Horror allows us to know the bitter so that we can appreciate the sweet, which is a huge part of Mormon theology and Christian theology in general. If you only read half of the New Testament it’s a story about killing Jesus, and I can’t think of anything more horrific than that the “good” part, the redemptive part, the uplifting, inspirational part, comes at the end, after you’ve been through the horror and watched terrible things and come out the other side wiser and stronger and better. The thing about horror, or any story in any genre, is that you can’t focus on just one part of it. How do you reconcile horror with the gospel? Image courtesy Dan Wells For some, horror seems to be a genre far from the spirit of the thirteenth Article of Faith. I’m no William Gibson by any means, but it’s something I think about and try to keep improving. The more important influence, though, is my love of language and words for their own sake: to not just tell a story, but to craft the words in such a way that the telling is beautiful even outside of the story. My first four novels all have poetry quotes as epigrams, and the first three specifically namecheck famous poems in the text, so there’s that.

Has that had any influence on your novels? In the bio on your site, you mention your strong love of poetry. So it took a long time, but it was totally worth it. I started buckling down and treating it like a professional job, and eight years later sold my first book. It wasn’t until college, though, that I took a writing class from Dave Wolverton and realized for the first time that writing could be an actual career in which one could actually make money. I wrote all through school, trying everything from short stories to novels to poetry to comicbooks I built puppets and wrote elaborate mythologies for them I wrote songs and scripts and experimented with every weird narrative device I could think of. I told my parents in second grade that I was going to be a writer, because they’d raised me to be a reader and I couldn’t think of anything more awesome than making up stories. Website Photo courtesy Micah Demoux How did you get into writing in the first place?

He plays a lot of games, reads a lot of books, and eats a lot of food, which is pretty much the ideal life he imagined for himself as a child. He is a co-host on the podcast Writing Excuses, for which he has won a Hugo award and two Parsecs.

Dan Wells is the author of the Partials sequence, the John Cleaver series, and several other novels and shorter works published all around the world.

Books by dan wells