Q&A Part I: John Fram talks about The Bright Lands
It's like Friday Night Lights meets your worst nightmare but there's no Coach Taylor to save you.
I planned to share this months ago, but life happened. I hope, somehow, it’s actually the perfect time for this to slip into your inboxes. After all, we’re talking about horror, Texas, football, oppressive structures, and the like. Perfect for a time of year when you walk outside and are immediately confronted by a heat you can’t escape, no? And on that note…
The best book I read in 2020 was John Fram’s “angry sexy spooky queer Texas thriller” AKA The Bright Lands. I was planning to write a standalone newsletter focusing on the book, but as I was researching to learn more about John’s influences, I found I still had some questions.
I reached out to see if John could answer them—and he graciously did! That’s why you’re getting a Q&A with John instead of a book review! Because who could sell the book better than the author and a huge fan of his book?
Before you dive in, make sure you buy his book, check out his website, and follow him on Twitter and Instagram.
Reader beware: The following Q&A contains spoilers for The Bright Lands.
Q&A Part I: John Fram talks about The Bright Lands
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
CLAIRE: Okay, so I cover some of these in my email to you. And I feel like we just have to start at the beginning, which is: for people who haven't read the book, what's the best way you can describe The Bright Lands? You can give your official elevator pitch that your publicist and your publishing company want you to give, and you can give the one you really want to give people when they ask you what it's about.
JOHN: The official pitch is Friday Night Lights meets Twin Peaks, where a queer man from the South has to return to his hometown that he had escaped about 10 years before to figure out what's ailing his younger brother, who is a football quarterback. Then when his brother goes missing, he untangles a much darker web of secrets and lies and gets a lot of other characters dragged into a much bigger mess than they realize was going on.
For the unofficial elevator pitch: I think all of my books are about, ideally, talented people in impossible situations. What I do love about the grittier side of suspense with the horror genre is that I always want to write a book where there is genuine fear that they're not going to get out of this. I feel like, with The Bright Lands, I wound up sort of setting a challenge myself pretty early in the book to see how many dynamic characters I could get running and giving them all a purpose and a challenge that seemed kind of insurmountable. So I guess the unofficial elevator pitch is: a lot of people in a small town trying to do the impossible.
CLAIRE: I definitely got that because I can talk about each character for 45 minutes, but I will spare you. It's so interesting, because when we meet Joel, you can tell he set up a life for himself away from Texas where he is very capable. And then the second you get him home, you're just like, “well, good luck. This is going to be bad for you.”
JOHN: Yes, yeah, exactly.
CLAIRE: We're both from smallish towns. Are you from Waco?
JOHN: I was born outside of Silver Springs in Maryland. We moved but I was super, super young. I don't remember anything from there. I kind of considered myself a Texan. I don't know how eager they're going to be to adopt me, but I've always sort of considered myself a Texan.
CLAIRE: As someone who's from a small town in Louisiana, I'm pretty biased about this, but I don't think there's a better setting for a horror story than a small town, especially in the South, especially when the hero is from there. It's one thing to roll up to a place you're not familiar with, but when you go home - I'm sure you've had this experience, I don't know if you've gone home recently - there's nothing like going back to a place that knows you from a time where you're not like that anymore. They have your secrets and they might judge you for them. I was wondering why you wanted to set The Bright Lands in Bentley, which is this fictional, small town in Texas, and how that paralleled your upbringing, if at all.
JOHN: I think part of it was like you hinted at earlier, part of what inspired Joel. I was living in New York, and had been there for about a year by the time I started writing this. I was always really struck by how you would go to Fire Island or to a rooftop party in the summer and you meet these guys who really seem to have it together. I had this epiphany that the reason everybody in queer circles talks in small talk is because everybody has a lot of trauma. They don't really know how to unpack that when they're trying to get drunk or get laid or whatever, like you're out in the sun. It really struck me how these men felt so much more put together than I did. I moved to New York when I was really young. I was 25. I didn't have a college degree, and I felt like I was fumbling around. And you meet these guys who seem so put together. But then after a little bit of experience, you're like, “oh, all of these dudes have pretty complicated histories that they don't seem to have reconciled.” That was one thing.
Then my family does still live in Texas, so whenever I would go home for Christmas, even as I got more and more established in New York, I was always amazed how after two or three days back home, I found myself falling into the old patterns that I had with my family. I felt almost like I was losing maturity. I felt like I was in retrograde because you would sink into the same old arguments, or not even arguments, but having the same conversation you had 10 years ago. It was surreal to notice that it was still happening, even as I entered my late 20s.
So it was kind of those two forces together. What would happen if one of these men who, on the surface, has it all put together, but is forced to confront what he doesn't want to deal with? And then what if in doing so he goes back into his hometown and really comes face to face with his past in this really visceral way? So those were the two guiding forces for that.
CLAIRE: I'm glad you touched on this because - and I know the entire South isn't conservative and religious, but a wide swath of it is - growing up queer in those places can feel like you're in a horror movie. You have a target on your back or a monster inside of you, depending on which flavor of condemnation you're gonna get from the people around you. And I thought that was really interesting because horror, as a lot of really smart people have written and I agree with, is a genre for the marginalized, for people who won't see themselves as the main character in society, but also in other stories. How would you describe queerness in the context of your work? Joel is obviously a gay man and the main character. Why was it important for you that Joel was the hero of this story?
JOHN: I think that's a question I ask myself every day.
CLAIRE: And it’s a blank page, and you're like, “Okay, what is it today?”
JOHN: Yeah. “How gay are we gonna be?” *laughs*
To your point, the horror genre is pretty explicitly queer. Even going back to Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, a Picture of Dorian Gray or something. Or on the other hand, you have something like HP Lovecraft, which is a really horrible person wrestling with how terrible he is. Which isn't to forgive Lovecraft. I mean, he sucks. But it was really striking the first time I read Lovecraft. You see this man who is so palpably racist, so afraid of so much. I'm not saying Lovecraft was queer, but it reminded me of the way that, especially the gays in my hometown who never really reconciled with it became really angry and scared. That sense of paranoia. So in a way, that actually was more of an impact. Seeing just how sad so many horror writers seemed, so much of it seemed to be a really messy spot. I wondered if somebody could come at this from a different angle, as a hopefully well adjusted-ish person. As somebody who's been living with this and has kind of made peace with themselves, can I still create an effect that is just as unsettling as some of these horror writers who have definitely not reconciled aspects of themselves? That was just kind of the technical question that I asked.
And then queerness in the context of the work, I think it's just in this particular instance. I mean, you never know if anybody's going to read [your first book]. So it was fun in a way to just kind of go for broke and say, “let's have queer heroes.” And not to spoil anything, but as the book goes on, it keeps hitting twists where other books would be the climax. And so I was like, “let's just keep pushing, and see where this goes,” by bringing in a character like Joel. In a traditional police procedural, or small town story, he would be a side character, and I was like, “let's drag him front and center.” And then as we start to go along, [I asked] what problems can Joel face that he alone would be specifically capable of handling? If that relates to queerness, or sexuality, or repression, let's keep going on that path.
It's weird to even talk about it because I do approach a lot of the work on this very technical level. It doesn't really get exciting until about a month before it goes to my publisher because so much of it is just setting all the pieces in motion and making sure that there's a justification for everything. So I guess, in a way, the queerness just kind of always fit. I was like, “Okay, what would happen if Twin Peaks, but gay?” Then it kind of morphed from there. This is a really weird answer, because I've never quite understood [it myself]. Some of my other work isn't super queer, or it has a queer side to it, but I don't see myself as a queer writer every day. It's a really odd thing in the same way that I don't always consider myself a Southern writer. At the same time, you're aware that if you have two books in a row where people say ‘y'all,’ or getting two books in a row with a gay person, or two books in a row with a monster, etc. you're now a Southern queer horror writer. I don't really even think in those terms. I think more in terms of what the plot needs. In a broader scope, you follow the story that's handed to you, right? And this was just one of those instances where I had a gay man in Texas Twin Peaks, and I was like, “where's it gonna go?”
CLAIRE: That's so funny you said that because when I write emails, I put one ‘y'all’ in. And I'm like, “you can't put a second one in here. That was your one, like an exclamation point.”
When I was reading, I was going down rabbit holes of your social media and articles you've been interviewed for and things you've written. I was shocked to find out that you didn't incorporate supernatural elements until after the first draft. If that's true, I was wondering what convinced you to add those in later? That's such a great parallel to the evil that the individual people in Bentley are enacting upon other people around them. I love this supernatural element, so I was just curious. At what point you were like, “Oh, wait, this is going to get even deeper?”
JOHN: There's so many routes into that. I think there was a part of me that subconsciously was always really interested in horror. Part of that is you grew up in a conservative house where we watched a lot of movies, but we never watched horror. It's forbidden, so that's always seductive. It's always sneaking off to read Stephen King and things. Also, I had an incredibly baggy first draft. It was like 600-something pages, it was insanely too long.
CLAIRE: Oh, wow.
JOHN: Oh, yeah, it was nuts. And it was bloated. Honestly, I still write really chunky first drafts.
Then I had to produce a big body of material to know what I was working with. In trying to weave all of this together, I just kept bumping up against all of these moments. I wanted to set a rule where you never are in one character's point of view twice in a row, and that presents a really technical challenge where not every chapter has something palpably suspenseful. But to get readers through pages 100 to 270, or that hard middle chunk, you need something that's always hooking the reader and keeping them going, “what's going on?” It was just this process of saying, “Okay, I have six protagonists, I can't figure out a way to cut them, and I don't really want to cut them. How do I give them all something to do?”
As I was reading over the manuscript, I was really struck by the way I had put in lots of pretty spooky stuff already. There was a lot of the symbol of a dark hole just repeated several times through the manuscript. By the time I got to the climax I realized, “there's so much strange stuff going on here.” I think I probably was walking home from work one day and was like, “well, what if? What if there's something haunting the town?” And then really quickly it develops into, “how does that tie into my metaphor?” Once I realized that it both tied into the metaphor and opened up so many fun ways to keep the reader engaged in the novel, even when there wasn't like a big party thing happening, it was great. It really was a technical fix at first, and then I found how easily it sank into the book. I realized that maybe I had been waiting for it. I'm assuming that somewhere way down deep in my subconscious that was forming and I just hadn't found it yet. I try to be really honest about this, but it's sort of depressing how the sausage gets made. So much of a novel is just sort of trial and error. And it was like, “trying this and it didn't work, trying that didn't work,” and then I put an actual monster in the book and so many things just opened up for me. And I was like, ‘well, there we go.” And you’re stuck with it.
Stay tuned for the part II of the Q&A in next week’s newsletter!
Deep Pockets: There’s More Down Here
To continue on the horror theme:
I just started Grady Hendrix’s The Final Girl Support Group. I’m only a handful of chapters in, but if you’re a fan of the genre (books and movies), I think you’ll like it.
I’m planning to watch Megan Fox in Till Death as soon as I can.
If you’re looking for something more in the psychological thriller vein than straight horror, I recommend Thoroughbreds. I sent a friend $4 via Venmo the other week so she’d rent it on Amazon. That’s how insistent I am that people in my life watch (and hopefully love) this damn movie!