Interview - Sean Eads

A multi-talented author capable of working in multiple genres and styles, Sean Eads has built a solid reputation on his work in different styles and aspects of the industry over the years, keeping his name in high regard. Now, in honor of the release of his latest novel, "Servants of Stone," from Crystal Lake Publishing, I talk with him about his early interest in writing, collaborating with co-writer Josh Viola, and the book itself.

Me: Hello and thank you for taking the time to do this. First off, when did you get into horror in general? What films specifically got you into watching horror movies?

Sean Eads: It started pretty early, and from my memory, with a distinctive literary bent when an elementary school teacher read us “The Rhime of the Ancient Mariner” and explained how this guy is stuck at sea on a boat with all of these dead shipmates who reanimate and might be possessed by spirits. There’s more to the poem, of course, but I was hooked. I always gravitated to campfire ghost stories, and I discovered Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Graham Masterton when I was 13 (this was in the mid-80s, so I was getting them all fresh). I read King’s Danse Macabre when I was 15, and it was formative not just for my appreciation of the genre, but my overall interest in literary analysis and cultural criticism. Movie-wise, my father let me watch the original Salem’s Lot TV miniseries with him on its original broadcast when I was 5 years old, and I was definitely too young to handle it. In fact, I can still distinctly remember sobbing on the floor because I didn’t know how else to express my fear of being taken by a vampire. I caught The Exorcist when I was 16 or so, and that remains the only horror movie that really bothers me. It touches on so many psychological pressure points, such as medical trauma and fears about being unable to care for aging parents. The demonic horror is almost secondary in my opinion.

Me: Who were some of your favorite writers growing up? Do you try to take influences from their style with your own voice in your work?

SE: Stephen King, without any doubt at all. By the time I was 14, I was writing horror stories and sharing them with an English teacher who also liked King. Ray Bradbury became a big influence in those early years as well, and of course, Bradbury influenced King as well. Hawthorne’s weird fiction remains important to me, and as a teen, I started gravitating toward the Southern Gothic sensibilities of Flannery O’Connor and Faulkner. I’m a product of all of them in one way or another.

Me: What was the starting point of becoming a writer? Were you always into writing growing up?

SE: Yeah, that bug caught me early. Like I mentioned, I was already dedicated to writing stories when I was 14, and I must have started submitting when I was 15. I’ve long since lost the rejection slip, but I remember when I was in 9th grade, I submitted a poem to Twilight Zone Magazine and got a rejection back from Tappan King that said, “Sorry, this feels a little too much like a college writing class piece.” Considering I was in my early teens, I took that as high praise. But it would be a very long time—something like 20 years—before I ever sold anything at all.

Me: Having contributed to several anthologies early in your career, what tools and skills did you acquire working on those that transferred to future projects?

SE: I love themed anthologies for their capacity to trigger unusual ideas I wouldn’t have otherwise thought up. I like the puzzle-like challenge of developing a story to match a theme. “Oh, this anthology wants intelligent sharks battling zombie fishermen for the fate of the ocean…how do you come up with a premise for that?” Of course, if you write that story and it gets rejected, you’re probably not going to find anywhere else to sell it, so there’s always that risk. But that sort of monetary concern never crosses my mind at all. If I like an idea, I’m going to pursue it regardless of its commercial value. The main value of writing for themed anthologies is that it requires you to be strategic in your storytelling, work fast, and be disciplined in your word count. Those factors strengthen your writing no matter what project you’re doing.

Me: What is the general process for getting involved in these projects?

SE: More often than not, it’s just stumbling across an anthology with an intriguing theme and deciding to write a story for it—it’s just a blind shot in the dark, with the same rate of acceptance and rejection as everyone else. I do get submission invitations a little more than I used to, but that’s still pretty rare.

Me: So, that brings us to your new novel, “Servants of Stone.” What can you tell us about the book? How did you settle on the plot for it?

SE: The book is a historical fantasy set in the United States around 1830, focusing on a New England kind of river community. A little girl named Lily is being raised on a small farm and shielded from the world by her very religious mother and her father, a kind but mysterious stonemason. Upriver from their farm is a strange town called New Vineland, a dangerous place that seems to spring up overnight. New Vineland has a tower in the middle of it that apparently emits a siren’s song that draws people to it, and they leave…changed. One day, Lily is allowed to go to New Vineland with her father, who is delivering a tombstone with a girl’s name on it. This sends her into a dark adventure of self-discovery.

Me: Working in collaboration with Josh Viola on the book, how much back-and-forth went into planning the book? Was one of you responsible for one part while the other worked on different aspects?

SE: When Josh and I collaborate, I’m usually the principal writer of the first draft, and then we go back and forth on rewrites. Servants of Stone was a different beast because Josh had already written a full novel—I think he’d completed it before I ever met him, in fact—and one day he asked me to read it. I was taken by its ideas and characters, but thought it had some structural problems and a few underdeveloped areas. So we started talking about how the story might change, and I worked on anchoring the narrative more into the historic context, such as the plot points involving President Jackson.

Me: What was your writing process? How do you stay focused on writing?

SE: It’s a bit different now. For many, many years, I was the dedicated 1,000 or 2,000 words-a-day writer. Then, over time, I’ve become something more of a “burst” writer, where I’ll sit down one day and write 6,000 words, and then not write at all for the next five or six days. I can’t explain that change; maybe it’s just a product of growing older and finding myself more distracted by other interests and pursuits.

Me: Was there any special significance to making the characters become embroiled in a battle against witches?

SE: Josh and I both love witch characters. One of our side projects involves writing a comic book series for Terror in the Corn, Colorado’s largest haunted house attraction, and one of the largest in the country. We’re doing one issue a year, and we just wrapped up the second installment, which explores the nasty backstory of a witch named Dumitra. The witch in Servants of Stone is quite pitiless and unpleasant, but also purposeful, diligent, and faithful to her god. She’s a fun character and a worthy adversary.

Me: Was there any part of your real personality injected into the characters?

SE: Most of the time, I see storytelling as a way to escape my own personality, and I’m more interested in creating characters who I don’t think share much commonality with me. That said, Harold Goodman is obsessed with a novel by Charles Brockden Brown that I myself love, and reflects a shared desire for gothic, weird adventure. And when it comes to Toad, the novel’s sympathetic antihero, there are parts of my own childhood desire for friendship, acceptance, and approval that must have influenced the character.

Me: Once it was finally written, what was the process for having it published?

SE: On our collaborations, Josh tends to take over the finished work. His background is in business and marketing, and he’s a great networker and basically acts as the submissions agent. Josh is a publisher in his own right.

Me: What do you do to keep your creative energy flowing?

SE: I think if the ideas behind the plot and characters are good, then creative energy is a self-regenerating wellspring. But if a storyteller isn’t feeling inspired, the thing to do is to step away and immerse yourself in someone else’s story—a book or short story, a movie, what have you. View them from the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of how the story is operating and use that as a blueprint for your own work.

Me: Lastly, what else are you working on that you'd like to share with our readers? Thank you again for your time!

SE: My next solo novel, Lost Story, should be coming out later this year or in 2026. It’s a literary novel about Ernest Hemingway. Meanwhile, Josh and I are working on a few video game properties, but I can’t remember what the non-disclosure agreements stipulated I can and cannot discuss, so I'd better just leave it at that!