Dan Kois: On the Concept of Gentle Horror

Dan Kois is a writer, editor, and podcaster at Slate, where his work has been nominated for two National Magazine Awards and two Writers Guild Awards. He’s the author of the novel Vintage Contemporaries; How to Be a Family, a memoir; The World Only Spins Forward (with Isaac Butler), which was a 2019 Stonewall Honor Book; and Facing Future, a book of music criticism and biography. He is a frequent guest and host of Slate’s Culture Gabfest podcast, was a founding host of Slate’s Mom and Dad Are Fighting podcast, and hosts The Martin Chronicles, a podcast about Martin Amis. Dan grew up in Milwaukee, where his first job was as a paperboy delivering the Milwaukee Sentinel newspaper. He now lives with his family in Virginia. Follow him on Facebook and Instagram.

Dan Kois

Photo by Alia Smith

In this interview, Dan discusses how having kids of his own helped inform the tone of his new adult adventure novel, Hampton Heights, his hope for readers, and more!

Name: Dan Kois
Literary agent: Alia Hanna Habib, the Gernert Agency
Book title: Hampton Heights: One Harrowing Night in the Most Haunted Neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Release date: September 17, 2024
Genre/category: Adult fiction / adventure and horror
Previous titles: Vintage Contemporaries; How to Be a Family; The World Only Spins Forward (with Isaac Butler); Facing Future
Elevator pitch: One cold winter’s night in 1987, six teenage paperboys are taken to sell subscriptions by their stupid manager, Kevin. Unfortunately, he’s brought them to Milwaukee’s most haunted neighborhood.

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What prompted you to write this book?

I live in Arlington, Virginia now, but I grew up in Wisconsin, and my first job was working as a paperboy for the Milwaukee Sentinel. It was my first chance to really interact with adults who weren’t parents or teachers—subscribers, of course, but also my stupid manager Kevin. Once a year, Kevin threw a bunch of us in a truly frightening van and took us out to some random Milwaukee neighborhood to sell subscriptions. Our reward: Burger King.

I’ve had a lot of jobs since then: frozen custard scooper, indie bookseller, unsuccessful literary agent, movie development executive, blogger, journalist. But I really remember those canvassing trips, which taught me that there are all these people living lives of their own behind closed doors, and there’s something interesting about them.

I wrote my first novel, Vintage Contemporaries, over seven years. I put everything I had into it, writing it at 10:45 every night as my kids grew up. I just stuffed seven years of my obsessions into Google Docs and then painstakingly transformed them into a book. I wanted to write something totally different: shorter, funnier, an adventure. And I didn’t want to write it for seven years. I thought of those canvassing trips, long ago, and thought, That’s a story.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

I started writing Hampton Heights in the fall of 2021, with a goal of writing a story that happened over one night. But I soon discovered that simply writing realistic fiction, I didn’t seem to be capturing the true danger and weirdness of these canvassing nights as I felt them at age 13. So, at some point pretty early on in the process, I decided: The neighborhood is haunted. All of a sudden, I was writing a very different kind of book.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

My editor came back to me right away with the idea to publish this as a paperback original—an idea I loved, given that all I wanted in the world was for this book to resemble, as closely as possible, the ratty paperbacks my parents kept on their bookshelf that I stole without them knowing about it, encountering a lot of inappropriate material in the process.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

As I was writing, I thought about not only what I liked to read back then but what I wanted to read now. And now I have kids of my own, and I am allergic to a story that puts a kid in serious danger. Like everyone reading this, I think the government has no business telling publishers what to publish or readers what to read; nevertheless, I would support federal legislation requiring a warning sticker to be placed on the front of any book in which a child dies. So, as I was writing it, I found I kept steering away from the gruesome, toward the funny, the heartfelt, the folkloric. I started thinking of Hampton Heights as Gentle Horror: It’s got monsters, and adventure, and peril, but at every point you always know that somehow, the kids are gonna be OK.

The adults? Sorry, Kevin, they’re fair game.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I want readers to bond with these kids, to laugh at their adventures, and to be unexpectedly touched by all they go through. And I want them to beware the hodag.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

(Editors, don’t read this:) It’s totally fine—in fact it’s really fun—to write a book that is absolutely nothing like your previous book!

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