REPORTER:
00:00:16
Black Phone 2has had audiences screaming nationwide since its release last week. A sequel from author Joe Hill's original story, and one of many for Hill to go from book to screen. Novels like Heart-Shaped Box, NOS4A2,and The Fireman made Hill a regular on The New York Timesbestseller list. His books invoking fear, often with a side of humor, along with characters which keep the scary in check. On Tuesday, his latest novel, KingSorrow,hit store shelves. We spent some time with Hill to get a closer look at how he has mastered his genre. We have talked about this being the midlife crisis truck. Spend a little time inside what author Joe Hill calls his man cave on wheels-- I wrote my first novel when I was 14.
REPORTER:
00:01:00
--and the stories begin to flow.
JOE HILL:
00:01:03
And it was set in a boys' boarding school. And the cafeteria ladies were all satanists. And at the full moon, they'd have a satanic ritual and they'd kill one of the boys. Then they'd grind him up and-- Serve him. --serve him back to the rest of the school-- I love this. --in the beef stroganoff.
REPORTER:
00:01:21
Hill still sets his stories on home turf. The New England aura like along the New Hampshire seacoast, helping to provide an escape for his readers. And it turns out, for him.
JOE HILL:
00:01:34
I like coming down to look at the ocean because it's bigger than me. It reminds you how tiny you are. Yeah. And I like to be reminded that I'm a small animal on the face of the Earth that could be crushed at any time.
REPORTER:
00:01:52
It may sound a bit drastic, but as we quickly learned, that's just how Hill's mind works, the perfect incubator for the horror genre where he's had his success, releasing five novels, four New YorkTimesbestsellers.
JOE HILL:
00:02:06
Almost everything that's funny, if you push it hard enough, it becomes horror.
REPORTER:
00:02:12
Adaptations to film and TV, like the cult horror classic, Horns, starring Daniel Radcliffe. I'll see you soon.
REPORTER:
00:02:23
And the Netflix drama, Locke andKey, based on his comic series. His latest book, KingSorrow, follows a group of friends after they're forced into a deadly pact with a cunning dragon.
JOE HILL:
00:02:38
When I was in college, I took a course on Arthurian legend dragons, Arthur, Lancelot, the Grail Quest. I always knew that study was going to pay off big for me someday. Fast forward 30 years, and here we go. It will. Everything I learned in Beth Darlington's King Arthur course, I was able to jam into the book.
REPORTER:
00:02:59
Hill grew up in Bangor, Maine, one of three children to Tabitha and Stephen.
JOE HILL:
00:03:05
Just to immediately address the elephant in the room, you know, my dad, Steve King. What? No.
JOE HILL:
00:03:10
No, I know. And Jay Leno had this great joke. He said, "Stephen King says to the kids, do you want to hear a bedtime story? And the kids all go, 'No!'" Was that your house growing up? No. My dad told great bedtime stories. But I did learn to the scary stuff pretty early. When I was seven years old, my dad made a horror movie. They stuck me in a trailer with Tom Savini, the master of gross-out, gore special effects. And I sat in his trailer for a week. And all day, I watched him disfigure movie stars and create horrific looking monsters. By the end of the week, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to murder people in creative ways, and I wanted to come up with unforgettable monsters. And that is, in fact, what I wound up doing just on the page.
REPORTER:
00:04:03
He learned how to do that in his childhood home, where as you might expect, with two parents as writers, imagination and writing were a part of daily life.
JOE HILL:
00:04:13
I would come home from school at a very young age, and both my parents would be playing make-believe. My mom would be in her office in front of her tomato-colored typewriter banging away. My dad would be in his office in front of a Wang word processor. It had a black screen and Jade letters. It just looked like the future. It was just an amazing thing to behold. By the time I was 12, 13, I just thought that's what you were supposed to do. And eventually, someone would pay you a lot of money for it, which did, in fact, turn out to be true. Did your parents want you to do this? My mom says I didn't have a choice. My mom says, after I wrote my first book when I was 14, she's like, nope, he's screwed. [LAUGHS] This is it. This is it. And while he shared the same last name as one of the best known horror writers of all time, he chose to write professionally under a pen name.
JOE HILL:
00:05:02
I became concerned that if I wrote as Joseph King, someone might decide to publish a book I had written that wasn't very good, but they'd go with it anyway, because they saw a chance to make a quick buck in the last name. And so for that reason, I decided to stop being Joseph King and start writing as Joe Hill and just keep it a secret, not let anyone know who my parents were.
REPORTER:
00:05:23
In time, he'd find success, winning the Bram Stoker Award for best debut novel with Heart ShapedBox.
JOE HILL:
00:05:30
I was just not mentally wired for that kind of breakthrough. Yeah. How did you deal with it then? I did all the traditional things you're supposed to do after you finally make it big. I had a nervous breakdown and a divorce and spun into a doom spiral that I wasn't able to climb out of for about two or three years. When you came back, you said you went to therapy. Yeah. And I got on a low dose of an anti-anxiety med. I had resisted that for a long time because like many artists, I thought if I got help with my mental health, it would destroy my creativity. And then, like many artists, I discovered that after I got help, the biggest block on my creativity was being a nervous wreck all the time.
REPORTER:
00:06:06
So once the block was out of the way, even more from you that has been of a success. I have probably had my most creative stretch just in the last eight years, I would say. You want some other good stuff while you're here?
REPORTER:
00:06:19
He says they've also been some of his happiest. In 2018, he married his London-based editor, Gillian Redfearn. In 2022, she gave birth to twins. Hill found himself making more time living his life than writing about others.
JOE HILL:
00:06:36
And my dad has a thing that he says I've often heard him say, which is that art is a support system for life. Life is not a support system for art. And so I didn't disappear. I didn't stop writing. But for sure, I put my work over here a little bit and decided to bring my life here. But then eventually, it was time to do another novel. And then when I got into it, I thought, oh, this is going to be the first book I'm going to dedicate to my wife. It better be good.
REPORTER:
00:07:04
Really? So while juggling newborn twin boys and watching his three older sons start their own careers, Hill was back at his desk working on KingSorrow,the book he says he's the most proud of.
JOE HILL:
00:07:18
I think I extended myself as far as I've ever gone, went way outside of my comfort zone. Probably nine feature characters spread over 25 years of American history. But that's also what makes it page-turning. I mean, the job is to make it hard to sleep at night and then to make sure you have terrible dreams when you finally do, just wreck you for work the next day. I keep laughing at this, but this really is-- That's what people want. That's what they're paying for. Wreck my sleep, Joe. And he has helped do that for me. Now, I should point out, we said that he has four NewYork Timesbest sellers. KingSorrow'sthat fifth novel. And it could wind up there. It just was released this week. He now has a goal of writing a book a year for 10 years. It's his goal for his 50s, KingSorrowbeing the first. He promises the others won't be as long. He has the second one done, and he'll keep moving on. Is that his mom's tomato typewriter? I don't believe that's his mom's, but he had pulled that one out. KingSorrow,he admitted he did on a computer. Not admitted, but told us he did on a computer. But now he's starting to write that way as well, too. He has a collection. Wow. One last thing. At the heart of every Stephen King novel is connection and belonging. How would you describe Joe Hill? That is the exact same thing. It's also that at the heart of everything is a little bit of humor with a side scary or reverse it the other way. All righty. Yeah. Loved it.
