Jonathan Maberry Interview: Ghosts of the Void

Ghosts of the Void | Jonathan Maberry | Blackstone Publishing

Ghosts of the Void by Jonathan Maberry brings the NecroTek trilogy to a close, and in this Jonathan Maberry interview he tells us how he got there. The series began on a San Diego beach, with grey whales passing on the horizon. It ends 56,000 light years from home, with the dead pilots of Asphodel Station facing the Mi-Go. Maberry edits Weird Tales, the magazine that gave Lovecraft his home, and he treats the Mythos as a shared folklore to build on.

He talks about soul-death, a madman’s dreams, the real science behind the monsters, and the advice Stephen King gave him about letting characters stroll from book to book. If you want a verdict first, my Ghosts of the Void review has one, and there are plenty more horror interviews where this came from. But start here, because near the end he says plainly why hope sits at the heart of everything he writes.

The Jonathan Maberry Interview: Ghost Pilots, the Mi-Go and the Price of Hope

GINGER NUTS: The idea for NecroTek came to you on a San Diego beach, watching grey whales migrate. The trilogy turns out to be full of migrants: the Old Ones who fled to Earth to escape something worse, and twelve thousand people thrown 56,000 light years from home. Was that image of vast creatures crossing impossible distances doing more work in your head than a backdrop?

JONATHAN: Absolutely. Whales sing songs, have common languages with their species but also smaller dialects within pods. As they travel, they sing their songs and sometimes learn new songs or new “story” elements from other whales. Birds do this –crows, for example. And other animals. Evolution isn’t just about species but about the social consciousness of any community, group, or race. We can only imagine what stories they tell, or how their shared knowledge changes through exposure.

There are also species that travel great distances to spawn or mate, or to follow growth cycles on land or sea. We now see species changing their routes, their songs, their habits because of climate change. Change doesn’t just change a species as a whole but its understanding of self, of group, and of their place in the world.

It was that kind of thinking that took me from seeing gray whales on an annual migration swimming past my favorite beach in Del Mar, California that made me start thinking about how humanity –including their physicality, psychology, social structures, religious understandings, etc—would change if they left Earth. That kind of migration may not happen in my lifetime, but I’m a new grandfather and my 16-month-old grandson, Orion, may live to see settlements on the Moon and Mars. Who knows what his grandchildren will see.

Just as the early ancestors of humans migrating from our species’ birthplace in Africa to eventually settle all around the world changed our physical form, our skin color, our beliefs, and our knowledge, so too will being citizens born on other worlds effect a significant change in what defines us as human once the shared identification as ‘Earthlings’ is not universal.

So, in NecroTek, I wrote about humans being accidentally sent across the Milky Way, which cuts them off entirely from a shared ‘Earthling’ definition, particularly when they encounter races who don’t share biology, language, religion, or anything else we’d easily understand. Likewise, I discuss the emigration of the shoggoth race from that side of the galaxy to Earth.

As Dr. Soren points out in his lectures in the books, all known religions are Earth-centric. Hell, there have been and still are wars fought over who gets to claim the ‘Holy Land’ contested by just three of Earth’s many, many religions. Eventually Earth will cease to be the absolute center of human experience. We will likely emigrate a ruined world in search of other ‘Edens’ on habitable worlds. To get to those worlds will take centuries or longer, which means the settlers will be many generations separated from those left behind. Once they’re on a new world, biology will adapt, foods will change even with terraforming, and almost certainly new religions and new languages will emerge.

These changes in thought, culture, identity, and nature are reflected by the humans in *NecroTek –*notably the NecroTeks themselves, who are no longer physically human—and the shoggoths, who were created as slaves but have evolved to desire freedom and self-determination.

GINGER NUTS: You’ve said you knew where the trilogy would end before you’d finished the prologue of NecroTek. Yet the third book you first pitched, Rate of Decay, was substantially reimagined into Ghosts of the Void. If the destination never moved, what changed about the road there, and what did writing the first two books teach you that made the original route wrong?

JONATHAN: The only real change in my vision of the NecroTek series was how soon I’d reach the already-planned resolution described in the last act of Ghosts of the Void. The original version, State of Decay, had most of the same story, but I’d initially planned a fourth book. But we decided to combine the bulk of State of Decay with a few new elements from the propose book 4, and it makes a tighter, neater wrap up.

That said, I intentionally left a couple of threads hanging that could lead into a future second NecroTek trilogy. Nothing that spoils satisfaction in reading what is now Ghosts of the Void and its wrap-up, though. That is neatly planned because it’s what I wanted to do all along. But it’s been my experience with many of my novels that there is usually more story to tell. Some NecroTek short stories have appeared here and there, and I expect to do a bunch more of those in the near future.

GINGER NUTS: Lovecraft’s universe is famously indifferent; humanity is an accident nobody upstairs has noticed. Your premise turns that around. The people of Asphodel Station are noticed, and the gods turn out to be refugees who fled Earth to escape something worse. How did shrinking the Old Ones down to beings with a history and a fear of their own change the kind of horror you could write across three books?

JONATHAN: Lovecraft himself dwindled the awareness and involvement in some of his own stories. He stories imply these ancient cosmic monsters may disregard us but yet they create or patronize cults that worship them, suggesting that being worshipped is in some way vital to them. Likely that’s a precursor of what other writers have since explored that gods die when they are no longer believed. Although Cthulhu, Azozoth, and the other cosmic creatures in the Lovecraft stories aren’t actual gods, they are as close as makes no difference.

Also, the NecroTek books are, in many ways, war stories…and in order to build suspense based on the strategic moves of each side, you have to have some idea of what motivates the players. The Outer Gods remaining indifferent to humanity becomes a big ho-hum pretty quickly if they simply ignore humans and other organic races. Having them playing a very long-game for galactic –and ultimately universal—conquest makes them solid antagonists, though they use surrogate races instead of risking their own cosmic skin.

GINGER NUTS: The Mi-Go finally arrive in force in this book, and they first reached the world through the pages of Weird Tales, the magazine you now edit. Lovecraft wrote them as collectors more than conquerors, creatures who carry human brains away in metal cylinders. What did you need them to be for the finale that the shoggoths and night-gaunts of the first two books couldn’t give you?

JONATHAN: While still actively writing cosmic horror for Weird Tales, Lovecraft famously allowed any other writers to use his characters, locations, and concepts for their own work. This is why we find Lovecraftian elements in Robert E. Howard’s Conan and King Kull stories, as well as August Derleth, Frank Belknap Long, Robert Bloch, Robert H. Barlow, Donald Wandrei, and others. He did not require them to adhere strictly to his versions of what is now known as the Cthulhu Mythos.

So, taking license and running off in new directions was a thing from the jump. Many of his followers’ stories used Lovecraft’s materials as starting places and went on to create new monsters, new branches of the cosmological histories of the various alien races, and so on. That process has continued unabated ever since, with things like Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, Stephen King’s N, The Mist, Revival, It, Jerusalem’s Lot, and the Dark Tower Series borrowing heavily, as have hundreds and hundreds of writers around the world.

Being editor of Weird Tales, I wanted to honor that tradition while also having a hell of a lot of weird fun, and NecroTek is what happened.

Now, as far as why introduce the Mi-Gos and why they’re important, from the beginning I’d planned to have them be the Big Bad of book 3. My genre is science fiction horror, but my main focus overall was science. Survival in space, the challenges of micro-gravity, the potential for terraforming, first contact with intelligent alien life, and so on.

One big thing –something that’s fascinated humans since H.G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds, is what alien tech would be like? What would be the attrition rate while trying to understand and combat it, and where our own science stands in terms of winning that war. The introduction of shoggoths as a ubiquitous designer-slave race as presented in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness gave me a useful connection. If he Mig-Gos are the science nerds of the Outer Gods, they surely had a hand in creating the shoggoths and, likely, providing them on-site for various cosmic beings. If so, then they had galaxy-spanning tech of some kind.

Whatever it was, they guarded that science fiercely, even from their own masters, else the whole galaxy would already have been conquered. So, I gave them a very strong motivation to guard or retrieve that tech by any means necessary. In Ghosts of the Void, they aren’t the frontline fighters –they’re like the CIA sending in special forces (Night Gaunts, for example) to do their wet-work, while they are poised to benefit from a successful campaign. And it worked really well in the story I got to tell.

GINGER NUTS: You worked with real scientists to keep the hard science accurate. Cosmic horror, though, has always depended on what can’t be understood, and Lovecraft’s monsters scared us because they broke physics. Where did the science push back hard enough to change the story? Once you can explain the Mi-Go, how do you stop them becoming just another alien army?

JONATHAN: Surprisingly, real science didn’t get too badly dented in my NecroTek series. Even godlike alien beings need weapons for their armies, and also armies to use those weapons. Hence relying on the science of cloning, forced evolution, spacecraft, and so on.

All of those elements are no different in concept from what we’re doing here on Earth. We are already cloning animals and would clone people except for international laws (rather than scientific limitations); we mess with evolutionary development in humans (molecular biology, synthetic biology, cell biology, etc.); we already have a space program and some success in sending craft to other worlds and moons; and we build lots and lots of weapons.

The parallels are right there, so I talked to my scientist friends for advice so that the tech I use in the books is either completely accurate (as with microgravity, astronomy, stellar cartography, Einsteinian relativity, human biology, cybernetics, robotics, etc) or actively being developed by groups like DARPA and big tech). There are ongoing research into near-light travel, human-robotic interfaces, cryogenics, and so on. Therefore, I get to build my fiction on a pretty secure scaffold of real science. There’s been much less push-back than I expected. And where my plots do run afoul of scientific impossibility, I’ve worked through that with revised elements that are, at least, plausible in science’s future.

GINGER NUTS: Lost, Bianca Petrescu and the Lost Souls are dead pilots fighting in ghost-powered mechs, and in Cold War the danger was that the war might destroy their souls outright. By the final book, how did you think about what death costs a character who has already died once? Where did you find the stakes?

JONATHAN: Soul-death is the real threat to the NecroTek ghost pilots, and that’s a terrifying thing. It was contemplating faith, agnosticism, and atheism in terms of physical death here on Earth that got me started. No everyone who puts on a uniform and picks up a gun believes in the hereafter. Despite the catch-phrase, there are some atheists in foxholes.

Physical death is something all humans have to face, and they do with wildly different expectations and fears. Given the dwindling numbers of people with absolute and genuine religious beliefs and then going more than a hundred years into the future, it’s not a big stretch to assume that fear of hell or fear of not going to heaven would be less important to a big percentage of the population.

However, having an alien tell them that souls exist –perhaps even apart from an anchoring religion—and that soul death means being obliterated from all existence forever, that is terrifying. To rise from death and rejoin the fight as a ghost who has similar fears of a kind of mortality is a demonstration of the real courage we see in those brave men and women who fight for their countries. That level of sacrifice is the substance from which true heroes are made.

GINGER NUTS: Part of the route home in this novel runs through the dreams of a madman. In Lovecraft, dreams and madness are usually the price of contact, never the way out. Why hand a piece of the answer to the one mind on the station that’s supposed to be broken?

JONATHAN: Because being broken doesn’t mean that broken thing was wrong or now lacks all value. The old saw about there being a fine line between genius and madness is often pretty accurate. It’s kind of like the concept of staring into the abyss and having it stare back –when you look too closely at truths that stretch, bend, or break the laws of the universe as you view them, then the mind snaps free of anchors.

It stops being purely sane by any legal or medical definition. But insanity does not erase intelligence, education, experience, or understanding. It merely lets those elements swirl chaotically, and chaos is the forge from which all things are born. Imagination is chaotic, and all science, literature, art, and so on are born in the imagination. So, no, a madman’s dreams should not be dismissed out of hand, but studied for whatever clues might be in there. After all, a chaotic mind is mor capable of pushing past what is believed to be the limits of understanding…and truths might be waiting for just such a mind in order to make themselves known.

GINGER NUTS: You pointed out that Jules Verne wrote An Antarctic Mystery partly out of frustration with how Poe left Arthur Gordon Pym unresolved, which arguably makes it the first published fan fiction. As editor of Weird Tales, working with Lovecraft’s open invitation to borrow his creations, is NecroTek in some sense an answer to a frustration of your own? Is there a Lovecraft story whose ending you’ve always wanted to argue with?

JONATHAN: Lovecraft’s endings were often abrupt, with what happens along the way being the juiciest meat. That said, I seldom feel entitled enough to want to rewrite or revise someone else’s work. Instead I like to add to that overall body of knowledge while respecting the existing elements. If I were to, in any way, posthumously collaborate with Lovecraft it would be to take something like At the Mountains of Madness and build outward from it, possibly with a prequel, or spin-off stories as the last remaining shoggoths interact with earlier generations of humanity.

GINGER NUTS: Your road into fiction was a strange one: magazine features from 1978, martial arts books, then The Vampire Slayers’ Field Guide to the Undead under the name Shane MacDougall, which you’ve said outsold everything else you’d written. Ghost Road Blues came after that, an experiment by someone who’d never written a word of fiction. How much of the folklorist and the nonfiction researcher is still doing the heavy lifting in NecroTek, a series about invented gods on the far side of the galaxy?

JONATHAN: My background in folklore is stitched into my soul. It was my wonderfully creepy grandmother who got me going along that path. She was a believer in what she called the ‘larger world’ –vampires, ghosts, psychic abilities, etc. But she also believed that the supernatural was merely an aspect of the real world that science had not yet figured out how to quantify.

I’ve always been fascinated by the things people believed and how they tried to understand the unknown based on the science of the day, their general understanding of things, and their religion. I wrote The Vampire Slayers Field Guide to the Undead, which was my first non-martial arts nonfiction book, as a thank you to my grandmother (who, sadly, passed before that part of my writing career got going.

While researching and writing that book, I got hungry for novels that used folkloric versions of monsters rather than the versions creating by prose writers and screenwriters, but couldn’t find many. Dracula is only partly based on folklore and instead both rewrites folklore to suit the plot, and also makes up a lot.

It’s even more extreme with werewolves, because most of what the average person knows about werewolves is NOT based on folklore but instead came from Kurt Siodmak’s 1941 script for The Wolf Man. Few writers, it seemed dug into folklore, or adhered to it, for their spooky tales. So, after complaining about it, my wife encouraged me to simply “write the damn thing”, meaning to write the novel I couldn’t otherwise find. That became Ghost Road Blues and its two sequels, Dead Man’s Song and Bad Moon Rising. And I’ve continued to rely more on folkloric monsters than retreads of fictional versions.

While constructing the plot for the NecroTek Trilogy, I went a different direction and took the Cthulhu Mythos as if it was an accepted and shared folklore, and built it outward from there. The shoggoths are among the first cosmic monsters on Earth, and being shapeshifters they are a lot of fun to use in a variety of ways. I even used shoggoths in some media tie-in stories, writing adventures ranging from John Carter of Mars to Winnie the Pooh encountering shoggoths.

My recent fantasy trilogy, Kagen the Damned, uses shoggoths, Cthulhu, Hastur, the Colour Out of Space, and other Lovecraftian elements, and even one of my weird-science action thrillers, the Joe Ledger novel Kill Switch, crosses over with that stuff. Call it a new folklore.

In the NecroTek novels, there’s some of that faux-folklore in the remembrances of Lost, the alien Ghost who become an ally to the humans. His memories are versions of the truths he remembers, but are not entirely in line with their roots in Lovecraft’s mythos.

GINGER NUTS: You’ve told the story of a literary agent steering the Pine Deep books towards the label “supernatural thriller” because a horror trilogy was a hard sell at the time. Twenty years on, you’ve received the Horror Writers Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award and you edit the magazine that gave Lovecraft his home. What did all those years of writing horror under other labels, thriller with Joe Ledger and YA with Rot & Ruin, teach you that writing under the horror banner alone might not have?

JONATHAN: Labels in genre fiction go in and out of fashion. In 2005, when my agent, Sara Crowe, was shopping Ghost Road Blues, the word ‘horror’ was out of fashion. People tend to see more movies than they read books, and at that time slasher films (with all their gratuitous sex, body count tallies, and misogyny), and torture porn (with violence for its own sake without an redeeming payoff), and found footage (with cheap-shot jump scares and often downbeat endings) were very popular.

As a result, people viewed horror through those lenses. During the switch from basic broadcast TV to cable and streaming, there was a rise in new networks looking for their own identity, and most kinds of horror are inexpensive to shoot. In print, it was the new generation of heavy-hitters publishing horror as mainstream fiction –Scott Smith with The Ruins, Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan with The Strain, Sarah Langan with her ghost novels, and so on—that rebranded horror as acceptable.

Since all of my fiction, no matter what genre or subgenre it falls into is built using the thriller storytelling model –a race against time to prevent disaster—branding myself as a thriller writer was useful and accurate. Just as Stepehen King calls himself a suspense writer and Dean Koontz is regarded as a techno-thriller writer.

On the other hand, I began winning horror awards from the jump, with Ghost Road Blues winning the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel. Side note, it was also nominated for Novel of the Year, but lost to some upstart named Stephen King (talented chap…he might have a future in this biz!) Over the last twenty years I’ve won six Stoker Awards, as well as other awards for my horror fiction. I call myself a horror writer as often as I do a thriller writer, and the horror community is my first and most beloved literary family.

Editing Weird Tales is actually less of a stretch, since we have always published weird science fiction, weird mystery, weird fantasy as well as weird horror, so I feel right at home here.

GINGER NUTS: Kagen the Damned and NecroTek both graft the Mythos onto another genre, sword and sorcery in one case and military science fiction in the other, and they arrived within two years of each other. After Joe Ledger, Benny Imura’s zombies and V-Wars dealt in more earthbound monsters, was the move towards cosmic horror a deliberate turn, and what pulled you there at this stage of your career?

JONATHAN: As I mentioned earlier, I love the storytelling potential of the Lovecraftian mythos, and have happily played with his toys. He freely offered them up to anyone while he was alive, and I’m one of thousands who have taken him up on it.

But there’s another part to that story. First time I met Steve King was at the Edgar Awards the night he was being inducted as Grandmaster. I sat with him and his wife, Tabby, for quite a while, initially congratulating him on his win at the Stokers. He knew I’d won for Best First Novel and asked what I planned to write in the future. I told him that since I read across genre lines I intended to write accordingly.

He approved and advised me to have characters from one story wander into others. Steve said that such guest appearances tie all of a writers literary worlds into one oddball universe. “Your constant readers will be delighted at the unexpected encounters,” he said, “but make sure those appearances won’t confuse newbie readers who aren’t familiar with the previous works.” Which is what I did.

Most of my stories are constructed with some connective tissue that ties them to other works. Joe Ledger is my most ubiquitous character, appearing in person, by reference, or through inclusion of story elements in a wide range of my novels. The Kagen the Damned series is set fifty thousand years in Earth’s future, after we’ve fallen into barbarism and begun to climb out.

That catastrophe was the Zombie Apocalypse referenced in both my Dead of Night series and my Rot & Ruin series. In my Sleepers War Trilogy (of which the first two books are out), there are characters from the Ledger novels. The God Machine in books two and three of the NecroTek series first appeared (and then vanished) in the Ledger novel, Kill Switch, and it’ll appear in another novel I’m currently writing. Also, Joe Ledger appears in several V-Wars short stories and comics, as well a *Dead of Night (*books 3 & 4) and Rot & Ruin (books 3-7).

GINGER NUTS: As editor of Weird Tales, you see more new cosmic horror than almost anyone. Lovecraft’s open invitation to other writers to use his creations has fed a century of fiction, and much of the most interesting recent work pushes hard against his racism and his fear of the outsider. Where do you see the Mythos heading in the hands of the writers coming through your submissions now?

JONATHAN: The Mythos keeps showing up in movies, TV shows, books, comics, and games. What’s interesting is that it’s now undergoing the same transformation as genuine folklore, in that each new generation takes it and makes it their own, but after several generations those creators may not even know they’re doing a whisper-down-the-lane thing with elements first created by H.P. Lovecraft for his stories in Weird Tales. That process will continue, but it’s getting harder and harder to point out that these are, in fact, new versions of Lovecraft’s characters and set-ups.

There’s no end to that process. And the readers are the ones most likely to not know when something is a nod to the mythos. Good example was when The Mist movie came out. Almost none of the reviews mentioned that it was decidedly Lovecraftian when it comes to the monsters. There was even less mention during the short run of The Mist TV show, and we’ll see if there is any at all when the next Mist film adaptation debuts.

GINGER NUTS: Horror and science fiction have been borrowing from each other since Frankenstein, and Alien made the marriage permanent, yet plenty of readers still police the border. What can a horror story set 56,000 light years from home do that the same story in a small Pennsylvania town like Pine Deep cannot, and what does it lose?

JONATHAN: Science fiction, particularly deep-space SF, offers a sense of scale that Earthbound stories can’t match. Worlds in conflict, alien races of conquerors or monsters, and so on need room to play out, and deep space has that room. So, the stories told about space –whether they’re survival adventures (The Martian, Project Hail Mary), apocalyptic (Deep Impact, Armageddon), pernicious alien invasion (Independence Day, War of the Worlds, A Quiet Place), interplanetary and interstellar war (Starship Troopers, Old Man’s War, The Expanse), and exploration (Star Trek in all of its variations)—need a bigger stage.

Take note, though, that the best ones drill down to the human experience at the heart of the massive scale. The worlds are farther away, the threats are often global rather than personal, and the solutions require more than shooting a zombie in the head or pounding a stake through a vampire’s heart. All that said, every form of dramatic and eerie storytelling has that human heartbeat, and the scale of horrors suits the form.

In the Pine Deep world, which is a small town with a haunted history, a single shoggoth would just wipe everyone out. In NecroTek a werewolf wouldn’t pose much of a threat to ghost-driven mechs. It’s all about finding the right balance of safety and threat, heroism and horror in each individual genre and sub-genre.

GINGER NUTS: Ghosts of the Void runs to just over 500 pages in hardback and juggles Asphodel, the Tempest, the Lost Souls, the resurrected NecroTeks, the Jokers, and the station’s scientists and philosophers. You learned structure by taking ‘Salem’s Lot apart. With a cast that size and a war on several fronts, what was the hardest structural problem in this book, and how did you solve it?

JONATHAN: The challenge with that many storylines and that large a cast of characters is making sure all of the key players have fully-realized stories worth telling; and that supporting characters earn their paychecks when they appear onstage. Yes, ‘Salem’s Lot was a good model because it’s a crisis impacting an entire town, with characters of all levels of importance needing appropriate space to become real and to matter. King’s novel The Stand and Robert MacCammon’s Swan Song were equally important as learning tools, because there are major storylines, some of which don’t directly overlap, and large casts of characters.

There’s a lot to learn from writers on that level because they have become adept at making even small scenes carry substance and importance.

I first applied that to my Pine Deep trilogy, because it’s a town in crisis, but that crisis has the potential to impact the whole world, and therefore every action taken needs to matter. As Ray Bradbury once told me, “Writing is 99% thinking about it and the rest is typing.” I inferred from this that there needs to be a lot of time in the overall writing process for the writer to climb into the skin of each character and view the elements of the story through their eyes and with their point of view.

For me that was a lot of beach walks, sitting on the balcony with coffee and letting my mind drift, and other non-typing phases so I could sort out each character, each storyline, and how they play out and interact.

GINGER NUTS: Mechs and fleet battles are all about scale, while dread usually depends on the opposite: a closed door, a sound in the next room. How do you build fear at the level of the sentence when your set pieces involve gods and armadas? Is there a moment in Ghosts of the Void where you had to pull the camera right in close to make it frightening?

JONATHAN: In all of the space battles I spend less time on describing the machineries of war and more drilling down into the heads of the pilots, the people they are defending, the officers who have to send those young people off to fight, and so on. By constantly returning to human emotion, reaction, and thought, the scale of the storytelling doesn’t overwhelm the book, nor does it rob the human moments of value.

GINGER NUTS: Ghost Road Blues only exists because your wife told you to stop complaining that nobody wrote novels built on folklore and to write one yourself. Twenty years and a shelf of books later, who is the reader you’re writing for now, and is it still the same person?

JONATHAN: Corny as it sounds, my default target audience is my fifteen-year-old self. By that point in my life I was devouring books at an insane rate. I also read widely across genre lines. So in any given week I’d be reading Roger Zelazney and Ed McBain, M.R. James and Louis L’Amour, Shirley Jackson and Edgar Rice Burroughs. That kid would have read what I write.

The man he grew into still reads broadly. For example, just this month (October 2026) I’ve read a collection of Joe Lansdale crime stories, a book on string theory, one of the Dungeon Crawler Carl novels by Matt Dinneman, Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions of Man and Animals, several newsletters on deep sea biology, a mix of Batman, Black Science, and Punisher comics, and Sharpe’s Storm by Bernard Cornwell. And it’s only October 15 at this writing. I read fast and I read a lot, and my novels, comics, and short stories all target that well-read teenager who lives in my soul.

GINGER NUTS: Lovecraft’s cosmicism says the universe doesn’t care, and that understanding this is what drives us mad. You’ve closed out three books about the Outer Gods by insisting on hope, on ordinary people finding courage they didn’t know they had. Is hope in the face of a cosmos that truly doesn’t care an act of defiance or a kind of denial, and how do you know which one you’re writing?

JONATHAN: Hope matters to me. I was born into abject poverty and raised by an abusive, racist, and violent criminal father and cruelly enabling mother. All through my childhood I struggled with despair and with hope. Luckily for me I had some real icons who, at one time or another, provided encouragement.

I mentioned Bradbury and Matheson, but there was my middle-school librarian who schooled me on the benefits of an open mind, of empathy as a super power, and instilled within me the belief that I could read and educate myself out of the live into which I was born. Also, my jujutsu master taught me about strength and the nature of courage; and my grandmother helped me keep my mind open and to accept all possibilities.

These elements kept my hope on a low boil, never letting it go cold. When I was fourteen I got into a fight with my father and that resulted in the cycle of violence in my home ended, freeing my four older sisters and I from ongoing abuse. Hope is a weapon and it’s a medicine. My stories get pretty dark at times, but I don’t cancel hope out of the equation. This is why when people ask me why I write about monsters, I say that I don’t –I write about people who fight monsters. And that difference has hope as its heartbeat.

Find Jonathan Maberry here:

WEBSITE: www.jonathanmaberry.com

FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.maberry.5/ (main) or https://www.facebook.com/JonathanMaberry5555/ (Author page)

TWITTER/X: https://x.com/JonathanMaberry

LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanmaberry/

INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/jonathanmaberry/

BLUYESKY: https://bsky.app/profile/jonathanmaberry.bsky.social

THREADS: https://www.threads.com/@jonathanmaberry

SUBSTACK: https://substack.com/@jonathanmaberry

TIKTOK: coming soon!

If this Jonathan Maberry interview proves anything, it is that the Mi-Go are the science nerds of the Outer Gods, and that in NecroTek even the dead still have to report for duty. Nobody at Ginger Nuts of Horror is volunteering for that shift.

Keep reading on Ginger Nuts of Horror

About Ginger Nuts of Horror

Ginger Nuts of Horror is an independent horror review and culture site based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Edited by British Fantasy Award nominee Jim McLeod, it publishes horror book reviews, film reviews, author interviews, features and cover reveals. Ginger Nuts of Horror won Best Inclusive Film & Book Review Platform at the SME News UK Enterprise Awards 2026.

How we review books and films