Category Archives: Interview

The 4th Circle: Interview with Josh Schlossberg

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Interview by Desi D

  1. Name one author you admire and explain how they helped you become a better writer.

I know I should probably say someone like Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, or Shirley Jackson, but the author who influenced my writing the most is definitely John Steinbeck. (What’s funny is it’s recently been revealed that Steinbeck wrote a werewolf novel that’s never been published, and people are calling on his estate to release it!)

Steinbeck’s writing comes across as so simple it’s almost like spoken word, but it’s deceptive in that it’s no easy feat. And not only are his stories deeply meaningful, they’re timeless—as is his prose style which avoids the flowery, clunky sentence structure that dates so many “classic” authors. If a literate alien picked up Steinbeck’s work today, I bet it wouldn’t be able to tell if it had just been written or published centuries ago.

Of course, I’m not saying I’ve achieved close to any of this in my writing. But I think he’s been rubbing off on me and I hope I’m making some progress.

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The 4th Circle: Interview with John WM Thompson

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-Interview by Desi D

1. What’s your favorite line in a book/movie? And why?

No singular favorite, but there are a few lines that drift through my mind unbidden every few weeks at most, and one of them is from Flannery O’Connor’s WISE BLOOD:
“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.”

In a vacuum, I think it’s a perfect description of a character at the precipice of a well-told story, but in context, it’s how O’Connor cuts to the heart of certain spiritual desperation, despair, displacement. I’m captivated by stories of spiritually alienated and confused people and the way that confusion manifests as a kind of vague menace. You never know what a person who doesn’t know themselves will do.

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The 4th Circle: Interview with Ian Neligh

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-Interview by Desi D

  1. What’s your favorite line in a book/movie? And why?

This is a hard one to pick—Frank Herbert’s DUNE has so many—but if pressed I’d say probably, “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed,” from the first book in Stephen King’s THE DARK TOWER series. As a reader it is almost impossible to read that line and not be instantly hooked into his dark and wonderfully bizarre fairytale. The line is intriguing, simple, and basically the plot of the novel boiled down into twelve words. The first sentence of a novel is important, and few know that as well as Stephen King.

  1. As a writer, how would you describe your fascination with history, specifically the Old West? And how does this inspire your story ideas?

For me, history is an endless source of writing inspiration. I suppose if I was living somewhere other than the American West, I’d find insight from other historic sources, but as it stands, the Old West is a perfect subject!

I love reading and writing about history but I’m also passionate about horror writing and the Old West was essentially a time of survival horror in the truest sense. It was a time where everyone and everything could kill you. And it really wasn’t that long ago; I recently interviewed someone who was the great-grandson of legendary frontiersman Kit Carson.

The Old West, after the Civil War, became this country’s shared mythology to help heal its division. That shared mythology (for better or worse) runs through a lot of our country’s psychology, which from a storytelling perspective is extremely insightful.

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