I also thought I’d better avoid writing scary stories, that I should try to find my own material. So I wrote a mess of New Yorker–style tales about divorce, raising difficult children, and midlife anxiety. These stories had some good lines here and there and not much else to recommend them. I didn’t have much to say about divorce—I’d never been married! Same for raising difficult kids. The only experience I had with difficult kids was being one. And since I was in my mid-twenties, I was spectacularly unqualified to write about midlife breakdowns.

Aside from all that, the real challenge of trying to write a good New Yorker story was that I didn’t like New Yorker stories. In my free time, I was reading fucked-up horror comics by Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore, not tales of middle-class ennui by Updike and Cheever.

At some point, probably about two hundred rejections in, I had a minor revelation. It was true that if I was out there writing as Joseph King, it would be awkward to start banging out horror stories. It would look like I was grabbing at my dad’s coattails with both fists. But Joe Hill was just another Joe Schmo. No one knew anything about Hill’s father and mother. He could be whatever kind of artist he wanted to be—and what he wanted to be was Tom Savini, on the page.

You get the life you’re dealt, and if you’re going to write, that’s your ink. It’s the only ink you get. Mine was just very red.

When I gave myself permission to start writing weird tales of the supernatural, all my problems vanished almost overnight, and before you could say New York Times bestseller, I was—hahahahahaha, just kidding. I still had piles and piles of shit to write. I churned out another four novels that never went anywhere. There was Paper Angels, a third-rate Cormac McCarthy pastiche. There was a young adult fantasy novel, The Evil Kites of Dr. Lourdes (no, fuck YOU, that’s a great title). There was The Briars, a confused, unsuccessful effort to write a John D. MacDonald–style thriller about two teenagers on a summer kill spree. The best of them was a J. R. R. Tolkien thing called The Fear Tree, which I spent three years on and which became an international bestseller in my wet dreams. In real life it was rejected by every publisher in New York and shanked by every publisher in London. For a final kick in the nuts, it was turned down flat by every publisher in Canada, which is a reminder to us all: No matter how low you go, you can always fall lower still.

(I don’t mean it, Canada.)