On this month's Special Page:
Chuck Augello conducts an exclusive interview with the best-selling, multiple award-winning author Ronald Malfi
Ronald Malfi is an award-winning author of several horror novels, mysteries, and thrillers. He is the recipient of two Independent Publisher Book Awards, the Beverly Hills Book Award, the Vincent Preis Horror Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award for Popular Fiction, and he is a Bram Stoker Award nominee. Most recognized for his haunting, literary style and memorable characters, Malfi’s dark fiction has gained acceptance among readers of all genres.
His novel Floating Staircase was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award. When he’s not writing, he’s fronting the rock band VEER. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Maryland.
Find his official website HERE
Breathless and Unmoored: An Interview with Ronald Malfi
Suddenly Ronald Malfi is everywhere.
Since the release of his breakout novel Come with Me in 2021, he’s published two novels and two collections of novellas, They Lurk and Ghostwritten, all published by Titan Books. Earlier this year Malfi published Small Town Horror, in which five childhood friends are forced to confront their dark past and the curse placed upon them. Also new is a re-released edition of TheNarrows, a creepy and atmospheric slice of literary horror. A Bram Stoker Aware finalist, Malfi has been called “horror’s Faulkner” by Gabino Iglesias and “a modern day Algernon Blackwood” by Birdbox author Josh Malerman.
Q: In Small Town Horror, Andrew Larimer, a successful attorney about to become a father, is called back to his hometown to face the consequences of past actions. For horror fans, it’s a familiar trope, but the novel is still vibrant and engaging. How do you approach the challenge of making the familiar unique?
Ronald Malfi: The idea with Small Town Horror, even down to its title, was to take that trope and give readers a sense of familiarity so that they think they know where the story is headed; I wanted readers to kind of smirk and think, yeah, I’ve seen this one before. I wanted that level of comfort, of an admittedly false sense of security. We all know how these stories go, right? Leaning into those tropes allowed me to pull the rug out in the final act, turning all those tropes on their heads. My hope was to leave the reader breathless and unmoored. Even the title of the book is meant to be ironic—this isn’t the type of “small-town horror” we’re used to.
Q: Small Town Horror features the concept of the wraith. How does Andrew’s reaction to the possible presence of wraiths reflect his character and help drive the story?
Ronald Malfi: Without giving too much away, the idea of the wraith—of this entity, real or imagined, that plagues our protagonist once he learns of his wife’s pregnancy—is to present a manifestation of Andrew’sconcerns at being a new father, but also a summation of his guilt and his concern that his secret from the past would, someday, come back to haunt him. It’s a manifestation of all his fears.
Q: Every writer needs to create well-developed characters and tell a compelling story, but writing in the horror genre brings the added challenge of delivering the expected scares. How do you approach writing a scene that needs to unnerve or frighten the reader?
Ronald Malfi: I think a scene is most effectively frightening when it’s grounded—surrounded—by reality. Which means the characters, the locations, the motivations and actions, all have to ring true in order to write an effective scene that’s meant to upend all of those things and leave the reader unsettled. For me, when I say a scene or a book is scary, what I’m really saying is the author did a commendable job creating a mounting sense of dread. It’s that sense of dread—of increasing doom, of constricting atmosphere—that I shoot for when I write scenes like that.
Q: The book’s dedication reads, “Thinking of Peter Straub.” Small Town Horror shares some DNA with Straub’s masterpiece, Ghost Story. How has Straub influenced your writing?
Ronald Malfi: How has he not? As a child, Stephen King was my gateway drug into horror fiction, but Straub taught me that fiction was boundless, and that there is beauty in even the most frightening things. He was a true poet. As a reader, I luxuriate in Straub’s prose, soak it all in. It’s less about the destination with Straub than it is about the journey, you know? The title of my novel, Small Town Horror, is an homage to Straub’s titling of a few of his books—Ghost Story and Mystery, both of whose titles are really just the subgenre of fiction they are.
Straub’s characters were always gray, and I can see why many readers couldn’t relate to them, or to his style of writing. I knew the characters in Small Town were going to be equally gray; they’re not necessarily likeable people, and while that may turn some readers off, I firmly believe that unlikeable characters are perfectly acceptable; it’s when a character is unrelatable that we have problems. An unlikeable character is a joy, really, as long as their motivations make sense and we can understand why they do what they do.
Q: Your latest, The Narrows, was originally published in 2011. What prompted you to bring it back?
Ronald Malfi:A few things, really. The Narrows was written for my former editor at Leisure Books when he went over to another publishing outfit. He wanted a novel, and since he’d been kind enough to publish me in the first place, I returned the favor by writing one for him. The book did okay, but never really got that mass market treatment that my more recent novels have gotten. When Titan suggested bringing some of my out of print titles back, The Narrows was the first thing I thought of.
Also, when the novel was originally published, there was a prologue that was offered as a free downloadable ebook—in essence, a come-on to entice readers to purchase the novel. But the novel itself never included the prologue. Here, for the first time, the book is being published in completion, and, as my British publishers might say, I’m chuffed at the idea. It’s a much more “monstery” book than the type of novels I’ve become known for, but in some ways, I get a lot of delight in that fact. I’m glad it’s going to find a wider audience.
Q: In the opening of The Narrows, you mention wanting to write about small-town America and its blue collar residents and shuttered storefronts. Since 2011, the plight of such towns has remained dire. What interests you in writing about these communities and their residents?
Ronald Malfi: There’s a heartbeat that pulses in stories like that, and I’ve always felt at home reading and writing them. An incredibly rough outline of what ultimately became The Narrows was written when I was in high school, and I remember writing that entire manuscript with John Cougar Mellencamp’s album Scarecrow on constant rotation. Small towns present the facade of safety and comfort and familiarity, but underneath, there’s still that pervasive sense of darkness, of secrets held, of screams behind the bulwark of pleasant smiles. Those are the things I like best to explore.
Q: You recently published two collections of novellas, Ghostwritten and They Lurk. The novella often faces commercial challenges along with the creative challenges of the form. What attracts you to the novella?
Ronald Malfi: I’ve had a love-hate relationship with novellas over my career. I’ve learned to love them, but it was a rocky, constipated relationship for a long time. I recognize how well they service our particular genre, but I tend to be verbose by nature, and short-form fiction never truly appealed to me as much as a thick, chunky novel.
Ghostwritten came from a prompt from my editor: I’d written the first novella in the book, “The Skin of Her Teeth,” between writing my novels Come with Me and Black Mouth—two decidedly heavy novels, subject-wise—and turned it in to my editor. I thought they might release it between the two novels as a standalone ebook, a cleanser of sorts. But my editor came back to me and asked if I could write three more novellas about haunted books, manuscripts, and writers. I thought it was a fun idea, so I agreed to it, not realizing at the time how difficult it would be to write four novellas on such a specific subgenre and not repeat myself. Once I started working on the other novellas, I realized I was writing what was, in essence, a novel in four novellas, and that they were all connected in this strange, shared universe. I ran with it and had a blast writing the book. I personally consider it a novel, but I know that’s not how it was marketed.
As for They Lurk, this was my publisher’s approach to republishing some of my out of print novellas in a collection. I had reservations about this—I felt they were too old, not up to snuff, so to speak—but after going through them in preparation for the book’s release, I actually found myself enjoying them. I wrote one new novella, “Fierce,” for that collection, and that was that.
Collections are tough to market and even tougher to sell. Readers tend not to buy them, for the most part, so I held my breath when both Ghostwritten and They Lurk were released. Happy to say, they’ve found their audience, but I was a little concerned at first.
Q: Your novel Come with Me was among my favorites of 2021. It’s a page-turner featuring elements of the detective story and the supernatural, but is ultimately about a husband’s grief-stricken journey toward the acceptance of loss. It’s a great book. Tell us about the initial inspiration.
Ronald Malfi: I often joke and say all my novels are love stories at their core, but the more I say that, the more I realize it’s not a joke. If a story doesn’t have heart, then I’m generally not interested in telling it. As for Come with Me, it owes its inspiration to two events: one was my reading of Michelle McNamara’s nonfiction book, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. I thought Michelle herself was a cool idea for a character—one of these armchair detectives, hunting a serial killer from the glowing screen of her laptop in the middle of the night. I filed that idea for a character away, until I knew what I wanted to do with it.
The other event was a bit more poignant and personal: a friend of mine, a newspaper reporter, Wendi Winters, was killed by a gunman along with a number of her colleagues when a lunatic broke into the newspaper office and opened fire. Wendi’s story and the character of Michelle McNamara ultimately blended in my head, and became a story. Writing Come with Me was an exercise in mourning, and I think it shows. I was raw writing that book; I bled out writing that book. Out of all the books I’ve written, it’s probably the one that cut me most to the bone.
Q: You’re a prolific writer with a consistent output of quality work within the horror/suspense genre. How do you keep the ideas flowing? How do you see your work having developed over the years?
Ronald Malfi:I never really have a shortage of ideas, just a limited amount of time to write them. It takes anywhere from three to eight months to write a novel, and if I’m going to do it, they better damn well speak to me from jump—they better demand to be written, in other words. I think like any author—or any artist, really—it takes some time to find your stride and develop your craft, your voice. I feel I’m there now, and have been with the last handful of books. In part, it’s about being confident in what you’re doing; another part is letting your voice be your voice, which is all about confidence as well, I suppose.
Q: What’s next for Ronald Malfi?
Ronald Malfi: My newest novel, Senseless, has just been published in April. It’shard to describe. The bodies of two murdered women are discovered a year apart in the desert outside Los Angeles, and the novel explores the repercussions of those murders on three different characters in three separate storylines. It’s a departure for me, and I’m excited to see what readers’ reactions are to the book.
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