Posted October 19, 2025
In this week’s author interview, NOWW Executive Director Jessica Kinnison interviews Author Adrian Van Young about his current writing projects and process and how as Adrian puts it: “without high stakes, there’s no suspense.” His class “On the Edge of Your Seat: How to Make Your Reader Squirm” takes place on Saturday, October 19 from 10 AM – 1 PM CT at the NOCCA Foundation. Early Bird Sale ends October 5 (tomorrow).
[“For so long I’d been pursuing that Raymond Carver-esque white guy show-don’t-tell laconicism we all have to unlearn from grad school (if we went to grad school), and it feels like, with this book, I’m almost shed of it. ” – Adrian Van Young]
Jessica: What are you currently working on? Is there anything about your latest project that feels like a departure from earlier work? Or: what most excites you about your latest project?
Adrian: At the moment, I’m simultaneously working on a magical realist historical “time-loop” novel (think: Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi meets Hari Kunzru’s White Tears), which is also sort of vampire story, weirdly, about the life, death and legacy of the Polish-Jewish story writer and graphic artist Bruno Schulz, who was murdered by the Nazis in the ghettos of Poland in WWII–and cheating on that novel with a horror story of sorts told in the (I think horrifying) voice of Vice-Presidential candidate, J.D. Vance. The novel has been a real labor of love for the past five years or so, and I’m happy to say that after years of research and writing I’m finally closing in on a complete first draft. I think what excites me most about the novel, at least–which, gulp, I will tell you not without superstition I’m currently calling Morning Song for the Undead Messiah–is that it marks a departure for me in attempting to be more forthright and vulnerable in conveying my characters’ own vulnerabilities and emotions. For so long I’d been pursuing that Raymond Carver-esque white guy show-don’t-tell laconicism we all have to unlearn from grad school (if we went to grad school), and it feels like, with this book, I’m almost shed of it.
Jessica: In terms of emotional stakes and tension, what feels really important to you about what you’re working on now—and why?
Adrian: Well, although it’s a bit difficult to address that question without venturing upon an ill-advised blow-by-blow of what is in many ways a very strange and nontraditional book, the emotional stakes and tension in the Bruno Schulz novel are more or less all predicated on notions of creativity–pointedly, creativity in the midst of suffering and chaos and the great sea-changes of history. For me–and perhaps for many of us–that also feels intensely personal, as the stakes in the very process of writing itself already feel so high. You devote so much of your faculties, your very life, to this thing that may or may not “see the light of day,” whatever that ends up meaning. To be writing about the stakes of creativity itself alongside being creative to realize those stakes feels so exciting to me, right now–and perhaps also a little bit daunting. But I’m really hoping to get there one way or another!
Jessica: How does your upcoming class differ from a class specifically focused on writing in the horror genre?
Adrian: My upcoming NOWW class, “On the Edge of Your Seat: How to Make Your Readers Squirm,” will be specifically different from your typical horror-writing class insofar as: (a) we won’t be trafficking in much horror, strictly speaking, at all, more just literary fiction with dark inflections; (that includes crime fiction, obviously, and your garden variety domestic realism, too); (b) the class will be much more focused on scene-making and scene-work, i.e. creating tension and suspense in-scene, as opposed to looking at literary “effects” like the uncanny and the grotesque, as I might in a horror class; and (c), it will be overall more geared, too, towards examining, as you suggest, how emotional and/or dramatic stakes play into techniques that generate tension and suspense. Without big stakes, there’s no suspense! But for all y’all horror-heads out there, don’t worry: we’ll be doing plenty to make these precious few October weekend hours well worth your while.