1--What is the title of your latest release?
HAMPTON HEIGHTS
2--What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
It’s right there in the subtitle: “One Harrowing Night in the Most Haunted Neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.” Six paperboys and their stupid manager Kevin set out to sell subscriptions on a cold winter’s night in 1987. Wild adventures ensue.
3--How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
I grew up in Milwaukee in the 1980s and wanted to capture that very particular time and place. And Hampton Heights is a real neighborhood—one that in the ‘80s was shifting from working-class white to working-class Black and facing the manufacturing shutdown that hit most Midwestern cities in that era.
4--Would you hang out with your protagonists in real life?
The six boys at the center of the story would (wisely) scorn me now, but back when I was a teen, a few of them might have thought I was OK. I would not hang out with their stupid manager Kevin.
5--What are three words that describe your protagonists?
Ambitious, anxious, and brave.
6--What’s something you learned while writing this book?
That it is really fun to take the familiar creatures of fairy tales and ghost stories—witches, werewolves, trolls—and use them to explore modern problems. I mean, I guess I knew that before—I watched Buffy!—but I never tried it myself til now.
7--Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
I do a lot of rewriting as I write, likely because I spend a lot of my time editing at my day job at Slate magazine. And I find rewriting a useful and productive thing to do while I’m trying to figure out the next bit.
8--What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
Cooking over-elaborate meals and making other people in my family do the dishes.
9--Describe your writing space/office!
My wife and I share the big dining room table in our house in Arlington, Virginia. We do have a screened porch that I can move out to on nice days, although right now they’re building a terrible McMansion next door so it’s a little WHIRRRRRRRR WHOOOOOOOOSH BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM loud out there.
10--Who is an author you admire?
I love the way Colson Whitehead bends genres to his purposes, both serious and comic.
11--Is there a book that changed your life?
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin was the first book I read that was as interested in adults and their inner lives as it was in kids, and gave them both equal time and attention. That book was for children; mine is for adults, but I hope I paid everyone the same compliment she did.
12--Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published)/Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
My wonderful editor seemed awfully bewildered when I sent Hampton Heights to her—it’s very, very different from my first novel, which was comic literary fiction set in New York City. But she got what was fun about it right away, and called me excited to figure out a way to convince people to read this one, too.
13--What’s your favorite genre to read?
I read a lot of literary fiction, which literary-fiction people think isn’t a genre, but is. Every summer at the beach I stuff in as much sci-fi and fantasy as I can carry. I’m actually much too chicken for most horror! That’s why my horror novel is about as gentle as it gets. You will never once worry that the kids might be killed or hurt. The adults? That’s another story. Sorry, Kevin.
14--What’s your favorite movie?
This is an impossible question to answer, but I do believe that no actor has ever had a year like Holly Hunter in 1987, when she made two perfect movies, Raising Arizona and Broadcast News.
15--What is your favorite season?
Summer. All other seasons are baloney.
16--How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
We have a great tradition in our family that on the morning of anyone’s birthday, everyone else makes construction-paper signs lightly roasting the birthday person and tapes them up all over the house. I love it!
17--What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
I really enjoyed the recent queer muscle thriller Love Lies Bleeding. A total blast.
18--What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
Been eating and cooking a lot of Korean recently!
19--What do you do when you have free time?
I read, I cycle, I see plays, and I play soccer (badly).
20--What can readers expect from you next?
Don’t tell my editor, but I’m working on a new novel that’s totally different from the last two.
From the author of the Washington Post notable novel Vintage Contemporaries, something completely unexpected: a hair-raising and rollicking adventure set on one night in 1987, when six paperboys must confront a slew of monsters as well as their own personal demons in a haunted Midwestern neighborhood.
On a cold winter’s evening in 1987, six middle-school paperboys wander an unfamiliar Milwaukee neighborhood, selling newspaper subscriptions, fueled by their manager Kevin’s promises of cash bonuses and dinner at Burger King. But the freaks come out at night in Hampton Heights. Sent out into the neighborhood in pairs, the boys will encounter a host of primordial monsters—and triumph over them.
Sigmone, who is bussed to a white school, is stuck with Joel, a white kid who idolizes Black culture. Mark, who's wrestling with his sexuality, joins his secret crush, Ryan. Nishu and Al are outsiders; one is a second-generation immigrant, the other a poor kid in a rich school. Over the course of one eventful evening, the three pairs will encounter the wild things of Hampton Heights—werewolves, witches with a centuries-old story to tell, and a creepy, ancient monster who feeds on memories. Meanwhile, Kevin is having an adventure of his own, seducing a beautiful woman in the neighborhood’s tavern . . . but who is actually in control?
Funny, thrilling, outrageous, and sneakily beautiful, Dan Kois’s Hampton Heights captures without sentimentality the dreams and fears of teenage boys in a tender horror-comedy about camaraderie, bravery, vulnerability, and the terrifying prospect of growing up.
Coming of Age | Horror [Harper Perennial, On Sale: September 17, 2024, Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9780063358751 / eISBN: 9780063358768]
Dan Kois is an editor and writer at Slate and a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. He's a founding host of Slate's parenting podcast Mom and Dad Are Fighting and is a frequent guest on Slate's Culture Gabfest. He lives in Arlington, Virginia a lot of the time.
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