Like, how do you guys feel like when you're together working?

working?Uh, we've only done it twice.

We've only done it twice.

We, we, we wrote In the Tall Grass and we wrote Throttle, and, you know, I mean, I feel like when I, the times I've written with Dad...

You ever see in, like, the, the Warner Brothers cartoons when Wile E. Coyote s- climbs on an Acme rocket and lights the fuse, and then suddenly it takes off under him?

Of course

... and, and parse his lines down to smaller clean lines of dialogue.

And also, I watched him, and he would reach f- he would practice reaching for a prop so he didn't have to look at it when he went to get it, and he'd measure it off.

Oof.

Arthur finds himself in trouble, menaced by some local thugs.

As you said, he has to steal books, which is just about the worst crime that I can imagine.

It's the worst.

He turns to his friends for help.

They get fooling around with one of these spells that they goof off with, only it actually works.

They bring a dragon through into our reality.

You say that book you've read 20 times, and that helped you really get into the zone of this.

[laughs]

There's a, there's a Dutch researcher named Mathias Clasen who wrote one of the best nonfiction books about horror as a genre.

It's called Why Horror Seduces.

Um, and he's really the, he's really the sharpest, you know, the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to, you know, talking about the genre.

Um, and he co-authored a, a now fairly famous paper that showed that horror fans dealt with COVID psychologically and emotionally better than people who don't enjoy horror.

You know, that if you're, if you consume a lot of horror films and read a lot of horror novels, that you, you absorb the emotional shock of the COVID years at a higher le- at, at better.

Um, and um, and like to me, that makes sense because we've all read The Stand, and so we've already got our action plan for when Captain Trips hits.

Hmm.

And I've often wondered, 'cause I've never worked in the civil service, just how much of that is true in the civil service but, uh, or is it actually just there is an institutional culture and individuals can't impact that very much?

It's a really good question.

Um, and I've never...

I agree with your diagnosis about most organizations, but I've never really applied that lens to it.

I think, um, most of the time the civil service isn't a product of the values and, and leadership styles of its leaders.

Um, there are some exceptions to that maybe we can talk about, but, um, most of the time it isn't.

I think-A key-- o-o-often it's the product of these kind of institutional values and norms in some departments, particularly the Treasury, um, a bunch I, I've never worked in, but I, I perceive from the outside.

So what is everythingism?

Yeah.

And, uh, this guy goes on to misuse his power, you know, we already knew he was not a good guy and it gets worse.

Um, and it was adapted into a pretty well-liked comic book, uh, by a buddy of mine named Jason Chiaramella and that first issue just straight adapted the short story and it got nominated for an Eisner Award which is like the industry's Oscar.

But then people wanted more and so Jason began to build it out into a continuing story and in the third issue, you know, Eric, who is our antihero, you know, the cops have started to get onto him because he's done some, he's, he's killed some people and they're hanging out in front of his house and he decides he's gotta deal with them.

So he flies to a nearby zoo with a log chain and, because the bear, the cape sort of gives him super powers, so he uses the log chain to pick up a bear and he flies over the car and he drops the bear into their convertible and then he lands and he's walking down the street and he's talking on his cellphone and behind him you can see the car shaking back and forth and like the guy screaming and bullets going off and, you know, bear claws swiping and, like, w- when that issue came out, the online response just exploded and, and ever since then, Jason and I and some other guys who worked on the comic have always had a shorthand which is that every once in a while, you have to drop the bear.

You know, you have to, that's what people are paying for.

They're paying for the moment you're gonna drop the bear and they're gonna see some crazy shit they've never seen before and it's gonna, you know, and that's what they're gonna talk about later.

What's so frightening about Maine?