San Antonio author Johnny Compton says his love of writing in the horror genre started as a child in Mississippi.
“There are a lot of ghost stories and a lot of ghost lore exists on the Mississippi Gulf coast,” he says. “And then eventually I made my way to San Antonio, where I have lived since 1994.”
The author’s debut novel “The Spite House” has been nominated for several awards and is applauded by critics. And now, with his second book, Compton continues spinning horror tales.
“Devils Kill Devils,” follows protagonist Sarita, who has had a guardian angel all of her life. On the night of her wedding, her guardian angel shows up and violently murders her husband. This leads Sarita to question everything she’s ever known: Was her husband planning something terrible, and the angel was protecting her? Or is this angel that has been protecting her all her life truly an angelic?
This quest for answers has Sarita learning to take back control of her life and be the own hero of her story.
“Devils Kill Devils” is set in the Texas Hill Country. Compton says the southern gothic elements of the story stemmed from it being a matter of writing what you know.
“One of my favorite parts of the book to actually discover and write about [was] a real place in the Hill Country called Baby Head Mountain,” Compton said. “And I talk about in the book – the rumors and legends around why it’s called ‘Baby Head Mountain.’ And so these things are all available to me and they were easy to access in terms of just my memories and also research.”
Compton says even if someone isn’t a horror fan, there are elements of the genre in many things folks already enjoy.
“Everybody likes to be scared a little bit,” he said. “We like Halloween. We like haunted houses. If you like Indiana Jones movies and you’re just like, ‘I prefer adventure,’ they have explicitly horrific scenes that are just straight out of a horror story. The entire opening of ‘E.T.’ is kind of presented as a horror story. So everybody loves a little bit of horror.”
But there are other elements to the book that provide a more dimensional experience than just ‘scary,’ Compton says.
“This story has a range of things in it, a range of emotions. There’s grief, there’s heartbreak, there’s overcoming that… There’s love and a determination to fight, and then there just also happens to be monsters that are lurking in the darkness,” he said.
So as the book repeatedly tells its characters, “be brave.”
“Anybody who wants to read it, be brave. It will be very rewarding, and I think you’ll really get a kick out of it,” Compton said.
