Josh Rountree is a novelist and short story writer who writes across multiple genres, and focuses mostly on horror and dark fantasy. His novel The Legend of Charlie Fish, released by Tachyon Publications to wide acclaim in 2023, selected for the Locus Recommended Reading List, and named one of Los Angeles Public Library's best books of the year. More than seventy of Rountree's short stories have been published in a variety of venues, including The Deadlands, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Bourbon Penn, Realms of Fantasy, PseudoPod, Weird Horror, and The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror. Several collections of his short fiction have been published, most recently, Death Aesthetic. Rountree lives in the greater Austin, Texas, metropolitan area with his lovely wife of many years and a pair of half-feral dogs who command his obedience. His latest novel is The Unkillable Frank Lightning and he recently talked about it with Daryl Maxwell for the LAPL Blog.
What was your inspiration for The Unkillable Frank Lightning?
For quite a while now, I've been working on a series of tales that I think of as my Texas Monster Stories. Basically, they're my take on various monsters, with all the tales taking place in old Texas, a time I define as roughly 1830-1930. I've had a blast writing these. Some have been short stories, and I've tackled werewolves, vengeful mermaids, harvest gods, mournful witches, and various other terrors. Some of these appear in my last two short story collections, Fantastic Americana, and Death Aesthetic.
Somewhere along the way, I decided that if I was having that much fun with monsters, I should take a shot at The Creature From the Black Lagoon. That idea grew into my last novel, The Legend of Charlie Fish, which tells of a gill-man and his companions battling side show scoundrels in the middle of a killer hurricane. That one was so much fun, I started to wonder what other classic monster stories I might be able to tell with that Texas spin. And, of course, Frankenstein was an easy choice. I love the novel, and I love the movies, Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) even more. Immediately, I thought, what if my Frankenstein was about a monster who couldn't be killed, so he joins a traveling Wild West show as their premier performer. Ultimately, the story took a few hard turns in other directions, but that initial inspiration set me on the path.
Are Catherine, Aubrey, Seth, or any of the other characters in the novel inspired by or based on specific individuals?
Catherine Coldbridge is my Dr. Frankenstein, and her husband, Frank Humble, is my monster. Those are the most obvious, though they diverge quite a bit from their original inspirations. Catherine is a doctor and an occultist, and her resurrection of Frank is more black magic than it is science. And while Frank does go on the traditional Frankenstein rampage, he regains much more of his old self along the way than Shelley's poor monster.
Some of the performers in the Wild West Revue have real-world analogs, at least in my head. Cowboy Dan is certainly meant to be a Buffalo Bill like character, and it is mentioned in the book that he even styles himself after that most famous ringleader of Wild West shows. And Mable Bones, the rifle sharpshooter, owes a lot of her creation to Annie Oakley, who performed in Buffalo Bill's show for many years. Others might have small connections to real performers I've read about, but for the most part, they're made up from whole cloth
How did the novel evolve and change as you wrote and revised it? Are there any characters or scenes that were lost in the process that you wish had made it to the published version?
The biggest challenge I had with this one was to get out of my own way. The Legend of Charlie Fish featured alternating first-person points of view, moving back and forth so that we saw the story through the eyes of two main characters. Since The Unkillable Frank Lightning is set in that same universe, and has one character crossover, I felt like I needed to stick with that same approach.
For a long time, I tried writing this so that the book alternated between Catherine and Frank, my doctor and my monster. I really wanted to tell this story so that we could see how differently they understood Frank's death and resurrection. But it just wasn't working. The parts where Frank was telling the story felt flat to me. The parts where Catherine was narrating, though, really started to sing. Still, I fought back for a while, determined to structure this book like the last one. When I finally decided that Catherine would be the only point of view character, the story came alive in a hurry. I also worked with my editor to restructure the book a bit. There are sections that take place in 1905 and sections that take place in 1879. Originally, I started in 1905, flashed back in time for the middle third of the book, then moved back to 1905 again. Ultimately, we changed this around so that we alternate back and forth throughout, and I think it helped the novel move at a better pace.
Thankfully, no characters were erased in this process, and no major scenes were changed or cut. Unlike with The Legend of Charlie Fish , where we had to make the painful (to me, not my editor) decision to cut a huge Cthulhu-like creature from the climax of the book. It's better that way. But, come on. Nobody wants to cut a big tentacled monster from their book.
In your Afterword, you talk a bit about the traveling Wild West shows of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. How familiar were you with these shows and their performers prior to writing The Unkillable Frank Lightning? Did you have to do a bit of research? If so, what was the most interesting or surprising thing that you learned during your research?
I was familiar with the Wild West shows of this period, as I've always been a fan of westerns and nineteenth-century American history. I've always been interested in the way these shows influenced Hollywood, and our ongoing perception of what the Old West was really like. Most of our assumptions about that period are colored by these tall tales. And certainly, the popular archetype of the hero cowboy as a vanguard of Manifest Destiny needs to be revisited and revised.
I reread several books to get all this fresh in my head again, including The Colonel and Little Missie by Larry McMurtry. McMurtry is my favorite writer, and though he's known best for his fiction, he has a number of non-fiction works that are worth your time. This one tells of Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley, and gives a good general overview of the Wild West phenomenon in general, including the logistics of pulling off that sort of traveling show before the turn of the century.
Right now, I’m reading True West, by Betsy Gaines Quammen. It's a fantastic study of the American West in the modern day, and how our ideas about the world were informed and often corrupted by these idyllic myths of westward expansion, and how we're still dealing with the fallout of those tall tales.
Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, was written over 200 years ago, and there have been numerous adaptations (film, television, graphic novels, etc.) along with pastiches and re-imaginings (which The Unkillable Frank Lightning now joins!). Do you have any favorite adaptations or related novels or short stories?
Young Frankenstein is my obvious choice. Mel Brooks' classic is a movie that never gets old, and every performance is a standout. I'm a big fan of the Universal Monster films, so a movie that loves them just as much as I do, but is willing to make fun of them as well, hits the mark for me.
I would also recommend the novel Brittle Innings by Michael Bishop. What a killer book. It's a continuation of the Frankenstein story, where the monster has made his way down from the Arctic and is now playing for a minor league baseball team in the 1940s. This absurd concept is masterfully rendered, and really delivers.
If The Unkillable Lightning Frank was going to be adapted into a film or television series, who would your dream cast be?
The make-or-break choice here would be the casting of Catherine Coldbridge, and I think Winona Ryder would nail this role. My choice for Frank would be Adam Driver, and Joe Bird from Talk to Me would be a cool fit for my teenage gunslinger Hank. To that I'd add Bradley Cooper to play Aubrey Dawson, and Paul Dano to play his wild brother Seth. Beyond that, there are a host of side characters, sideshow performers, and various oddballs that would be great for showcasing the talent of up-and-comers.
Same question for The Legend of Charlie Fish (since I didn't ask you when we talked about it two years ago!)?
I've had plenty of time to think on this one, and I've come up with a few dream casts over the last couple of years. I think Walton Goggins and Jessica Chastain would be the perfect pair to play Floyd Betts and Abigail Elder. For my scoundrels, I'd absolutely love to see Patton Oswalt playing Professor Finn, with Dave Bautista playing his sidekick, Kentucky Jim. I'd like to see newcomers play the children, Nellie and Hank, with a hope for a breakout performance like Hailee Steinfeld had in Joel & Ethan Coen's True Grit remake. My character, Nellie Abernathy, has a great deal in common with Mattie Ross from that film.
You also mention in your Afterword that you've written several short stories combining familiar archetypes from the Old West with monsters and supernatural elements in what you described as your "own mythological Texas." This version of Texas seems to be the setting for both The Legend of Charlie Fish and The Unkillable Frank Lightning. Will you be taking readers back to your mythological Texas for other monstrous adventures?
Yes, it's my hope to keep writing these Texas monster stories as long as I have good ideas for them. I like the idea that every book and story can stand alone, and be read in any order, but when you connect them all together, a wider universe is revealed.
As mentioned earlier, I started this years ago with various short stories, and ended up widening this world into novels with The Legend of Charlie Fish and now The Unkillable Frank Lightning I have a variety of other stories on deck for this world, and hopefully we'll get to talk about those next time.
What's currently on your nightstand?
I'm really loving The Last American Road Trip by Sarah Kendzior, a brilliant and insightful travelogue that reads like an elegy for an America we may never see again. I'm also reading Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser, a grim and thoroughly unsettling take on Pacific Northwest serial killers in the latter half of the twentieth century, and how environmental factors might have fueled their proliferation. And one more—I’m really enjoying The Daughter’s War by Christopher Buehlman, his follow up to The Blacktongue Thief which I also loved. Buehlman is an author who moves seamlessly between fantasy and horror, and if you enjoy those two genres, seek out his book Between Two Fires, about a war between Heaven and Hell taking place on earth during the black death. It's remarkable.
What are you working on now?
I tend to work on multiple projects at once, and right now is no exception. I have a few short stories in various states of disrepair, and I'm working on a bloody sword and sorcery novel, which is something new for me. Recently, I finished writing a novella that's a sort of near-future science fiction ghost story, and I have another of my Texas monster books waiting in the wings to be written as well. Too many ideas, and never enough time.
And next up on my publication schedule is a new novella, Summer in the House of the Departed, coming in August from Psychopomp Press. It's a West Texas haunted house story inspired by my grandmother, who was a ghost researcher in the eighties.
