By T.J. Tranchell

Every writer has a unique journey. Brian Asman’s has taken him from the world of bizarro and splatterpunk novellas to his first full-length novel, Good Dogs. Asman, who became a viral sensation for his haunted house novella, Man, Fuck This House, sees this journey as steps in a long-term plan. After half a dozen independently published novellas, the leap into a full-length novel was spurred by completing his MFA at UCR-Palm Desert’s low-residency program.

Published first in 2021, Asman’s breakout novella is eye-catching not only for its title, but for his innovative use of social media to promote it. At one point, Asman offered to purchase one lucky reader an actual haunted house if the book sold 1 million copies. The title itself is part of Asman’s design to subvert expectations. As he makes the move into more traditional publishing, he is also updating his most popular book. Before that, however, is a six-city tour promoting Good Dogs. The new novel follows a family of werewolves on a camping trip. Little do they know that a slasher right out of a low-budget horror movies is in the same forest, looking for new victims. The slasher, as one can guess, picked on the wrong family. (This interview has been slightly edited for clarity.)

 

The Coachella Review: Given the topic of your new book, Good Dogs, I want to start by talking about your dog. Tell me about Dracula.

Brian Asman: Dracula is a three-and-a-half-year-old Staffordshire terrier. He’s sitting on the chair in my office, staring at me right now. I got him in 2023; he was about two years old. He was in the shelter for about a year. I decided I was going to foster him at first. I’ve had bully breeds before and I loved it, but I was at a weird transitional stage of my life where I wasn’t really sure what I was doing. So I was like, I’m just going to foster a dog. I need a dog in my life, and I get him and immediately I text the rescue and say I’m going to keep him. So he was a foster for the car ride home, basically, and then became my dog.

When I got him out of the shelter, I was very surprised because he was super well-socialized, completely trained, house-trained, crate-trained, knew some commands. He was clearly very well taken care of before he went into the shelter, and it was kind of crazy that he was in there for so long because he has this amazing personality.

[To Dracula:] Hey, buddy, we’re talking about you.

TCR: How has that contributed to your writing? You have this werewolf book, Good Dogs, and you have a very good dog.

BA: Maybe it will [contribute] to the sequel, but I was already through edits on Good Dogs when I got my Dracula, so he wasn’t involved. The book is dedicated to a lot of different dogs. So obviously, I’ve had a lot of different dogs in my life and always loved dogs. The sheer love and affection they give you inspires me to some degree even if there’s not something specific in the book.

TCR: The characters [in Good Dogs], especially when they get into more of a dog form, have various levels of loving and caring, and some not-so-loving and caring attributes. Were you thinking of that—that love and affection from dogs, that personability—and putting that into mostly human characters?

BA: A little bit. There is stuff that carries through with them, from the night to the day, and certain personality traits. I wouldn’t say it was inspired by any experience with any specific dogs I’ve had.

TCR: What kind of stuff made you want to write a werewolf book?

BA: The main thing that made me want to write it is that I hit on this mash-up that I’d never seen before. A slasher film where the victims are all werewolves. It was my chocolate and peanut butter moment, where these two things came together in my head and I thought, This is a really cool idea. I try to write things that would translate well to film and in my head this seemed like a very cinematic idea. I just wanted to see how it played out.

TCR: The book does read very cinematically. Are you one of those writers that sees scenes in your head? Do you see the pictures or do you only see the words?

BA: I do. I do see everything, but I don’t see it beforehand. I figure it out as I’m going. One of the things I did when I was in the program at UCR-Palm Desert was I started taking screenwriting as my cross-genre [discipline], and that had a major effect on my fiction writing because it taught me how to think more visually as far as [how] scenes are laid out. The other thing is, I took some classes with John Skipp, the splatterpunk godfather, author of The Light at the End and a number of classics with Craig Spector. He is very well-versed in writing action. It’s something he’s taught a lot about, the principles of how you write a good action scene. I learned a lot from him.

For me, every action scene needs to be not just an action scene. It works best when it’s also an argument. My number one example of this is [in] Lethal Weapon. There’s this scene where Riggs and Murtaugh go to this drug dealer’s Beverly Hills house and they’re fighting him out by the pool. Each action each character takes represents their own personal take on policing. You see this threaded through the action scene, where it’s the two characters arguing over how to be a cop while they’re also trying to take down this drug dealer. That principle is something that I think about; I think about action scenes as arguments.

I also think of them as microcosms of the story itself. What I mean by that is, if you look at the principles of screenwriting—and I import these to fiction all the time because I think they’re helpful—every fight is going to have an inciting incident. Why did the fight kick off like this? Every fight is going to have, generally, three acts. It’s the beginning of the fight where things are happening. It’s the middle of the fight, the meat of the fight. And it’s the end of the fight, where one person triumphs and the other person loses. There are little things in each action scene that you need to make it satisfying. Reversals, for example, where the fight goes one way and then it goes the other. The climax point where all is lost. You see this all the time in John Wick, for example: those extended action scenes where all is lost and then all of a sudden John Wick “John Wicks” his way into victory.

TCR: Do you have a favorite fight or action scene that you are trying to recreate in your own way? Like the Lethal Weapon scene, the John Wick stuff. Is there anything else that runs through your mind, like, “I want that moment, but in my own voice?”

BA: There’s a lot of things that inspire me in general, but I wouldn’t say there’s one specific scene I’m trying to recreate. More like the feelings I get from watching certain scenes. I always go back to [Indonesian action franchise] The Raid movies as just exemplars of the genre. I know that’s just like basic bitch film nerd stuff at this point, but it’s true that those movies are really singular in what they do action-wise. Another Indonesian movie which is fantastic is The Night Comes For Us. That’s one I think about a lot as far as how each action is very brutal and how each action set-piece works differently. I also think about environments. Is it an interesting environment to be in, and what’s around you?

TCR: Do you do a lot of location scouting? Like if you were doing a film, do you location scouting for fiction? Do you say, “I need to go see this place”?

BA: I do. When I can, I do absolutely. I do what I call method writing, where if a scene or book takes place in a specific place, I’ll go there. Once, years ago, I was writing a story that took place in an IKEA. I actually went to IKEA and I went back into the home section where the home offices are. I found a desk and I sat there and I wrote my story. People kept coming up and saying, “Hey, can you tell me how to get to housewares?” And I would just point them in whatever direction, I don’t know if I gave them the right directions. I sat there and I wrote the whole story, so I do that. It helps to import that visual element into the story. It helps to go see and inhabit the places when possible. Obviously, if a story is set on Mars, I can’t go do that. But I live in California, so I can go out into the desert.

TCR: Locations and those places are something I’ve seen at play in a lot of your work. Man, Fuck this House is set in a specific and yet almost cookie-cutter kind of house. Was that a house you were in or a house that you knew?

BA: Yes! It was directly inspired by the house that I lived in during college. We had some really freaky stuff happen in that house. It was an old Craftsman and the layout is very similar. The house in the book is bigger than the house I lived in in college. I basically lived in the closet like I was fricking Harry Potter or something. We had weird stuff happen. We’d hear footsteps and things like that. One of my roommates woke up one night and swore he saw an old man at the foot of his bed, watching him sleep. Very freaky stuff like that. My girlfriend at the time stayed over at the house while we were off on some trip, and she was like, “I just felt like someone was watching me the whole time.” That space really inspired the book. The book was originally going to be a Van Wilder-style fratty ghost comedy. It’s one of those things where someone wakes up and there’s a dick drawn on their face but it was a locked room so no one could have drawn the dick on their face. Just shit like that. Then I decided to pivot and go a different way with it and I’m glad I did.

TCR: That pivot is something interesting to me. That pivot is something you are getting into with Blackstone and Good Dogs, a more traditional mode. Blackstone is still really independent in a lot of ways, but you cut your teeth on that independent, wild, hanging out with John Skipp, extreme horror kind of people. What’s that change like for you?

BA: It’s been interesting, but it was always planned, as well. Blackstone is an interesting place to be, because from a print standpoint, they’re like a mid-sized publisher and they’re a bit up and coming and they’re working hard on their physical media program, which is very cool. Their horror program is strong. They have books from myself, Jonathan Maberry, John Janz, and Eric LaRocca all coming out, which is cool in that respect. But they are kind of like the Big 5-A, as well, because they are the biggest audiobook publisher in the United States. It’s a good bridge between the small press scene I came out of and bigger publishing.

TCR: You said it was always planned. Was that plan built into the work? Your early work does appeal to that small press, wild and crazy attitude. What’s changed in the work itself?

BA: That’s a good question. So what I worked out with my agent was that everything was part of a long-term plan. Basically, she was shopping around my first novel, and then COVID happened. Publishers stopped taking agent submissions for the first time ever. We were kind of dead in the water, and she kept telling me, “Build your platform, Brian. Build your platform.” But I don’t have any books. It’s hard to build my platform. No one cares about an author appearance from a guy who has no books. We decided I would do a series of novellas. What I wanted to do with the novellas—and you’re right, I was hanging out with a lot of the bizarro, extreme horror, and splatterpunk folks at the time—I did some stuff that kind of fit into that mold, because that’s who I was friends with. I knew I could sell some books that way and hopefully start building on those relationships. My early stuff is stuff I truly love, essentially because that’s [what] I really love to write. Like gross-out comedy type stuff, but it’s not as commercial. What I want to do is appeal to a bigger audience. So Man, Fuck This House was kind of the bridge, where it is a comedy, but there’s a turn where it becomes not a comedy. That helps take my older audience and prime them for what I’m doing next. I’ll always love writing comedy, but there’s a lot of different [genre] aspects I like to write. I look at someone like Joe Lansdale, for example, who has made a career out of writing Joe Lansdale books. He writes westerns, and pulp, and horror, and sci-fi, whatever he feels like writing at any given time. And that’s my goal.

TCR: How aware are you of that during the process? “I have to write something different, but I still have to be me?” What are the landmarks of your voice?

BA: With everything I write, with every new project, I try and stretch myself in a different way. I try to do something different, but it’s all still me. I’m only one person, so at the end of the day, I think it comes through rather naturally. If I were to truly write a pastiche of something, it would sound different, but I do think it just comes through naturally. When I first got started writing horror, I was writing Thomas Ligotti pastiches, and I was using his voice. I think you have to do that as a writer to develop your own voice. You have to try different hats on and decide what fits you. It’s just evolved at this point. When I tell a story, there are some principles I try to live by. I try to be as honest as I can. I know that might sound pretentious, but it’s what I do. And I’m always having fun with it, too, for the most part. I’m always trying to have a good time and I think that comes through in the work.

TCR: I think that also comes through in your social media presence. You mentioned building your platform. You kind of took over social media for a while. Was that conscious, or was it “I’m going to try this thing and see what happens”?

BA: My agent did tell me I needed to have more of a social media presence. That’s the only reason I’m on Twitter [now X] to begin with. It’s something I have to work at and, honestly, something I feel I’m not good at. Social media just makes you feel like an imposter all the time no matter who you are. I’ve had tweets go mega-viral. I had one that went over 100,000 likes but I’ve also had things that haven’t hit. Like, I just tweeted out to my 10,000 followers, and I got two fucking likes. It’s the way the algorithms work. You have to be constantly feeding it and refining. You go through fallow periods and I feel like I’m wasting my time a lot of the time. And then something hits, and I’m all, “Cool, look!” But it’s all luck on social media. You can tweet a lot, you can post on Instagram a lot, you can refine your content, but it’s a lot of luck.

TCR: Man, Fuck This House is considered a viral sensation. You had a campaign about selling a million copies and buying a haunted house for a reader. How close did you get?

BA: Not that close. I need to do an update on that because there were other step goals that it has hit. It sold quite well for an indie book, for sure. And the next version of it, coming out in October 2025 from Blackstone, I am hopeful will sell even more. It didn’t get close to hitting a million, but it still did quite well for me.

TCR: Without spoiling too much, what is the purpose or the goal with this expanded edition?

BA: There are a couple things. One is to bring it to a wider audience. It’s a viral, cult hit, but I think there’s a wider audience for the book. It’s something that would appeal to Grady Hendrix fans, Rachel Harrison fans. It’s a little off kilter, it’s a little weird. So we’re doing this expanded edition. It was fun getting to go back and revisit the book and seeing places where things could actually work a bit better. And it was originally going to be five days of horror and it ended on Thursday in the original version. I got to go and write the scenes I wanted to be in the book that I couldn’t fit into [it] last time. There’s more about the relationships of the characters, more about the history of the house and the old owner, that I’m excited for people to experience. And then the short stories I’m working on that will go into the collection are super fun, too. I love writing short stories because you can just do anything you want. There’s one story I’m excited about that is essentially The Shield meets Supernatural and it’s bridging that gap between horror and crime. I read a lot of crime; my first novel that got me an agent was a crime novel. I’m hopeful to someday make a career writing crime, sort of like Laird Barron, where he’s doing horror and a series of crime novels.

TCR: Are they going to make you change the [book] title?

BA: I believe they are putting an asterisk in the title.

TCR: One of the fun things about reading the book is that I was expecting more profanity, but there’s only the one time [that the f-word is used]. How did you hold that back? Because people swear and there are plenty of moments when you could drop f-bombs like crazy, but you save it for that one moment.

BA: I felt it was going to be more impactful. I was heavily inspired by Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre, weirdly, and here’s why: people frequently talk about that as if it’s the goriest movie of all time; like, that’s a thing that people say about it. But there’s actually almost no blood. There’s blood in the first scene in the van with the hitchhiker and that’s the only blood in the movie. The rest of the violence is implied or shown at a remove. That’s one thing that inspired me to write this book. I had just come off writing Nunchuck City, which contains, I believe, 200 instances of the word fuck. I describe that book as the Rick and Morty version of the Ninja Turtles. So that’s what I wanted to do with that book. I came off that and was writing about this family and felt like if I wanted to use this title, I almost can’t put any profanity throughout the rest of the book, and it’s going to be obvious. So I thought if I put this book out with this profane title and no other profanity except the one moment when someone says the title, that’s what I wanted to go for. People remark on it, people respond to it. People respond on the Books of Horror group on Facebook, and they’ll be like, “Is this book appropriate for kids?” And others will say it actually is, it’s completely appropriate for teens. It’s almost a YA book, frankly. I just think it’s funny to challenge people with that expectation and then reverse the expectation. People warm up to it, they might not even notice, and then they’ll see, Oh, there’s nothing.

TCR: Do you think there’s any other piece of older work you’ll go back to, or is this going to be the one?

BA: This is the one. I’m generally not someone who wants to go back and rewrite old stuff. I like to keep moving forward and come up with new stuff. So… never say never. I mentioned my book Nunchuck City and, honestly, if I could get paid to do one thing in this world, it would be to just tell stories in that universe for the rest of my career. It’s everything I loved when I was a kid. It’s side-scrolling, beat-’em-up video games, it’s ninjas, it’s Ninja Turtles kind of stuff where it’s a sci-fi world of goopy ooze and magic and all these things. So I would love to continue to tell stories in that universe, but I’m not going to rewrite that book.

TCR: One of the things you have coming up for Good Dogs is a multi-city tour. How are you preparing for a tour?

BA: I’m not. I’m preparing by putting off buying tickets for flights. It’s going to be crazy getting all the flights together. Luckily, I have friends in a number of the cities I’m going to, so I’m just going to barrel through and do it.

TCR: So is that different than your preparation for a convention?

BA: I’m not that much of a preparing guy. For me, prepping for a convention is, “Do I have my books and is my Square terminal charged?” That’s different than if I’m on panels. If I’m moderating a panel, then I enjoy doing deep preparation on the panelists and their work, and coming up with lists and lists of questions because you can’t have dead air during a panel. That’s awful. If I’m going to be on the panel, I might do some cursory research on the subject. I did a panel on AI at [the Horror Writers Association’s] StokerCon this last year, so I did a lot of research for that one more on the side of [intellectual property] and how IP adaptations in the book world work and how they sell. The premise of the panel was that Amazon was going to use AI to put out a bunch of cheap content. My answer to that was that we already live in a world where cheap content gets churned out constantly, and Amazon has attempted to do things like Kindle Worlds where they got these licensed properties like G.I. Joe and people could write fan fiction and then submit it to the IP holder. Tie-in books have never been a huge bestseller. The top of the New York Times list might be books that are adapted to film, but it hasn’t come the other way, where Avengers: Age of Ultron is number one on the New York Times bestseller list for the 52^nd week in a row.

TCR: So what’s the difference between having to talk about a subject that’s sort of outside versus the upcoming days of you being the subject?

BA: I’m more of an expert on myself. Maybe less of an expert, considering that my memory has gotten so terrible over the last couple of years. I can’t remember stuff I said or wrote, for the most part. I’m not sure I’m an expert on anything, per se, other than my own experience. And hopefully there are things people can learn from that.

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T.J. Tranchell was born on Halloween and grew up in Utah. He has published six books, including The Blackhawk Cycle, a hardcover omnibus. In October 2020, The New York Times called his book Cry Down Dark the scariest book set in Utah. He holds a master’s degree in literature from Central Washington University and is pursuing an MFA through the UCR-Palm Desert Low Residency program. Tranchell has also published work in Fangoria. He lives in Washington State with his wife and son and teaches at a community college.