Writer Clay McLeod Chapman at the Toronto International Film Festival premiere of “Wendell & Wild” (Photo courtesy Clay McLeod Chapman)
Homegrown horrormeister Clay McLeod Chapman returns to town for The Poe Museum Unhappy Hour “Poe-Stock” at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 22. Over the past two decades, Chapman has secured a niche as an author-performer-playwright-screenwriter-comic book scribe. At the Poe, he’ll read from his recent novel, “Ghost Eaters” (Quirk Books), which is set in Richmond and environs that somewhat coincide with reality. (Sticklers should simply enjoy the tale.)
A few years ago, Chapman and director Henry Selick (“Coraline”) wrote a novel, “Wendell & Wild.” Selick, through an arduous journey, transformed that story into a stop-motion film. Selick shares screenplay credit with Jordan Peele. The film premiered Sept. 11 at the Toronto International Film Festival and debuts on Netflix Oct. 28. “Wendell & Wild” features the voice talents of Peele, Keegan-Michael Key, Angela Bassett, Lyric Ross and Ving Rhames. We spoke via Zoom to Chapman from his third-floor attic, where, confined by pandemic, he wrote “Ghost Eaters.”
Richmond magazine: Readers of “Ghost Eaters” will recognize some aspects of the Richmond region, although the novel occupies a world of its own. But how can a horror novel writer resist a town named Hopewell or a subdivision called Shady Acres?
Image courtesy Quirk Books
Clay McLeod Chapman: So, in some parts I hew close to reality, in others it veers far away. Of course, the geography is off, the history dovetails here and there, … ah, but the only people who could take me to task are in Richmond, so there is this holding of breath — no hyperbole, there are Richmond readers — and then there is you.
RM: Well, the genre in which you work allows for satire and critique. It’s about extremes and transforms the everyday into the frightening, or punctures the thrum of the horrific we take in every day — certainly the case for 2020-2021. And in “Ghost Eaters” you have an addictive substance that mirrors the present drug epidemic.
Chapman: The genesis came about somewhere between 2015 and ’17. I’d been tapped by this film company in Hollywood, about this haunted drug. At that time it was more like a Freddy Krueger-attacking-a-group-of-teens sort of story. That project never went anywhere and fizzled.
But the underlying idea of a haunted drug really stuck in my craw. I couldn’t get it out of my head. But I didn’t do anything with the idea until after I wrote “Whisper Down the Lane” for Quirk and we talked about, What do you want your next book to be about?
Honestly, after “Whisper Down the Lane,” which is a personal book that addresses things not from my life but of my life, I recognized that when I write from a place of emotional honesty — it’s still fictional, still fantasy, still horror — but that it’s grounded in something, if not experiential, but personal, it resonates more. … I had a friend who passed away due to his addiction to drugs. It was one of those things I acknowledge in myself that I wasn’t there for him when he needed me the most. He’d never forgive me, he never did forgive me, and the circle of our friends never forgave me, and I never forgave myself. And it was honestly one of those things — this, as ghoulish as it is, this is why you should never marry a writer, or be friends with a writer — in this case I was a grave robber. It’s crass. I pulled in my personal regret. I took in these pivotal things, this crappy, awful horror movie that failed and my personal experience of losing a friend. I brought them together on the page.
All that said, the writing coincided with this pandemic time when the entire world became a ghost town … that psychic energy, that vibe. During the pandemic we were all ghosts haunting our own houses. We were phantoms for a whole year. The circumstances were, for better or worse, the best time to write this book, and then to come out the other end and then ask, Who are we now? The ghosts are warily creeping out of their houses.
RM: Speaking of which, the story unfolds within an unfinished subdivision of houses not ever lived in as homes. These places, through the ritualistic use of this addictive drug, turn into giant Ouija boards to summon unflown spirits toward connection.
Chapman: I embarked on this book with the idea of, What does it mean to be haunted? We tend to root haunting to a fixed geographical spot due to a great trauma, an event —
RM: Like old battlefields, which Richmond has plenty of, and former hospital sites —
Chapman: Yes. What roots a spirit to a physical location if that vessel, that receptacle, isn’t there? The ghost is unmoored. I feel like a ghost is defined by its parameters. You put a sheet on and cut the holes out, but without the sheet there’s no ghost. I honestly found myself obsessed with the classic traditional and cliche tropes of ghosts. You need that sheet, the haunted house. My job then was to put a spin on all that to give them a breath of new life.
RM: In the novel’s midsection there’s this surreal dinner party in what you’re calling the Salisbury neighborhood, and the protagonist Erin is marking up the escalation of what’s happening to her by describing her “job interview dress turned into a funeral dress turned into a dinner party dress turned into a going-away party dress.” It’s an hallucinogenic nightmare.
Chapman: I’d turned in a draft, one of the last phases of revisions, and my editor came back to me saying, “This feels good, it’s a really good job, but I want you to make these 50 pages where Erin is out of the house and in Richmond as scary as possible.” [Laughs] … I cranked it up to 11 with mushroom ectoplasm, coats trying to strangle Erin, a decapitated head in a grocery bag. If you’ve ever seen John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” there’s this moment after The Thing has infiltrated the camp, then one of the members has a heart attack and they do the chest thing, and at the tail end of that scene of you see the head of that man detach itself, sprout eye stalks and legs. The survivors collectively turn to see this crab head scuttling across the floor, and one of them says, “Oh, man, you gotta be f-in’ kidding me.” That’s the reaction I want the readers to have.
RM: For “Wendell & Wild,” you were on the red carpet in Toronto. You’ve been to film premieres before, but this came at the end of a long development road.
Chapman: My work started in 2016 or so, and I was done in 2018, and then they started making the movie. But from the idea to the Oct. 28 premiere on Netflix, it’s seven years.
The production team, they went through COVID, forest fires in Oregon; essentially every wrench that could be thrown into the works was pitched right their way. God bless Henry [Selick] living and shepherding this project every step of the way. Stupefying. It can take a long time to make any movie, but multiply it 10 times for a stop-motion movie. Being able to finally see it not only in a movie theater, but in a movie palace, at the Toronto International Film Festival, with Henry Selick, with Key and Peele, with maybe 500 people but it felt like a thousand, it was absolutely stunning.
