CANR

• The Bright Lands: A Novel Hanover Square Press (Toronto, ON, Canada), 2020
• No Road Home Atria Books (New York, NY), 2024

1. No road home LCCN 2024938828 Type of material Book Personal name Fram, John, author. Main title No road home / John Fram, Loan Le. Published/Produced New York : Atria Books, 2024. Projected pub date 2407 Description pages cm ISBN 9781668031445 (hardcover) 9781668031452 (paperback) (ebook) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 2. The bright lands : a novel LCCN 2022275666 Type of material Book Personal name Fram, John, author. Main title The bright lands : a novel / John Fram. Published/Produced Toronto, Ontario, Canada : Hanover Square Press, [2020] ©2020 Description 473 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9781335836625 (hardcover) 1335836624 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PS3606.R3546 B75 2020 FT MEADE Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• John Fram website - https://www.johnfram.com/

  John Fram is the author of the critically acclaimed supernatural thriller THE BRIGHT LANDS and the queer Gothic chiller NO ROAD HOME, named a Washington Post notable book and a Most Anticipated Summer Read by Cosmopolitan. A native of Texas, he lives in Waco.

• Amazon -

  I'm John, author of the queer supernatural thriller THE BRIGHT LANDS, which was named a best a debut of 2020 by CrimeReads and BookPage, was called a great summer read by Rolling Stone and is that one thriller with the messed-up ending that got your mom's book club canceled.

  My new Gothic chiller, NO ROAD HOME, has been named a notable book by the Washington Post, a most anticipated book by Cosmopolitan and is pulling a way more positive Goodreads score. It's available now wherever books are sold.

  Check out my website where you can sign up for my newsletter, WHY IS THIS SO SCARY, a biweekly deep dive into my favorite works of horror in all its forms. You can also keep up with all my upcoming events and check out previous appearances and podcasts. And speaking of appearances, I love talking to book clubs. If you'd like to talk about NO ROAD HOME, shoot me an email from the contact form on my site.

  A native of Texas, I bounce between Waco and Austin.

• Nightfire - https://tornightfire.com/friday-night-frights-john-fram-the-bright-lands/

  Friday Night Frights: Interviewing John Fram About The Bright Lands
  Posted on July 6, 2020
  by Janelle Janson
  Friday Night Frights: Interviewing John Fram About The Bright Lands - 171
  Photo by Josh Kahen on Unsplash
  Janelle Janson: Thank you so much for your time, John. We’re excited to get the inside scoop on your debut, The Bright Lands. First off, how does it feel getting your amazing debut published during everything else going on in 2020? Are you doing okay?

  John Fram: I’m doing pretty well! I live in New York City, where the horrible grief and paranoia of Covid is slowly passing and, in its place, we’re finding horror and rage, which feels far more productive. I couldn’t be happier to be bringing this particular book into the world at this particular moment.

  JJ: Why is that, exactly?

  JF: Well, on the one hand, The Bright Lands is about the small town of Bentley, Texas, where football is king. Joel Whitley, a gay man who left town ten years earlier under mysterious circumstances, comes home to help his brother, Dylan, the town’s star quarterback, only for Dylan to disappear the next day. As Joel and a cast of misfits search for Dylan, they learn more about the shame and secrets and bigotry their town has harbored for decades, and soon all roads lead to a mysterious place known as “The Bright Lands.” And then everything catches on fire.

  JJ: The Bright Lands is an impressive debut. What’s your writing background? Is this what you’ve always wanted to do?

  JF: This is, truly, all I ever planned to be. I dropped out of school to write, worked crappy jobs, eked by. It’s been the goal from day one, and I’m insanely lucky that it’s worked out so far.

  JJ: How long did it take you to write?

  JF: From start to finish, a little under a year, but that was a year of hard writing. I honestly don’t remember much of my life in the three months before the novel sold. I’m not entirely convinced I was living in the real world as I finished this book.

  JJ: Describe your setup when you write. In front of a window, snacks, coffee? Any fun idiosyncrasies you’d like to share?

  JF: I face a white wall. There’s usually coffee. I write from 6:30 to 9:30 every morning, break for an hour for breakfast, then keep going until 1:30. Coffee or tea is a must, but those drinks also help me know when it’s time to quit for the day: typically by 2:00 my bladder is so overcaffeinated I can’t sit still, so then I take a walk and read in Central Park. It could be worse.

  JJ: Which character was the hardest to write? Do you have a favorite?

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  JF: The protagonist, Joel, was a challenge because I very much did not want to write a stand-in character for myself. Joel, like me, is a Texan boy living in New York, but when I was writing The Bright Lands I was extremely broke, whereas Joel is lavishly successful and has a bit of the arrogance that brings with it, though of course much of his ambition has a painful source. It’s incredibly gratifying to see notes from gay men telling me how much they connect with him.

  My favorite character would probably be either Sheriff’s Deputy Starsha Clark, Joel’s high school girlfriend and now an absolute ass-kicker, or Luke Evers, one of Dylan’s teammates. It would be a spoiler to say why, of course.

  JJ: Is any of the book based on real life characters or situations? Where did the idea come from?

  JF: This is a tricky question and I have to be careful with what I say. While I should stress that no one in this book is modeled even in part on real people I know, some incredibly strange shit goes on in rural Texas. When you hear some of the stories I heard growing up (and, later, when I started going to gay bars in the cities and meeting refugee boys from the countryside, I heard even more), that stuff is going to filter into your work.

  JJ: There are a lot hot button issues at the center of your novel, such as toxic masculinity, the plight of LGBTQIA people, racism, peer pressure, drug abuse, and police malfeasance – was it your intention to bring these issues to light?

  JF: When I started writing this book in 2017 I was so incredibly angry at the way the worst aspects of Texas culture—the chauvinism, the gleeful cruelty, the myopic petulance—had seized our country. I wanted to write a book that felt like Kafka’s brick thrown through a window; I wanted to burn everything down. So yes, I guess you could say it was intentional, but it was also just an effort at looking honestly at the world my generation has inherited.

  JJ: The characters are all realistic and relatable – how do you write such three dimensional characters?

  JF: That’s incredibly kind of you to say. I think the fastest way to write believable characters is to figure out their flaws and their needs and then get them talking to each other. Character is revealed in action and dialogue, and if you take pleasure in getting fake people talking on the page, you’ll soon find those people taking on three dimensions. Especially if they don’t particularly like each other.

  JJ: Are you as obsessed with football as depicted in your book?

  JF: I actually looked down my nose at football when I grew up, mostly because it scared me: all that physical contact and tight Lycra was a lot, okay? I didn’t even know the rules of football until I settled down to write this book, honestly. I sort of soaked myself in football for a long time and, the minute the book sold, I forgot all of it. That said, I do hope to watch a game again once we start emerging from Covid, but that might be the contact and the Lycra.

  JJ: What is the takeaway you would like readers to get when they read your book?

  JF: That you’re allowed to be angry! That things really are as fucked up as they look! That we need to fight! But also there’s beauty and tenderness and love. That those are worth fighting for, too.

  JJ: The Bright Lands is a mix of genres: what is your favorite genre to read?

  JF: I read whatever has good sentences and a suspenseful hook. Lately I’m finding that combination mostly in the mystery genre, but there’s some really exciting horror coming out in the second half of the year that I’m very much looking forward to.

  JJ: Have you always been a reader?

  JF: Always. Once I reached my teens, my family had very little money but we always had books.

  JJ: How did you get the nickname Stephen Queen? Because, I have to say, it’s fantastic.

  JF: This is so far the strangest thing to ever happen to me. Last year I had a big marketing meeting with HarperCollins, my publisher, and there was some talk of positioning me as the “gay Stephen King.” My agent, being a genius, laughingly said, “Stephen Queen!” and it stuck in my head. Then, six months later, I was doing an Instagram Live with @scaredstraightreads, a true king, and (slightly buzzed) I joking referred to myself as “Stephen Queen,” mostly for laughs.

  Someone at Library Journal must have been watching that video because a few weeks later, in their very kind review of the book, they described me as Stephen Queen. So, like, I guess it’s official now?

  JJ: What do you enjoy doing when you’re not writing?

  JF: There used to be these things called cocktail bars, and they were arguably the best thing about New York. There were also these places called gyms, and they were alright, too. Whenever those come back I can’t wait to see them again.

  JJ: What are you working on next?

  JF: I’m finishing up another book but I’m pretty sure my agent would flay me alive if I said another word about it.

  JJ: What is the first thing you want to do in the post-pandemic world?

  JF: Something that’s as consensual as it is irresponsible.

  JJ: What are the three books you always recommend?

  JF: This is a brutal one. The Brimstone Wedding by Barbara Vine is one of the most moving mystery novels I’ve read. Ditto for Walter Mosley’s Down the River Unto the Sea—nobody hits harder than Mosley firing on all cylinders like he does in that book. And lastly it’s a toss-up between Duma Key and Bag of Bones. I think they’re two of King’s half-dozen stone-cold masterpieces and maybe his two most coherent, aesthetically satisfying novels. Bag of Bones taught me the absolute magic of a good supernatural suspense story and remains one of the few books I truly, honest to God, could not put down.

  The Bright Lands is on sale July 7th.

• BookPage - https://www.bookpage.com/interviews/25226-john-fram-mystery-suspense/

  QUOTED: "One morning, over coffee, I realized that after spending years away from Texas, I would still be terrified to return to my hometown, even if something desperate were to arise and my family needed my help. I began to wonder what sort of chaos my queer hero could cause in just such a situation, especially if he came to suspect his hometown was hiding something from him."

  July 2020
  John Fram
  Friday night frights
  Interview by G. Robert Frazier
  Something terrible lurks behind the facade of a small Texas town in John Fram’s thrilling debut.
  Share this Article:

  John Fram, author of The Bright Lands, shares his fresh and frightening take on the small-town thriller and describes what it feels like to be compared to Stephen King.

  What was the inspiration for the story? Where did the idea come from and what compelled you to see it through to the end?
  All my life, I’ve wanted to read a suspense novel that featured a queer hero and dealt frankly with all the pressures and pleasures of the queer experience. One morning, over coffee, I realized that after spending years away from Texas, I would still be terrified to return to my hometown, even if something desperate were to arise and my family needed my help. I began to wonder what sort of chaos my queer hero could cause in just such a situation, especially if he came to suspect his hometown was hiding something from him.

  The last author I interviewed laughed when I asked if she used a whiteboard to organize her plot. So I’ll just ask, what is your writing process and what did you learn that might help you next time?
  The moment I started living in this book’s world, I found so much material—and so many characters—that I went more than a little overboard with the planning and the notes. This might be shocking, but apparently it’s not a great idea to write a rough outline that’s as long as a novel itself. Even after slicing out reams and reams of material, I still submitted a manuscript to my agent that needed to be cut down by another third. It was a humbling experience, but not an entirely unpleasant one. There’s nothing quite so thrilling as throwing 20 pages of decent material in the trash in the hope that five better ones will grow in their place. It takes faith, and maybe a streak of masochism.

  “I think we’re all suckers for nostalgia.”

  What is it about small-town America and football that is so eminently relatable to readers?
  Oh, man, how long do you have? One of the greatest pleasures I take from a novel is the feeling of losing myself in a world where everyone is getting into each other’s secrets, making each other breakfast, robbing each other blind. On a purely technical level, small towns also give us a setting that’s easy for the reader to hold in her head, so to speak.

  As for football, there’s something nice about a conflict in which we know exactly who to root for. Beyond that, I think we’re all suckers for nostalgia. Who doesn’t have some latent scent memory of bleacher steel, thunder, dry grass? We all love to suspend ourselves in the past again. What better way to do that than in a novel where everyone seems like someone you once knew?

  Some early critics have likened the novel to those by Stephen King. Who are your influences, what did you learn from them and if you had to compare your writing to someone’s, who would that be?
  The comparisons to Mr. King are more than mildly daunting. I think he casts a long shadow over all of us, though I didn’t actually have the courage to read him until I was in my late teens (when he, of course, rocked my world). When I was younger, my two idols were the British crime wizard Ruth Rendell and the almighty Alice Munro, who can teach us more about time and irony than anyone in English. Also, what little gay boy in the sticks doesn’t identify with Munro’s moody country girls, all eager to discard their childhoods?

  A few years ago, I discovered Kate Atkinson and found, in her wry English observations, the courage to write in the voice my family used to tell stories at the table. Atkinson treats her characters in a way that’s imminently Texan: She regards them with compassion, brutal honesty and a bleak, gut-busting humor. So, these days, if I had to be anybody, I’d like to be the gay son that she and Stephen King never had.

  There’s an obvious theme in the book about the pressures and expectations others put on a person, especially a star athlete like Dylan. His brother, Joel, is a gay man and faces his own prejudices. What compelled you to write about those pressures, and what lessons do you hope readers might take away from this novel?
  I think subconsciously I understood that these two pressures aren’t all that different, though it took me until well into the writing process to articulate it. I’m not saying that the star athlete suffers as badly as the closeted kid next door, but both can suffer incredible pain if they fail to fulfill the need their hometown has for them. Once I had that epiphany, I realized I could expand the novel to encompass all manner of “other” people who are held to impossible standards or pushed out by society: women, people of color, the poor. I wanted to make the reader feel, if only for a few pages, how terrifying it is to be different in a place that doesn’t accept you. Ideally, that reader would feel empowered to kick down a few walls wherever they live. Otherwise, they’ll at least know why the weirdos like us won’t go away without a fight.

  All of the characters depicted in The Bright Lands are richly layered and authentic. Did you draw from people you know in real life to help flesh out those characters, or are they more of an amalgamation of people you’ve met?
  Like a lot of authors, I’ve always felt that I can turn a little invisible when I’m around people I want to know more about. Ever since I was little, I’ve blended into the edges of rooms and grocery lanes to eavesdrop on housewives, employees and schoolmates and gather up every odd turn of phrase or token of their inner life they might drop. It’s a valuable skill. After a few years, I realized I’d seen enough people to start stitching together a few of my own.

  How much of yourself do you see in your characters? Did any of them reveal any truths about you that you hadn’t thought about until you saw it on the written page?
  There’s a line about midway through the book that came to me only a few weeks before the book went out on submission. To paraphrase myself, it says that shame and fear, while one can lead to the other, can never be felt at the same time. I had worked a long, long time on the scene where that line appears, and when the words finally came together, I realized that it was maybe the only thing I’d learned in the first 25 years of my life.

  ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Bright Lands.

  For the first 200 pages, your book reads like a crime novel. We have a disappearance followed by the discovery of a body. But the further you get, the supernatural aspects become more prevalent. How difficult was it to balance those genres?
  In its original form, this book was . . . I guess you’d say secular: no ghosts, no whispering voices, no shared nightmares. But I saw, in looking over that draft, that the text was so filled with strange, occult imagery—a deep hole, impossibly dark, kept creeping into all my metaphors—that I just sort of gave myself over to it during the rewrites. Introducing elements of the supernatural into a book with a carefully constructed mystery at its heart posed some incredibly satisfying technical challenges (to make sure the reader never felt cheated or done over) while also allowing me to heighten the drama for all of my characters. Yes, there are some strange powers at work in Bentley, but they’re simply enabling our culprits’ bad behavior. The darkness, in short, is already there inside them.

  What do you hope a novel like The Bright Lands can do for readers in a time when the COVID-19 pandemic is gripping the world?
  This might sound ridiculous, but I’ve found horror novels and thrillers to be weirdly homeopathic during this massive existential threat. I think this panic is driving home to the entire (straight, white) population something that queers and people of color and women have been saying for years: The world isn’t safe, and the people in charge are not looking out for you. Where can we find a better mirror to that reality than in a brutal piece of suspense?

  What’s next for you?
  If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to keep telling stories like The Bright Lands: character-driven supernatural thrillers whose monsters allow us to examine the sorts of scary truths we’d rather not acknowledge.

• Fresh Fiction - https://blog.freshfiction.com/john-fram-a-gothic-estate-murder-and-a-protective-father/

  QUOTED: "For whatever reason, I always seem to come back to my home state of Texas. There’s just so much here to draw from: dramatic weather, massive landscapes and very weird families."

  John Fram | A Gothic estate, murder, and a protective father
  July 24, 2024
  1–What is the title of your latest release?

  NO ROAD HOME

  2–What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?

  A young father must protect his queer son from a TV preacher’s demented family when a murder strikes at their crumbling Gothic estate.

  3–How did you decide where your book was going to take place?

  For whatever reason, I always seem to come back to my home state of Texas. There’s just so much here to draw from: dramatic weather, massive landscapes and very weird families.

  4–Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life?

  Absolutely. Toby is probably the toughest guy I’d ever know.

  5–What are three words that describe your protagonist?

  Loving, gentle and ruthless.

  6–What’s something you learned while writing this book?

  The Bible is absolutely loaded with references to the Zodiac and other mystical traditions.

  7–Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?

  I always start the day by reading over what I did yesterday and end by reading over the day’s work. It’s a pretty constant process of rewriting.

  8–What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?

  Expensive Cheddar is pretty amazing.

  9–Describe your writing space/office!

  I am very lucky to have two spaces in my house where I can write. My guest room has a small desk and no devices: I go there to write my first drafts in longhand. My main office has a very large desk with a big monitor and a laptop stand where I type my drafts and do my other revision.

  10–Who is an author you admire?

  God, I was really bummed when I never got the chance to meet Hilary Mantel.

  11–Is there a book that changed your life?

  Life After Life by Kate Atkinson arguably re-instilled my love of reading after a very long draught.

  12–Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published)/Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.

  I was at my old day job in a pharmacy helping a woman figure out her insurance copay when my agent called, and I wasn’t able to answer. She texted me a number and said: Call Me Back ASAP. That number was good enough I no longer have that job.

  13–What’s your favorite genre to read?

  I really love anything suspenseful, and I also admire the hell out of historians who can make long works of history gripping.

  14–What’s your favorite movie?

  Either Mad Max: Fury Road or Mulholland Dr. depending on the day.

  15–What is your favorite season?

  Spring or fall, as long as the allergens aren’t too ruthless.

  16–How do you like to celebrate your birthday?

  Hand to God, I always forget it.

  17–What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?

  I know it’s probably pretty obvious, but I’m listening to the audiobook of Stephen King’s new collection and I’m enjoying it immensely.

  18–What’s your favorite type of cuisine?

  Whatever I can cook quickly without dirtying too many pans.

  19–What do you do when you have free time?

  I really enjoy playing video games, hitting the gym, or going to a good rave if I can.

  20–What can readers expect from you next?

  Another claustrophobic mystery with some supernatural elements and also maybe the end of the world.

QUOTED: "The Bright Lands ... makes for an insanely engaging and entertaining read. Fram truly delves into the many fears and feelings that one growing up in a town like Bentley may have felt or are still feeling today. The books will leave readers on the edge of their seats because just when one mystery is solved, three more take its place, as a good mystery should do."

I will be the first to admit that I am not much of a reader. It is not that I do not like to read -- my ideal day is being curled up with a good book. The problem is I never have time to sit down and truly give a book my full attention. So, it should be a clear indication of its quality that "The Bright Lands" was not only a book that kept my attention throughout, but one that I finished in just a few days: I simply could not put it down.

Joel Whitley is a gay man seemingly living his best life in New York City with a successful career and social life. However, there has always been a lingering sense of pain in the back of his mind, and that pain is the trauma he endured in his small hometown of Bentley, Texas. Joel told himself he would never go back, but upon receiving some cryptic texts from his younger brother Dylan, he is on the first plane there. Things seem unchanged at first -- until Dylan goes missing a day later. All Joel knows is that Dylan's disappearance is far more rooted in the town's many secrets than he initially realized, and all of them center around a strange place known as The Bright Lands.

What truly kept me invested throughout this 470-page mystery is the excellent writing by author John Fram. For his debut novel, Fram perfectly establishes the feeling and setting of a rural community. While the Texas setting plays a part in the overall story, Fram describes the town in a way that many growing up in similar areas can relate to. The word choice used to describe each character and location perfectly paints a picture of the scene, one that I could so vividly see in my head throughout.

When it comes to mysteries, I am usually quite picky, mainly due to few mystery stories genuinely surprising me. However, "The Bright Lands" creates a truly compelling and layered mystery that left me guessing at every turn. Similar to the characters within the story, every time I thought I had the answer I was looking for, another bombshell dropped and changed everything I thought I knew before. The format also allows for the reveals to flow in such a unique way. Instead of having chapters, the story is split up into the different perspectives of the characters, with the passing of another day essentially serving as the end of the "chapter." Since each character was learning pieces of information before others did, it made me crave reading what comes next waiting to learn something new along with the characters.

I will warn many readers now that this novel tackles some very heavy topics and, toward the latter half of the novel, spares few details on some of these acts. However, the themes of which Fram chooses to explore are very much in service of the overall message of the story as a whole.

The idolization of high school athletes was repeated throughout the story as these being "the best years of our lives." As a member of the LGBTQ+ community myself, the depiction of homophobia is horrifying for simply how real it is. The book truly captures the fear of having to hide who you are because if the news were to break, there is a chance everyone around you would suddenly turn against you.

If I had to file one complaint this overall solid read, it would have to be the inclusion of a supernatural element. Without giving too much away, the story hints throughout that there is a darker and more powerful presence looming beneath the town. With many characters suffering from similar nightmares and visions of mysterious beings, I was hoping that perhaps Fram would pull through and reveal there was nothing supernatural at all. Unfortunately, the story toward the end leads full on into the supernatural element. I cannot say that it was bad, as it did create some truly creepy imagery in my head -- a rarity for written media in general -- but the story worked perfectly well without this supernatural element, and if removed from the story I feel little would be affected.

Despite this unnecessary addition, "The Bright Lands" still makes for an insanely engaging and entertaining read. Fram truly delves into the many fears and feelings that one growing up in a town like Bentley may have felt or are still feeling today. The books will leave readers on the edge of their seats because just when one mystery is solved, three more take its place, as a good mystery should do. From the vivid imagery to the vast array of memorable characters, to its hauntingly relevant and poignant themes and ideas, "The Bright Lands" is a story I cannot recommend enough.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 ULOOP Inc.
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Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Beam, Adam. "'The Bright Lands' is the horror of small-town America." UWIRE Text, 22 Nov. 2022, p. 1. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A727731336/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=755bc109. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024.

QUOTED: "When I started writing The Bright Lands, I was sick of the way some sides of queer culture behave as if breaking free of the closet is the panacea to all woes; how ludicrously privileged do you have to be to believe that? Both the heroes and the villains in this book keep secrets, often for good reason. The deck is stacked against most of us, to greater or lesser degrees, and sometimes you have to do things you aren't proud of just to keep your chips on the table."

NTRODUCED BY

Sarah Gailey

author of seven books, most recently When We Were Magic, published by Simon Pulse in March.

John Fram's debut novel, The Bright Lands, is a gripping exploration of queerness, masculinity, monstrosity, and small-town football. This book is True Detective meets Friday Night Lights but even darker. No, darker than that. The Bright Lands is a deft combination of genres--suspense, horror, coming-of-age--that shines a light on the monsters that spread when secrets are hidden for so long they take on a life of their own. I've never read anything like it. I had the immense pleasure of reading an early copy of The Bright Lands and the even bigger privilege of discussing it with Fram. A transplant from Waco, Texas, to Manhattan, Fram brings a uniquely tender perspective to a story only he could tell.

What sent you down the road that led to your writing this particular book?

This book grew out of two desires that, from some angles, might seem contradictory. The first was the desire to see a queer hero in a crime story. Who could be a better amateur detective than a gay man, someone who has trained himself from childhood to sniff out other people's desires, who survives on little signals, codes, secrets? The fact that I had never read a story with a queer hero in the genre made the idea of writing one feel both daunting and incredibly exciting. I knew the second I started, however, that I was on the right path: By centering a narrative around a queer man, I was able to bring into focus a larger cast of misfits, weirdos, and Others, all of whom have the chance to be heroes.

The second desire came out of a simple itch to write about Texas, a state that has complicated opinions of queer heroism, to put it mildly. While I'd left Texas at twenty-five, I never felt like I'd left it. I still dreamed about it, even missed living there more days than not, but I'd like to think I was never too nostalgic about my old home. As kind as the people there can be, as pleasant and progressive as the cities are, if you're not a white, straight Christian, you don't have to go very far to find a town that's scared to death of you and all that you represent. You can't ask for a better wellspring of Gothic dread.

An editor once told me that the way to write a truly great book is to scare yourself while you're writing it. Did anything about this book scare you? How did you handle that fear to get to the place you are now?

I think that most horror is actually rooted in very simple truths. H. P. Lovecraft has been deservedly eviscerated by modern critics as a racist and all-around piece of garbage, but he was right that we are tiny creatures adrift in a vast, unfeeling universe. Stephen King has built a career around the fact that we often can't protect children from a violent world. Edgar Allan Poe understood that our bodies and our minds will fail us, often when we need them the most.

The horror at the root of The Bright Lands is a simple one: Your home is not safe. If you're queer, a person of color, a woman, you will always be the first person thrown overboard when a storm hits the ship. You will always be the first subject of suspicion when a corpse turns up in a creek. It took me about four months of hard writing to articulate this, but the moment I realized how deeply this simple fact scared me, it turbocharged the rest of the book. It gave my heroes something to fight against, even if some of them, I knew, would ultimately lose.

The Bright Lands is in many ways a horror story about the way our conception of and adherence to a performance of masculinity can become a poison, for a person and for a community. How has your relationship to masculinity shifted over the course of your life?

You know what's so gross? I realized the other day that the practice I'd had in hiding who I was--in modulating the way I walk and dress and talk--still has its uses. Even in Manhattan, strangers treat me with more courtesy when I keep my hands in my pockets, deepen my voice, and pull on the idea of "a man." While I seldom feel like it's keeping me safe from physical harm the way such a performance used to, I also remember the years as a kid when I'd forgotten it was a performance at all.

How did it shift while you were writing this book?

Oh, writing this book just made me angrier and angrier. I realized that, after a childhood around Nice American People, I'd come to believe that any pain I endured as an obviously queer man was both deserved and undeserving of concern. Women are implicitly taught this, as are people of color, as is any other Other. Crime fiction is a weirdly conservative genre, one devoted to the purging of a few small undesirable elements from society--a murderer, an arsonist, a thief--so that everyone can return to a safe and secure status quo. The fact is that status quo--a culture of silence, of shame, of normalcy at all costs--is incredibly toxic. I wanted to write a book whose revelations were so shocking they would permanently destroy such a status quo. I wanted to take no prisoners.

This is a dark book that doesn't shy away from examining how a culture of secrecy hurts queer people and can lead us to hurt one another. How do you hope this project lands with queer readers?

I feel most qualified in talking about other queer, cisgender men, but maybe this answer will apply to others. I sometimes think it's a testament to our power that queer men are able to function at all. We get the worst from both worlds. As men, we're raised from birth with the understanding that this planet is made for us, while as queer people we're taught early on that there's something wrong with us, that nowhere is made for us. This can lead to entitled, toxic, unhealthy behavior that is just tacitly accepted in queer society. I remember how, when I first started going to gay clubs in my early twenties, I would fear for days that something was wrong with my hair, my clothes, my face, if I wasn't groped by an older man while I waited for a drink at the bar. It was as if sexual harassment were the best yardstick to my own value--a man wants me, so I must be worth something. If just one young queer person can read The Bright Lands and gain the wherewithal to shut down that sort of behavior in their own life, I'll be happy.

Secrecy is a hallmark of many stories of queer survival--but secrecy can also serve as an atmosphere that welcomes predatory behavior, because no one can speak up about what's happening to them. This is especially true when the predators are the only ones who are defining the limits of normalcy. The Bright Lands engages with this subject in such a careful way that makes space for all the nuances of villainy. Why was that important to you?

Primarily I think I did this because there's nothing more boring in art than a lazily drawn bigot. Nobody comes out of the womb hating queer people or women or people of color, and there's a regrettable tendency among well-meaning authors to depict villainous people with toxic opinions-these villains typically come from rural America--as nothing more than "evil." This might earn you a salutary review in a coastal magazine, but readers from the rest of the country will see right through it; you clearly aren't engaging with the people they meet every day on the trip to the grocery store. That reader's pharmacist, hopefully, isn't Jeffrey Dahmer, but his voting record is arguably far more harmful to far more people. Surely there's something more frightening in the fact that the villains in The Bright Lands are simply products of the world in which we all live. We can work to understand a person's awful behavior without excusing it. If we don't, how will we ever learn how to stop future generations from repeating it?

The cost of secrecy is a major theme in The Bright Lands. What made you want to explore that theme?

If you want to survive this life, you have to figure out how to keep a secret without letting the secret keep you. Keeping the truth about my sexuality concealed arguably kept me alive in Texas, or at least kept me from enduring even more trauma than I did. When I started writing The Bright Lands, I was sick of the way some sides of queer culture behave as if breaking free of the closet is the panacea to all woes; how ludicrously privileged do you have to be to believe that? Both the heroes and the villains in this book keep secrets, often for good reason. The deck is stacked against most of us, to greater or lesser degrees, and sometimes you have to do things you aren't proud of just to keep your chips on the table. Does that excuse the awful behavior that some of my characters perform? No. But I felt like it was time to give a more honest account of the challenges we're up against and the limited tools most of us have to face them.

Let's talk about queer joy and queer tragedy. How do you bring those concepts into your work? How do you hope they show up most in The Bright Lands?

It's funny--even after all that I just said about the need for secrets and the persistence of trauma, I knew that I didn't want to write a queer tragedy. We have enough of those already, and frankly most of them have come to feel less like tragedy and more like bourgeois self-pity. I don't have time for that. We have a tyrant to unseat and a patriarchy to shatter.

I'm fortunate that my home state has a mordant sense of humor, and so once I figured out my characters' voices it was a pleasure to realize how much comedy I could slip into a story so dark. Moreover--and it's difficult to go into details without spoiling too much--I found that by periodically tapping the brakes in my narrative, I could create little bubbles of space where my characters could find pleasure, satisfaction, success. Our little lives might be small, but they have meaning, and they have joy. If I'm proud of one thing in this book, it is how many people have written to tell me it made them laugh or cheer or swoon, even as it scared the hell out of them.

I worry I haven't said enough about the terrifying monster that lurks beneath the surface of this story. It is a gorgeous mirror to the monstrosity of several of the characters. What made you choose to include a monster in this book that might or might not be real?

I've wondered that myself! Growing up, my two biggest influences were Final Fantasy video games and the Bible, neither of which are known for understated conflict or a fear of metaphor. I think there's something so powerful in the potential of the supernatural. It's an elegant way for the writer to organize themes and allows the darkness at the heart of a story to bend the rest of the book, so to speak. As to whether there's an actual monster in Bentley, however, I'll leave it to readers to discover that for themselves.

Agent: Ross Harris

Editor: Peter Joseph

Publicist: Roxanne Jones

Cover designer: Sean Kapitain

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 Poets & Writers, Inc.
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"John Fram: whose debut novel, The Bright Lands, will be published in July by Hanover Square Press." Poets & Writers Magazine, vol. 48, no. 4, July-Aug. 2020, pp. 48+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A626746845/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=eb116eab. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024.

QUOTED: "This offers as many weekend frights as celebratory lights."

The Bright Lands

John Fram. Hanover Square, $27.99 (480p)

ISBN 978-1-335-83662-5

Fram's ambitious debut takes a critical, terrifying look at a small town in Texas, where high school football reigns supreme and puts a double bind on those who are desperate to get out. Former high school quarterback Joel Whitley, now almost 30, returns home to Bentley, Tex., from Manhattan after a decade, distressed by a series of desperate text messages from his younger brother, Dylan, a star high school quarterback himself who has become disenchanted with football. Joel, openly gay, has embraced a new life as a data analyst, but when he's back in the stadium watching Dylan play, old feelings of angst return after someone makes a homophobic remark about a black male cheerleader. Dylan soon disappears, which may be related to an out-of-town s&m club and a supernatural creature that occasionally causes underground rumblings. Joel teams up with a former classmate turned sherrif's deputy to search for Dylan, and they begin to uncover the town's dark secrets. While Fram stacks the deck with a few too many secondary characters (old loves, family ties) and subplots (drugs, murders, nefarious schemers), his attempt to connect Bentley's long-buried secrets with generation-repeating bullying and homophobia is commendable. This offers as many weekend frights as celebratory lights. (July)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"The Bright Lands." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 20, 18 May 2020, pp. 34+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A625410798/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=036feba9. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024.

QUOTED: "I grew up in a church not quite as demented as the one in the novel, but pretty rough. So much of the American evangelical movement depends on this feeling that they're being persecuted. ... I was fascinated with the real people inside."

What inspired this story?

I grew up in a church not quite as demented as the one in the novel, but pretty rough. So much of the American evangelical movement depends on this feeling that they're being persecuted--it's how they drive growth and money. I was fascinated with the real people inside. What motivates them to say this incredibly bigoted stuff and convince a bunch of other people to believe it?

When building a story full of secrets that characters know but readers don't, what makes for an effective reveal?

My editor pointed out that a good secret has an arc of its own. It has to be teased, developed, and then revealed. There's this principle in video game design where you never allow the gamer to encounter the key before they see the lock. When new writers are figuring out how to write suspense fiction, they sometimes show the key before the lock. You have to have the patience and the discipline to keep them apart from one another, without stretching it so far that the reader has forgotten what the key was even meant to unlock.

"Memory palaces" get a lot of airtime in your novel. Can you explain the concept?

The memory palace goes back to the ancient Greeks. It's a very old concept of how to retain memories by constructing a building in your head and putting the memories in specific spots. I was interested in the way that I could give two characters in the book two different forms of a memory palace. But also, a gothic novel needs an absurdly huge, crumbling house. Every novelist loves a metaphor that can be both internal and external. By the end of the book, that interplay was really interesting, because as the house degrades, the memory palace degrades with it.

Do you see No Road Home as queer literature?

I had a lot of resistance to the term "queer literature." It triggered a lot of internal work: "Is this internalized homophobia? Is this not wanting to be associated with the other gays?" But I really don't think that's it. I want this book to speak to a lot of people who might feel excluded by that label. I want to talk to people like my mom--smart women in the regular American world who want a good book, but when they see the term "queer literature," it seems like it's on a shelf not meant for them. And it is meant for them. What fascinates me is how can we show that homophobia and racism and classism, these huge prejudices driving this book, don't just affect the persecuted people, they also damage the people who perpetuate them? It's a poison that goes everywhere.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Bloom, Vicki Borah. "PW TALKS WITH JOHN FRAM A Pervasive Poison: In Fram's thriller No Road Home (Atria, July; reviewed on p. 39), a father tries to protect his queer son from his evangelical in-laws." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 21, 27 May 2024, p. 40. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799270236/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6af7907a. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024.

QUOTED: "Exquisitely rendered, realistically damaged characters lend credence to myriad mad twists, propelling the tale from portentous start to pulse-pounding finish."

Fram, John NO ROAD HOME Atria (Fiction None) $29.99 7, 23 ISBN: 9781668031445

The sins of a televangelist and his kin come home to roost.

When Toby Tucker and his sister were kids, their guardian, Uncle Ezra, made them spend four hours on the couch every Sunday watching The Prophecy Hour, a "glitzy, exuberant, overwhelming televangelism program" hosted by "America's prophet," fire-and-brimstone preacher Jerome Jeremiah Wright. Now, two-plus decades and a whirlwind courtship later, Toby is married to Jerome's granddaughter Alyssa, and the couple are traveling to Hebron, Texas, with Toby's 7-year-old son, Luca, to celebrate Alyssa's 30th birthday at the Wright's compound. Toby has never put any stock in Jerome's predictions, but he is nevertheless unnerved to learn while en route that the man's most recent broadcast ended with three grim warnings seemingly intended for Toby and Luca. Toby's anxiety skyrockets when, just hours after they arrive, someone kills Jerome; a surprise storm of biblical proportions takes out the phone, internet, and access roads; and Luca starts seeing and conversing with an apparition he calls Mister Suit. Toby soon realizes the remaining Wrights are contriving to pin Jerome's murder on him. Worse, once Toby is sidelined, Alyssa and her brother Richard have plans for long-haired, sparkle-loving Luca that start with a stay at a church-run wilderness camp that destroys sweet, sensitive boys like him. The situation seems dire, but the Wright clan has no shortage of terrible secrets, and Toby won't go down without a fight. By turns searing, soapy, and spine-tingling, Fram's latest pays homage to Southern Gothic icons Michael McDowell and V.C. Andrews while also tipping its cap to modern horror great Jordan Peele. Though there's a particular contrivance on which the plot leans a bit too heavily, that's a minor quibble; exquisitely rendered, realistically damaged characters lend credence to myriad mad twists, propelling the tale from portentous start to pulse-pounding finish.

Trenchant, terrifying fun.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Fram, John: NO ROAD HOME." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799332742/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d67c7316. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024.

QUOTED: "Fram lends authenticity to the behaviors and motivations of his sprawling cast, keeping readers glued to the page."

No Road Home

John Fram. Atria, $28.99 (416p) ISBN 978-1-6680-3144-5

Fram (The Bright Lands) touches on generational curses, anti-queer bigotry, and religious trauma in this tense, supernaturally tinged locked-room thriller. By the time Alyssa Wright brings her new husband, Toby, and his feminine-presenting seven-year-old son, Luca, to her family's isolated Texas compound, the mood is already jittery. Alyssa's televangelist grandfather, Jerome, has been making increasingly dire end-of-days predictions, and someone has been splattering cryptic threats in vivid red paint across the main house's bedroom doors. When Jerome is discovered stabbed on the roof just as a powerful storm cuts off communication with the outside world, Alyssa's relatives turn their suspicions toward Toby. As he struggles to prove his innocence, and to keep Luca out of whatever nefarious plan the Wrights seem to be hatching for him, long-repressed memories of Toby's late sister start to surface. Meanwhile, Luca claims to see a ghost stalking the halls. Fram lends authenticity to the behaviors and motivations of his sprawling cast, keeping readers glued to the page as the complex plot unfurls--though certain late-stage reveals don't feel entirely fair. Still, this ambitious swing for the fences connects more often than it misses. Agent: Melissa Danaczko, Stuart Krichevsky Literary. (July)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
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MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"No Road Home." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 21, 27 May 2024, pp. 39+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799270235/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=abcc9377. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024.

Beam, Adam. "'The Bright Lands' is the horror of small-town America." UWIRE Text, 22 Nov. 2022, p. 1. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A727731336/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=755bc109. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024. "John Fram: whose debut novel, The Bright Lands, will be published in July by Hanover Square Press." Poets & Writers Magazine, vol. 48, no. 4, July-Aug. 2020, pp. 48+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A626746845/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=eb116eab. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024. "The Bright Lands." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 20, 18 May 2020, pp. 34+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A625410798/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=036feba9. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024. Bloom, Vicki Borah. "PW TALKS WITH JOHN FRAM A Pervasive Poison: In Fram's thriller No Road Home (Atria, July; reviewed on p. 39), a father tries to protect his queer son from his evangelical in-laws." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 21, 27 May 2024, p. 40. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799270236/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6af7907a. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024. "Fram, John: NO ROAD HOME." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799332742/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d67c7316. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024. "No Road Home." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 21, 27 May 2024, pp. 39+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A799270235/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=abcc9377. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024.

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