INTERVIEW: Horror Novelist Grady Hendrix Talks Witchcraft Ahead of Proctors Performance
10/30 @ GE Theatre at Proctors, Schenectady
“You’re talking about monsters and spells and witches who steal penises and keep them in bird nests. I try to capture that line between the horrific and fun.”
Famed horror novelist, the best=selling, Manhattan-based Grady Hendrix, will be bringing his unique brand of novel reading to the GE Theatre at Proctors on October 30 for a special night of Halloween frights.
“I got really bored of author events where people show up, [the author] reads from the book and does a Q&A,” Hendrix said. “It was boring to me and it looked boring to the audience so I started experimenting with different ideas when I did the book tour for Paperbacks from Hell.”
Paperbacks from Hell, Hendrix’s 2017 non-fiction book explores the horror novels of the ‘70s and ‘80s and since that book's release, he’s been perfecting his live show to be more exciting than your standard book reading.
“It’s got slides and usually songs,” Hendrix explained. “My singing is essentially a war crime so I apologize in advance. With Paperbacks from Hell, I just made a show about the horror paperback boom from the early Jack the Ripper fanfiction in the 19th century on through stuff like Psycho and all the serial killer novels that came out in the wake of Silence of the Lambs.”
His most recent novel, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, is set in the 1970s and focuses on four pregnant teenagers who get sent to a maternity home in Florida. While settling into their new lives at the maternity home, the girls discover witchcraft and things get messy as it is wont to do when teenagers start messing around with spells. All us millennials remember the cult classic The Craft right? I really miss Katie Holmes in her heyday before she married Tom Cruise and shit got real weird.
Right! Back to Grady Hendix.
“For this show, it’s basically about the history of witches because [witches] have been around forever,” Hendrix said. “It's the one mythological monster that’s always coded as a woman the same way werewolves are almost always men in folklore. So it explores witches from classical mythology through the witch hunts in the 16th and 17th centuries and finally witches as these feminist icons in the 20th century.
“Witches are weird, because what is a witch?” Hendrix posited. “Is it an old lady who eats children and lives in a house made of candy? Is it a bunch of falsely-accused women being hung in Salem? Or is it a bunch of women dancing around, celebrating female power underneath a full moon? The image of the witch changes depending on where society is and how comfortable it is with women and their power.”
While the novel and the subsequent show clearly has a lot of ideas on its mind, Hendrix is also tapping into the campiness of horror by including songs and “a lot of stupid jokes.”
“Horror is fun,” Hendrix explained. “You’re talking about monsters and spells and witches who steal penises and keep them in bird nests. I try to capture that line between the horrific and fun.”
Unsurprisingly, on a book tour for a novel that features witchcraft and demonic possession threatening the male genitalia, Hendrix has faced some pushback from certain stops on his fall tour.
“People have been complaining that the library is bringing witches and tales of demonic worship to the public libraries,” Hendrix said. “Schenectady has been free of that so I’m very excited that everyone is broad-minded and free-thinking there.”
I questioned whether Hendrix was being facetious because broad-mindedness in upstate New York can feel few and far between at times but was surprised and also proud that he was being 100% serious.
“Schenectady is one of the places on the fall tour where I’ve gotten no protest threats,” Hendrix assured me.
“Going to a book event can feel a little bit like playing Russian roulette, except five out of the six chambers are loaded. You get a sitter, you go out and then someone reads from their book in a monotone. I’m really trying to make sure people get bang for their buck. I want people to go home entertained and make the money they paid for that babysitter worthwhile.”
So dear Metroland readers, before we take the kids out trick or treating on Halloween, let’s prove Mr. Hendrix right and show that we are a free-thinking and fun-loving bunch that appreciates the finer points of men having their members end up in a bird’s nest.
For tickets to Grady Hendrix’s live reading, presented by It Came From Schenectady, visit https://tickets.proctors.org/TheatreManager/95/tmEvent/tmEvent35970.html