Lilhop asked Jeff Strand:

Your favourite weird novels which inspired you to write horror-comedy.

Jeff Strand Actually, no novels inspired me to write horror-comedy. I really just wanted to write comedy--I loved books like the Myth Adventures series by Robert Asprin, but by far the biggest influence was the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. I couldn't believe that an actual published novel could get away with such an insane level of silliness. That's the kind of stuff I wanted to write.

Later I got into King/Koontz/Ketchum/McCammon etc. and started to write horror, but I wasn't trying to write funny horror--just horror. But it was horror that was corrupted by all of my years of writing humor. After my novel Graverobbers Wanted (No Experience Necessary)--which was supposed to be a funny mystery, not horror!--came out, I got labeled as a "horror-comedy writer," a label I embraced. THEN I started consciously writing "horror-comedy" novels.

So there was humor influence, and horror influence, but not humorous horror influence.

If we take out the "influence" part, my favorite horror-comedy novel is This Book Is Full Of Spiders by David Wong.

flag