Daniel Kraus is the author of The Teddies Saga, The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, and Bent Heavens. He is also the co-author of The Shape of Water, The Living Dead, and Trollhunters. His new book, The Ghost That Ate Us, comes out on July 12 from Raw Dog Screaming Press. We were fortunate to get the chance to talk with him about his new book, his work on the Creepshow television series, and much more. Read on for our full interview – or give it a listen in the player below.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
GVN: Can you talk just a little bit about yourself and also about your book, The Ghost That Ate Us, for anyone who’s maybe not as familiar with you?
Daniel Kraus: Sure. I mean, I’ve written, let’s see, this is probably my 10th… Maybe something like 14th book, around there. And I publish for all ages, really. I’ve got middle grade, young adult, and then adult. So, I kind of mix it up. And I mix up genres too. Although most of them, probably three-fourths of them are at least horror adjacent. Regardless of what the number one genre I’m writing in, there’s always an influence of horror in there. So, it has really, kind of within those parameters, really swung a pretty wide gamut from fantasy-tinged to historical fiction, illustrated graphic novels, made a lot of comics now, at least one hard case crime book. So, that’s sort of another genre there too, as well.
And as you said, I’ve done a number of collaborations. Two books with Guillermo del Toro, one book with George Romero. And then I’ve got two upcoming projects that are coming out later this year. And one’s a sort of Michael Crichton kind of science-based thriller called Wrath. That’s written with a brilliant geneticist named Sharon Moalem. And then a middle-grade series called The Graveyard Girls. That’s written with Lisi Harrison. So yeah, I’ve got a lot going on. But The Ghost That Ate Us, which is subtitled, The Tragic True Story of the Burger City Poltergeist, is one of my all-time favorite things I’ve done. So, I’m real glad to talk about it. It’s up there in my top two or three favorite things.
GVN: So, on that note, what would the pitch for the book be for someone who is maybe thinking about getting it, but is sort of on the fence?
Daniel Kraus: Well, it’s presented like a non-fiction book. It’s presented like a true crime book. And a, sort of, section of true crime that exists is the paranormal true crime. The godfather of that sub-genre is probably Amityville Horror. But there’s a lot of stuff. I can’t remember their names, the movies that The Conjuring are based…
GVN: The Warrens.
Daniel Kraus: Yeah, the Warrens. They wrote a bunch of books that were all in this kind of style. And so, what I wanted to do, particularly now that true crime is such a major genre of people’s reading and watching, is I wanted to create a book that felt a hundred percent realistic and used all the sort of tropes of true crime. Right down to the footnotes, and the photos, and captions and, you know, interviews, and try to make it… Most readers that I’ve talked to did spend a bit of time at the beginning of the book, Googling things to see if this was part of something that actually happened. But no, it’s, it’s all made up.
It’s sort of, the book version of a mockumentary. And it is about… Ostensibly it’s funny sounding. It’s about a poltergeist in a fast-food restaurant. And kind of where I came up with that is poltergeists are generally associated with families. And that’s not just in movies like Poltergeist, but the sort of alleged pattern of such hauntings are that they tend to follow a family – or, specifically, a member of the family.
And my kind of thinking was that jobs, really, are where we have a kind of secondary family. I think particularly when you’re younger and you’re working at a restaurant or something like that, you really bond – in good ways and bad ways – with your coworkers. You become a sort of different dysfunctional family. And I think most people realize when they’re working, that they actually spend more time with your coworkers than you do your family. It’s kind of inevitable. So, I wanted to move a poltergeist to that sort of family. And it struck me as kind of funny on the outset to set it at essentially an off-brand McDonald’s type place called Burger City, just off some random exit on the interstate 80 in Iowa.
But I always feel like the best kind of horror sort of straddles that line where it’s almost funny, and almost absurd. And it can kind of break either way. And then when it does break into full horror, it’s almost more upsetting. And I think actually, now that we mentioned the movie Poltergeist, that’s a great example because the family in that movie, like there’s… The first part of that movie is really kind of fun. Like, the music is fun, the family’s funny. Even when the poltergeist occurs, they’re having fun with it. And it makes what happens later all the more troubling. And that’s kind of the effect I was going for with the book.
GVN: Honestly, I think you nailed it. And it’s really funny that some of what you just said is stuff that I kind of talked about a little bit in my review of the book that I did. I was writing it earlier this week. And I picked up on a lot of the way that you were really straddling that line between terror and absurdism. And almost like you were, not necessarily parodying the genre, but kind of critiquing and satirizing it. You know what I mean?
Daniel Kraus: Definitely. It was, yeah.
GVN: I think it comes across really well… That intention comes across really clearly.
Daniel Kraus: Good. Good. Yeah. I think, I think we’re in a strange period here with true crime, where there’s so much of it being dished at us that… It’s on the border of being a little disturbing to me. I think some of it really has worth and is good for us in a lot of ways. But there’s so much of it now that inevitably… Some of it is just looking at the car wreck of someone’s life, and doesn’t really mean anything. And that’s kind of what this book is reflecting. Like, the book starts out kind of talking about real problems, you know, like the waves of meth problems in the Midwest, and fentanyl addiction, and things like that, and poverty, which are actual issues. And then there’s sort of a razzmatazz of, “Oh, let’s all get distracted by this poltergeist.” Which is kind of what happens with true crime books. Like, there’s a lot of crime that really is worth staring at. And maybe what is not worth staring at isn’t always this one peculiar murderer. That’s just kind of gross in a way and doesn’t really add anything to any kind of discourse.
So yeah, I do have some critiques. But it’s also self-critique, you know, like I have watched some of these and listened to some of these podcasts. And that’s one of the reasons I cast myself as the reporter in this book. If I’m going to sort of attack someone, I want to attack me first because, if there’s a problem, I’m part of it.
GVN: I have a few thoughts. The first of them being that one of the things that I found almost most arresting about the book was that you are the narrator and you’re part of the story at times. And it blends that line between reality and fiction in such an… almost a disturbing way, especially as… I don’t want to get into spoilers, but especially as the story progresses, and you kind of get more involved in the story that you’re telling.
Daniel Kraus: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t see how… That just led from me trying to be realistic. I grew up in a town like this in Iowa. I sort of know what these people are like. There’s no way that you couldn’t, as a reporter, intrude into their lives and not become part of it. Like, your presence would be such a big deal that I don’t think you can ignore it.
GVN: 100%. And then the other thing that I think is really interesting about the approach that you take in the book is that, like you were saying, in many ways, it is so much about these bigger societal issues. And a thing that I feel that a lot of true crime and even true crime, you know, paranormal books do is that they focus so intently on the crime and not on the people who were affected by it. But your book focuses almost… It flips that on its head to some degree in that, you know, you spend so much time exploring the way that this traumatic event changed the lives of everybody who survived it. And that, for me, was such a more engrossing experience, where I felt that the way that these people were so fundamentally altered by this was almost scarier than the idea of a poltergeist in a burger joint.
Daniel Kraus: Yeah. It should be. I mean, that was the idea of jumping back and forth between times. For the listeners, I kind of go between the year during which the poltergeist was active and then present-day, which is 2020 in this case, where I’m interviewing the people now, and they’re all drastically changed. And part of the decision of that… Part of it is just drama, you know? Like if you, if you see how different these people are now, it kind of adds immediate stakes. You want to know what happened that was so terrible that changed these people so dramatically, and now, they’re all sort of ruins of people. But yeah, the other part of it is just exactly that. Like, I want to sort of give airtime to the people now who feel not only traumatized by these events, but discarded, you know? Like for a while there, they were good for social media, and TV shows, and jokes, and memes. For a while there, they were treated as if they had some value. But as soon as the joke sort of ran its course, they were just left kind of to rot in Iowa. And, you know, that’s a sort of a comment on celebrity culture. Once the joke has run its course, well, that’s it. You’re left behind just to the life you had, but worse.
GVN: The focus on the way that these events change people, and they get left behind, and all of that… I’ve found in reading several of your books, that you seem almost drawn to the way that terrible, horrible things can really mess a person up. Like I’m thinking specifically of, like, Bent Heavens and The Autumnal, which both stories to me feel almost fundamentally about the main characters’ either past trauma or current trauma. And so, I’m kind of curious, for you, is there something about the horror genre that feels like a really big conduit to tell those kinds of stories? Or is that just the kind of story that you are drawn to tell?
Daniel Kraus: Well, that’s interesting. I’m kind of looking at my bookshelves now and I think, I think largely that isn’t the case for most of my books. But I think you’re right. I think for this one, and Autumnal, Bent Heavens, and probably Scowler, they are about that. Like someone kind of working through something, I guess you could say traumatic in most cases, and trying to put the pieces back together. I mean, I think horror is a good place to do that, but I think it’s a pretty universal theme. I think you could probably find that theme in everything. You could probably see it in romance, you could probably see it in, like, a noir type of detective who’s kind of had a broken career in life and is trying to put it back together. I think it’s essential. One of the kind of quintessential places to start a character is sort of post-trauma. And The Ghost That Ate Us sort of has its cake and eats it too by presenting both sides. You see them, you know, these sort of bitter shells of people now. But then you flip back to a few years ago, when they were working at Burger City, and they’re all kind of, at least at the beginning, kind of happy and excited about this Poltergeist that’s bringing them all this attention.
GVN: And then, as the book progresses, that maybe isn’t the case anymore.
Daniel Kraus: Yeah. I mean, the sort of concept is, as is the case in most of these kinds of books, these paranormal true crime books, is you don’t ever really know if there’s a ghost or not. Or if there is a poltergeist or not. Like, almost everything bad that happens is really just interpersonal dynamics and, sort of, the exploding of everyone’s interpersonal issues with other people they work with. Which everyone who has relationships with coworkers has these issues. But in this case, the poltergeist – or the appearance of a poltergeist – just acts as the catalyst. And everyone’s relationships kind of explode. So, there’s a reading of this book where there isn’t a poltergeist and it’s just, you know, some sort of flukish event and it makes everyone explode.
GVN: I’m not going to lie, that was honestly, as much as I personally love paranormal stories, that was really the vibe that I had for the vast majority of the book was that it was just this terrible thing that happened that wasn’t at all paranormal. Which I thought was just a really fascinating way of reading that. Because fictional Daniel Kraus was certainly taking the stance – or, at least, it felt like he was taking the stance – that it was all made up, and it was like an excuse to shift blame from those who maybe should be blamed. Which I just think is such a fascinating way of combining those two genres together. Because normally you’ve got something like the Warrens, where they’re very much trying to prove that this event was a haunting, right? Or you’ve got something on the other side of the spectrum that is very firmly just, “We’re going to tell you all the nitty gross details about this murder and it’s just going to be a whole thing.” And The Ghost That Ate Us kind of lives in the middle of that.
Daniel Kraus: Yeah. And I mean, I think that’s accurate. It’s trying to do a lot of things, I suppose. But yeah, those were all the appeal factors for me, definitely.
GVN: And kind of on that note, given all the research you had to do and the viewpoint that the book takes, do you personally have any belief in the paranormal?
Daniel Kraus: No. I don’t, really. I’m kinda one of those people who would love to believe in it. Like, I think it would be… I would love to have an experience that changed my mind. I’m highly open to that. But no, I don’t really believe it. It would take an experience for me to believe it. I think in all likely circumstance, these events you hear about are most likely like the events in The Ghost That Ate Us, where there is something that’s unexplained. And just because it’s unexplained doesn’t mean it’s the supernatural. And then, the people around it… It sort of galvanizes the people around it to either undergo a kind of hysteria or to fabricate something. And history is filled with examples of both of those. I think it’s much more likely in, in every case, that that’s what’s happening.
GVN: That’s super fair. I think I tend to kind of think along those same lines, in that it’s a fun thing to think about, but it’s also highly unlikely.
Daniel Kraus: Yeah.
GVN: Keeping on the same kind of thought line of your research, I’m sort of curious, what kinds of, you know, true crime documentaries, or paranormal books, or whatever did you delve into for this?
Daniel Kraus: Oh, that’s a good question. I don’t really recall too many specifics. I’m someone who’s not obsessed with true crime, but certainly partakes in enough of it. Like, I’ve seen my share of documentaries and documentary series. I remember a few, like Making a Murderer on Netflix was one I recall. But I’ve seen a bunch. Like the podcast, My Favorite Murder, which is a great podcast.
But then I dipped into other podcasts that are similar. And eventually sort of turned away from them because they felt more ghoulish in a way. Like, it felt like there’s some true crime podcasts out there that are really… “We’re just going to recycle all the terrible things that happened.” And they’re sort of feel-bad podcasts for reasons that I can’t quite figure out. And I’m not, you know, I’m not really against any kind of the stuff. I have no problem with it existing. But it’s not for me. People could look at anything… They could look at my books and say, “why would someone want to read all this grim material?” So, I’m sure there are things that the right person can draw from it. But for me, for this person, there’s a lot of it that feels empty and salacious to me without having anything to say about it.
GVN: I think that is certainly communicated in the book as well, that that’s kind of the viewpoint that you have about a lot of this.
Daniel Kraus: Yes, that’s true.
GVN: Correct me if I’m wrong. I haven’t read your entire bibliography. I started really kind of religiously reading your books around the time The Shape of Water came out.
Daniel Kraus: Okay. Gotcha.
GVN: I think this is the first one that you’ve done that isn’t in a more traditional prose style.
Daniel Kraus: Yeah.
GVN: So, what was the experience like approaching that kind of a different writing style for you?
Daniel Kraus: It’s a good question. And there’s kind of a number of facets to the answer. One thing is definitely just for my own involvement and engagement in a book, I like to change it up. So, from book to book, at the very least, if it’s applicable in a way that makes sense, I like to at least change up the point of view or if it’s present tense or past tense. I definitely never try to write in the same style. I always try to tweak the style a little bit. I think The Ghost That Ate Us and my book, Blood Sugar, are probably the only ones written in a totally different style that feels radically different than a normal novel on the page.
And so yeah, part of that is to keep myself interested and wanting to create new problems for myself. Like, that’s really what it’s all about for me in the writing. Especially once you get up into the double digits of books. I want to create complications for myself, so that I can’t rest on my laurels, get up to my old tricks again. I want to come up with new tricks. And I had a hunch the nonfiction style would come natural to me. Like, it felt like something that would be fun to do. I read a lot of nonfiction. So, it felt like it felt like it would be fun to write captions, footnotes and write with this sort of somewhat neutral style of a reporter. Like, usually, when you write a novel, you want it to be colored pretty heavily with some sort of drastic point of view. Usually, I write in, if not first person, then a close third person. But this, it really pulls back, and it feels like a reporter where you’re still trying to write artfully, but you’re trying to present facts.
So, how I did that was I did a lot of work upfront before I started writing. I plotted out the entire book, and all of the events. I didn’t plot out the book as much as I plotted out the timeline. So, I wanted to know every paranormal event that happened. I wanted to know who was there to witness it. I had to figure out the shift schedules, which people at the restaurant were working which days and which shifts. And so, I had all the facts before me because when you write a nonfiction book, you’re going to have all the facts. And so then, the writing of the book was really just reporting on the facts that I had created. So, I would just sift through the fake facts that I had created. And also, I had, sort of, a map of everyone’s relationship with everyone else and their sort of buried frustrations and rivalries. And that kind of freed me up to just act as a nonfiction writer and just, sort of, take you through the story beat by beat and present it to the reader to sort of make their own judgements on.
GVN: Do you normally plot your books out to that extent, or is this kind of something special you had to do for this one?
Daniel Kraus: I do plot my books out extensively, usually. This was different in that I was less plotting out the book than I was creating a series of events that I could then report upon. But yeah, I generally do outlines. And some of them are of moderate length, and then some of them are massive. You know, for like my really long projects, like The Living Dead or Zebulon Finch, I think for Zebulon Finch, my outline was… The outline itself was over a hundred pages. And these are, you know…
GVN: These are good-sized books too.
Daniel Kraus: Yeah. Oh, they’re huge. And they’re complicated, and I don’t want to spend… I’d rather spend a few months preparing the outline and not end up spending, you know, months of writing, going down a dead end, and not realizing. So, I try to do that work up front.
GVN: That makes sense. And on the same kind of train of thought, how do you approach some of the collaborations that you do? Like with Guillermo Del Toro or The Living Dead, which I know was written after George Romero died. But is it a different process for you when you’re working with another author?
Daniel Kraus: Oh yeah. It’s majorly different. And every person you collaborate with, the process is gonna be extremely different from everyone else. And that’s, again, that’s going back to the idea of creating problems for myself. In a sense, collaborating is a kind of problem. Like, you now have a secondary input that you didn’t have before. Someone who’s going to suggest things you wouldn’t have suggested and come up with approaches that you wouldn’t have thought of. And you’re not even always going to agree with them. And it offers you something to bump up against, but hopefully in an interesting way that will push you to do things in a new kind of way.
So yeah, it’s very different. You know, writers generally work in isolation. So, when you put them together, you always find two people who don’t work the same. There’s no standardized way that people do this. So, it’s always a little bit rocky. But in a good way. I look forward to that rockiness.
GVN: It sounds like it would be the thing that would make the whole experience fun.
Daniel Kraus: Yeah. Oh yeah. It’s another way to shake things up. And, for me, that is fun. And that’s not the case for everyone, I think. Like, somebody who’s on book 28 of a series, they’re after something different. They’re after, I think, in a way, the comfort of familiar environments. But for me, I don’t want… And probably to my commercial deficit, I don’t want any book to feel like a previous book. So, I’m doing everything I can to shake up the format, and the genre, and the language, and the working style, the way I approach just the everyday writing. I want all of that to be constantly messed up so that I have to readjust. I think it’s the only way you can stay vital, is to make yourself have to think in new patterns and new ways.
GVN: I think as a reader, it’s also what makes a lot of your books really interesting. I mean, just in the past few years, you’ve had a middle-grade series about Teddy bears. You’ve had this, you know, dark comic book about a town with an interesting past. You’ve had a zombie book. You’ve had this one, there’s such a variety. So, as a reader, it’s also just really fun to pick up one of your books because you never really know what you’re going to get.
Daniel Kraus: Yeah. And it’s the same for me. That makes it fun for me. As I said, I don’t know that that’s the smartest way to approach it commercially. Like generally, the sort of cliche is, you know…
GVN: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Daniel Kraus: Yeah, or create a brand and stick to it. But I just couldn’t possibly do that. I can’t imagine… Like, there’s a lot of, you know… Like for example, in the horror genre, you’ll see some writers and it feels like they’re just kind of ticking off lists. They’ll be like, “all right, well, I’m gonna do my werewolf book, and I’m gonna do my vampire book.” And I don’t want to fall back into that sort of comfortable series of events like that. I don’t want to feel like I’m clicking off a checklist. I want to do things that are surprising to me. Like, I don’t think anyone expected me to write a trilogy of books about Teddy bears. Nor did I. And that’s what I’m kind of seeking out. Or Blood Sugar, which is, you know, it’s something that has no resemblance to anything else I’ve done. That’s the whole reason I’m doing this. I would just be a failure if I had to write things that felt solidly like a Daniel Kraus novel every time. So, I’m hoping my brand can sort of be an un-brand, but we’ll see how that goes.
GVN: Shifting from novels a little bit. Some of our readers might be most familiar with your work with the Creepshow series.
Daniel Kraus: Oh yeah. Sure.
GVN: And I’m curious, how did you get involved with that, and what was it like writing the two stories that you wrote so far – which are Pipe Scream and The Things in Oakwood’s Past?
Daniel Kraus: One of the producers on the show reached out to me. I guess he was just sort of a fan of my work. And it was very exciting for me because, you know, George Romero was my hero. And which is why when I wrote The Living Dead with him, posthumously, it was such an important thing for me. So, after Night of the Living Dead, my favorite Romero movie is Creepshow. Those two movies were just the two movies for me, growing up. So, a chance to work in the Creepshow world was just unbelievably exciting for me.
And then, the process was really simple, you know? I pitched some ideas. They said, “Hey, what ideas do you have?” And I’m so devoted to Creepshow and also the EC Comics of the fifties. I just have all of them and just love them. So, my brain is pretty trained on the kind of Creepshow format, the classic format. Which I think you can really see in Pipe Screams, my first script, which, without commenting on the quality of it because I’m too close to it, I think is, almost out of all of the episodes of Creepshow so far, but almost fit the most neatly into the original movie. Like it really has that sort of classic “the chickens coming home to roost” kind of feel to it.
So yeah, the process was straightforward. I pitched some ideas, they liked one of them. I talked to Greg Nicotero on the phone a few times, and kind of worked through some of the plot ideas, and then wrote it. Did some small edits. And that was pretty much the process on both of them. The second one was a little different because it was going to be an illustrated, or an animated episode, which freed us to do things that are typically beyond the Creepshow series’ budget. It’s a small budget, so you always have to be kind of aware of how many characters you have, how many settings you have. So, that idea that I had pitched earlier fit better for the animated one because we didn’t have any boundaries.
GVN: That makes sense. Having seen the second one, I definitely see the benefit of doing it in animation, and how that can free up the ability to explore avenues that maybe wouldn’t be possible doing it live-action.
Daniel Kraus: Yeah, and I think it makes sense. I’m almost surprised that there hasn’t been more of them. Like, it’s a comic book, so it makes sense that it would be animated. I still can’t believe there hasn’t been a straight-up Creepshow comic, you know? The whole premise of the original movies were that it was a comic book. So, I think, you know, the rights issues are always thorny. So, I’m assuming that’s part of the reason we’ve never seen just issues of Creepshow come out.
GVN: Well, my final question for you is perhaps deceptively simple. And that is if you could describe The Ghost That Ate Us in one word, what would it be?
Daniel Kraus: I mean, the word that pops to mind is “tricky.”
GVN: I can see that.
Daniel Kraus: Yeah, I think it’s one of those books that makes a lot of gestures and feints in different directions that makes you think it’s sort of about something, but it’s about something else. You know, the whole book is constructed as a sort of trick. Even the format of it is a bit of a trick. So yeah, there’s a lot of little traps sort of hidden within it. And misdirection is a big part of it.