One Crazy Night: A Guest Post by Dan Kois
The author of Vintage Contemporaries returns with a haunting novel of one wild night in the suburbs. Centered around middle school boys in the 1980s, the Midwest has never been creepier. Discover Dan’s inspiration for Hampton Heights in his exclusive guest post, down below.
Paperback $16.99
Hampton Heights: One Harrowing Night in the Most Haunted Neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Hampton Heights: One Harrowing Night in the Most Haunted Neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
By Dan Kois
In Stock Online
Paperback $16.99
Anyone who grew up in the 80s knew one thing to be certain: get home before dark. P.S., Paul Tremblay (Horror Movie) loves this one just as much as we do.
Anyone who grew up in the 80s knew one thing to be certain: get home before dark. P.S., Paul Tremblay (Horror Movie) loves this one just as much as we do.
My first novel, Vintage Contemporaries, was a friendship story set in a New York City that was resolutely realistic. I did a lot of research into the city in the ‘90s and ‘00s and strove to create a city and a story that would feel as real as possible. The book was about two young women, it was set over several decades, and it took me like seven years to write. For my second, I wanted to write something completely different—in themes, in spirit and subject matter, yes, but most particularly in the amount of time it took me to write it. I was almost 50! If it took seven years to write every novel, how many novels did I even have in me?! I resolved to write something short, fast-moving, funny, and limited in scope—a story that would take place over the course of One Crazy Night.
As a tween, my first job was as a paperboy, delivering the Milwaukee Sentinel to houses in my suburban neighborhood. Once or twice a year, our stupid manager Kevin would pile a bunch of paper carriers into his van, drive us to some random-ass block in Milwaukee, and set us loose to sell subscriptions. That was a really signal event of my childhood, my first foray into neighborhoods in the city that were not my comfortable, quiet suburb—my first glimpses of other people’s houses and the lives within them. I remember feeling curious about everyone I met, certain that each house held secrets and stories, if only I could find out what they were. I sort of think of these shady canvassing journeys as my first whiff of what I might like about both fiction-writing and reporting.
It seemed fun to me to, decades later, write a wild adventure set on one of those canvassing trips. My protagonists would be boys, not women; kids, not adults; residents of the middle of the country, not New Yorkers or even New York aspirants. The novel would cover a single night, and it would definitely not take me seven years to write.
It was important to me to convey, in telling this night, how wild and unfamiliar and dangerous it felt. (Not bad dangerous, exciting dangerous, though maybe my parents might have thought it was bad dangerous had they really known how junky Kevin’s van was.) After a few weeks writing about these kids out in that night, I felt I still wasn’t getting across how much these nights felt like journeys into terra incognita. Then I realized: I don’t have to be married to realism. If it feels to them like they might encounter a monster, why don’t I have my characters encounter monsters—a werewolf, a witch, a hag? When I started thinking about making a bunch of 12-year-olds face a dang hodag—the elemental monster of the Wisconsin Northwoods—I started cackling, right at my desk. That’s when I knew this book would be really fun.