Dissecting Joseph Myer
Welcome back to the Black Hare Press Dissecting Author interviews where we dissect an author to find out who they are, what they write, and what keeps their creative juices flowing.
Today we slice open horror writer, Joseph Meyer and spill his writing secrets and author aspirations.
Who is Joseph Meyer?
Joseph Meyer is a writer whose main focus is horror, originally from a rural area in Illinois, just outside St. Louis. He has a Bachelor of Science in Business Management and an associate’s degree in Computer Network Administration, and most recently worked in Social Services in Northern New York State.
Currently, Joseph is in the process of moving, with his husband, John, his dog, Eli, and his two cats, Ellie and Lila, to Portland, Oregon, to explore the next chapter in the ever-evolving family adventure, having lived in four other states with much the same coterie over the last fifteen years.
He is very excited to explore the moody forests and historical haunts of Oregon, and hopes to finish his next book, nestled among its tall, misty-crowned trees. Screaming into the Canyon is his first published book, and consists of ten short horror tales, one of which, Filth, had been previously published by the same publisher, Black Hare Press.
Books:
Screaming Into The Canyon: books2read.com/Meyer-Screaming
Filth: books2read.com/Meyer-Filth
Connect:
Website: www.byjosephmeyer.com
Amazon: www.amazon.com/author/byjosephmeyer
Instagram: @byJosephMeyer
TikTok: @byJosephMeyer
Tell us about yourself. When did your passion for reading and writing start?
Like many children of the late 80s and early 90s, I had a mother who belonged to the official Stephen King book club, which, if you don’t know, was monthly subscription from which this company would send a new Stephen King novel directly to your home. Because they quickly began to pile up and because we lived in a very small house, the only place to hold these numerous doorstops was on a bookshelf in my bedroom, already home to a full set of proudly displayed Encyclopedia Britannica.
Naturally, I was overjoyed to accept these treasures, and much, much too young to read them. In spite of that, I tackled them one by one and quickly found myself obsessed. Very soon, I decided that I, 11-year-old Joseph Meyer (then called by my pre-married name, Joey Porter), would write a sequel to The Shining called The Shining Part II. It was four full pages long and included almost every single story element that happened in the first few chapters of the original.
It’s funny to think of that now, but it sparked a love of reading and writing inside of me that remains to this day.
How much of your writing is ‘write what you know’ or ‘researched to death’?
Most of my writing is from the hip. For short stories, I don’t even write outlines, they sort of just stream how they come. For longer stories, I also don’t write outlines, but I will write a lot of notes of story beats and set pieces and things that I want to include and to keep track of the orders of things.
What elements from your real life creep into your stories? Ie Worldbuilding, character traits etc.
There was a ten-year period of my life, which spanned approximately ages 15 to 25 where I was intoxicated in some manner or another almost twenty-four hours a day. For some of that period, I was even homeless and shooting up drugs on the street or in gas station bathrooms in the middle of the night. I don’t share this to elicit any sort of pity or other emotional response from the reader, but to explain that there is quite a lot of personal history sewn into many of my stories.
In many, if not all, there is often an element of profound suffering and struggling with mental health in at least one of the characters, and in almost all such instances, there is an element of something once personal experienced. I am now fifteen years sober, so there is quite a lot of distance between that time of my life and today, but the memories are still there and I sometimes still wake in the night, sweaty and trembling, filled with the fear that I have fucked up and thrown it all away, as I had done so very many times throughout those ten years.
Writing characters who are currently experiencing those things is one of the many ways in which I can continue to exorcise those demons and exert power over the shame and struggle instead of allowing them to hold power over me.
Have you ever based a character on someone you know?
Of course. I used to work for a Social Services agency, and I had to work with landlord quite frequently, as we paid her the rent for one of my clients. She was hands down one of the most irritating people I had ever had to encounter, and she may have relatively short cameo in one of my stories. Fortunately for her, she suffers no harm and only shows up to annoy the protagonist.
Do you write for entertainment, or is there a deeper message in your stories?
Absolutely entertainment only. Occasionally, during my own editing process, I uncover themes and meaning to the story that I hadn’t intended to include, but as with all authors, that is just a thing that sometimes happens, as our subconscious minds are as involved in writing as our primary consciousness, but overall, I just want to creep myself out a little. Messaging is great in the right hands, but I’m not the one to be teaching people how to live.
Do recurring themes appear in your stories?
They do. As I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of themes of mental health and personal struggle in the characters I write. My mom once said that I write about “unhinged people having a bad time,” and that is more or less true. It is my favorite kind of story, but that may be because I can be a little morbid and pessimistic from time to time. I have watched the movie ‘Night Mother, dozens of times, for example, and it makes me cry every time. I used to work with a person who asked how I could possibly interact with fiction that made me feel bad, and I was genuinely perplexed by the question. How could you not? I have seen the darkest sides of this world in real life, and I don’t want to (or maybe I can’t?) live in a place that is all bright colors and shiny surfaces. I love having a nice day and feeling great, but I want to experience the entire range of emotions available to us, from within the safe confines of a book or movie. That is what makes life real to me.
In relation to your latest book:
Madness echoes in the canyon, and if you listen closely, you might hear your own scream.
Step into the shadows of the human psyche, where reality blurs and the familiar turns menacing. In Screaming into the Canyon, nightmares don’t simply lurk in the dark—they seep into the cracks of everyday life.
With prose as sharp as a scalpel and an unsettling intimacy, this collection drags you through surreal horrors, psychological unraveling, and the quiet terror of being truly seen.
These are stories that haunt, linger, and whisper long after the final page. You may think you're safe, but the canyon is deep—and it's listening.
How did you come up with the stars/MCs of this book?
I’m not sure how normal this is, but generally, my ideas for a story usually come from thinking of a weird thing that I want to explore, and then the characters spring up around it and then I kind of work backward from there. What type of person would be having this experience? What lead them to this point? What experience have I had, or people have I know that might inform this character? Now that I’m thinking about it so plainly, I think this is actually probably a pretty standard way to do things, but my toxic personality trait is to always assume I’m special until proof is provided to the contrary and then throw that proof into the trash and carry on.
Which of your main characters do you relate to the most? Why?
It’s a bit of a cheat to answer this way, but one of the stories in this book, “Hunger Pangs”, is actually a personal accounting of a real series of events for the first half of the story. Until the vampires show up, anyway. The first part of that story was actually written about ten years ago, when my sobriety was still a bit fresher and I was more actively exploring the past to try to deal with some of the more traumatic elements that lingered around me. I put it in a drawer and then rewrote it many years later, deciding to turn it into a horror story instead of a depressing glorified journal entry. Who knows how successful a story it really is, but it certainly has the most personally relatable main character, since it is literally me. That’s also the reason it’s written in the first person. I don’t like writing in the first person, generally, but I felt I had no choice for that one.
Is there a particular message that you hope readers will take from the book?
Sometimes everyone dies, and that’s okay.
What’s your favorite scene?
My favorite scene in this book, is when Andrew from “Cantharus” opens the elevator in his office and encounters The Mourners for the first time. Those guys came to me while I was on a long drive a couple years ago, and I had to pull over and write that scene without any other story or context around it. They still creep me out. I don’t even really know who they are exactly, or what their real purpose is, which makes them even more distressing to me.
