Michael Patrick Hicks is the author of a number of speculative fiction titles. His debut novel, Convergence, was an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award 2013 Quarter-Finalist.

 

His most recent work is the horror novel, Mass Hysteria.He has written for the Audiobook Reviewer and Graphic Novel Reporter, in addition to working as a freelance journalist and news photographer.

 

In between compulsively buying books and adding titles that he does not have time for to his Netflix queue, he is hard at work on his next story.

 

Anthony Vicino: We sat down for a chat a little over two years ago and there are a couple questions from that interview I’d love to ask again to see how they’ve maybe changed or not changed in the intervening time. Right off the bat, last time I asked what’s your favorite story you’ve written?

Michael Patrick Hicks: I see we’re starting off with a tough one! And it kind of depends, really, on my mood at any given time, but I always kind of flip-flop back and forth between two short stories I’ve written. One of them is Consumption, which is this kind-of Lovecraftian meets Food Network’s Chopped gourmet foodie horror story. That was a blast to write, and I wrote it over a three-day frenzy with an almost feverish need to tell this particular story. It was one of those stories that demanded it be borne, and I had this very physical need to write it.

The second story is a more socially relevant piece, and although it’s a few years old now it feels all the more timely and relevant given America’s current political fuckery. That story is Revolver, and it’s another one that demanded of me to write it, and it’s very personal in terms of its depiction and thoughts on depression, religion and politics, and the media. I wrote it while my wife was pregnant with our first child, after we’d had several miscarriages during the prior years, and at a time when Republican politicians were threatening women’s health care, shutting down clinics, making proposals to jail women who miscarry, and telling us all about how rape was God’s gift to women.

I had some thoughts about all this, and Revolver was my way of exorcising some demons and examining things and trying to speak out against all the shit that was happening in the USA. And then, you know, November 2016 hit and whatever warnings I was yelling about in Revolver were clearly ignored! It’s a story that’s been called classic social science-fiction by some, and libtard hate speech by others, and it kind of straddles that divide between scifi and dystopia and personal horror, and would probably fit in nicely with anti-fascist sci-fi that’s becoming more and more relevant with each passing week. It’s got a lot of different elements, and it’s something I’m really proud of. It seems to spark a lot of emotions, some good and some bad, in anyone who reads it, which for a writer is pretty awesome!

AV: You’ve been steadily chugging along these last few years, having consistently delivered quality stories which is made impressive by the fact that you became a parent not long after our last interview. How was that transition on your writing? Judging by your output, it doesn’t seem to have too negatively affected your productivity!

Michael Patrick Hicks: Yeah, well, we’ll see what happens next! Kiddo #2 is on the way very soon now, so clearly my productivity is at an all-time high! At least for the moment. I don’t know how having two kids is going to impact my writing moving forward, but I suspect it will mostly be business as usual on the writing front (he says, with zero expectation of this remaining true). With our first child, I obviously had to make some pretty big concessions and changes in my schedule, or at least alter when I’m able to write.

It’s certainly not easy to write at home on the weekends or evenings anymore, but I’m usually able to, fairly reliably, carve out some time during my lunch hour at work to write using a Google Docs app on my phone and with a mobile Bluetooth keyboard. Or some days I get to the office early and do a little bit of work before I’m forced to give my time to the company. I suspect I’ll be looking for more time to sneak in some sleep soon, though, so I’m trying to bust my ass and finish up my current work-in-progress.

AV: When you first arrived on the scene it was with your science fiction (Convergence), but over the past it seems you’ve changed course a bit and are now focusing more exclusively on horror. Was this a conscious decision or were those just the stories that were begging to be told?

Michael Patrick Hicks: As a reader, horror has always kind of been my go-to genre. I love reading horror, so it seemed like a natural step to write horror. After I wrote Convergence, I needed a bit of, well, let’s say a palette cleanser, and that’s when Consumption came about. I’ve kind of been weaving in and out of horror in-between sci-fi titles, but over the last few stories I began to realize that horror was really where I wanted to be and what I most naturally gravitated to.

In one of my conversations with Lucas Bale (science fiction author of the Beyond The Wall series and editor of No Way Home), he pointed out that I’ve kind of always been writing horror, even when I was writing sci-fi, and looking at Revolver and The Marque, which I wrote for his Crime & Punishment anthology, I realized he was right. And a lot of the ideas I’ve been developing and spring boarding off of are all horror. At some point along the way I decided to stop trying to be a sci-fi author and just embrace what I was creatively. It kind of just so happens that the stories that have most begged to be told by me were horror. And horror just feels like a more natural fit for me and my interests.

AV: What’s the most notable difference between writing science fiction and horror? Do you prefer one over the other?

Michael Patrick Hicks: I definitely prefer horror, easily, and by a fairly wide margin at this point. I don’t honestly know that I could write a good science fiction story anymore, and I haven’t really had any ideas come up that demanded a sci-fi setting. Even as a reader, nowadays, I’m having a bit more of a difficult time enjoying science fiction and getting pulled into those kinds of stories.

In terms of writing…look, I’m a bit of a gore-hound. I think that’s one of the biggest differences, at least for me, is what exactly I’m allowed to get away with. Some recent reviewers have called Mass Hysteria a sci-fi story because of the virus at the book’s core is brought to Earth by meteors. But, look, it’s a horror story first and foremost. It’s splatterpunk. It’s gory and there’s an awful lot of sick depravity in it, and stuff that I would not associate with the science fiction genre. To me, it’s a horror story and I push the envelope in that one as much as I can, and even more than I’m really comfortable with.

I wrote it two years ago – in fact, I think I was in the middle of writing it the last time we talked – and there’s stuff in there that had I written it now, as a parent, I probably would have done some things very, very differently. Even as the author of it, I have a very visceral reaction to that work, and it’s something I never really experienced with my sci-fi stuff, with maybe the exception of Revolver. But even that story fits pretty well in the horror genre.

AV: Your short fiction has been featured in a bunch of anthologies at this point. It’s always been impressive to me how well you write both short and novel length fiction. Tell us a bit about your process and how you approach these two very different types of story.

Michael Patrick Hicks: I just do what the story tells me to do. Over the last few years, though, I’ve gotten a knack for sensing what stories will be novel length or novella or short stories. If something can be done in 10,000 words, I’m not going to force it to be 80,000 just to have it be a novel. I don’t want a story to become bloated or bogged down in minutiae simply to hit a word count. Also, you know, when you’re invited into anthology like The Future Chronicles series or Clones or something like those, there’s a maximum word count.

Getting paid is always a good incentive to write to spec and do what you’re told! When I’m writing for an editor, I’m very conscious of what they want in terms of word count and how elaborate my ideas can be, and I’m able to carve out a story around what those needs are. When Amazon launched their Kindle Worlds line based off Nicholas Sansbury Smith’s Extinction Cycle series, and Nick invited me to come play in his world, it was to write a 30,000 word novella, and that’s what I did. I didn’t formally outline it, but I had a pretty good idea of what the rough shape of the story was, where certain benchmarks would fall, the beats I wanted to hit around the 5,000 words mark and 10,000 and halfway through.

Sometimes I know those beats going in, sometimes it evolves as I go, but an awful lot of it is just instinctual. As you write more and more, you get a feel for the rhythm of the story, and a feel for your own personal rhythms as a story-teller, and then you just write, write, write, until it’s all done.

AV: Now that you’ve been in the game for a couple years, do you feel your finally gaining traction? Are there any things you know now that you wish you could tell younger you?

Michael Patrick Hicks: I don’t know that I’m gaining much traction, frankly. I know that I have a small core of dedicated readers, which all by itself is pretty damn awesome, and any time a book sells it’s already more than I had honestly expected. So maybe I’m making some headway, but I’m also not delusional about where I stand in terms of audience reach. Still, I’m grateful for the readers I do have and the anthology curators and editors that have found my work strong enough to invite me into their projects.

If there’s anything I could tell younger me, and it’s probably good advice for writers in general, it’s to know who you’re doing business with. There were some opportunities I came into early on that sounded amazing, and if I had known more about some of the individuals involved, some of their associations and business practices, I wouldn’t have given them the time of day.

If you have an editor that starts sending you e-mail blasts demanding you pledge to their Kickstarter or whatever, or that you need to raise money on their behalf to help their business succeed, you need to fucking run for the hills! So, yeah, if I could pass some names along to my younger self on who to avoid, I’d do that immediately. I’d also tell younger me who the good guys are and encourage me to get to know them sooner rather than later!

AV: You’ve experimented recently with Patreon. Tell us about that and what fans can look forward to by supporting you over there.

Michael Patrick Hicks: Patreon is kind of like a creative’s version of Blu-ray extras where uber-fans can pledge their monthly support to their favorite authors. Right now, my Patreon patrons get a “book of the month” for $1 from me, and any new stuff I write they get in advance. Patrons got Mass Hysteria about two months before it released anywhere else, and there’s different levels of rewards and behind-the-scenes stuff at different pledge levels. I’ll be revamping things a bit in 2018 as I begin working on a new full-length novel, so for $1 each month supporters will get to read that book as it’s being written in serialized format, in addition to getting access to all of my previous work. I’ll be releasing more details on all this as we get a bit closer, and I recently did a blog post for current supporters on what they can expect. So keep an eye on my Patreon page! https://www.patreon.com/michaelpatrickhicks

AV: Your newest release, Mass Hysteria, came out a little over a month ago (which, if I’m not mistaken is your first full length horror novel?). Tell us a bit about that story and what spawned it.

Michael Patrick Hicks: Yes, that one is my first full-length horror novel, and I went completely hardcore with this one. It’s grisly, dark, very violent, and carries pretty much all the content warnings. It’s a story where the Natural Order has been completely turned upside down. Meteors carrying an alien virus have hit the Earth and animals are going absolutely deranged, attacking and killing each other and the humans they encounter. And then things get even crazier from there. It’s not for the squeamish.

As for what spawned it, I was in need of doing something a bit different after writing a full-length sci-fi novel. I had just finished writing Emergence, the sequel to Convergence, and was following some of the Philae lander news, listening to NASA budget worries, and seeing news footage of meteors hitting Russia, and that douchebag dentist who killed Cecil the Lion. I was also a big fan of natural horror genre flicks, stuff like THEM! and Arachnophobia and Tremors, and I wanted to do something in that vein, that sort of nature versus mankind stuff. It was kind of a personal challenge to myself to cut loose and see how far I could take things, and Mass Hysteria ended up being the result of all that.

Fatherhood kind of changed my perspective on that book, though, and although I finished it two years ago, it took me a long while to get comfortable with the material and fully own it as mine. Once I began to realize my career was moving into horror, and that I was comfortable enough to embrace my own role as a horror author and making plans to work within this genre indefinitely, I finally got serious about releasing it. And it also seemed like an appropriate horror novel to release under the Trump presidency, when everybody is at each other’s throats and you have no idea who to trust, and people are actually arguing over whether or not it’s good and proper to punch Nazis.

After the election, horror author Brian Keene posted a message on Facebook about how the horror genre has responded to some of our unfortunate political realities and troubles in the past, and predicted that we’d be seeing a resurgence in the horror genre as people turn to our stories in order to escape our world’s real monsters by seeking shelter with some make-believe monsters instead. Clearly things are pretty fucked up and crazy in the real world, so now felt like as good a time as any to unleash Mass Hysteria upon the public and hope that, maybe, some people can find refuge in it.

I don’t mean for this sound like a crass marketing ploy on my end. It’s just that it felt to me there were these confluences of events over the last two years that prompted me to write Mass Hysteria and then to finally release it. I think there were a lot of things simmering under the surface that helped give rise to this book, much like there was with Revolver, and that there was maybe some kind of cultural zeitgeist I was tapping into then. Mostly I just hope it’ll prove to be some good escapist fun for readers looking to be shocked and disgusted!

AV: What’s the future hold for Michael Patrick Hicks. Are there more projects on the horizon?

Michael Patrick Hicks: Depending on how things in my personal life go, I’ll be releasing a novella either late this year or first quarter 2018 called Broken Shells. (This is actually going to be the September book for my Patreon supporters, but I won’t be giving it a wide launch until later.) It’s a subterranean horror story, and quite a bit less hardcore than Mass Hysteria, but still packs a punch.

I’m wrapping up the last novella in a three-part historical horror novella series that should be releasing over the course of 2018. Once I finish writing this final installment, I’ll start writing the novel that I’ll then begin serializing on Patreon.

So, yeah, there’s still a few more scary stories in me and some projects readers can check out! I’m not planning my escape just yet, and I expect to be writing for a good long while here.

AV: What seedy corner of the web can readers find you, Mike? Any books or stories you’d like to promote? This is the place to do it. Pimp your wares, son!

Michael Patrick Hicks: Readers can find out everything about my books and social media links at http://michaelpatrickhicks.com, and subscribe to my newsletter while they’re there to stay abreast of new releases. I would also encourage them to head over to my Patreon page and see what’s on offer there: https://www.patreon.com/michaelpatrickhicks

Another way to get notified of new my releases is to follow me on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Patrick-Hicks/e/B00ILI4XLK/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1506118833&sr=8-1, and Bookbub at https://www.bookbub.com/profile/michael-patrick-hicks.

My latest release is Mass Hysteria, and fans of extreme horror can find out more at http://www.michaelpatrickhicks.com/mass-hysteria — if they dare! It’s available in paperback, ebook, and audio editions, all of which contain the bonus short story, Consumption.

If you want to check out my science fiction works, head over to http://www.michaelpatrickhicks.com/convergence to learn about my Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award finalist, Convergence. And if you’re a fan of Nicholas Sansbury Smith’s Extinction Cycle series, check out my story, From The Ashes, set within that world during the events of the first novel, at http://www.michaelpatrickhicks.com/extinction-cycle-from-the-ashes-kindle-worlds.

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