Brian McGreevy, author of Hemlock Grove, discusses his novel, the possibility of future installments, and the television adaptation.

A young girl is murdered in the most horrific way, and no one is quite sure if the monster behind the act is man or beast. Peter and Roman are from different worlds entirely — one a gypsy, the other heir to a fortune. Setting their differences aside, or perhaps teaming up in spite of them, they join together to solve the murder, hoping to clear Peter’s name in the process. The novel is, without a doubt, a work of terrific horror. Read our review of Hemlock Grove.

Interview with Brian McGreevy

Tell us five interesting facts about yourself.

– My mother is a Presbyterian minister and I largely grew up in the culture of the church.
– I dropped out of high school in the ninth grade.
– I was once, briefly, engulfed in flames (it is a not-so-small miracle we all survive adolescence).
– As a teenager in the rust belt when everyone else was riding in loops around the Wal-Mart parking lot blasting hip-hop to show off their systems I would play the Aladdin soundtrack (see previous parenthetical).
– My formal title at the production company of which I’m a partner is “El Tigre.”

Have you always been interested in horror? Which literary works influenced you the most in terms of your writing?

Horror has always held an aesthetic fascination over me, and certainly when I was younger I read it as compulsively as I suppose kids today read Harry Potter — which wouldn’t necessarily have had the tits and blood quotient I required to hold my attention. (I’ve actually written on this subject for Salon.) Books like, for instance, The Stand or Congo, which had both horrific and speculative qualities, certainly left their imprint at the impressionable age I was reading them. As I got older more conventionally “literary” (makes jerk off motion) stuff in the Gothic canon ended up in the hopper: Waterland, Winesburg, Ohio, One Hundred Years of Solitude (which I absolutely classify as a Gothic novel), and the most immediate influence on Hemlock Grove, Angela Carter’s unsurpassable collection The Bloody Chamber. It is also impossible to overstate the impact of Greek myth on my work both in terms of theme and image, especially Theseus and the minotaur, which is clearly the awesomest.

Hemlock Grove is an incredibly visual book. Is this something you always hoped would be adapted into a television show or movie?

Yeah, probably. But I have a “one step at a time” mentality when it comes to this stuff, so it wasn’t anything I thought about in a concrete way until the book was done.

What about developing this into a show appealed to you, rather than turning it into a movie?

There was a version of each that could have made sense to me. But I wanted teenagers fucking and getting horribly mutilated while knowing the property would require a certain budget level, and movie studios haven’t had the balls for that in years.

Season 1 of Hemlock Grove is one of the best adaptations of a novel I’ve ever seen. How important was it that the show stick to the source material as closely as possible?

It was only ever a jumping off point. The book is a self-contained aesthetic artifact; adaptation has no obligation whatsoever to remain faithful to the source except when it makes the most narrative sense for the medium. It’s form follows function (and budget).

Can we expect any future Hemlock Grove novels, or will you be concentrating on the show for now?

There are no plans for future Hemlock Grove novels, and the show is currently being run by Chic Eglee. Having spent the better part of a decade on this project in one form or another I currently feel like I’ve more or less had my say on the matter; it just so happens others seem to have more to say and I consider that a blessing.

How has writing for the show been different from writing your novel? Have there been any similarities?

One is building a ship in a bottle, the other is building a ship. They’re both hard, but in completely separate ways. A part of me certainly enjoys the otherworldly solitude of writing prose — one of the main determinants of whether or not one is constitutionally disposed to being a novelist is how much one enjoys being alone in a room. But I’m also a bit of an instigator by nature, so the crazy shit that happens when you have a bunch of weird randos (and everyone in the entertainment industry is weird — everyone) in a hadron collider is hard to resist. Basically if you can make what’s happening on-camera one tenth as interesting as what’s happening behind it you’re a genius. It’s all stories in the end. Your life is a story.

Do you have any upcoming projects you can tease?

I’m working on a new book, a love story, or at least what passes for one in my brain. So there will be a comparable amount of bloodletting, but mainly emotional.

About Brian McGreevy

Brian McGreevy is the author of Hemlock Grove, as well as creator of the Netflix series of the same name. Born in the Pittsburgh area, he dropped out of high school in the ninth grade, citing “creative differences.” A former James Michener Fellow at the University of Texas, he is a founding partner of the production company El Jefe.