Welcome to the kind-of sort-of new Sara Gran newsletter! If you experience any issues with the new format such as spam, ghosts, demons, poisons, etc., let me know, and I probably won’t be able to fix it, but perhaps you and I can commiserate, together.
Much like this old newsletter is now born again, fresh and revived, so also is COME CLOSER, the topic of this newsletter, coming out TODAY in the UK from Faber & Faber & Faber (& Faber) (& also Faber) (who are these Fabers? why are they so plentiful? how have I never questioned this before? are any actual Fabers involved in the making of my books? so many mysteries!). Faber is maybe my favorite publisher out of the dozens I’ve worked with. In a publishing landscape of people who are often just utterly full of shit, it is always a refreshing treat to deal with my honest, hard-working, truly nice and actually very cool team at Faber. It’s like I imagine publishing was in the 70s—working with cool bright people who actually read books! And they don’t act like I’m a fucking weirdo because I don’t live in Brooklyn and rarely go to book parties where everyone hates each other and tries to sleep with each other’s spouses! The Faber people either genuinely like me or do a really good job of faking it, which is all I ask. No one’s real feelings need come to the fore here.
COME CLOSER & my other new project, MARIGOLD, have a bit in common—they’re both horror, they’ve both been rewardingly well-received by readers (thanks, readers—that’s you!), and they were both books no wanted to publish. I was told, in both cases, that there just isn’t an audience for this kind of thing. I really love telling these stories of rejection and failure because it’s always gratifying to be right, of course (VERY RIGHT), but more so because I know so many of you go through similar shit.
Horror is a difficult genre to work in creatively, and difficult career-wise. The biggest creative challenge is creating fresh, original, imagery that can actually scare—not just a jump scare that will startle you in the moment, but something that will keep you up that night (and the next, and the next). The challenge is the same as with all writing: digging really deep and finding the idiosyncratic, weird, potentially-embarrassing, potentially-vulnerable stuff that good books are made of. If you feel a feeling a bit like you’ve just peed on yourself in public in front of someone you like (someone you like like), you’re on the right track. And if you can’t stand that feeling, well, learn to stand it, a little bit at a time. This is your ore to mine, and all that frightening stuff inside is where your greatest gifts as a writer are buried.
The biggest challenge career-wise is that most people who work in publishing (and film and tv) don’t actually like to feel frightened and uncomfortable. They’re not gross creepy freaks, like me, who have an urge to express their ugly parts and find kinship with others there. And that’s fine, of course, but these people sometimes stand in between us and our audience, so that’s less fine. The other big challenge is that in the publishing world (not, thankfully, in H’wood) everyone is perpetually convinced that there just isn’t a market for horror. A big chunk of the highest selling authors ever write horror, so I don’t get what this is all about, but it’s real, and foolish.
Of course, there are also many joys of working in this area. One of them is that when something hits, it really hits people in a deep place, and lasts, and this seems to be the case with Come Closer. This book will not fucking die. It was just about twenty years ago that I started writing it. In summary of the past twenty years, I will just say, I always wanted an adventurous life, and I got one. Come Closer is, at least in part, is what happens when we turn away from exploration and experimentation and adventure—when we try to confine our lives to other’s expectations for us. The parts of ourself that we ignore tend to fester and rot, and rot invites forces we may not want around, and be unable to end our association with when they no longer serve us.
Another wonderful thing about working in this field is the intelligent, dedicated, outspoken fan base. I just love you guys so much, and I appreciate the fuck out of you every day. Life is often dark and it’s a great source of light to know that I have a whole world of people who care about what I do.
So this is all just say a tremendous THANK YOU to all of you for reading, and to Faber for publishing—and here’s a silly little video I made for a sales conference (or human sacrifice? exorcism? book party? something like that) that you may enjoy.