Interview with Richard Thomas | Author of Incarnate

Interview with Richard Thomas, author of Incarnate

It’s a great time to be author Richard Thomas. His latest passion project, House of Gamut, with business partner R.B Wood, is on its way to becoming the source for works of dark, speculative fiction. Debuting in December, the online magazine features Thomas as Creative Director, and follows on the heels of Gamut, a dearly departed website that Thomas helped bring to life. “With House of Gamut, we wanted to take the best of what we did with Gamut and expand it in ways that made sense,” he told me on our Zoom call.  “It’s going to be a place where you can take classes to improve your craft, study and enjoy the best in new fiction courtesy of the books we put out, and a place to submit stories to.”  Thomas pulls double duty as Editor-in-Chief of House of Gamut’s publishing arm. Their first release, The Best of Gamut, is on sale now.

Thomas’s name has been synonymous with horror fiction for over a decade. He’s an award-winning author who has also helped scores of new writers find their footing in the industry as an instructor. His new novel, Incarnate, debuts later this year. In this visceral tale set against the backdrop of an Arctic wasteland, we’re introduced to Sebastian Pena, a mysterious member of a small community who possess an, ahem, particularly unsavory skillset. When nightmarish events rock the town it’s up to Pena to keep the village safe. Along with the protagonist’s struggles, the vivid descriptions of the bleak environment — the constant cold, the howling winds, the seemingly never-ending darkness — create an immersive setting that amplifies the suspense. Thomas is at his finest as he stacks the pages with scores of terrifying monsters from your darkest nightmares while pitting Pena on an adventure that spans dimensions. It’s an intense, violent tale with gorgeously crafted prose that comes to life in cinematic detail. Incarnate drops in September from Podium Audio in print, e-book, and audio. Pre-order yours here.

Interview

What drew you to want to use the idea of a sin-eater for Incarnate?
I’m a spiritual person but I’m not a religious person, so the idea of someone who absolves a person’s sins was really interesting to me. If you’ve ever read about sin-eaters, they sit by somebody’s death bed when they’re dying and they must eat a meal to absolve the person of their sins. So in my novel, my sin-eater has to eat the meals, and then depending on how good or bad the person is, that’s how good or bad the meal is. So if somebody’s a decent person, that’s the best bowl of chili you’ve ever had. But if that person is a bastard, then the meal would taste awful. So, Sebastian in the story has to absolve the sins of these horrible people in this community. In the process, he uses their sins to create some truly horrible creatures, which he sends into the rift to do battle with the monsters there.

Let’s talk about some of the strange, terrifying monsters in Incarnate.
Because there’s a tear in reality, and there are monsters coming through, Sebastian has to birth creatures of his own to do battle with the monsters on the other side. I knew I wanted to develop creatures that were varied and interesting. So if a monster is furry one time, another time it will be skeletal. If it has tentacles here, another time it will be on fire, or spider like. I knew there would be at least three monsters, and each time I wanted to ramp it up. So it was all about working toward those moments. I wanted it interesting, surprising, and terrifying but I also wanted to work in moments of peace and hope in between.

Richard Thomas’s upcoming novel, Incarnate, is full of terrifying monsters like the one above

What is your writing Kryptonite?
I get easily distracted, so I know I have to set myself up for success before I start. It’s all about booking the time, turning off social media, closing the doors and making sure the dog has his chew toy. When things are going well I can do up to 6000 words a day but I have to prepare myself for it. Part of it, is knowing where I’m going in the story. Like, maybe I need to watch some movies for inspiration, outline a few plot points, or read books to fill my head with imagery. It’s all about being ready so when I sit down to write I can do so with authority.

What font do you write in?
Definitely not Courier. More often than not, it’s Cambria. It’s easily visible and has a good vibe. I used to write in Minion. I like a serif font that has a bit of sharp edge to it. Cambria has a little heft, too. I never write in a sans serif font or Helvetica. I mean, I’ll change it over into Times New Roman at the end because that’s what publishers usually ask for. But only if I’m doing something specific like showing a text message in a story will I use Times New Roman in a story. Definitely not Courier. Basically anything but Courier. What do you use?

Courier.
Oh. Well, you do you, lol.

What’s been the most important lesson you’ve learned in developing as a writer?
To be myself. One of the most important things you can do as a writer is to figure out who you are. That’s one of the first things I ask my students in some of my classes is to make a list of the kind of stories they like, the authors, maybe their favorite bands. And then use that to figure what kind of stories they want to tell. Once they find out, I encourage them to read those authors. Like, a book that influenced me was Stephen Graham Jones’s All the Beautiful Sinners, and it’s still one of my favorite of his. That kind of gritty realism, blended with the weirdness, really changed me. Also Jeff Vandermeer with Annihilation, which I teach to my students. For me, it’s been figuring out who I want to be and then writing to those spaces. I’m a maximalist, I do heavy setting,  sensory details, I like immersive weird stuff. Lately I’ve gotten into more hope punk, which came about in the pandemic. It was hard to write dark stories at that time when people were dying. So I started adding a lot of hope into my stories.

If your house were to suddenly become haunted by the ghost of any dead horror writer, who would you want it to be, and why?
Jack Ketchum. The Girl Next Door is a horror novel that really affected me and shaped me as a writer. I took a class with him one time — his real name was Dallas Mayr — and that was a time that changed me as a writer. He was so cool and so nice. I wanted to turn in the most disgusting, vile brutal things I could think of to show him that I could “go there”. And yet, I kept turning in these sweeter stories for some reason, and he seemed to enjoy them. I did finally turn in some stuff that was out there and he thought they were intense, so eventually I “got there”. I’ve been published alongside him in collections once or twice over the years, but I never got to hang out with him, really. So I’d love to have more time to chat with him about that book and so many other things.

Read more interviews with other horror authors here

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