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WORK TITLE: The Dissonance
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WEBSITE: https://www.shaunhamill.com/
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COUNTRY: United States
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PERSONAL
Born in Arlington, TX; married.
EDUCATION:University of Texas, Arlington, B.A., 2008; University of Iowa, M.F.A., 2016.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and podcast host. Co-host of the podcasts Team Hurricane Returns and Fandom University.
WRITINGS
Contributor to publications, including Carve and Crimereads. Contributor to anthologies, including Come Join Us by the Fire 2.
SIDELIGHTS
Shaun Hamill is a writer and podcast host from Arlington, TX, who is based in Birmingham, AL. Hamill earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas, Arlington and a master’s degree from the University of Iowa.
In 2019, Hamill released his first novel, A Cosmology of Monsters. The book is narrated by Noah Turner, who tells the story of his broken family. His father, Harry, dies young; his mother, Margaret, struggles to endure her grief; one sister, Sydney, goes missing; and his other sister, Eunice, struggles with severe mental illness. In addition to all of that, Noah takes in a giant monster. Later, Noah meets members of a shadowy group called The Fellowship, who also see monsters. In an interview with Mallory Yu, contributor to the All Things Considered radio program, Hamill discussed his intentions for the book with Scott Tucker, writer on the Dallas Observer website: “Horror has this wonderful ability to concrete-ize our deepest fears and anxieties and give us a chance to face them directly, in ways that real life can’t. … Mental illness and family dysfunction have played a big role in my life. I wanted to explore life in a broken household, a place where there’s no lack of love but there’s a lack of connection. Every single person feels isolated and is struggling with their own demons.”
Writing on the Bookreporter.com website, Joe Hartlaub suggested: “Hamill … will keep you up all night reading and have you wondering, pondering and checking your windows for weeks, if not longer.” A Kirkus Reviews critic described the book as “an accomplished, macabre horror saga and a promising debut from an imaginative new author.”
The Dissonance finds four young friends, whose experimentation with the supernatural connects them with the Dissonance, a powerful force. They form a coven that is later disbanded after a tragic event. Decades later, the four reconvene unravel the mystery of the Dissonance. In an interview with Roberto Ontiveros, contributor to the Dallas Morning News website, Hamill stated: “I think the coven/secret pact story is a great way to explore human relationships amid the supernatural. You have a group of people who share the ability to partake in the extraordinary, who understand you in a way the rest of the world cannot. … They can lift you up, but they can also be toxic and dangerous, because you all have power over one another, sharing this secret.” He added: “I think this type of story … has a universal appeal.” “It was inspired during COVID, when I couldn’t see any of my friends in person. I missed them terribly, so I wrote a novel about friendship,” Hamill told Rami Ungar on the Rami Ungar the Writer website. He compared the book to his previous novel, suggesting: “When I started The Dissonance, I set out to write a more accessible book, with characters who were a little easier to love and root for. I also wanted there to be more action and excitement.”
“Fantasy readers won’t want to put this down,” asserted a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. A Kirkus Reviews critic described the volume as “a wistful, emotional roller coaster that finds worse than memories waiting at home.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
All Things Considered, October 31, 2019, Mallory Yu, “Cosmology Of Monsters Looks the Monstrous in the Face,” author interview.
Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2019, review of A Cosmology of Monsters; July 1, 2024, review of The Dissonance.
Publishers Weekly, May 6, 2024, review of The Dissonance, p. 36.
UWIRE Text, November 6, 2019, C. Peyton, “UTA Alumnus’ Debut Horror Novel, A Cosmology of Monsters, Attracts Attention from Stephen King,” author interview, p. 1.
ONLINE
Allium, a Journal of Poetry & Prose, https://allium.colum.edu/ (September 13, 2024), Eve Talley, author interview.
Bookreporter.com, https://www.bookreporter.com/ (September 27, 2019), Joe Hartlaub, review of A Cosmology of Monsters.
Dallas Morning News Online, https://www.dallasnews.com/ (July 18, 2024), Roberto Ontiveros, author interview.
Dallas Observer Online, https://www.dallasobserver.com/ (September 17, 2019), Scott Tucker, author interview.
Millions, https://themillions.com/ (August 16, 2019), Bradley Sides, author interview.
Rami Ungar the Writer, https://ramiungarthewriter.com/ (July 1, 2014), Rami Ungar, author interview.
Shaun Hamill website, https://www.shaunhamill.com/ (September 13, 2024).
I grew up in Arlington, Texas, surviving mainly on a steady diet of genre fiction and comic books. I got my BA in English from the University of Texas at Arlington in 2008, and my MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2016. My debut novel, A Cosmology of Monsters, was released in hardcover by Pantheon books in September of 2019. Vintage/Anchor published the paperback in August of 2020. My fiction has appeared in Carve and Tor Nightfire's Come Join Us By the Fire 2. My nonfiction has appeared at Crimereads and Tor Nightfire. I also co-host two podcasts: Team Hurricane Returns (with Darrel Smith, Jr.) and Fandom University (with Sergio Hernandez), and am an occasional panelist on the Lovecraft Ezine Podcast. I live in Birmingham, Alabama, and am finishing a new novel.
Shaun Hamill
A native of Arlington, Texas, SHAUN HAMILL holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and his fiction has appeared in Carve and Spilt Infinitive. If you really want to embarrass him, go check out the short films on his IMDB page. He currently lives in Alabama with his wife, his in-laws, and his dog. A Cosmology of Monsters is his first novel.
Genres: Horror, Fantasy
New and upcoming books
July 2024
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The Dissonance
Novels
A Cosmology of Monsters (2019)
The Dissonance (2024)
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Series contributed to
Come Join Us By The Fire
Come Join Us By the Fire Season 2 (2021) (with others)
Music of the Abyss (2021)
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Heroic Legends
Conan: Lethal Consignment (2024)
QUOTED: "Horror has this wonderful ability to concrete-ize our deepest fears and anxieties and give us a chance to face them directly, in ways that real life can’t. ... Mental illness and family dysfunction have played a big role in my life. I wanted to explore life in a broken household, a place where there’s no lack of love but there’s a lack of connection. Every single person feels isolated and is struggling with their own demons."
Arlington Author Shaun Hamill Receives Praise from Stephen King for Debut Novel, A Cosmology of Monsters
Imagine being a neo-grunge musician and receiving a letter from Kurt Cobain that your band’s latest record is a masterpiece. Shaun Hamill is making that kind of splash in the horror and fiction literary world. On Sept. 17, his first novel, A Cosmology Of Monsters (published by Pantheon Books in New...
By Scott Tucker
September 17, 2019
Author Shaun Hamill's debut novel A Cosmology Of Monsters has earned the approval of Stephen King.
Author Shaun Hamill's debut novel A Cosmology Of Monsters has earned the approval of Stephen King. Rebekah H. Hamill
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Imagine being a neo-grunge musician and receiving a letter from Kurt Cobain that your band’s latest record is a masterpiece. Shaun Hamill is making that kind of splash in the horror and fiction literary world. On Sept. 17, his first novel, A Cosmology Of Monsters (published by Pantheon Books in New York), will hit bookstores, but before the book's widespread release, the 36-year-old Arlington native is already experiencing a flurry of success as critics, reviewers and the master of horror himself, Stephen King, are praising his first offering.
“If John Irving ever wrote a horror novel, it would be something like this. I loved it,” Stephen King has said, as quoted on the book's dust jacket.
Hamill is a self-described horror devotee. While pursuing a BA at The University of Texas at Arlington, he worked full time at the city's Barnes and Noble for nearly a decade, where he spent his time soaking up books and courting his future wife. Upon graduating in 2008, Hamill was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop. In 2014 he moved to Iowa with his wife to attend the graduate program and battle the frigid winters.
“It was interesting and weird," Hamill recalls of that time. "I felt a little out of place at first because everyone was so much younger than I was and came from Harvard, Yale and Brown. Winters were long and cold, and if you weren't careful they could kill you. There were also little things, like no Tex-Mex food or fried chicken, that I missed about Texas.”
Editor's Picks
Haunted Houses Are Scared of Guests
While in the program, Hamill taught rhetoric, creative writing and novel writing before graduating in 2016 with his MFA.
“Iowa has a reputation for being a pressure cooker of ruthless competition and also for churning out Raymond Carver devotees who only deal in po-faced realism," the author says. "When I was accepted to the workshop, I bought into the cliché without really speaking to anyone who’d been there. Once I got settled in, however, I realized that the current workshop, under Lan Samantha Chang’s leadership, has become a place that encourages a much wider range of voices. I got the guidance I needed to become a better writer and courage to pursue my aesthetic.”
Hamill lives in Alabama with his wife, his in-laws and his dog, but it was in Iowa where he started work on what would become his bold and clean entrance to the New York literary world, landing a deal with monster publisher Pantheon Books.
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A Cosmology of Monsters centers on Noah Tuner, the youngest of three siblings from the Turner family who, like his father, has a special talent for scaring people. Noah’s family dynamic is shattered early on in the story as his father battles cancer but leaves his family the seeds to a successful business in the form of a haunted attraction — and a reputation for scaring the hell out of people. Over the course of the next 25 years, and along with a few more tragedies, Noah picks up the pieces for everyone around him to find there is more to the family history than he could have possibly imagined.
“Horror has this wonderful ability to concrete-ize our deepest fears and anxieties and give us a chance to face them directly, in ways that real life can’t," Hamill says. "Mental illness and family dysfunction have played a big role in my life. I wanted to explore life in a broken household, a place where there’s no lack of love but there’s a lack of connection. Every single person feels isolated and is struggling with their own demons."
Starting in mid-September, Hamill is embarking on a 13-date national book tour, with several dates in Dallas, including an appearance Oct. 30 at The University of Texas at Arlington, Oct. 31 at Bouchercon Dallas and Nov. 3 at Interabang Books.
The novel is a tender, coming-of-age piece about sacrifice, family and the vulnerability in stepping up to responsibility through a family business lineage, in this case, a haunted attraction known as The Wandering Dark. The reader experiences Noah growing up over the book’s pages while battling demons inherited from someone he never really knew, his own father.
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“I guess what horror fiction, or at least this novel, can teach is that there are no tidy solutions for these problems," Hamill says. "Mental illness and dysfunction aren’t solvable. They are ongoing, and you grapple with them across a lifetime, but that doesn’t mean they're not worth grappling with.”
There is also a major influence of the obscure horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, as well as references to his works throughout the book, as members of the Turner family know and use this fiction with biblical authority, while navigating their own complicated lives. This sets an almost existential backdrop for the families’ personal drama.
“Lovecraft believed that humanity is an insignificant accident in a deep meaningless universe," Hamill says. "Again and again, his characters discover this fact and react to the revelation with horror. I thought it should be interesting to take this cosmic philosophy and apply it to everyday family life. So what if the universe doesn't care about you? People do. The way you handle people in your life can turn you monstrous or keep you human. Sometimes it does both.”
Shaun Hamill Has a Scary Story to Tell You
The Millions InterviewBradley Sides August 16, 2019 | 6 min read
Shaun Hamill’s debut novel, A Cosmology of Monsters, asks what makes a monster. “Is it based on body and appearance? Is it defined by actions, like those of a serial killer or a murderous despot? Or is it an aspect of all of us, our ugly, mean-spirited, spiteful side?” Hamill asked me, adding, “I think it’s all a matter of perspective…”
A Cosmology of Monsters follows the Turner family as they navigate illnesses and hardships. The heart of the family—and the novel—is young Noah Turner. Noah befriends a monster that appears outside his bedroom, and the two of them form a bond that transforms the Turners’ lives. Told with tenderness and brimming with darkness, Hamill’s debut is sure to please readers who have a special literary craving for monsters.
Hamill and I recently discussed the influence of other horror writers, haunted attractions, and, of course, monsters.
The Millions: One thing I admire so much about A Cosmology of Monsters is how it shows appreciation for the horror writers and works that came before it. Among others, your novel mentions Weird Tales, Shirley Jackson, and H. P. Lovecraft. Do you mind talking about your decision to include so many references to other horror writers and works?
Shaun Hamill: I like stories that are in active conversation with other stories, and I always enjoy finding recommendations inside books—when a piece of fiction mentions a book I haven’t read, an album I haven’t heard, or a film I haven’t seen, I feel like I’m being invited into a secret club. With Cosmology, I found a way to turn my own self-indulgence into a narrative asset. After all, this is a story about people who scare other people for a living. They needed to be familiar with their genre, and the characters’ awareness of the horror tradition allows them to grapple with the larger thematic questions of the book in a more direct way than if, say, they existed in a world without Shirley Jackson or H.P. Lovecraft.
TM: The Lovecraft references are especially strong.
SH: Although the narrative shape of Cosmology is sort of a John Irving/Stephen King mash-up, its worldbuilding and philosophy have more in common with Lovecraft. Lovecraft believed that humanity is small and insignificant in a large, uncaring cosmos. Much of his fiction hammers at this idea, with unknowable monsters standing as symbols for a godless universe. When I started reading Lovecraft in grad school, this philosophy seemed a perfect backdrop for a tragic family saga. What was interesting to me was taking that cosmic nihilism as a given, and then saying “Okay, now what? How do you live a life? How do you give it meaning?”
TM: A Cosmology of Monsters is very much a monster story. Did certain literary monsters from the past guide the way you crafted the monster in your novel?
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SH: The closest literary relative is probably Eli, the child vampire from John Ajvide Linqvist’s Let the Right One In. I was also inspired by “The Window,” a story in Alvin Schwartz’s More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, in which a young woman sees lights outside her bedroom window that turn out to be the glowing eyes of a vampire. There’s definitely some of Lon Chaney Jr.’s Wolf-Man in there, but I also want to mention a real-life monster: my dog, Sheplin, who laid behind my desk chair every morning, sighing loudly while I wrote (he didn’t get a walk until I was done). His body language and personality were a big influence on the monster’s early appearances.
TM: I want to talk some more about monsters. After I met the monster in A Cosmology of Monsters, I felt pity for it. It’s alone in the dark. The first word it makes out to Noah is “friend.” It can’t really write, and it has trouble playing with toys. It’s a pitiful creature really. Still, though, it is the monster—we know it and it knows it. As I kept reading, I couldn’t help but focus on this question that I’ll pose to you: what defines a monster?
SH: That’s the central question of the book, isn’t it? It’s a nebulous term, hard to pin down. After all, Dracula and Grover are both monsters, and while they both have abnormal physical characteristics, they’re completely different in demeanor and intent. So what does the term mean? Is it based on body and appearance? Is it defined by actions, like those of a serial killer or a murderous despot? Or is it an aspect of all of us, our ugly, mean-spirited, spiteful side? I think it’s all a matter of perspective, and it’s something the book’s characters are struggling with. That’s probably less of a straight answer than you wanted, but it’s as close as I can come.
TM: Here is one of Noah’s descriptions of the monster: “My friend stood and stepped back. It extended the talons of its right paw. It felt more like the hand of an adult human than like that of some unspeakable horror, and, as the creature pulled me into its embrace, I felt warmth and sturdiness.” What is it about the monster in A Cosmology of Monsters that makes it be so comforting to Noah?
SH: Noah has a cold home life. Neither of his parents are around to provide physical affection. His sister Eunice does her best to take care of him, but even her attention is diverted early in the story. The monster is big and warm and gentle like you want your parents to be, and it’s a constant presence for Noah—something he can always count on. There’s more to it, of course, but to say more would spoil some important aspects of the book.
TM: Do you think of Noah as being a monster?
SH: He’s worried that he is, but I want readers to make up their own mind.
TM: Noah is an interesting character. He has a tough life. His dad dies when Noah is very young. His family members have mental-health issues. And, well, his best friend is a monster. I’m curious how he came to you and what inspired him.
SH: Noah’s voice has been with me for a long time. I first heard him when I was on a road trip in my early 20s, and had one of those “lightning bolt of inspiration” moments: a novel about a fatherless boy in a house full of women, coming of age working at the family business. The nature of the business changed, and monsters invited themselves in, but all the family characters and mental illness stuff were there from the beginning. As far as the source material for that inspiration, I grew up in a house of women and have spent a lot of my life dealing with the effects of poverty and mental illness. Like many freshman novelists, I built my story from what my wife likes to call “all my carry-on.”
TM: A Cosmology of Monsters is a horror novel for sure with violence and terror, but it’s not only a horror novel. It’s also a rich love story. The novel begins with love. The Turner family stays together because of love. It ends with love. The book is often tender and sweet. What do you think the addition of the love stories adds to the novel?
SH: There are a few ways the love stories add to the novel. First, love is an aspect of monstrousness, potentially a cause and a cure (sometimes simultaneously). Second, this book torments its characters, so it was important that I and my reader become invested enough to endure that torment alongside them. Third, love was the secret sauce that turned Cosmology from a rambling, overlong, confused epic (my first draft was 220,000 words) into a more focused, propulsive narrative. Whenever I felt the story getting too big, or heading in a cliched or overdramatic direction, looking to love (both mine for the characters and theirs for one another) almost always gave me a more interesting scene or surprising moment. It made the book smaller, but better.
TM: I don’t want to make the book seem light because it’s definitely not. In fact, so much of the novel is about how we, no matter how hard we try, can’t truly protect other people no matter how hard we try. It’s a bleak outlook—maybe, but I think it’s true.
SH: Agreed. Life is a slow motion train wreck. Disasters will beset you and everyone you care about and you are powerless to stop it. It goes back to that Lovecraftian nihilism I mentioned earlier—we are cosmically insignificant in an unplanned, indifferent universe. That’s another reason love is so important to Cosmology. If life has no inherent meaning, there’s something romantic about living a good life and caring for the people around you.
TM: The Wandering Dark, the haunted house the Turner family operates, plays a huge role in A Cosmology of Monsters. I can’t let you go without asking about real-life haunted attractions. Do you have a favorite?
SH: When I still lived in Texas, I used to make pilgrimages to a few local haunts in Dallas-Fort Worth with friends, but I haven’t been to one in years. I am terrified of going alone. My favorite was called Zombie Manor, in my hometown of Arlington, Texas, (they’ve since moved to New Brunswick in Canada). I never went there as a customer but visited after hours for a screening of a short film I’d worked on. The staff told us we could walk through the empty attraction and explore, but they didn’t tell us that there was a single cast member hiding in the shadows. When a piece of scenery in a dark corridor reached out and grabbed my arm, it gave me the fright of my life and started my mind down the road toward the Wandering Dark.
Shaun Hamill
Shaun Hamill talks inspiration and influences behind his debut literary horror novel, A Cosmology of Monsters
Interview by Eve Talley
I was destined to read Shaun Hamill’s novel. He came to speak at the University of Texas at Arlington (also his alma mater) while I was in the same creative writing program he had traveled, and under the same professor. A Cosmology of Monsters demanded to be sold in the Barnes & Noble where I worked at the time. Now I wish to force this fate on our readers as well.
Don’t let the genre of horror scare you away. A Cosmology of Monsters is not for avid horror fans as much as it is for people who love a good story.
Shaun Hamill grew up in Arlington, Texas, and earned his MFA from Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop. A Cosmology of Monsters is his first novel. It’s been hailed as the perfect story for Halloween. However, no matter what time of the year you read it, that season will transform into Halloween. Keep up with what he does next at his website shaunhamill.com
You mention H.P. Lovecraft many times in the novel, and he appears to be one of your literary heroes. However, I noticed a quote form Ray Bradbury at the start of the book. Is Bradbury a quieter influence in your writing? Who are some of the other, quieter influences in your work and what do you draw from them?
I like that phrase, “quieter influences.” Bradbury’s mix of the mundane and the wonderful (especially in Dandelion Wine) left a mark on me as a reader, and I think there’s evidence of that all over Cosmology. The other quiet influences would be: A.M. Homes, whose short stories and novels showed me how to depict transgressive behavior in a human way; Anne Rice, whose vampires were an excellent example of damned narrators who need to confess their sins and beg for mercy; Thomas Ligotti’s short fiction, which is rife with haunted cities and otherworldly strangeness; Donna Tartt, who is the gold standard in literary page-turners; and Grant Morrison, the genius high shaman of the comic book world, who has a way of reframing pop culture and making it truly mythic and mind-expanding.
Apart from the fact that you grew up in Texas, is there another reason you chose Texas for the backdrop of your novel?
Since this was my first novel, I knew there would be a steep learning curve as far as narrative, character development, etc. I wanted to make things easy on myself where I could. Using Texas—particularly the Dallas-Fort Worth Area—helped me lessen the curve a bit. I felt I could write about the area and the people in it with authority. I also knew that setting the novel in a conservative place in a more conservative time would have consequences for the LGBTQ characters in the book, and I was interested in exploring that as well.
My favorite character in the novel is Margaret—she has an undeniable presence. Which character’s voice was the most fun to write?
Writing the first section of this book was like a honeymoon. I fell in love with Margaret and Harry as they fell in love with each other. It was the easiest part of the book to write, because it was the most fun. Later in the book, as her situation worsens, Margaret became more difficult to write, although I still loved the character and sympathized with her. I also had a lot of fun writing Noah’s sister Eunice. There’s a sweetness and vulnerability to her that made her easy for me to love.
On the cover of A Cosmology of Monsters, it’s hard to miss Stephen King’s name. He wrote a blurb for your debut novel—can you talk about the experience of getting King to not only read, but also comment on Cosmology?
On my part it was pure luck! But I want to give credit where it’s due: the book had an incredible publicist at Knopf, named Abigail Endler. Abby knew someone who had a direct line to Stephen King, and convinced that someone to read the book. That person liked it and agreed to give it to Stephen King, who agreed to read the book with an eye toward providing a blurb. I tried not to hope too much for the blurb, because I didn’t want to face the disappointment if it didn’t happen. I told myself it was amazing that he was reading my book at all. He was traveling while he read the book, and he kept emailing Abby and telling her “don’t worry, I’m still reading it, just need a little more time,” things like that. He didn’t have to do that. But again, I tried not to get my hopes up. And then the blurb came through. I got the email while I was at work, and I just walked into my office, shut the door, sat down, and cried. It was more than a dream come true, because I hadn’t even dared to dream it, and in a lot of ways it’s been the high point of the entire experience of publishing Cosmology.
What do you take the most pride in about your writing?
Oh man. I have no idea how to answer this, because I spent most of my time not especially proud of my writing. I guess my ability to rewrite and rewrite a thing until it becomes clear to me what I’m writing about. I don’t usually get it right on the first or second try, but I’m persistent and patient enough (in my impatient way) that I can find my way to the heart of a story.
The arrangement of A Cosmology of Monsters is very digestible. It’s broken into seven parts, and those seven parts are divided into short chapters. It’s already a very readable novel thanks to your writing voice, but how did you decide to arrange the story this way (without giving away too much of the plot)?
I’ve always been a very scene-focused writer. I tend to think cinematically and write that way as well. I tried to lean into that strength for Cosmology. That meant focusing on specific moments in the family’s life, years apart, with cliffhangers and time jumps between each. I always love it when stories make a big jump in time and the status quo changes. It’s meant to keep the reader off-balance and curious, desperate to know what will happen next. I think when the book works for people, its partially due to this unbalance, paired with fast pacing.
I know you have a fondness for Barnes & Noble booksellers. In addition to the influence of your undergrad writing professors at UT Arlington and earning an MFA from Iowa Writer’s Workshop—I was wondering if Barnes & Noble played a role in how you think about writing today?
You know, Barnes & Noble still holds the record for the longest job I’ve ever had. I worked there for eight years. I’ve never been at another job for more than four. It was a great place to work in the early-to-mid 2000s. I had managers who read a lot of my early stories and provided feedback, and one in particular who sort of took me under her wing and gave me things to read. And just wandering the aisles, I discovered plenty of books and writers that I wouldn’t have otherwise. It was an education in itself, apart from UTA and Iowa.
Could you see yourself publishing outside the horror genre in the future?
Absolutely. I think what will remain constant in my work is the attention to human stories mixed with genre elements. If Cosmology’s genre was “suburban gothic,” the book I’m writing now could be labeled “suburbs and sorcery.” It has more in common with Neil Gaiman novels and early Alan Moore superhero comics than it does with H.P. Lovecraft. It’s also less beholden to its influences, less meta in discussing them.
A Cosmology of Monsters
Vintage
ISBN: 978-052-556-3921
336 Pages
QUOTED: "It was inspired during COVID, when I couldn’t see any of my friends in person. I missed them terribly, so I wrote a novel about friendship."
"When I started The Dissonance, I set out to write a more accessible book, with characters who were a little easier to love and root for. I also wanted there to be more action and excitement."
Conversations with Shaun Hamill
Posted: July 1, 2024 in Author Interciew, Novel, Scary Stuff, Writing
Tags: A Cosmology of Monsters, authors, cosmic horror, editing, entertainment, horror, IT (novel), living and life, magic, novel, occult horror, occultism, publishing, scary stuff, Shaun Hamill, The Dissonance (novel), witchcraft, writing1
Some of you may remember prior to COVID a rather unusual novel called A Cosmology of Monsters, about a family in the business of haunted attractions and the entities that seem to haunt them through the generations (see my review here). You may also remember my interview with the author, Shaun Hamill (which you can read here). Well, Shaun’s got a new novel called The Dissonance coming out soon, and I got him to sit down with me to discuss the new book and what went into writing it.
So, without further ado, let’s do an interview!
Rami Ungar: Welcome back to the blog, Shaun. Can you tell us what you’ve been up to in the past five years since Cosmology came out?
Shaun Hamill: Like everyone else, I’ve had a crazy few years! I’ve moved from Alabama to Texas (and then moved three more times to different living situations in the last 3 years). I haven’t written as much as I would have liked, but I managed to write The Dissonance, and I have just turned in another novel I can’t talk about yet.
RU: Tell us about The Dissonance. What’s it about, and what inspired it?
SH: The Dissonance is a dark fantasy novel (with a dash of horror), about a type of magic that feeds on negative emotions: pain, depression, and the like. The only people who can use it are usually “broken” in some way—traumatized or mentally ill or the like. The story focuses on a group of friends who discover this power as teenagers, and how it shapes their lives in good and bad ways. It was inspired during COVID, when I couldn’t see any of my friends in person. I missed them terribly, so I wrote a novel about friendship.
RU: Can you tell us a bit more about the novel’s themes and influences?
SH; As previously mentioned, friendship is a huge theme of The Dissonance. So is trauma, and pain, and regret. It was influenced mainly by Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. Some reviewers are also comparing the novel to IT (it deals with a group of friends and has a split timeline between their adolescent and adult lives), so that’s in the mix, too!
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RU: Nothing wrong about being compared to IT, especially when it’s favorable. So, do you think your writing style has changed at all since Cosmology?
SH: I’m not sure. When I started The Dissonance, I set out to write a more accessible book, with characters who were a little easier to love and root for. I also wanted there to be more action and excitement. Whether that means a change in style? I couldn’t say. Maybe I’ve gotten a little less pretentious? I’ll be curious to see what readers of Cosmology think.
RU: I’ll be sure to let you know. Now, I’ve noticed based on Cosmology and on the description for The Dissonance, but you seem to have a thing for cosmic horror. Can you tell us your thoughts on cosmic horror and what about it you like?
SH: Yeah, I’m a cosmic horror nerd for sure. I think it stems from growing up religious (although I’m not a believer anymore). I was always fascinated by the awe and wonder that came with believing in something bigger than myself, and when I discovered cosmic horror (relatively late, in my early 30s), I found something more in tune with my personal feelings about the universe: a dark wonder, and the sense that reality is bigger and more complex and strange than any of us can ever comprehend. The best we can hope for in this life is a peek behind the curtain. Weird fiction is all about that curtain.
RU: It also seems this book will be delving quite a bit into witchcraft and the occult. Do you have experience with magic and witchcraft, or did you do a bunch of research and then make up the rest?
SH: I have an ex who practiced a bit of witchcraft. I’ve partaken in a couple of rituals (which I found as boring as church), and have spent my fair share of time in wiccan shops, browsing books of spells and baskets full of crystals and whatnot. In The Dissonance I employ a little bit of that knowledge, but mostly stick to made-up stuff, where I get to make the rules. My novel doesn’t discount the idea that pagan beliefs are valid, but it doesn’t engage with them much, either.
RU: Changing gears a bit, in our last interview, you mentioned at one point cutting down Cosmology from 250,000 words to about 100,00. Did you have to do something similar with The Dissonance?
The cover for The Dissonance.
SH: Actually, it’s the opposite! I worked hard to turn in a draft of The Dissonance at about 100,000 words. When my editor bought the book, she encouraged me to open up the world and story, and we ended up adding almost 50,000 words to the novel. Just like the cuts were appropriate for Cosmology, I think the additions ended up helping The Dissonance. The early drafts of the novel were very fast-paced—a little too fast. We needed to slow down (just a little) and give the characters time to breathe and feel between the action beats. We needed to show them having fun in addition to getting into trouble. The resulting novel is almost 50% longer than Cosmology but I have yet to hear anyone complain about the word count, so I think we got it right!
RU: Before we wrap up, are you working on anything new and spooky right now? And do you have any exciting future plans?
SH: I just turned in my third novel (which I can’t really talk about yet). It’s definitely on the spooky end of the spectrum. I’m also in talks for a fourth book (which I also can’t talk about), and have given my agent outlines for two possible other novels. So I’m going to be quite busy for the next few years! Hopefully I’ll be publishing more than once every half-decade from now on.
RU: Final question: what are some horror stories you’ve read recently that you’ve enjoyed?
SH: I loved Rachel Harrison’s latest novel, Black Sheep, and Clay McCloud Chapman’s What Kind of Mother. I’m really excited for Gabino Iglesias’s House of Bone and Rain. I haven’t been reading as much horror recently (because of the fantasy edge of The Dissonance, that’s been most of my reading), but I need to get back into it!
RU: I hope you do! It’s an amazing genre, after all. And thank you again for joining us once more.
If you’re interested in checking out The Dissonance, it comes out July 23, 2024 and is available for preorder from most retailers. And if you want to follow Shaun Hamill, you can follow him using the links listed below.
I hope you’re as excited as I am to read this book, my Followers of Fear. And until next time, good night and pleasant nightmares!
QUOTED: "I think the coven/secret pact story is a great way to explore human relationships amid the supernatural. You have a group of people who share the ability to partake in the extraordinary, who understand you in a way the rest of the world cannot. ... They can lift you up, but they can also be toxic and dangerous, because you all have power over one another, sharing this secret."
"I think this type of story ... has a universal appeal."
Arlington native Shaun Hamill provides spooks and thrills in ‘The Dissonance’
The author’s second novel is about a scattered coven of dark-art dabblers who reunite to face the damage their craft has wrought.
By Roberto Ontiveros
Special Contributor
7:00 AM on Jul 18, 2024 CDT
Entertainment mug shot of Shaun Hamill.
Arlington native Shaun Hamill's second novel 'The Dissonance' is due out July 23, 2024.(Cedrick May)
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With the forthcoming release of his second novel, The Dissonance, Arlington native Shaun Hamill has solidified himself as a master of literary horror, of works that satisfy the spooky requirements of the weird tale while simultaneously providing the grounded pleasures of literary fiction. This synergy is something the author strives for.
“Although I grew up a genre reader, I had a really great mentor in college who turned me on to literary fiction,” Hamill said in an email interview. “She taught me to pay attention to character and word choice and interiority. For a long time after that, I thought I wanted to be a literary writer, like Lorrie Moore or Ethan Canin.”
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Entering the MFA program at the University of Iowa, Hamill initially wanted to write purely literary fiction, but soon found this path unfulfilling. “The problem was that my regular literary fiction was pretty boring. I was bored writing it, and I think readers would have been bored reading it,” says Hamill. “But when I started incorporating elements of cosmic horror and fantasy, the work seemed to come alive in a way that it hadn’t before. I think this is my sweet spot — fiction that hopefully entertains the typical genre reader, but also wouldn’t embarrass my teachers.”
“I think this type of story ... has a universal appeal. We’re all haunted by the past, in...
“I think this type of story ... has a universal appeal. We’re all haunted by the past, in good and bad ways. We all have to reckon with our past, and make peace with it or be controlled by it,” says author Shaun Hamill of his second novel, 'The Dissonance.'(Pantheon)
The Dissonance, due out July 23, is about a scattered coven of dark-art dabblers who reunite to face the damage their craft has wrought. The novel owes much to popular horror, and Hamill happily admits to influences that include Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Ghostbusters and Stephen King.
“In junior high, a friend passed me his copy of It, and that sort of altered the trajectory of my life,” says Hamill. “That same year, my Dad gave me a copy of Halloween on VHS. It was a weird gift, since I didn’t like horror movies, but eventually my sister bullied me into watching it with her, and I loved it (and remain a huge fan of the franchise to this day, barring a few entries). After those two experiences, I was a horror fan for life.”
Fright films and horror anthologies aside, Hamill concedes that King’s It is the most obvious influence on The Dissonance. Both, Hamill says, contain dual timelines, split between youth and adulthood, and characters who return to a hometown with unfinished business. Both also explore the power of friendship. “I think it’s proof of how deeply that book is rooted in my psyche,” Hamill says of It, “because I wasn’t thinking much about Stephen King during the composition of this novel.”
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Hamill did, however, seek structural inspiration from Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, as well as Neil Gaiman’s collected works. “All three of those writers write about magic as a dark and wild thing, with specific rules and unforeseen consequences.”
Hamill views the trope of the coven, or the covert cabal, as a particularly ripe way to express the complications of intertwining characters.
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“I think the coven/secret pact story is a great way to explore human relationships amid the supernatural. You have a group of people who share the ability to partake in the extraordinary, who understand you in a way the rest of the world cannot,” says Hamill. “They can lift you up, but they can also be toxic and dangerous, because you all have power over one another, sharing this secret. Sometimes the secret brings you together in a good way, sometimes it ruins your life. Sometimes it does both.”
The kind of horror Hamill excels at, stories about a secret group of suffering souls, provides a specific type of catharsis. “I think this type of story — a person or people reckoning with the past (be it their own, or their family’s, or their community’s) — has a universal appeal. We’re all haunted by the past, in good and bad ways. We all have to reckon with our past, and make peace with it or be controlled by it,” says Hamill, adding: “Horror takes those figurative hauntings and makes them more literal. Characters can wrestle with these ghosts in exciting, visceral ways. It’s primal, powerful stuff. It’s just one example of the way horror allows us to face the darkest truths of human existence, but also allows us to walk away at the end, and continue living.”
Related:Horror in the 'burbs: Monsters stalk a North Texas family in Arlington native Shaun Hamill's debut novel
Just as Hamill has seemingly perfected his formula for literary horror, he feels he is already drifting into a new set of aesthetic aims.
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“I feel like I’m already transitioning away from horror with The Dissonance, which I would describe as horror-adjacent dark fantasy. While I love horror, I’ve seen too many other writers who do the horror part better. I think I’m better at ‘dark wonder’ than scaring the pants off my reader, so I think I’m going to explore this fantasy space for a while.”
The Dissonance
By Shaun Hamill
(Pantheon, 496 pages, $29)
To listen to this broadcast, click here:
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BYLINE: MALLORY YU
HOST: MARY LOUISE KELLY
MARY LOUISE KELLY: What if the scariest thing isn't a monster in your life, but the emotional demons in your own family? That is an idea Shaun Hamill writes about in his debut novel. NPR's Mallory Yu treats us to the story.
MALLORY YU: "Cosmology Of Monsters" is about a family, specifically the Turner family, who own and operate a haunted house called The Wandering Dark. Shaun Hamill says, growing up in north Texas, he spent some time at haunted houses, but...
SHAUN HAMILL: I'm a big chicken when it comes to this stuff. I would go with my friends because, you know, it was a Halloween-type thing to do. And I love Halloween. But I would end up with, like, my face buried in somebody's shoulder the entire time.
YU: The novel spans many years during which Noah Turner and his family build The Wandering Dark. It's a maze of pitch black rooms for visitors to walk through, armed only with a single flashlight. As a teenager, Noah feels at home in the haunted house. His job? Playing the house's monster. He jumps out and scares groups of teens who venture through the doors. And he's very good at the role of monster because he's been friends with a supernatural beast since he was little.
HAMILL: It's got orange eyes, big claws, wet, rattling breath. But it's also incredibly warm and soft and has the capacity to be incredibly gentle.
YU: And, Hamill says, Noah Turner is predisposed to liking the creature because he feels like he's the outsider in his own family.
HAMILL: So an outsider is able to sort of make its way into his life by being there for him in a way that his family isn't.
YU: Noah's family actually can't be there for him because they have a lot going on, and their family drama makes up much of the horror in the book.
HAMILL: Because I was really interested in exploring the fact that, you know, life is a slow-motion train wreck. Like, it's just a question of how long it is between disasters in the average life.
YU: Noah's had a lot of loss in his life, more than most. And his older sister Eunice experiences depression and suicidal thoughts. Shaun Hamill says writing about her mental illness from Noah's perspective reflects his own experience. Hamill's father is mentally ill, and he says as a kid in the late '80s, he didn't always understand what was happening.
HAMILL: You know, when you're living with a bipolar person, sometimes you don't know who that person is going to be from day to day, especially when you're little.
YU: So in his novel, Hamill explores the horrors of depression without judging Eunice. He says even though the creature stalks the Turner family throughout the years, it isn't the cause of Eunice's mental illness, and it isn't a metaphor for it, either.
HAMILL: By not making the monster, like, pure metaphor and suddenly fixing everything by, you know, vanquishing this thing, I hope that lends the struggles that the characters face a little bit more reality and lets it be messy and real.
YU: And in the backdrop of this messy human horror, Shaun Hamill creates a cosmic world full of creatures who use humans as food, entertainment, slave labor, which might feel familiar to fans of 1920s horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. Hamill references the writer's stories throughout the novel but says he struggles with Lovecraft's prose and his politics.
HAMILL: He was a racist and, you know, a xenophobe. You know, it's very much there in a lot of his writing.
YU: So he wanted to go beyond Lovecraft's limitations, to question the very idea of monstrousness, human or otherwise.
HAMILL: I feel like everybody has this fear that we all have inside of us that, you know, if people really knew us all the way through, they wouldn't be able to love us because we're bad. We're gross. We're disgusting. You know, and I think it was less about, like, accusing them of monstrousness but more about them struggling with their own fears of being monstrous.
YU: For the time being, Shaun Hamill plans on sticking with horror a little while longer. Being scared, he says, can be useful for us.
HAMILL: It allows us to sort of look directly into the dark, you know, the unknown, the things that we're most anxious or afraid of and then walk away and keep on living. What horror does is I think it gives a valve to sort of look it in the face and then walk away and feel more alive for a while because of it.
YU: "Cosmology Of Monsters" allows readers to look the monstrous in the face. It's the small flashlight to keep you company when you're ready to venture into the dark.
Mallory Yu, NPR News.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions page at www.npr.org for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.
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"'Cosmology Of Monsters' Looks The Monstrous In The Face." All Things Considered, 31 Oct. 2019, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A604773539/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=568c79c0. Accessed 24 Aug. 2024.
Byline: Peyton C.
Since childhood, UTA alumnus Shaun Hamill wanted to be a storyteller.
He would go to the library and check out as many books as he could, devour them all in a week and return for more.
Now, he has toured the country with his debut novel, A Cosmology of Monsters, which even features a blurb from Stephen King, one of Hamill's influences on its cover.
"If John Irving ever wrote a horror novel, it would be something like this. I loved it," stated King, the best-selling author of The Shining, It and countless other modern horror classics.
The book, published Sept. 17, 2019, takes place primarily in the fictional city of Vandergriff, Texas, where a young Noah Turner and his family have been tormented by monsters for generations.
Hamill said Vandergriff gets its name from the Vandergriff family, whose name is on everything from parks to dealerships in Arlington, Texas; his hometown.
"It's Arlington, for all intents and purposes," he said. "I knew anybody living in Arlington would get the joke."
Hamill said choosing to give Arlington a pseudonym gave him enough space to explore the story he wanted to tell without saying anything he didn't mean about his home.
"For example, there are some bad teachers in the high school in [the] book," he said. "I didn't want my high school teachers to think I was actually calling them out."
Hamill started at UTA in 2005 and knew he wanted to major in English.
He had written books and screenplays but nothing he said would see the light of day.
"What I didn't know was that there was a creative writing minor," Hamill said. "Whenever I was first meeting with my adviser and found out about it, I was like, 'Yes! That! I want that!'"
It was through creative writing at UTA that Hamill met his mentor, Laura Kopchick, senior english lecturer and creative writing coordinator for the English Department.
"Without Laura, I don't think any of this really happens the way it did," Hamill said.
Kopchick was the first teacher who took his ambition seriously, he said.
"I've had a lot of great creative writing teachers, but she was the first one who really pushed back on me and was like, 'You can do way better than this,'" Hamill said. "She didn't let me get away with any of my little bad habits as a writer, and I responded to that."
Kopchick said one of her fondest memories of Hamill was when he won first place in short fiction for his story Sell Yourself during the department's Undergraduate Creative Writing Awards in 2008.
"It was clear early on that he was not only a solid writer, but he was willing to put in the work that it takes to be a really great writer," she said.
But things weren't always easy for Hamill.
After graduating with his bachelor's degree in 2008, he applied to several of the top Master of Fine Arts programs in the nation but didn't get accepted anywhere.
"It's very rare that something has just worked out for me the first time, in my career," Hamill said. "It's usually like the next time around."
Kopchick said even though he may have been upset at the rejection, Hamill's determination never faltered, and he continued to write even more.
"He always wrote, but he didn't always get what he wanted or succeed the first time he tried at something," Shaun Hamill's mother, Patrice Hamill, said. "He continued with his creative process even through times when he might have been brokenhearted. He took that emotion, and he used that emotion in his writing."
After graduation, Hamill would volunteer for six years as a reader for Kopchick, who served as general editor for the University of North Texas Press' Katherine Anne Porter Prize.
Each summer, Hamill and Kopchick would read through hundreds of submissions.
"I learned so much about writing just from reading so many of those manuscripts," Hamill said. "You see so much good and bad stuff, you really learn a lot about what keeps your interest as a reader."
Hamill also spent eight years working at Barnes & Noble, which he said was formative in his career as a writer.
"It was definitely an education in itself," he said. "I discovered so many writers on the shelves and just through being around other readers who worked there."
In 2013, he would apply and be accepted into the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.
Iowa has the No. 1 fiction program in the nation, Kopchick said.
Hamill began writing his novel in November 2014, the first sections serving as his thesis at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Patrice Hamill said Shaun has wanted to be a writer his whole life.
"He was always a word-oriented kid," she said. "He was always a story person."
Shaun Hamill said he was never sure how far his hard work would take him, but his love for writing prevented him from feeling like he wasted his time.
"I think it's that ability, even at my lowest, to kind of just keep plugging away at something that has kind of carried me as far as I've gone," he said. "This is just part of what you're doing when you set out to be an artist in a professional capacity."
@peytonnorth
news-editor.shorthorn@uta.edu
Peyton C.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 ULOOP Inc.
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C., Peyton. "UTA alumnus' debut horror novel A Cosmology of Monsters attracts attention from Stephen King." UWIRE Text, 6 Nov. 2019, p. 1. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A604891739/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6832e678. Accessed 24 Aug. 2024.
QUOTED: "an accomplished, macabre horror saga and a promising debut from an imaginative new author."
Hamill, Shaun A COSMOLOGY OF MONSTERS Pantheon (Adult Fiction) $26.95 9, 16 ISBN: 978-1-5247-4767-1
A Texas family that runs a haunted house is haunted by monsters for decades.
This ambitious, grotesque debut novel is a love letter to H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, so it may not be the easiest horror novel to parse or explain. That said, this is a very scary coming-of-age tale that lives in the same space as Stranger Things, Stand By Me, and Stephen King's It (1986). The story is told by Noah Turner, who matter-of-factly recounts the dark and terrible fortunes of his family. He opens with the sweet romance between his parents, Harry and Margaret, who marry and start a comic book store and a haunted house called The Wandering Dark in the small town of Vandergriff, Texas. But terrible things keep happening, including Harry's untimely death, Margaret's bottomless grief, the sudden disappearance of Noah's oldest sister, Sydney, and his sister Eunice's crippling mental illness, not to mention the increasingly frequent disappearances of children from Vandergriff. These events would be frightening by themselves, but Hamill adds another layer by introducing a huge supernatural creature that turns up on Noah's doorstep one night and declares it's his friend while giving him a few magical powers to boot. But things like giant monsters always turn out to be something...else, and in Noah's adolescence, this one does, too. The way Hamill weaves his way between the phantasmagorical elements and Noah's everyday dramas is nimble in a way reminiscent of King, who practically invented this narrative style. Creepy interstitial entries dubbed "The Turner Sequences" flesh out the fates of Noah's family. Eventually, an older Noah meets a group of people calling themselves The Fellowship who can also see these monsters, and Noah's instinct is to run as far away as possible. But darkness unleashed can never really be escaped, and readers are bound to find themselves shuddering at the novel's lurid denouement.
An accomplished, macabre horror saga and a promising debut from an imaginative new author.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Hamill, Shaun: A COSMOLOGY OF MONSTERS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A593064564/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ded21d84. Accessed 24 Aug. 2024.
QUOTED: "a wistful, emotional roller coaster that finds worse than memories waiting at home."
Hamill, Shaun THE DISSONANCE Pantheon (Fiction None) $29.00 7, 23 ISBN: 9780593317259
The surviving members of a powerful teenage coven of magicians reunite in East Texas.
Much like Hamill's debut, A Cosmology of Monsters (2019), this meaty horror novel is a treat for readers whose nostalgia gravitates to the likes of Stand by Me, Twin Peaks, or, most thematically, Stephen King's It. In a similar vein to Chuck Wendig's Miriam Black novels or Stephen Graham Jones' Indian Lake trilogy, Hamill takes some ordinary young people and puts them through the metaphysical wringer to see what's left at the end. In Clegg, Texas, circa the late 1990s, we meet best pals Hal, Athena, and Erin. Their chance encounter with a lost boy in the woods leads them to classmate Peter and his grandfather, Professor Elijah Marsh, an eccentric practitioner of the titular magic who teaches them the ropes. "This power, this energy, this Dissonance?" explains the professor. "It's born from discomfort. From unhappiness. From pain. This world we occupy, and which we hope to control, is a broken, violent place." Grappling with forces they don't really understand leads to a disaster that claims many lives, including one of their own. Unfortunately, our heroes aren't in great shape two decades later. Erin is a barista going nowhere, Athena parlayed her magical talents into running an occult bookstore, and recovering alcoholic Hal is on his way to prison for murder. When an invitation to a 20th-anniversary memorial service arrives, no one wants to revisit the scene of the crime. But after a well-meaning closeted teen named Owen botches a necromancy spell and finds himself playing Renfield to a bad actor, they're forced to reunite not just to confront their past but employ all their collective gifts to save the world. The rules governing Hamill's fantastical universe can be a little hazy, but when the nightmare-fraught tale is filled with monsters, teleportation, time travel, and other supernatural wonders, it's more fun to embrace the chaos.
A wistful, emotional roller coaster that finds worse than memories waiting at home.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Hamill, Shaun: THE DISSONANCE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799332730/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ba63d223. Accessed 24 Aug. 2024.
QUOTED: "Fantasy readers won't want to put this down."
The Dissonance
Shaun Hamill. Pantheon, $29 (496p)
ISBN 978-0-593-31725-9
Hamill (A Cosmology of Monsters) returns with a dark and enchanting account of four friends whose dabbling in the supernatural as teenagers threatens their present happiness. In the 1990s, Hal, Athena, Erin, and Peter discover the Dissonance, which enables them to transform negative emotions into great feats of magic, and form a powerhungry coven. In 2019, now adults and their coven dissolved due to some unstated disaster, the friends must reckon with the consequences of their impulsive adolescent actions. Toggling between the two timelines to tease out what happened between now and then, Hamil weaves a tale of magic, teen angst, the power of enduring friendship, life in small-town America, sexuality, and the use of religion (in this case, Christianity) as a tool of subjugation. As the friends learn more of what they are capable of, they also discover what, and who, is behind the forces of Dissonance, building to a shocking conclusion that will change them forever. Fantasy readers won't want to put this down. Agent: Kent Wolf, Neon Literary. (July)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"The Dissonance." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 18, 6 May 2024, p. 36. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799108207/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=54e89ccf. Accessed 24 Aug. 2024.
QUOTED: "Hamill ... will keep you up all night reading and have you wondering, pondering and checking your windows for weeks, if not longer."
Review
A Cosmology of Monsters
by Shaun Hamill
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A COSMOLOGY OF MONSTERS, Shaun Hamill’s debut novel, deftly and effectively straddles a number of genres. It is certainly a work of horror. Hamill pays tribute to H.P. Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury in separate epigraphs at the beginning of the book, and the influence of each of them is manifested throughout this grim and haunting coming-of-age tale. There are elements of other genres, including mystery, thriller and even romance, that ultimately make it a book with potentially much broader appeal than would appear at first blush from its title.
The novel centers on the Turner family, who are both cursed and blessed (though mostly the former). The story is narrated by Noah, the youngest son, who does not make an appearance until nearly a third of the way through the book. That said, the history of the family is anything but a contemporary boring begat. We are first introduced to Harry and Margaret Turner, who meet, wed and have two daughters, Sydney and Eunice. At a certain point, Harry begins to wander off the deep end, which is partially manifested by his building and managing a Halloween haunted house before such things became a fixture in popular culture.
"[Hamill] will keep you up all night reading and have you wondering, pondering and checking your windows for weeks, if not longer."
Harry and Margaret eventually and inconveniently conceive Noah, who seems weird from the start, but that is only because he sees the world from a view that others do not possess. That vision includes a monster that appears outside his bedroom window each night and ultimately persuades him to let it in. These nocturnal visits continue far beyond childhood and evolve into different forms --- some expected, others not so much.
There are also a couple of quiet and matter-of-fact shockers attached to those visitations, one of which is a series of disappearances over a number of years that include children as well as Noah’s mother and sisters. Noah suspects his monster friend of being behind them, but the truth is much more complicated than that. Things proceed to a twisted ending that is more Grimm than Disney and leaves the reader haunted long after the last page is turned.
Hamill wears some of his influences on his sleeve. There are homages to Lovecraft, of course, but also to Stephen King. With regard to the latter, he gets the subtle message of King’s early work --- that the true horror in the story isn’t the monster but rather the heartbreak and tragedy found in the everyday visible world that strike unpredictably and without warning. In addition, there are nods to Steven Spielberg, Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, as well as passages that bring to mind the artwork of Arthur Rackham.
The bedrock of A COSMOLOGY OF MONSTERS, though, is all Hamill, who will keep you up all night reading and have you wondering, pondering and checking your windows for weeks, if not longer.
Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub on September 27, 2019