Awakening follows a group of neighbors caught in a bizarre and increasingly terrifying fight for survival when an ancient fungal intelligence awakens beneath a Los Angeles hillside. Where did the idea behind this novel come from?

I think it was really a combination of several ideas.

Part of it came from looking back on my youth, when taking mushrooms that somebody handed you without giving it much thought seemed like a perfectly normal thing to do. I liked the idea of a kind of perennial adolescent—someone who never quite felt the pressures of adulthood and was therefore still willing to do some of the foolish things the rest of us eventually learn not to do. That became Rage. I wanted him to be a little dim, but in an entertaining way, particularly in contrast to his much more cautious, rule-following roommate, Tim.

Navarro actually came from somewhere else entirely. Years earlier, I had written a short story about a long-dead murderer and sexual predator lying in his grave twenty years after his death. There was almost nothing left of him but his skeleton and one eye, and he spent his days trying to move a finger and thinking about how terribly unfair his situation was.

What I liked about that story was that, over the ten minutes or so it took to read it, you could actually begin to feel sorry for him—until you gradually realized what a terrible person he had been. More importantly, he never realized it. He still saw himself as the victim.

I liked the character enough to bring him into Awakening, and eventually he became connected to the fungal network that resurrects him.

From there, I mostly let the story go where it wanted. I spent years rewriting and playing with it while I was gainfully employed and had no particular expectation that it would ever become a published novel. At various points it was really a couple of smaller books that I eventually stitched together and fussed over until they became Awakening.

Underneath all of that, though, is an idea that still fascinates me: there’s much more to the world than what meets the eye, and sometimes those of us who become a little too civilized miss out on quite a lot.

How did you balance the book’s gruesome body horror with its dark comedy?

Realistically, I think almost everything is funny—or at least has a funny side to it.

Some of the grotesqueries in Awakening are so outlandish that I find them difficult to take entirely seriously. Rage is deliberately a little ridiculous, and putting someone like him in the middle of genuinely horrifying circumstances naturally creates humor.

But I don’t think I ever consciously sat down and decided, “I need a joke here.” Humor is just the way I tend to look at things. It makes the medicine go down a little smoother, particularly when the writing itself has a somewhat self-deprecating quality.

I also think horror sometimes takes itself too seriously. Horror is, after all, frequently absurd. Terrible, frightening things are happening that shouldn’t be possible in the first place. There’s something inherently funny about that absurdity if you allow it to be funny.

For me, the comedy doesn’t diminish the horror. If anything, I think the two work better together. You laugh, relax for a moment—and then something awful happens.

What drew you to fungi as the source of the novel’s supernatural threat?

As I may have already given away, I was a bit of a fan of fungi when I was younger. When I started writing Awakening, I was looking back on some of those years with considerable fondness.

What’s funny to me now is that I ended up turning the fungus into the apparent bad guy when, personally, I have rather warm feelings toward mushrooms.

But Mother—the fungal intelligence in the book—isn’t really evil. She’s amoral. She consumes dead and sometimes dying material and incorporates it into herself. The intelligence—or, if you want to call it that, the soul—of everything she consumes becomes part of her collective consciousness. In that sense, Mother isn’t an individual at all. She’s a family.

And she’s starving.

If you’re starving, you eat. Mother isn’t setting out to be cruel or malicious. She’s trying to survive, and unfortunately her idea of survival can be rather unpleasant for everyone else.

So despite having made a giant fungal intelligence the supernatural threat in a horror novel, I don’t really think of fungi as the bad guys. Mother is dangerous, certainly, but I think she’s also terribly misunderstood.

Can you give us a peek inside Book 2 of the Mother’s Little Helpers series? Where will it take readers?

One of the biggest changes in ReAwakening is that the center of the story shifts.

Rage is the protagonist of Awakening, but the person who suffers the most at Navarro’s hands is Pippi, the ten-year-old girl who fancies herself after Pippi Longstocking. ReAwakening begins within about an hour of the end of the first book, and Pippi realizes very quickly that whatever happened between her and Navarro isn’t over. Somehow, he is still affecting her.

Rather than retreat from that, she has to grow up a little. She has to decide what she’s going to do about it.

And ultimately, she becomes the hero of the second book.

Rage and Alicia are still there, as are the other characters from Awakening. In fact, pretty much everybody from the first book makes it into the second one, whether they’re alive or dead. We also add several new characters, so the world and the strange little family at the center of it become larger even though the book itself is a little shorter.

Someone who proofread Awakening once told me, “Rage is a jerk, but he’s kind of my spirit animal.” I loved that, because I think you have to be a certain kind of person to really root for Rage.

Pippi is different. I’d be hard-pressed to imagine anyone not rooting for her.

The threat is bigger in ReAwakening, the cast is bigger, and dealing with what’s happening becomes much more of a group effort. But at its heart, I think it’s Pippi’s book. She was the victim in Awakening. In ReAwakening, she gets the chance to become something else.

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