, because a lot of people put out books—like celebrities—who may not necessarily be writers. I’m going to leave it open to you.
GI: Then I’m going to go with (Senator) Ted Cruz.
JLD: Good choice.
GI: Because I would really like to break his arm.
JLD: You might have to go through Congressman Jim Jordan to get to him.
GI: I have no problem with that.
JLD: The Devil Takes You Home is an example of a synthesis of two genres: crime and horror. In what ways do the two genres complicate or complement each other? Do you feel that your background in crime fiction makes you a better horror writer, and vice versa?
GI: For me, the actual base of both crime fiction and horror is the same. It’s taking individuals who are “normal” and then you put them in bad situations, and then the rest of the writing is figuring out what they do to get out of that situation. In crime, it’s desperate acts, and once you put in the supernatural aspect that horror fiction usually brings—it’s usually finding a way out, doing an exorcism, surviving the haunted house, whatever it is you’re doing. So, it’s the same, basically, for me. I started writing horror first, but then I spent a lot of years writing crime, and they always went hand-in-hand. I think they’re the best dancing partners. Horror itself might be the best dancing partner because you can mix it with absolutely everything: fantasy, romance, comedy. Whatever you want, it mixes well with it.
When I’m approaching my stories, I forget about genre. Genre is for telling librarians where to put the book and for marketing. These days, everything that’s dark and hard to market is going to be called a “thriller,” so I don’t worry too much about genre. That’s about it.
JLD: Great! What other genres or modes of writing are you interested in exploring?
GI: Sci-fi! Because I love aliens. Sci-fi mixes also very well with horror.
JLD: You could have a sci-fi crime horror novel.
GI: That’s probably going to be one of the books down the road.
JLD: Which situation would be more terrifying for you, to be pursued by Anton Chigurh (from No Country for Old Men), or to run out of gas in Leatherface’s (of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame) neck of the woods?
GI: Leatherface. Leatherface. One is a bad human, the other is a monster.
JLD: That’s interesting, because I feel like if Anton Chigurh wants to get you, you’re going to get got.
GI: Yes.
JLD: Whereas with Leatherface, you just have to praise the slaughterhouse industry and his family will take you in as one of their own.
GI: That’s a good point. It depends. One has the crime swagger—he doesn’t run, and Leatherface, you can see him coming, he runs, he’s bigger, he’s got a chainsaw. Good point.
JLD: I think a lot of writers have at least one much-beloved author whose hype they just don’t buy, for whatever reason. For Tolstoy it was Shakespeare, for Nabokov it was Faulkner, and for me it’s James Joyce. Is there any literary godhead you’d like to call out as a fraud, even at the risk of being cancelled?
GI: Jonathan Franzen.
JLD: That’s a good one.
GI: He’s not a bad writer! But I’ve read his work, trying to find the excitement, trying to find something that makes me feel, whether it’s grief or fear or tension, and I’ve never been able to find any of that. It’s just a whole bunch of words that tell a story; they sound very well put together, because he can write a sentence. And then at the end of the 500, 400, 600 pages, you think to yourself, “A better investment of my time would have been four action-packed novellas instead of this book.” So Franzen. Calling him out. I’m here, you know where to find me, Jonathan.
JLD: In addition to your writing, you’ve also taught creative writing at the university level. Most recently you were a visiting professor at Arizona State University. As an instructor, how would you describe your pedagogical priorities? What do you really want students to learn when they’re in your class, and how do you approach workshopping their stories?
GI: Number one, I hate workshopping. It’s one of those systems that we created because we don’t have a better option. I try not to do standard workshops because those are rarely as productive as we want them to be. I’m bringing my love of literature in general to the classroom because—for example, I teach at SNHU (Southern New Hampshire University) where I have a lot of students who write historical fiction, students who write science fiction, fantasy, and students who write romance, so it’s not necessarily my cup of tea. But I’m not there for my personal pleasure, I’m there to help them make their manuscripts better. We start with the absolute basics. At some point you need to go through classes where you need to understand how to build a paragraph, how to tell a story, how to do dialogue; you need to learn about economy of language and pacing and all that stuff. So, by the time they get to me I’m more concerned on three guiding questions: Why are you writing this book? Let’s get to the core of that question. What are you getting out of it? And What are your readers going to get out of it? So those three questions, if we can tackle those three, then we can move forward and work on, “it doesn’t move well,” or “the parts need a bit of connective tissue.” So, what I want them to take away from each one of my classes is sort of, you have a purpose; you’re not just writing because it’s fun to get an MFA or publish something once in a while. There’s something deeper, and let’s get to that and let it guide the rest of your work.
JLD: I’m glad your pedagogy prioritizes the feedback between reader and writer. I’ve taught beginning creative writing classes as well. I find that a lot beginning writers have never really considered that someone might read what they’re writing one day.
GI: Yeah, exactly. It’s okay if it’s for you, if you’re processing trauma, but then maybe don’t bring it to a class and don’t try to get it published, because then it’s no longer just for you.
JLD: Your prose often resonates with a powerful lyricism. Do you read poetry? If so, who are some of your favorite poets?
GI: I read a lot of poetry—it’s sort of like candy to me, on the side. And from time to time, it surprises me that I can read poetry from 100 years ago and try to understand it, and I can also read poetry right now, on Twitter, from some random person that I did not even know read poetry. It’s like tiny bits and pieces of things—I turn to it when I feel like I’m trying to say something important and it’s taking me way too many words to get to the core of what I want to say. Any poet who’s relatively decent will remind you of what you can do with very few words. So just like some people read James Elroy for the speed—you know, I just want to get this story out of the way—I turn to poets, just like Cina—Cina Pelayo, who is here. I turn to poets to remind myself that you can do a lot in a limited space. And I enjoy absolutely everything; I try to read—this year I couldn’t do it—but I tried to read and review, for PANK Magazine, one book of poetry every day of April for National Poetry Month. So yeah, I love it, I absolutely love it. I don’t write it, but I love it.
JLD: What I like about that answer—one thing that poetry does that we don’t necessarily get from prose but that prose can learn from poetry is the ability to slow down the reader’s attention.
GI: Yes.
JLD: That’s the power of the line. And if you can build those same sort of “brakes” into your fiction to draw your reader’s attention, that can have powerful effects.
GI: Yeah, no, totally agreed. In The Devil Takes You Home there’s a murder in which the guy is walking around the pickup truck, and he’s murmuring a prayer before he shoots this other guy in the face. And you go to poetry and poetry dictates the rhythm because you have to force yourself to read the way it’s on the page. When I’m working on stuff like that I’ll go with poetry, and I’ll go, Yes, this thing has to be line of action, space, new line of the prayer, and so on and so forth. So, you kind of grab that from poetry, because like you said, we can learn a lot from poetry.
JLD: Finally, for fans of your work, who are some other authors whose work you’d recommend they read? And for those who may not be familiar with your work, what would you suggest they start with?
GI: With me—to get me out of the way—if you’re going to start, start with Zero Saints, I think that starts the real period of me finding my voice, in the sense that I didn’t care anymore if people were angry that there’s Spanglish in the book. And I’ve been doing it ever since; that was the starting point. And for folks who are familiar with my work, you should check out—you probably already have—Silvia Moreno Garcia is an outstanding writer, doing her own thing with identity and, you know, mixing with cultures. Stephen Graham Jones is an absolutely amazing author. Shawn Cosby—S.A. Cosby, author of Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears—it’s absolutely amazing. Recently in horror, the work of Cynthia Pelayo also warrants that space, you know, where you’re from and where you live without really paying attention to it, it’s just part of what she does. Eric LaRocca is another amazing writer, and I think he has no fear, he’s willing to go everywhere. And when you talk to people—you know, if I talk about the next book and I mention, well, there’s a little bit of child mutilation in there, then some people frown—that’s what I love about Eric’s work; he doesn’t care. I’ll stop there because I’d just go on and on.
JLD: Well, thank you so much, Gabino. This has been a pleasure.
GI: My pleasure, thank you.
JLD: As a reminder, you can get Gabino Iglesias’s newest book, The Devil Takes You Home.
GI: Thank you!
Jonathan Louis Duckworth is a completely normal, entirely human person with the right number of heads and everything. He received his MFA from Florida International University. His speculative fiction work appears in Pseudopod, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Southwest Review, Flash Fiction Online, and elsewhere. He is a PhD student at University of North Texas where he serves as the Interviews Editor at American Literary Review, and he is also an active HWA member.