GBBP 98: Joe Hill

The Great Big Beautiful Podcast, Episode 98: Joe Hill

You can listen on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and YouTube; you can follow the RSS feed; or you can listen right here!

Happy Halloween! In case you didn’t know, we regularly release new episodes on Tuesdays (though recently we’ve been doing two a week, with the second on Friday). This week, we’re dropping our episode a day early. Why? Because when you have a guest like Joe Hill, and the stars align to release on Halloween, it’s kind of an obligation to bend the rules a little.

So yeah, today we’re chatting with Joe Hill. If you’re a fan of the funny books, you know him from the phenomenal Locke & Key series from IDW (along with Gabriel Rodriguez’s amazing art). If you’re a fan of the prose books, you know him from a long line of keep-you-awake-at-night novels, such as The Fireman, Heart-Shaped Box, Horns, and NOS4A2.

And pretty soon, if you’re a fan of the boob tube, you’ll know him from there, too. Locke & Key is currently being adapted for a series (with Hill himself writing the scripts). And we were also almost graced with a brand-new incarnation of Tales from the Darkside, the show that scared the bejeezus out of me when I was a kid. Alas, that show was never meant to be, but we instead got a graphic novel out of the deal (again with Rodriguez on art), and Joe’s scripts for the shows he wrote are coming out soon from IDW. So you can act them out and scare your kid if you really want to. (Please someone do this.)

On this episode, in addition to Locke & Key and Tales from the Darkside, we talk about his road to creativity and how much of a choice he really had growing up in the family that he did, perspective and self-doubt, his mountains of unpublished words and ideas, family rivalry, how his experience growing up in a literary family and being the kid of a legend has translated over to his own kids, and playing Scrabble with Stephen King.

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