Bookwild - Cosmic Horror, Claustrophobia & Craft: John Fram on The Midnight Knock

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

This week, I talk with John Fram about the creative process behind his new horror-thriller The Midnight Knock, a genre-blending desert nightmare. He dives into selling the book early, wrestling with a complex multi-POV structure, and navigating the behind-the-scenes realities of publishing—from word-count limits to printing costs to foreign rights. He traces the story’s roots from a childhood moment of awe in West Texas to the unsettling idea of an endless highway, explaining how claustrophobia, cosmic horror, indigenous-informed mythology, and a terrifying owl-snake creature all converged in a motel where the guests can’t outrun their pasts—or the desert itself. Check Out Author Social Media PackagesCheck out the Bookwild Community on PatreonCheck Out My Stories Are My Religion SubstackGet Bookwild MerchFollow @imbookwild on InstagramOther Co-hosts On Instagram:Gare Billings @gareindeedreadsSteph Lauer @books.in.badgerlandHalley Sutton @halleysutton25Brian Watson @readingwithbrianMacKenzie Green @missusa2mba 

This week, I got to talk with John Fram about the Midnight Knock, and this was a super exciting one for me. John Fram's No Road Home definitely got me on my big horror kick this year, so I was super excited to know he had another one coming out, and there is an element of this book that I was not expecting that I absolutely loved. So here is the synopsis. In the frigid West Texas desert, weary travelers converge at a lonely roadside motel nestled at the foot of a massive mountain. Ethan and Hunter have left behind a corpse, a fire, and a horrific act of violence. Kyla and Fernanda are fleeing for the border. Stanley and his granddaughter are returning from Mexico with a mysterious man in hot pursuit.

All of them are on the run from something. All of them are hiding something. And somehow, they're all connected to the motel. other guests, an enigmatic woman named Sarah Powers. Within hours, Sarah is dead. The strange twins who run the break-in motel inform the surviving guests that her murder demands justice. The guests are given an ultimatum, uncover the killer by midnight, or die when the protective lights around the motel go out. Because something very old and very dangerous lurks in this corner of the desert, and it's hungry. But nothing at the break-in motel is quite as it seems, as time

takes away alliances fracture secrets unravel and the guests will not only have to confront the violence of the past they will need to face the darkness within themselves so again there's a whole part of this book that i'm trying to talk around but it's one of my favorite parts of it but what i can say is it's very much like a mystery box thriller in the middle of the frozen texasasas desert um and we actually kind of talk about it a little bit you don't typically read books in the desert where it is winter and i was here for it as you all know i can vibe with some winter temps so if locked room but very much in its own vein sounds fascinating to you right now then you definitely want to pick this one up and for my audiobook girlies who have not been able to

hear me shut up about Angel Pene. She is one of the narrators. So that being said, let's hear from John. I am super excited this week. Anyone who's been listening, I haven't stopped talking about how much I love horror since I read No Road Home. And Gare has an ongoing joke that he was like, Kate read No Road Home and was like, I think I like horror. And he was like, and now we've lost to the horror for the last year. So I'm with John Fram as you guys heard earlier. And I'm super excited because we're going to talk about the Midnight Knock, which is a genre mashup.

So I'm not even going to try. But if you're on YouTube, go look at the book that he just held up because the cover, the cover is amazing. Yeah, they knocked it out of the park with this one. I'm so happy with it. Yeah, I'm going to have to go get a copy the next time I'm in a bookstore, which is frequently. But yeah, I am super excited to talk about this one. Typically, there are questions I always ask when people are new, but I've already asked you those questions.

So was there anything different about writing this one compared to your other novels? So one thing that was actually interesting on this book is we sold it early. It's the first time I've been able to do that because typically when you start your career as a writer, you have to have a full manuscript. you have to have a full manuscript on your book and what I found so for the first two books I wrote those completely ahead of time like and then we submitted them to a publisher and then with this one you know we had an option with Atria meaning that they could they would be down to read I think it was like a hundred I think they only wanted like 50 pages I'm an overachiever so I sent them like 200 or something and then a synopsis and for me as a writer I don't

personally love writing outlines like i don't make really elaborate plans ahead of time and what i found with this book was like it was kind of a catch-22 because on the one hand it's a really really complicated story but on the other hand it is a very um what's the word i'm looking for bruce has your word for you yeah no his word is rough it was rough it was a rough book like it was It was a challenging, without giving too much away. It's a very, very challenging novel. And so I had to write this outline ahead of time. And it was a really complicated outline.

Like, we'll get into it later, but it's a very complicated book. There's a lot of characters. There's a lot of mystery. There's a lot of speculative horror elements. Like, there's just all these pieces. And what I found, on the one hand, writing the outline was cool because I could see the whole novel in my head. but also like any writer will tell you typically by the time you get into the book itself like that outline doesn't help you that much anymore like the characters are growing and changing and so this book had a lot of rewrites and I found I found that it was actually really challenging to kind of undo the outline in my head so that I could rewrite it as I was going in a way that felt natural and authentic versus when I wrote my other books and have written other stuff since without outlines it can feel a lot more organic. And so I've kind of debated this with my agent because she was like, I don't think you could have written it without an outline.

And I was like, I really don't know if I could have, I don't know. I don't know if I would have been happier writing it without it or not. But logistically, it was a very, very different writing process. Yeah, I think something that not all readers know is like what you're talking about where like your first couple books are sometimes a different experience just because of how publishing works. And then once you've been a published author, it's like the expectations. expectations actually kind of get bigger or different than just like sitting and writing. It does. And, you know, I, it also, like, I feel like more writers could talk more about the way that, like, the financial incentives of the industry work. Like, I was at a point in my life

where I still had, it was like a part-time job, but it still was like 28, 30 hours a week, like a pretty serious time commitment. And I was really ready to go part-time and, like, really try to start working my way, you know, I think a lot of writers think that, oh, I've made it if I quit my job. And for me, it's more of like, can I find, can I get together enough money to not work for a while and then figure something else out kind of thing? And that's what I did with Midnight Knock, where I was like, even though I didn't really want to do the outline and do all this other work, I would have rather just been writing the book, I knew that that would have taken me probably six months versus if I do an extra month of this work and then sell it early, that will give me the

money to then really devote a lot of time to the book, right? Yeah. And so so much of being a professional writer for me, I found is learning how to buy time. It's really interesting, which actually kind of has a bearing on this book, because this book is very much about, like, how we use our time, how we use what we're given. And it felt very, what's the term I'm looking for? Apposite would be like the fancy word for it. It felt very like on the nose almost where I was like, man,

I'm literally purchasing time to work on a book about the value of time. That is pretty next level. Yeah, it was a meta moment. The writing life, you get a lot of meta moments. It's really weird. Yeah, I bet you do. And I think a lot of, I was talking to another writer about like kind of the same thing that you're saying. I think it's also like people who are like creators in general. It can feel

that way. Like most of my job is making content, but it's not for like fun clients. And so that's even how I get myself to like get through stuff sometimes. It's like, oh, I really want to like, I really want to make this post or this video where I loved this book and I want to talk about it. And so then I'll try to convince myself to get through my work so that I can do the fun stuff. So I don't have a meta version of it that has happened yet, but I do resonate with the feeling of like, can I just like get some time to do my own stuff? Totally. Oh my gosh. Yeah.

Well, what's interesting too is like I've also found now because like right now I was able to get enough money in the bank. I don't have to work for the moment. And I moved cities. So it was kind of easy just to like let one job go and just be like let me coast for a while. it's actually really interesting too like having too much free time is not good you know it's not good for your creativity and I adopted a dog recently

and she has eaten up so much my free time because she needs so much attention that it's been valuable but a good object lesson that like when I was younger and working really shitty jobs 40 hours a week like desperate to not do that like I was just like God I would kill for just

like a week to write and I'm very blessed that I get that time and I'm very thankful for that I very thankful for readers and publishers and all that but it is funny too because I before I got the dog there were a couple weeks where I was just like man like there's really no pressure like this is actually not helpful yes yeah that's how so my husband has ADHD and I'm not diagnosing you with that but that's his problem is if he doesn't have a deadline he cannot get himself to do it like there has to be some form of like outside pressure for him to like sit down and do stuff yeah i mean it's motivating it for me it's my bank account because whenever you're living on your writing you're just because like so much of the writing income is based on benchmarks

of like you sign a contract you submit a manuscript you have hardback publication paperback publication that a submission chunk is really motivating to finish the book i bet yeah Yeah, it's just such a, I feel like the industry, at least from what I'm hearing, it's also like always changing like in ways that you're like, wait a second. When I was writing this book, it wasn't like this. And then there's like the delay of it coming out. Well, there's always a lag. This one had the shortest lag of anything I've done, which was kind of cool because like No Road Home and the Brightlands, my first two books. Like those had been done for over a year by the time I got around to talking to people about it.

right? And so it wasn't very fresh in my memory versus this, you know, I think I turned in the last drafted it in like December or January. Like it's been pretty, like once you get more established with the publisher as well, they can kind of assembly line you a bit easier and fit you into their schedule. One thing that was really interesting, though, speaking of the publishing industry changing, this is kind of insider baseball, but they're, when I was coming up, I was told like your limit in terms of word count for a debut writer is 120,000 words. which is a long book. That's about 500 pages in Hardback.

Like, that's a pretty chunky novel. Yeah, because I've always heard like 90 for thrillers. Exactly. So I got away with it. 120K, it kind of worked because it was also, the Brightlands was also horror, and horror does get a bit more wiggle room. Right.

Mostly because of Stephen King, like we're being honest. But what's interesting with this, when we were, since we sold Midnight Knock early, we had to put, we actually had to negotiate a word count into the contract because like typically it works where writers were promised a book of a certain length and deliver something way shorter

and publishers need something to be like well we were promised a meteor book than this frankly for me it was the other direction because I had promised it at 135,000 words which is very long and I was glad that they went out on a limb for that and then I was finished and it was like like 140. I mean, it was a, I think the manuscript was like almost 700 pages was this massive book. And my agent was like, that's awesome and really excited. I can't take it to them. I'm like, what do you mean? And she was like, printing costs have gotten so high since COVID and the tariffs and all this other stuff. Printing and shipping and paper has gotten super expensive. And so she was like, publishers are really fickle now about word counts because the

you can fit two extra copies of this shorter book in a box, right? And you cut down on your shipping cost versus like, you know, God bless him, somebody like Brandon Sanderson or something, like a doorstopper. They can only fit about four of those into a shipping, like a shipping box. And so that eats into your overhead really bad. And thankfully, before readers think that it's a doorstop, I actually got the book quite a bit shorter.

Like I rewrote it multiple times. And I think it actually shipped it 10010 or 115, like a very reasonable. word count for this kind of book but yeah um i you know not to sound spoiled but it's very rare that your agent will give you a hard no typically they're like well i'll work on it and we can find a way and with this she was just like no like unambiguous no i can't send and so i was like oh my god do i have to split it into two books like what do i do like it was a crisis but again boundaries and pressure it was better for the book at the end of the day made it a much shorter book, which I think is always pretty much always a good thing. But yeah, now the other issue then

is that for foreign publications, it's even more expensive right now in Europe. And so nobody by and large is reading manuscripts for translation rights over 100,000 words because publishers and like especially Europe don't want to publish anything longer than that. So yeah, it's really interesting like so basically unless the midnight knock wins like you know um some big award like the stoker or something yeah the odds of it getting published and say um i don't know germany are like minuscule as far as i understand it but who knows i mean also like you said publishing industry changes constantly so this year maybe we're having different totally different conversation yeah it doesn't make any sense because like it was making me think of when you were saying

Europe there's a Catherine Ryan Howard book out that I really wanted to read like it was early this year or late last year and they could they only printed it in Europe and they didn't she didn't even get a US run basically wow and I was like that doesn't make any sense and then there's this there's a memoir I saw one of my publicist publicist friends share and I was like oh that sounds really good and like typically i definitely am audio audio booking a memoir and you can only get her memoir in canada or the audiobook version oh that's so weird i'm like i'm like that has nothing like what you're saying i've i've kind of heard the stuff about like shipping being a problem like the really uh like tangible physical stuff but i was like why would you not make an audio book available

so i yeah i've never yeah because typically we sell those as north america rights. Yeah. Like all my stuff, I think, is bundled as North American, which isn't really an industry secret. Like, that's pretty standard. So that's very surprising. I know.

And you can, I can buy the, I can buy it for an e-reader, but, because I thought maybe I wouldn't be able to get the digital version either. That's so weird. But, yeah, I don't know. Publishing. Publishing, bro. Publishing. If you're an author who's listening right now, I'm sure that sometime recently,

you thought to yourself, I really just want to write and I don't want to have to think about social media. The good news is I have a couple of solutions for you. If you just need help brainstorming ideas and building out posts and Canva, my monthly consulting might be good for you. If you're about to publish a book, I can help you with a book trailer. The other option is accumulating a content bank of both long and short form content that can be used now and generically into the future. I love reading your books and I know you don't love figuring out how to post on social media, So I would love to help. Follow the link in the show notes to learn more. Well, with the Midnight Knock, we've kind of mentioned there are a lot of things going

on. And some of them we're not going to talk about until the end. So if anyone was worried about spoilers, you won't hear them. And when we get near them, we will warn you. But what initially sparked your idea for this premise? so I had been interested in a long time in West Texas like I've always loved West Texas and I went out there as a kid a couple times and this sounds sort of this is an indication of the kind of child I was I remember being like 11 or 12 and I was on I think it was like a church trip like a weekend trip or whatever to some like Bible camp or something and we were on a charter bus and I remember falling asleep on the bus somewhere in like the hill country of Texas. and waking up in the desert and it's you know we were in like if you've ever seen you know no country for old men or there will be blood like these huge open vistas and this massive just incredible amount of sky and i remember it was the first time i think that as a human being i realized how small i was right like how i'm not the center of the universe right and like

inconveniently yeah that somehow i'm not the most interesting thing in the world and because you feel so tiny in a landscape like that um so it moved me on like literally almost a spiritual level it was a really really profound experience and so um as i got older i've thought about it more and more i've loved going out there and one day i don't remember where it came from it was just one of those little sparks where whenever you're out on a highway like that it doesn't feel like you're going anywhere. Like the speed limit in West Texas is 85 and people are usually going like 90 or 95 just because it's so spread out, right? Like you're driving all day. And it was this weird thought that I had. It was like, what if you were literally stuck on a highway that never

ended? Like what if you were literally on this highway that you couldn't get off? And then your car runs out of gas and like it's cold and there's something out in the dark. And that always struck me is just very creepy. But it's not quite a novel. Like there's not really a, it would be a very short novel. And I was like, I feel like there's more to this year.

And so I was like, well, maybe you find somewhere to stay, like a motel. And then once I had the motel, all of this stuff started to kind of click into place because you have the weird twins who run the hotel,

and then you've got that classic kind of road story set up of a bunch of travelers, converging for the night yeah and once I had those elements it was kind of just off to the races because it was like well who are these people and they this happens to me all the time like I'll kind of write a fragment of something and and it doesn't work as a full piece of art but the characters are really good and like so that's where I got there's two boys in this Ethan and Hunter um they're two of the main traveling people and they they were in like a a film script I wrote back when I thought I wanted to write movies.

Yeah, and it wasn't a very good script, but the characters were really interesting. Like, their dynamic was really cool. And so I was like, all right, I'll keep them around. And then I was like, this could be the time for them. And then there's two other women, Kyla and Fernanda, who are on the run from a, like, kind of a crime boss. And they were for another idea I'd had for, like, a Western that I wanted to write. You know what I mean? And so it was like, I don't know.

I feel like as a writer, you're just always kind of cannibalizing stuff for part. and and this felt like a like a kitchen sink novel like just throw everything in it and then see what comes out of that and so I just I just chucked them in there and then what I found was so fun is that by setting all of these characters kind of bouncing off of each other and then having one person there who knows all of them it allowed me to you know it's always a great feeling when the first hundred pages basically come together on their own because then you're like oh I have a book here. Like I have like a bedrock I can work from. But yeah, I would say that the initial inspiration, it was just the idea of an endless highway in the desert. Yeah. I mean, it is it is like a fascinating thing. I could see how that would stick with you forever. That's like, it's reminding me of like the moments when I was a kid when all of a sudden I'd be like, wait, what is eternity? Yeah. I would have basically a panic attack about it. Yeah, totally. It's less about like, yeah there's that realization of like oh you're going to die someday like that's one thing but just the

idea that like time is really really big and your chunk of it is very small that's and that there's only you have a finite amount of it i think that was really haunting to me yeah yeah me too um well i was going to ask how you how you created such a large cast of characters but it sounds like some of it is that it was coming from um characters you had kind of created and met in different or other different projects, but did you have like a set number of people you knew you wanted to be there? Or did you just kind of like intuitively? It felt intuitive. Yeah, it felt more intuitive. Just because it's like, this is one of those weird things that I don't know how you could. I don't think it's bad to like teach writing.

Like I think there's a lot of skills you can teach of like the like just the day to day process of writing a book like there's a lot of practical stuff but there are these sort of imaginative intuition like this element of intuition you just kind of get of like reading a bunch of stories and thinking about stories and so it always felt like the right number of people it always felt like basically two pairs of people going west one guy going east with his granddaughter and then another guy following him and so somehow you know as the book continues you realize that the number of people there might be important like there might be a significance to these people all being there at this particular time but that all kind of came

later it was more of just like it feels almost like a geometry or something like how do I get the balance of this right right and how do I balance all these characters against one another in interesting ways yeah that makes sense the other thing with so the motel is called the break in motel which I thought was such a clever idea to you when in the process did you come up with that idea that was so weird um because i've gotten asked about this a lot and i wish i had a better answer i was thinking about the book like this happens every time i start a novel when i start to get excited about it i'm just like locked away in it like everywhere i go whatever i do i'm always thinking about it it's always you're always getting ideas

um and it's a great feeling because you only get that once or maybe once every year or two as a writer, like this sort of all-consuming creative thing of like fever. And I was going through that and I was in my hometown, which is a small, a smallish city called Waco, like in the middle of Texas, like the heart of Texas. And I remember I was turning, I was on like an interstate frontage road and I was turning past a motel. And out of the corner of my eye, I thought the sign read the break in motel and what's really weird as i've gone back and looked at it and it doesn't say anything close to that it was like it doesn't even say motel on the sign but it it again i think it's just your subconscious comes up with something and kind of gives it to you um and yeah as soon as

i saw that name or thought i saw that name i was like oh i'm stealing that like that's perfect that's so cool because it also is kind of a pun on it yeah like literally i mean this is i I feel like I hallucinate it for a living some days, but like it also kind of is a play on the idea because there is, there's a lot going on in this book, but kind of the spine of it is a locked room mystery, like a locked room murder mystery. And so calling it the break in motel just seems like so like. Perfect. Yeah, you know what I mean? Like it's so on the nose, it becomes ironic again. Yeah, a little bit. And it does. That's what I was going to talk about too. There's like the locked locked room element it there's some supernatural horror that's happening there's definitely like

psychological thriller or psychological horror elements as well did you have all of those in mind when you started or did they kind of pop up as you wrote it as I was thinking through the book I realized I could do again it could be a kitchen sink kind of novel and I was really excited about that because there's a section that feels almost like a slasher movie, you know, like a really gory slasher story. There's like a creature feature element. Like there's something out in the desert. And then it's got like more of a, there's some cosmic horror, like some of that sort of big, large scale horror that starts to blur almost into like it starts to feel kind of epic in a way. And I knew I could do all of that and have a mystery at the center of it.

and it just it seems so fun i was like i've got to try this i don't know if it's going to work but i've got to it was a bold experiment i was like i have to see if i can pull this off i know there are some elements that calling it an epic i want to bring up but it's not time to bring them up yeah we'll get there we'll get there um there so i feel like there are also some umages to horror so like creepy twins is i mean they're not creepy creepy but they are they're odd they have some secrets going on that other people don't know how to what to make sense of um was any of that like deliberate or do you think just because like you've enjoyed horror some of those like are kind of like in your mind i think it's a little bit of both you know i think

that there's um there's some stuff that does sort of creep in subconsciously like you know the there's a a very weirdly out of place like victorian house behind the motel right and like that very much feels like an homage to psycho but it also very much has its own purpose within the plot so it's it was important to me to do stuff like that it was important to me to have these aspects that even if it's an homage to something it needs to stand on its own two feet like I find um I find it when something is really self-referential, I find that kind of exhausting, right? Or when it's, if you're not careful, you dip into, like, a bad, like, Tarantino movie or something,

where it's, like, constantly winking at the audience. Like, you never want to do that. But, yeah, it's, like, creepy twins, weird houses. And then also the element with the motel of, like, I was really interested in open space claustrophobia. We like that was something I felt a lot because I drove out to West Texas to research the book. And the first night that I was there, I stayed in this very isolated motel. And it was genuinely unnerving.

I had, you know, no cell signal. It was like dark, dark outside. I mean, like pitch black. And like the motel was perfectly nice. But it was like basically on a highway, you know, in the middle of nowhere. And so I felt this intense claustrophobia of space where I was like, I really am. I'm, like, physically scared to leave my room because there's so much empty space around me. And then it also interested me, too, I was like, well, if something were to happen in this motel became unsafe, you really don't have anywhere to go.

It's almost like being a sea or something. Like, there's nowhere to go. So that sense of claustrophobia, I really wanted to play around with different ways to explore claustrophobia. Yeah. That's a good point because I remember feeling. that when like they were when different characters were starting to realize that some stuff was messed up then you're like well what do i do at this point like when it's like i think it's also set oh sorry um during a is it also it's set when it's getting darker earlier i think

they mentioned that or it's just that i'm living where it's dark at like 4 p.m right now no i mean it is it's the winter in the the desert you know and everybody always imagine Texas is hot right but it's like the desert is freezing like it's yeah okay it's miserable i mean like i found it was really cool but like yeah at night it's it's frozen over yeah and then even that part is like even so it's like there's no one around or there's nothing around you and then there's the fact that like you would get like frostbite if you just kept walking for forever especially possibly die of hypothermia yeah it's a real concern yeah man i yeah i yeah i first I read it obviously

I don't know last month so some of these things you're saying reminded me of parts of it with the characters and how

their stories like do and don't overlap was that something that kind of came as you were writing it I'm assuming it kind of is

since you said like you kind of morph with your outline when you have one I try to let the characters grow I try to like I want to have

a pretty clear idea I need to have a decent rough start. I need to have a rough idea of where I'm starting. But yeah, I try to stay pretty loose. You know, you don't want to get really locked into a particular idea because, and again, that kind of goes back to the idea of the outline. The danger to me of a really set outline is it can rob you of room to experiment and play around.

For example, there's a character in this book named Ryan. who is like this slightly older man he's in his 40s. He's trying to reunite with his stepdaughter. And he's one of these characters where he was always there. And he was not quite a plot device, but he definitely galvanized a lot of action in a way. Like his presence was really upsetting to another character. And then like there's a lot of conflict because of that.

But he never felt integral in a way. But what I found was that as I was, I knew that in this kind of the second chunk of the book, he would become a lot more important. And a big part of this book is about, you know, it's sort of that round-robin thing of seeing the same event from different people's perspectives and learning, like, what brought people there and what they saw and how they interpreted it.

And he becomes really integral. He sees a lot of stuff that other people have missed. But I also found as I wrote him, I just fell in love with his voice. Like, I found him so interesting and so. relatable and I could root for him and I really wanted him to do well. And he just started eating up more and more space on the page, the point where I had to reorganize other stuff around him. And in a way, the outline was sort of a hindrance because I was like, man, I feel like I'm budding up against a different version of this book. And I'm having to like unlearn

that book in order to write a better one. So I felt sort of, I don't know, maybe like a snail that's outgrown its shell or something, like I felt sort of pinned in by this other idea of the story in a way that if I had just sort of naturally allowed him to grow on his own, the plot would have maybe been a bit messier, like it would have taken probably more revision to get all the beats of the plot straight, because that is useful for an outline, especially a really complicated story. But I found that it was much harder to get into the characters because I had this outline sort of weighing me down. And once I started to let that go,

and I would just give myself five pages in this guy's voice to goof around, I had so much more fun with it. Yeah, that makes sense. Were there any characters that like, because it is multi-pov, like you were just mentioning, which is that fun. I love that structure almost every time I read it, where you're like, oh, but this is what this person saw,

Because it's just, you really have to be thinking about everyone's perspectives to kind of try to understand your own truth of it. Were there any characters that were like harder to write and you had to like do research or did you have any characters where you were like, I love writing in this character's voice? Yeah. One thing that it kind of just crept into the book as a consequence of where it's set and, you know, we, it's not a huge spoiler to say that there's something out there in the desert with these people know right and every book you need some person or book or videotape something has got to give you the exposition of what is the thing in the desert and i was like well the people who would know would be the native americans because they were here when this got started hundreds of years ago but then you're like all right

let's really do our homework here like let's do this right um so yeah there's a character uh in the book whose perspective, I won't spoil it, but we don't get her perspective until near the end. And her, she is part native or part indigenous. And getting that right was challenging. And that took a lot of research and a lot of reading and talking to other, and talking to indigenous people and just trying to get, trying to nail the tone of somebody who is aware of the identity and kind of disillusioned with it. and like nailing that feeling

yeah that took a lot of work and it was definitely the scariest one it was the one where I was like on the one head every writer is always word they're going to get canceled but there's this deeper element where it's like I don't want to make a bad work of art I don't want to make a dishonest piece of work

and so how can I just depict this person honestly yeah yeah that was I loved that inclusion as well which I guess we could just get into spoiler territory at this point 100%. Um, yeah, so you did, and I guess we'll start from that even. You did include some, uh, almost like folklore, um, related to people indigenous to that area. So, uh, how did you kind of decide on that? Not even a villain, but like that, uh, character as a antagonist, maybe? You mean, Telohi, the thing in the mountain? Yeah. Yeah. I was really interested in, um,

Like I said, Cosmic Horror, like Lovecrafting kind of Cosmic Horror. And I also was like, well, these people can't beat this thing, right? Like, it's so powerful. It's not even just go in there with a gun. And I feel like if you go back and you read Lovecraft, his best books are where the humans lose in a way. Like when you read versus a book like a story like Call of Cthulu, it has this amazing setup. And then it gets really cheesy because like Cthulhu's chasing. this guy in a boat and he like rams the boat into this like fell god and it like just feels

very corny or something it feels like the little mermaid or whatever and you're just like oh god this is so silly um so i didn't want that and but i also was really like you said is it an antagonist is it bad or is it just what it is um and that interested me a lot partially too because like i i also play a lot of video games i feel like they're a really interesting sort of narrative it's a style of storytelling that we're still figuring out, which is fun. Like, the novel is basically figured out versus video games. People can still experiment and try new things. And I think that's really interesting. And video games are very, very good at big epic showdowns. You know, I grew up playing like, you know, Final Fantasy and stuff, like these big final encounters

with like some cosmic entity. And I knew we weren't going to be able to fight it, but it was still going to be, all right, well, if you can communicate it, what does it want? Like, if you can talk to this thing, what is it trying to achieve? And what is it scared? of and that again was one of those where I kind of knew in my head that we were going there but once I was able to get the characters into the mountain talking to this this god thing like I was just it was so interesting to just write that thing's point of view it was very surprised that I got as engaged with it as I did yeah yeah it was it was kind of like added to the fact too like you're saying that like there's this they're trying to over in

spoilers so they're trying to solve somebody's murder so there's like that locked room element um but to your claustrophobia point then it's also like oh there are just levels and reasons to why you just cannot go outside yeah seriously like you're you're by the end of the book like it's kind of established that they're in like some sort of extra dimensional space almost like you there literally is nowhere to go yeah like they're stuck in time um which brings me to the time loop which is so fun. I love books. I love books that play with time in general,

but time loops are so fun too. And I was lucky because I did not, it's not in the synopsis. And especially with like books where I already know, I like the author's writing. Like I'll read like maybe the one sentence synopsis at the top. And I'm like, I don't need to know that much.

So it was fun for me. I think it's around like 25% in that range. When all of a sudden I was like, oh this is what we're about to do um so did you know that part i it's interesting you said you did kind of have to outline so did you know what the outline phase that it was going to be that yeah that for sure i knew was going to happen and i i knew that i wanted to do it the way it did where like it literally restarts the book like on a new title page like yes i knew i wanted to do that so badly and i have a lot a fun doing it so um i to this day don't know where the time loop idea came from i really don't know

why that became so integral to the story but i knew it was there and so that part yeah that part was like okay i'm going to try to write a murder mystery in a time loop like i'm not the first person to have done it there's other people who do this and i've done it really well but i had no idea what i was signing up for like it is the most logistically complicated thing I've ever tried to do yeah and so yeah the the pleasure of that twist of turning the page and there's a new title page and the book has started over was so acute like I got excited even writing it and that's pretty rare normally it's like work and like that was one of those were so hyped to do it I was like well it's so good it has to stay and then basically I wrote the that first section

is what we sold to the publisher along with an outline. But once it came time to actually sit down and write the rest of the book, like once we sold it, I remember this moment of like absolute horror when I realized what I had like signed myself up for and gotten paid to do. And now I had to actually write it. And I was like, what have I done? You're like, this is actually harder than it is just cool. Yeah, exactly.

It was a really fun idea at the time. And now look where it's gotten us. So, yeah, then it's, it kind of one ups it, too, because, like, we were talking earlier, like, in the first part is that they have until midnight to solve this murder. And so they're like, oh, my gosh, we better do it. So, like, that's the big literal ticking clock. Okay, one second. Yeah, you're good. better it is you got to stop yeah better better better yeah i just brought

yeah i just brought this bread well peanut butter with me this time um okay so i think i got through yeah i got through the part um so they think that the big ticking clock is literally midnight and so then it's this fun flip because all of a sudden you're like oh my gosh it is not just like midnight and now you're like this could just keep happening and happening exactly i felt like i like felt the dread of it with the characters where i was like oh no they're not like almost done they're about to have to do it all again yeah exactly and the question of who knows that who remembers it when they remember it that was definitely the the most logistically challenging part of the book because yeah you know not only do people know

something but it also can really affect them as a person right like it affects your personality of like if you know certain things about what's happening here it's going to change who you are over time especially if you remember this night happening to you over and over like what does that do to you be exhausting yeah exactly i can't even it's terrifying kind of a night i know and you're just like because they have some lag like you're saying we're like sometimes they'll start to remember stuff but each characters is different too and i was like trying to decide because i most of the time and someone who just wants to be informed, even if it's not fun, what I end up knowing. But, like, with this stuff, I'm like, if you just, like, knew you may never figure your way out of it.

And you're going to die every time. Yeah, I don't think I would want to know either. Yeah. Also, so also there's the entity in the mountain. Right. But there are also these physical creatures that you came up with that were, like, very, terrifying. What was your process creating what they looked like? Yeah, I mean, that was something where I did, I was researching, again, to try to get it right, I was researching Native American folklore, different stories, and none of the mythology from the book comes directly from any particular tribes, sort of story or sort of roster of legends, but a lot of tribes, across many cultures, both in the Americas and elsewhere, really do not mess with owls or snakes. And I was like, you know, they're honestly pretty creepy.

Like, they both have an element of something kind of spooky about them. And so, yeah, I don't know. It did feel kind of like a kid with construction paper of like, it's an owl snake. But then I was like, no, this is actually really scary. Like, it's actually really frightening. Yeah. And especially if it walks like a man, like it moves like it's on two legs. I was just like, this is the most, I don't know.

Once the image got in my head, it just really creeped me out. And I couldn't let it go. Yeah, it was creeping me out. I think there was one section when I was listening here at home and Tyler was gone for work. And I was like, I don't want to go let the dogs outside. Exactly. Like, can I just stay in here? And then it's another one that's like

With like daylight savings here It's also pretty dark until eight in the morning here And they are especially the younger one Is used to like getting his WLK at like 630 So sometimes I'm like still listening to an audio book Even though it's dark out there But I was like I don't think I need to listen to this one While I walk the guys right now

You gotta there's a couple sections of it There are a couple chunks of it that There are a couple chunks that even like rereading it would freak me out like i read this book you know i probably read it 40 times you know in different at least different parts of it and like yeah there's a couple of scenes that still creep me the hell out which is always really weird when you're like well you wrote it like it shouldn't bother but it does kind of feel like something outside of yourself sometimes it's really strange yeah so it's not the same thing but we saw oh why can't i think of it with jack quade this

year. What is? Okay, whatever it is. Novocaine, I think is what is called it. And so like the gist is his character does not feel pain. And then something happens that makes him as like a really ordinary person use it to go save someone. I'm trying like that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But my main note when we had like after we saw it is like they play with. that idea in these action scenes where like there's stuff like going through his arms and breaking his bones and like as i'm watching i'm just like oh you're like i was reacting like in pain right even though like the story structure told me like he's not feeling pain but but you're watching it you can't help yourself like you assume that pain is happening yeah and then you're imagining

it happening to you or to yeah no trust me it's i know exactly what you're talking about Yeah. Some authors are like, no, I walk away from it. I'm like, but you like created something that scary in your mind. I feel like you would stick with me too. But my mind likes to come up with scary things. Now that it's out, it's always really weird. Once the book gets published and it's out in the world for about a month, which is where we're at now, like, yeah, it does feel a lot less vivid. But yeah, whenever it's in embryo, so to speak, like when you're rewriting it and like working on it, yeah, it still feels very spooky. believe it. Were you, was there anything about like the ending? Did you play around with the ending at all? Um, no, I had a really clear idea for the ending. I kind of knew, um, I knew that Ethan and Kyla were going to be the only ones who made it out. And I knew who the murderer was. And once you have, you know, that, everything else is just kind of going to build itself around it. Um, but again, you know, speaking of people who surprised me, Ryan,

the dude who's like i always thought was just going to be sort of a side character yeah he sort of survives like he's on his he's doing his own thing like i didn't have that i didn't predict that at all like yeah um so yeah i i think that basically from very early on i had the image of of ethan and kaila uh leaving the mountain at the end of the book and what they found you know the world that they find outside like that was with me the whole time um it's actually interesting we did move there's sort of a final chapter that's like five pages or so this really tying of all the last little loose ends um and my publisher like my editor and i we it wasn't a fight at all it was just like we reordered those scenes multiple times to try to figure

out the right um rhythm for it and the right kind of and it actually changed between the galley and the first edition but like the galley had a slightly different order and then whenever i read the book because you get proofs like where the book is is typesets you see what it's going to look like on the printed page and you oftentimes will catch stuff or see stuff that you I don't know it's really hard to explain like when you see that as I finished book you judge it differently and I remember reading and getting to that part and just being like no I really want to change it and yeah it was a pretty last minute change I mean we made that change like a month or two before the book went to the printer which was very late in publishing yeah and thankfully they they

went along with it. I was like, hey, we've, we've tried it in all these different orders. And now that I see it, I actually want to do it this way. And I'm grateful for them for going along with it, because by that point, nobody wants to change anything. Understandably, right? Because it's like a printed book is a very finicky document. Like, there's a lot of really complicated sort of formatting and stuff that goes into that. So nobody wants to screw with it too hard. But I'm very grateful that let me change it. Can I ask you a really huge favor? One of the biggest indicators in audience growth and podcast popularity is ratings and reviews. I am always going to be growing bookwild and the range of guests that we're able to have. But the one thing that you can really do that would help grow

bookwild is rate and review on whichever platform you listen to. And if you do rate and review, send me a screenshot because I would love to send you some bookwild bookmarks. Now let's get back to the episode that's fascinating i remember lane fargo coincidentally it talked about um in her most recent one the favorites she has these uh chapters in between that are like the transcripts from a documentary that was being made about the main characters and she said the same thing where she like when she gets her proof she like is obsessed with how it looks on the page and so she was even changing like the dialogue in these like documentary sections because she was like i want it to look this way totally i just never thought of that yeah i think a lot about how something looks on

the page i think a lot about how it it's not just like is each sentence a good sentence it's about like do these paragraphs sit well next to each other like do they have a nice rhythm to them does like the prose sort of move i think lee child says that he wants to write a prose that's always tripping forward like it always feels slightly off balance and like it's tipping forward um and then yeah i remember reading i'm not obsessed with him the way some people are but i i do really admire corment mccarthy um who died recently and he you know he was really really interested in how the book looks on the page and to the point where like he wouldn't use quotation marks and you know certain things that feel in certain books i think it's great in his later book

because I think it's pretentious. Like, I think that you're allowed to evolve your style as you get older. Right. But if you read a book like Blood Meridian, for example, that book has this really amazing use of white space. And not in a way that feels sort of silly, but it's just there's like the dialogue is always very clipped and short. And like the, even some of the paragraphs are very brief.

And sometimes it's just like one or two sentences. And so it creates a lot of white space on the page that, maybe it's reading too deep into it, but it does sort of echo the big empty desert that these men are kind of wandering around in. So, you know, that made a huge impression on me as a kid of like how does the book, how does it actually lay? Like when the reader opens the page, what does it actually look like? Yeah, it's so fascinating. And I think some of why I'm probably like still fascinated by it is I'm like, I mostly read on my, on a, like digitally. Sure. or with audiobook and now I'm like I need to like look I like having my book trophies that's what I have

yeah yeah totally and mostly it's like podcast guests too but I'm like I need to like look at open a book and look at it yeah I think it sounds like a touch grass there's a there's a there's a pleasure to the printed page that I don't think is going anywhere you know people were predicting the end of print like 20 years ago. And I think there's just, there is something innately pleasant about it. Oh, yeah. And there's so many people who will like never read digitally or read an audiobook. So. Yeah, I only read digital for really long stuff. Like if I'm reading like a biography or a history or like a long ass novel, I'll read it digitally just because I hate carrying a big book around or trying to read in bed with a big book. But yeah, typically I just like all I want to read is a paperback. I don't like hard

If I do read, I want it to be a paperback. It's so much easier. I don't know. Like hardbacks, I feel bad because hard bags are like the financial bedrock of the publishing industry. Like they have the best margin and like all this other stuff. So like I feel bad that I'll buy hardbacks of friends. You know, like a friend's book because I'll buy the hardback. But like if I'm just in a bookstore casually, I'll see a book and I'll be like, oh, I'll wait until next year.

That looks great. But like I've got a year's worth of books I can get through and then I'll get the paperback. Right. I know. That's what I've talked about before where I'm like, if I couldn't read digitally, it would suck to be like, because I get what you're saying. I understand it's where the profits are. But like some people don't want to read hardcover. And like there'd be a whole bunch of books that I'd be like, I don't know if I can do this. Mine comes so much down to like somewhat what you were saying with how you prefer a paperback is convenience is like a huge part of it for me. So for me, it's like, oh, I can, oh, I can read in bed on my phone. Oh, I'm waiting in line. I can keep reading on my phone. It's like the convenience. I want that they do that so cool in Japan, and I wish we would do it more here,

is they, because Japan's a very commuter heavy society, like a lot of Japanese people read on trains or buses and stuff. And so publishers will publish a book in multiple installments, and even though they published them all at once, typically, it'll still be in multiple volumes. And so it's good, like, so Harakumirakami, you know, he's like the best-selling Japanese novelist, I think, of all time. His publisher likes to brag that he sold like 20 million copies of one of his books or something, like some insane number. And then people will point out, they were like, well, if he published it in America, it would have only been, I think, 10 million copies because

they published it as two volumes and they count each volume separately. But at the same time, it's like shoving he sold a bazillion copies good for him right but like he has a book called one q84 that's like his magnum opus and it's like a thousand pages long and i remember i had bought it in hardback when i was younger when it came out and i never read it and then yeah uh i tried to read the paperback and then luckily his his american publisher actually has a really cool three volume like box set and i bought that and finally was able to enjoy that book because i wasn't lugging i didn't have 800 pages in my right hand you know what i mean it is smart and it's like people might be more apt to pick it up to just try it psychologically it's less

daunting yeah i know that is the that is the trick of it and sometimes like with digital books that's the other thing too is i'm not aware of how long it's about to be if i don't look no that's also my problem i really love to keep tabs on where i'm at in a book and i struggle with that with digital yeah like it says a percentage at the bottom but like i don't know to me that doesn't feel the say but I do yeah I'm definitely not a Luddite like I think digital's great right but yeah I don't know I everyone just has their preferences I could I didn't even do audiobook until this year and now I'm obsessed with it so it's like who knows maybe I'll be a physical reader how was the audio book for midnight knock I haven't listened to it yet it's fantastic and it has one of my favorite

narrators of all time angel peen yeah she seemed really good oh her voice is just stunning I actually it was wild so I don't know if you can you see it So I interviewed Aaron Crosby-Extein, who's the author of Junie that came out. I just did. I just interviewed her like last week. And Angel Peen narrated her full book and it was just one POV. So it was all her. And that was the first one where I basically fell in love with Angel Pean.

And then I listened to Boomtown by Nick Stone that just came out. And Angel Pean is one of the POVs on there. And that episode just came out. And then when I realized I was going to be interviewing you, too, I was like, I am about to have three Angel Peen narrated books. Like, eventually, I'm going to get connected with her. So I've had a lot of Angel Pean in my life. That's awesome. I just got my, my publisher, I just got my link to my free digital download for the audiobook.

So I'm going to crack that open at some point here soon. Yeah, I loved all the narrators. I really, I really enjoyed it. I was actually listening to it when I was like doing my roots. Nice. And I was like doing my roots. And actually I had to kind of do like a gloss on the rest of my hair. So I had all of my hair just like on top of my head when I hit the twist when I found out it was a time loop.

And I came like running out of the bathroom. I was like, Tyler, it's a time loop. He's like, I don't know what that means. That's really awesome. So it was like quite a moment. I have a photo of it that will just, I'll always have it that I was like at my home. lawn when I realized it was a time loop oh my god that's amazing you have to post that photo yeah I will send it to you too I posted it in my stories but I didn't tag you because I think I had like tagged you

a couple I was like I don't mean to keep tagging them but I will send it to you I would love to see that yeah so yeah I will I will never forget that moment um obviously I loved it so I mean if anyone's still listening at this point I guess they knew spoilers but if you haven't read it go get it because you guys will love it yes thank you um and then i always i always do ask at the end if uh if you have books that you always recommend or if you've read anything recently that you love what have i read recently that i love um i have been so it's so off brand there's this series of um nautical like adventures basically it's by um patrick o'brien and it's about these um it's set during the napoleonic wars so it's like a you know sea ship captain like a man of war

captain and the surgeon do sales with him uh and their best friends that russell crow movie master and commander from a few years ago was based on the patrick o'brien books um okay but yeah they're just they're incredibly well written they can be very funny um very moving and they're like weirdly suspenseful like it's always interesting to me as a writer because it's like i know how I do suspense, but to see other writers where I'm just like really engrossed in this story, but I don't quite know why. It's not using any of the usual tricks, but I just really don't want to put it down. And he, it's tricky too, because now we know that he wasn't like a sex pest, but he was just a really shitty person. Patrick O'Brien, like he was just not a good

person. But the books are amazing. Like, it's really incredible. And he wrote like 20 of them. So I'm on book 10. Like I'm finishing book 10. now. And yeah, I read like one or two a year just because I don't want to, you know, because you only have so many. And it's been really fun because for other projects I've been reading about how to do, I'm always interested in how people do series characters, like how do you evolve characters over time. And he does a great job of growing the characters enough with each book that they don't feel static, but also giving them room to develop over the course of years and years and years. That's really, really great. So yeah. So, yeah.

I've been super hooked on that. And then, yeah, and that always, reading historical fiction then always distracts me into reading, like, history. Like, I'm always, like, I'm always reading, like, some new history thing. So I just recently read a history of the founding of Australia called The Fatal Shore. And that's one of those where we kind of just know that Australia was a penal colony, but you don't realize, like, how insane an idea that was. of like let's ship a bunch of boats across the other side of the world and establish a penal colony on a you know I mean it's a fertile island obviously but like it was not cultivated at all like we don't realize like establishing an agrarian society can take

years to get the soil up and running and all this so it's like the first couple years of Australia we're like on the brink of like masturbation all the time like indigenous violence like all this crazy shit going on and then as it developed You know, prison riots and reforms and all this stuff going on. It's one of the best written books I've ever read. I mean, like, every page has a sentence where you're just like, it's just such a lovely line. And it's a very kind of wise and insightful book. It understands human foibles really well, like violence and capriciousness. But it's also just like, yeah, riveting history. You're just like, oh my God, like, how did people live through this? How did they survive this? That's what for me, I've been reading more history this year. year and all of a sudden I'm like kind of like a lot of genres you have that moment where you're like oh there's a lot under this genre that you could possibly like I read like pop culture history of like the early 2000s and how it turned women against each other like there's like all kinds of stuff that you can find under the umbrella and kind of like what you're saying is like for me it's at least giving me like a sometimes it helps give me a higher overview of humanity. as like a thing, as a system, as whatever. And it's sad that it also reminds me that we just kind of keep repeating cycles.

Yeah, history is an open book exam and we keep failing it. It's really funny. Exactly. Yeah. Like that part freaks me out. But then also sometimes hearing the people who are like, no, I'm not standing for this. It makes me hopeful because I'm like, oh, there are other people who, you know, think people should be treated well.

And it's not to minimize how. bad the present moment is because this is definitely like a very dangerous time in history like i think we can all agree that we're living in like an epoch shift there have been other really catastrophic shifts you know what i mean and they've ended in various ways but it's like i think that it's very easy if you don't read history to just say oh this is the worst it's ever been and reading it and being like no andrew jackson almost destroyed the country you know what i I mean, the civil war literally destroyed the country. Like, there have been periods of horrible upheaval, and then they do get better.

They have, like, it's just, I don't know. It's not that you, I think that it's a bit lazy to say, like, you know, like Martin Luther King, like, things are always leaning toward justice. I feel like it takes a lot of work to establish justice, but like, it does happen. And then, yeah, it's also really interesting to read, like, especially pretty far back history. And you realize just there's that Ursula K. one quote where she's like we can't imagine a world without capitalism but 500 years ago we couldn't imagine a world without kings so like things do change yeah i'm not saying i want to overthrow capitalism tomorrow but clearly we're seeing the consequences of like what happens when

people have too much money when money is the god yeah when money has become your god like what consequences does that have so yeah i think history it can be very horrifying sometimes to realize like real people went through these things but also it does give you that kind of going back to our beginning of the conversation when you zoom out and you realize that you're not the center of the world and like time is very long like yeah it's good to have some perspective it does help for yes i agree i saw i think it was joy who is saying i saw her saying a version of this where she was like i know it feels really bad like it's tempting to think it's never been this bad but obviously in her case specifically as a black woman she's like i mean i don't I don't feel very connected to my ancestors, hopefully, but for her, it was like your ancestors have survived this and this and this to even be in the point where I could be sitting here talking to you. And sometimes I remind myself, like, all of these women who came before me,

like, they were getting through stuff too. So, like, I can probably figure out a way. I'm paraphrasing heavily. But that's, like, the positive takeaway you can get from knowing a little bit more about your history for sure absolutely and realizing that you have four bears is really important like there are people who've come before you like yeah for a woman of any race for a gay man like we've all had ancestors that have had to go through worse to get us to where we are and so instead of feeling sorry for ourselves we just have to keep going we have to yeah you're the best thing you can do to honor that is to just not give up right I agree I completely agree well I am so excited we got to talk about this. I bet we could talk forever. Probably could. It's

been so much fun. Yeah, it's been great. But yeah, thank you so much for coming on. I'm excited for whatever you do next. Thank you. Thank you so much. Always a pleasure.