man stumbles home after a night of hard drinking, only to find his walls and floor slick with blood. His wife and
young daughter have been butchered; in an act of heinous psychological torture, the killer will later have the little girl’s face delivered to her grieving father who, by then, is out for blood himself. Welcome to the brutal world of John Connolly.
The Dubliner is best known for his Charlie Parker novels, about a Maine-
based private detective who is haunted, figuratively and literally, by the rest- less ghosts of his murdered wife and child. The best-selling series, which began with the Bram Stoker Award-nominated Every Dead Thing in 1999, isn’t Connolly’s only foray into the realm of horror, though; his collection of ghost stories, Nocturnes, included “The New Daughter,” which was adapted into the criminally underappreciated 2009 film of the same name (RM#102), and his short fiction has been included in anthologies such as Haunted: Dark Delicacies III (Running Press, 2009) and The New Dead (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2010). The eleventh Parker novel, The Wrath of Angels, finds the troubled detective
searching for a strange artifact from a plane that crashed in the Maine woods years ago: a list of men and women who have literally made a deal with the Devil. Parker fears his own name might be on the list, but others are drawn to it as well, including a serial killer who harvests the souls of his victims. With The Wrath of Angels out in North American on January 1. Connolly helps us navigate the no man’s land that lies between mystery and horror.
Horror fans are happy to embrace the conventions of crime and mystery fiction, but that dynamic often doesn’t work both ways. Why is that? Mystery is based on a certain scientific rationalism. [Readers] come at it with this belief that, by the application of logic and reason, the universe can be understood. … Supernatural fiction is the opposite of that. Human beings – and the world – are a lot stranger than we sometimes realize. The mystery community tends to be slightly more conservative, whereas I think horror can be a little bit more embracing. It’s a bit of a wider church, I think.
Your work is full of references to myth, folk tales and fairy tales. How did those things shape you as a writer? I’ve always had a fascination with European folk tales and their original, much darker versions. There are elements of that in the Parker books: they tend to use forests, they tend to use missing children, they tend to use a lot of [mythic and folkloric] motifs. I like the darkness of them. I never sat down and thought,
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I’m going to start weaving in folk tales and fairy tales. It’s more because those motifs suit the mood of what I’m doing, and the atmosphere.
You’re most often classified as a mystery writer, but all of your short fiction deals with the supernatural... The short form is perfectly suited to the supernatural story. I actually think it’s much harder to write supernatural novels than supernatural short stories, be- cause a short story doesn’t have to explain. It can just give you a glimpse and that’s it – you’re left with the end dangling like the tentacle of a jellyfish in the water. Whereas, if you read a horror novel and you’ve gone through hundreds of pages, quite often the mystery is much more interesting than the solution. That’s often the case with mystery fic- tion as well. Because of writers such as M.R. James, I’ve always loved short, supernatural fiction. I think it’s very po- tent, and I like the fact that I don’t need to explain – that these things just hap- pen.
Parker routinely takes on both human monsters and supernatural ones, usually in the same book. Why is that juxtaposition important? I think most people are not evil. Selfish or greedy, maybe, but they’re not evil. Evil tends to be a consequence of their actions and intent. And so, quite often in the books, these people are pre-
sented in opposition to this kind of deeper evil. Is there a deeper well from which these things crawl? If there is a God, is there a not-God? The books provide an interesting playground for those ideas, so some of the villains tend to be more grotesque than others. But quite often it’s basic human weakness that’s much more interesting to explore.