Editor's note: This story was produced for the ear and designed to be heard. If you're able, WCMU encourages you to listen to the audio version of this story by clicking the LISTEN button above. This transcript was edited for clarity and length.
Emma Brown: You're listening to WCMU, I'm Emma Brown.
A Midland County writer has just completed his final book in a spooky trilogy—just in time for Halloween.
J.C. Vande Zande, who is also an English professor at Delta College in Bay City, recently sat down with WCMU's Tina Sawyer to talk about the eerie Michigan-based series and his latest book: "Coven of the Worm Moon."
Vande Zande starts the conversation by explaining why he considers his books gothic horror.
J.C. Vande Zande: Literary horror wasn't really a genre, so gothic seemed the most acceptable to me. But it deals a lot with isolating your characters. There's more suspense. Tends to be paranormal activity. Ghosts are kind of important and there are ghosts. One of the characters can even hear ghosts.
Tina Sawyer: Mm-hmm.
VZ: But I also know that in Gothic horror characters are often struggling with addiction. There's addiction in Dracula. And my main character, Isaac, the main character of the first book, is struggling with alcohol addiction, especially after the loss of his wife and he's raising these three children on his own and actually writing "The Dance of Rotten Sticks".
TS: That's the first book.
VZ: Yeah, as I was observing the ways that Isaac wasn't able to be there for his grieving children. I was also observing myself as I've been in recovery for five years and it was the writing of that book that got me to quit.
TS: Well, besides the eerie stuff happening, is there a common theme throughout the trilogy?
VZ: The first two books, "The Dance of Rotten Sticks" and "Blood of the Witness Tree", are definitely Isaac's story. It follows, I would say thematically, it just kind of follows this, the Fletcher family's dealings with the supernatural and their own growth and their own connections to each other and their own discoveries of their powers within.
The books start when the paranormal and the supernatural are re-occurring. So, they are kind of attached unwillingly to the supernatural world, I think the last book, "Coven of the Worm Moon", moves much faster because the characters are no longer asking what's going on here — they kind of know right away 'ok, it's back.'
TS: So, is this the end of the Fletcher family, then? I mean, I know it's end of the trilogy, so, no more Fletcher family?
VZ: Yeah, pretty certain. Although my son's feeding me ideas about what else could happen, what a different book might be.
TS: Oh!
VZ: Or a spin-off book. But I think I'm done with the Fletcher family. But I'm not necessarily done with horror. I got an idea coming together for, uh, Grand Marais up in the U.P. And one of the things I did want to celebrate in the books too, Michigan itself, especially Northern Lower Michigan, is almost like a character, in the same way, like, Stephen King and often setting his novels in Maine. And Maine and its landscape becomes a character itself.
TS: Yeah, I know you are a Michigander, but why just focus on the state of Michigan?
VZ: You know, look at Michigan on a map. It's a wildly different state from any other state, you know, surrounded as it is by the waters, connected by the Mackinac Bridge, call it the Third Coast, right? There's so much water around us. And so, I love writing about Michigan as a setting in my books.
EB: That was author J.C. Vande Zande speaking with WCMU's Tina Sawyer about his latest gothic horror novel: "Coven of the Worm Moon."
