Craig DiLouie

Welcome, friend! I am thrilled to share an interview with Craig DiLouie, author of Episode Thirteen, a horror novel I recently raved about. Since getting back into chatting with authors, this is my first time hosting a horror writer and I could not be more excited.

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Hi Craig! Welcome to Armed with A Book. It means so much to me to host you on the blog for an interview. Please tell me and my readers about yourself.

Thank you for having me as a guest, Kriti!

I’ve been writing pretty much my entire life. It’s something I simply can’t imagine not doing. Over the years, I’ve had novels published by small presses and major companies like Hachette and Simon & Schuster, and I’ve self-published quite a few. It’s been an amazing journey, both humbling and gratifying.

You write in a number of genres: horror, military thrillers, apocalyptic and SciFi. Do you have a genre you love writing?

If I had to choose a single genre that I enjoy writing the most, it would probably be horror because it’s such a base but fine emotion, there’s so much you can do with the horror element, and you can get very deep into character and psychology.

Overall, though, I’ve always enjoyed writing stories about ordinary people in extraordinary situations. Most stories have a protagonist living their normal life, likeable but usually lacking something due to a misbelief or flaw, and then something big happens that puts them on a path of transformation. For me, I’ve always loved making that something catastrophic or fantastic. It creates distinct stakes, and under extreme stress, you really see what someone is made of. Confronting horror, war, or a massive societal crisis, you inevitably find the very best and worst of humanity. For me, the key to making it all real is creating believable characters.

Otherwise, I’m drawn as I think many readers are to the nonfiction topics in various story ideas. The Children of Red Peak had me learning about the psychology of trauma and how cults work. The Aviator had me learning about flying carrier-based fighter jets from a former TOPGUN instructor. Our War sent me on a journey exploring modern civil wars in places like Sarajevo and what such a conflict might look like here. Episode Thirteen, my latest, offered a bonanza for a research hound like me, as I was able to take a deep dive into how reality TV shows work, the science of the paranormal, and the technique and gadgets involved in ghost hunting. It was a ton of fun to write, and I hope of course it will be as fun for readers to explore too.

How did the idea of Episode Thirteen come to be?

I’ve always loved the idea of a “house within a house” offering a look into a secret world beyond our own. This is a trope done very well by movies and books like His House, Angel of Darkness, House of Leaves, and Relic. Talking it out with my wonderful editor at Hachette, I couldn’t hook him, which was my fault: I had a good situation but not a good story.

We ended up chatting about horror movies, and I recalled he’s a big fan of found-footage horror. So, I pitched something big—a found-footage book about a ghost-hunting reality TV show like Ghost Hunters that gets permission to investigate an infamous house and ends up discovering far more than they’d imagined.

This offered some terrific themes, including how knowing the answer to a mystery can become so important you’d be willing to bet your life on finding it, and also opportunities to portray the psychology of how the human mind responds to extreme stress and direct confrontation by the impossible.

When I first started reading Episode Thirteen, I googled if there was actually a show, Fade to Black. There wasn’t. Is there a similar horror/ghost hunting show or movie that you have enjoyed? 

Episode Thirteen is a work of fiction, though it is presented as a nonfiction book compiling documents about a doomed TV show that confronts the paranormal. In fiction, as you know, we call this an epistolary novel. I love that you checked whether the TV show was real, as I am hoping that people wonder or at least hope it’s real a la The Amityville Horror or The Blair Witch Project.

That being said, I didn’t want to go so far as to create a website or anything trying to make it more real as a marketing thing. I wanted to tickle the reader into a state of wonder, not fool them. As I say in the book’s introduction, what’s real and what isn’t is up for the reader to decide.

What kind of research did you do for this book? 

All the research! For a research and horror hound like me, this book was the holy grail. I watched a ton of ghost-hunting reality TV shows to grasp the formula, and I read a ton of books and articles about how science regards the paranormal and how reality TV and ghost hunting work. It turns out there are a lot of ghost-hunting groups out there, and they take it very seriously. I particularly enjoyed watching the investigations of a group called the Paranormal Investigators of Milwaukee.

One thing I did as research was play a computer game called Phasmophobia. In this extraordinary game, you and some friends go into a haunted house and use various gadgets to try to find the location of the ghost and document aspects of it so you can characterize what kind of entity it is. Hopefully without getting hunted and killed, as the game is programmed to respond to your voice on your headset—including what you say—as well as your character’s movements. The atmosphere of dread, the constant threat from something you can’t see but is slowly manifesting as a haunting, and the ticking time bomb all combine to seriously freak you out. It’s a pretty amazing game for its psychological effect. It definitely got me in the mood for writing about a ghost hunt! My goal was to bottle that dread in the novel.

Is the Paranormal Research Foundation based on a real location or myth? 

It’s entirely invented, though there may have been organizations at some point with a similar name and purpose. The Paranormal Research Foundation provides another layer to the story, a titillating backstory about a small group of genius hippie scientists who wanted to prove the paranormal back in the early 1970s and similarly became obsessed with going all the way after they hit the jackpot. They disappeared, Foundation House was abandoned and lay derelict ever since, and our ghost-hunting crew is able to investigate and explore it almost as they left it.

While the Foundation is fictional, a lot of wacky and interesting research like this was actually conducted in the late 60s and early 70s and involved human subjects in experiments. A lot of this backstory is based on various bits and pieces that are real. Peeling the layers of that onion allows our ghost-hunting team plenty of interesting discoveries and provides an additional ingredient in the overall sense of strangeness and dread in the house.

Did you always plan to write this as an epistolary style novel or did that style come up as you wrote?

It came about during the pitch with the editor, and I instantly regretted it. Epistolary is a tough format. You need to invest the reader through character and depth of narrative, making the reader empathize. At the same time, you are engaging the reader as voyeur by offering them an outside perspective of something real. Then you have to make all these elements work together so every scene advances plot or character and adds up to something that is bigger than the sum of its parts.

In the end, I decided to put these two threads together in a basic formula of 1) video transcripts showing the main action and help set the reality mood, 2) the characters writing journals while they’re in the house—why is explained, it’s part of the show marketing and a research tool—which allows the reader to get into their heads, and 3) including other documents to round it all out and provide backstory and additional flavor. I think it works. It invests the reader in the gut, titillates them in the head, and provides a sense of wonder that this might be real. And I think it’s highly engaging, as every time a chapter ends, here’s something new and different that invites you to keep turning pages. Keep exploring the mystery.

Once I started writing Episode Thirteen, I had an incredible amount of fun that I hope comes through for the reader as well. As the creator, I fell in love with the format. I felt like I was creating real people and an actual real event. The story tore out of me as fast as I could physically write it.

If you could be in the shoes of any of the characters, who would it be? Which one felt the most like you as you were writing?

All of my characters are me, and none of them are me. It’s like acting. The key is to know your character before you start writing, mainly through their character arc and primarily through their want and need.

For example, Matt’s a true believer, which makes him charismatic but sometimes obsessive and thoughtless about what’s real and in front of him. His wife Claire is a bit cold and clinical, with a very scientific mind, but when she’s confronted by very real evidence of the paranormal, it shatters her entire understanding of how the universe works, and she becomes obsessed with knowing too.

Internalizing this core understanding of who these characters were, I was able to write them as flesh and blood people. While it may sound goofy when authors say their characters can take on a life of their own and start directing what they do, it’s entirely true, it really can feel like that while you’re writing.

I love horror novels, and this is my first time interviewing a horror author. 🙂 Tell me about writing horror. Have there been scenes, in Episode Thirteen or your other books, that have been too spooky or scary as you wrote them? 

Horror is tricky to capture as it’s so subjective. All you can do is create the conditions where the reader willingly provides that emotion through imagination. You really have to trust the reader when it comes to this. Ideally, it comes through in how the characters react, as the reader connects with them through empathy.

I can tell you as the author, I’m definitely feeling it. Not scary so much as, well, horror. Trauma. Dread. Occasionally revulsion. It can be grueling!

Probably the most harrowing story I’ve ever written is Suffer the Children. In this novel, a parasite kills the world’s children, but if they are given a little human blood, they can return to life exactly as the children they once were. But only for a short time. Then they need more blood. And more. And each time the kids return to life, something in them degrades, and as a result they start changing.

In this novel, the kids are basically vampires, but the parents are the monsters. They become monsters through the purest love in the world. It’s a common thing for a parent to say they’d put their arm in a thresher for their kids. Being a dad myself, I have no doubt they would if they had to. My question was, okay, would you put someone else’s arm in a thresher? How many arms? How far would you go for someone you love more than you love yourself? To have them for just one more hour after they’ve gone?

I put the parents in that book through the wringer. In that story, I faced all of my worries and existential fears as a father. It was the toughest thing I’ve ever written.

Thanks for sharing, Craig. That’s a tough tale to write. I am definitely going to read that.

Do you have another book in the works?

I just signed a deal with Hachette for a new horror novel about the making of a horror movie. It’s a celebration of the genre and takes a deep look into why we’re so fascinated with playing with scary things.

For someone who loved Episode Thirteen (me!), please recommend one of your books and one book by another author that you loved.

If you want to go all the way, read Suffer the Children. If you’re interested in the psychological horror embedded in trauma, check out The Children of Red Peak, which might be described as Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House meets the Jonestown Massacre. It’s about the survivors of an apocalyptic cult.

As for books by other authors, there are so many I’d recommend, but one of my favorites is The Descent by Jeff Long. It starts out as a horror story and then becomes an amazingly imaginative story of survival horror deep under the earth with a truly epic feel. Another is The Watcher by Charles Maclean, which is an incredible work of psychological horror. And another is Hater by David Moody, which offers straight-up paranoia and apocalypse and then delivers an incredible twist.

Thank you so much for chatting with me. 🙂

Thanks again for having me as a guest!

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Thank you for hanging out with Craig and me. Connect with Craig on his website, Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for Craig’s newsletter here and stay current with his new fiction. 

Add Episode Thirteen to your TBR on Goodreads. Read my review here. I recommend it to all who love following a ghost hunting crew and exploring horror houses!

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Many thanks to Craig for being open to this interview and the wonderful folks at Orbit and Redhook for the opportunity to review an advanced copy of Episode Thirteen.