Cover image courtesy Clay McLeod Chapman; file photo
Originally from Richmond, Clay McLeod Chapman is a New York-based author of shocker-chiller-horror stories as well as a multihyphenate purveyor of the weird and wonderful; Esquire magazine recently named him one of the next generation of leading writers in the genre. His latest titles include “The Remaking,” which concerns an urban legend in scruffy Pilot’s Creek that becomes a cult ’70s horror movie that may also be cursed, and the more suburban anxiety- and drug-afflicted supernatural tale of the “Ghost Eaters.” He’s done it again with “What Kind of Mother.”
The story is set in the small town of Brandywine, along the Piankatank River, where Madi Price has spun in after 17 years away to bring her daughter, Kendra, closer to her father. An old flame, Henry, married Grace, and they eventually have a son, Skyler, who goes missing. Madi ekes out the rental on a grotty motel room by reading palms and giving spiritual advice. Those circumstances alone could make for a fine novel, but Chapman has other eldritch ideas.
Chapman launches the title here in Richmond at Fountain Bookstore, at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 12. Poet Ryan Kent leads a discussion with the author. We recently spoke with Chapman about the background of “What Kind of Mother.”
Richmond magazine: First, how do pronounce the name of your character Madi? If it’s May-dee, sounds appropriately like May Day, which is a signal for distress.
Clay McLeod Chapman: You know, it’s so funny. I say it three different ways depending on the interview. In my mind, it’s May-dee, short for Madeleine. We’ll see how it’s said in the audiobook.
RM: Madeleine — a Proustian touch about memory — which plays heavy into this story. A brief definition of horror could be when order becomes chaos. And you set up a convincing scene of this hardscrabble existence there in Brandywine. Desperate as it may be, there is an order. The reader wants to know if Madi and Kendra can work out their differences with the ex-husband — and then it all goes horribly wrong. Where did this come from?
Chapman: I grew up in Richmond, and my grandparents had a river house along the Piankatank River, an hour and a half away. It wasn’t their home, but a river house. Immediately, class comes into this to whatever degree. As a kid I’d get dragged down kicking and screaming to this river house, to be among my parents, not of the age that I could bring friends. So there was this immediate tension between people who lived there and the people who weekended or summered there. The first time I was made aware of a Southern class system was when the neighborhood kids called me “New Kid on the Block,” literally from the [boy band] New Kids, because the Piankatank Shores kids said I had what they called a “city haircut”; it was kind of flippy floppy — the nickname [of the haircut] was “Golden Arches.” I grew up in that environment to whatever extent. And the local folklore was insane. They’d literally point to a house and say, “Last week the kids who lived in that house killed their parents.” And there was the true tory of star-crossed lovers along the Piankatank, with a daughter dating an older man, parents not going to let this happen, and he snuck in and held them hostage and murdered them. They flew the coop and inevitably got caught.
RM: These stories are right there, perhaps just below the surface, or a little deeper …
Chapman: You can follow the notion of being in this environment where “folklore” doesn’t need to be about ghosts and goblins. It can be about real people, human beings, which are mythic stories in themselves. I love that stuff. That’s home to me, that’s what storytelling is, you start off with a kernel of truth, like tossing a rock into a pond and what radiates out, and that ends up being the story. I do love the feeling of how you can be driving down Huguenot Road countless times and going to Monacan High School — the stories are there whether or not you are personally aware of them. You tread through those stories. The savvy listener, the savvy reader will intuit or kind of acknowledge the stories around them.
RM: This story struck me, in a real way outside of the genre, as one about the challenges of parenthood. You describe the efforts of the characters Grace and Henry to have a child. The reader gets involved, and then Skyler at last comes along — and then events unfold.
Chapman: That section is the most terrifying thing I’ve ever written for me as a parent. You never, ever want this to happen. Without going too far into it, and to the extent that some of your life seeps into the writing, we’re navigating our youngest son’s key phases of his developmental life. Some of those milestones are different than other children and require a lot of special attention. He’s unconventional. And I wonder all the time, what did I do today to muck that up? And I’m writing this book at the same time! When you consider parenting, … it’s nearly miraculous that any of us turn out halfway OK.
RM: Before reading your book, I’d never heard of what you might call “woodworker lung,” epithelial desquamation, or the poison cedar wood excretes that kills insects. And Henry is making this crib for Skyler from cedar.
Chapman: Learn something new every day, right? When you’re writing a novel, you fall down these rabbit holes. I’d been trying to write a novella about 20 years ago, and I started researching cedar trees for that piece and learning about different kinds of wood. And came across this characteristic of cedar, that it contains a natural bug repellent. If you have lice, it can be used as a spray — that kind of thing. But if you work around it too much, it can make you sick or potentially even kill you. That detail embedded itself, and writing this story and about Henry wanting to make this crib, it could potentially, not going to say one way or another, lead to the tragedy in this story.
RM: One point to this is that every monster has a mother.
Chapman: A monster only a mother could love. That’s my ethos these days.
Advisory: not a book to read after eating seafood. Admission to the Fountain Bookstore launch event is free, but preregistration is required. That and $23 get you a book.
