Horror Author Chris Panatier on Writing Character-Driven Scares

Welcome back to Scare Me! a weekly horror newsletter. Today, we’re speaking with Chris Panatier, author of horror novels including The Phlebotomist, The Redemption of Morgan Bright, and his latest, Shitshow.

Have you ever read a book that’s just a hoot, from the first page to the last sentence? Over the summer, horror author Chris Panatier posted that he was seeking coverage for his newest novella. One Instagram DM later, and his digital ARC was in my inbox.

Shitshow tells the story of Sunday McWhorter, a latrine technician eking out a humble life in Texas. His mother, Regina, is slipping into ever-deepening dementia, and Sunday’s determined to take care of her as best he can.

Sunday’s world flips upside down when he discovers a gruesome crime scene within a porta potty at the county fair. When his mother disappears shortly after, he realizes that there could be an unlikely connection. With the help of Ms. Poppy, his elderly, Fireball-slugging neighbor, and Gabby, the young caretaker of a local museum, Sunday races against time and all odds to retrieve his mother from an otherwordly carnival realm.

Your mileage may vary, but for me, Shitshow never felt cheap or overly reliant on predictable toilet-related gags, despite its name. Like Neil McRobert’s Good Boy, which I covered several weeks ago, it’s both scary and incredibly wholesome, full of kindness and humor and heart. Its scares are similar to those in Ghost Ship. Remember when that takeout container of rice momentarily transforms into a writhing mass of maggots? If you got a sick enjoyment out of that campy scare, I think you’ll like this book, too.

Chris recently joined me for a wide-ranging conversation about how he developed Shitshow, his unconventional journey to becoming a published author, and the many projects he’s working on currently.

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Michelle Delgado: In Shitshow’s acknowledgements, you write about how this story started out as a bit of wordplay—porta potty, portal potty. But what came next?

Chris Panatier: I'm glad people are finding the book and are willing to give it a chance. It’s a story with quite a big heart, actually. But to answer your question: That is very true. I was riding my bike, I saw a porta potty, and I went, “Portal potty?”

I think every idea I come with is super obvious. So I went to Goodreads, and I went to Amazon, and there was no portal potty book.

I was like, “Okay, this feels like a light novella. What is it? How can I make portal potty a real story that can last more than three pages?” I never really outline, but one of my favorite parts of writing is that I'll sit for weeks and just think about it. Then, at some point, my brain overloads and goes, “Start writing right now.”

I still remember the night that happened for this book. I needed a venue where there are porta potties, and the first thing I thought about was music. I'm a huge metalhead, I love concerts. But it didn't feel quite right. My other goal was that I really wanted to do a Halloween book.

Even as seedy and dangerous as carnivals and county fairs are, there's something really comforting about them. We kind of toss our cares to the wind, go in with our cotton candy and corn dogs, and enjoy ourselves, despite the dangers. Carnivals really fit the spooky season Halloween aesthetic.

The next step was, who are my main characters? I didn't know, but, but when I sat down to write, the prologue came into my head. It's got to start with some teenagers, and I think I got to kill them. Do I kill them? Unclear, but at least in the opening scene, it's very dire for Jessie and Roy. When I wrote it, I didn't even know if the story was going to follow those two or not. And I could have, and that could have been a good story. But once I finished that prologue, I wanted this to be really grounded. Who would be someone that no one would guess would be the protagonist, but is totally obvious? And that's our fifty-plus-year-old latrine technician, Sunday McWhorter. I thought, “That’s it, one hundred percent.” And it went on from there.

I have such a fondness in my heart for your main character, Sunday. Fundamentally, he does things other people might not want to do, from his job as a latrine technician to caring for his mother through her struggle with dementia. He's such an admirable character. How were you affected by spending time in Sunday’s mind?

For me, writing is often exploratory and sometimes aspirational. In my twenties and thirties, I’ve worked on trying to push selfishness away. I can be cynical, and Sunday is not cynical. Sunday has character traits that I really admire, and those exist in real people. Sometimes I have a conversation with someone that is so uncynical I feel like a fuckin' dirtbag. I'm like, “Jesus, why can't I just always see the good? Why do I have to get so caught up and angry at times?”

Sunday doesn't have time for that shit. He's got a task in front of him. He had to get this job because he's taking care of his mom. There was no woe-is-me, no questioning. It had to be done. Sunday's a Stoic, and there's something about that I admire. And Sunday's not just a fictional character. There are many, many people like that, and I admire those people. I'm so glad that you were touched by Sunday, too.

It definitely prompted some self-reflection for me. I went into this book a little bit nervous that it was going to be really gross. What I discovered was, “Wow, I'm kind of a piece of shit.” Because why would I think a sanitation job is any different than a normal job? It has dignity, it's very important, and Sunday is completely unbothered by it. That was such a humbling experience for me as a reader, to realize I came in with some assumptions and biases that I wasn't even aware of.

Was that on your mind while you were writing? Or did Sunday just bring out the best in all of us?

That's literally what happened. As soon as I had the first scene of him cooking breakfast for his mother, I knew who he was. To the extent that I had any prejudices, I wasn't confronted with them, because I had Sunday as my guide. He was just very practical: “I'm doing my job, and damn it, I got a potato chip bag stuck in the vacuum, this is the shit I have to deal with.”

It never felt like you were trying too hard to make a point—your perspective and politics felt suffused throughout the narrative in a way that felt very organic.

Oh, thank you. I'm getting better at that. In all my books, specifically my debut, The Phlebotomist, and my last one, The Redemption of Morgan Bright, I was very conscious of not getting on my soapbox. But I still have moments in both where a character is expressing something and whacking you over the head a little bit. Sometimes that's what you're there to do. Both of those are kind of angry books, socially and politically speaking.

But this one, I'm going to express the things I want to express, but through characters who are in a situation where it is completely natural for them to say it and move on. Because, again, they got shit to do.

There was one scene that just I loved, where Ms. Poppy asks a cop, “Can't you just ban fairs to keep the public safe? You’ve already banned books and abortions.”

Yep, that's Ms. Poppy. That kind of flowed off the tongue. I didn't know where it was gonna go, but I was like, “Oh, I'm leaving that in.”

Sunday has many different women of different generations within his orbit. He's really just trying to keep up. How did you build this cast around Sunday?

I tend to write more women protagonists than men. Sunday was a bit unusual for me. I was a drama kid, always hanging out with the women around me. I have a sister, I have a wife and a daughter. In a lot of ways, I feel more simpatico with women.  

Women in fiction often get short shrift for being practical—when in real life, I think women are way more practical than men. I was flexing that a little bit here, where the women around him are like, “This is the answer. This is what you have to do.” Gabby is not only is very practical, but she has her own motive. She's being extremely pragmatic, because she's found a ticket to break this curse she has.

I love highlighting the pragmatism of women. I think that society has forced women to be more pragmatic than men. Society caters to men, so they don't have to be as creative as women, generally speaking.

It's also very rare to see elderly women specifically get treated with the full humanity that you gave them in this novel. It’s sad that it’s rare, but that is the case.

As I get older, I’ve realized that old people are just in different bodies than the rest of us. That's really it. They are just as vital and useful. They may be slow, they may not hear as well, they may not speak as well—but in their minds, they're there.

Even though Regina is fighting the loss [of her mental faculties], I really wanted to make her the hero of this book. It’s interesting, because in my first novel, The Phlebotomist, the main character is a 67-year-old grandmother.

There’s an interesting displacement that happens, too. A lot of people fear aging and death, but in your story, we actually need to be more concerned with an evil carnival owner bringing about hell on Earth.

Right? I love that. I haven't had dementia in my direct family, but it's just something that terrifies me. I have been around people who do have it. It's awful. So for me, if I can be present with it, I can try to understand it better. I can sit with it.

Death in this book doesn't feel like the big bad, really.

You pack so much humor into the book, too. How much fun are you having writing one-liners and colorful descriptions? Is that flowing out of you, or are you crafting these moments to punch things up?

There are a lot of writers that just get that juice and it comes out fully formed. Not for me. I write like I paint—layer, layer, layer. I would have a little turn of phrase, and then I would go back and go, “How can I really punch this up?”

It was also L.P. Hernandez, who's one of the owners of Sobelo Books, and a brilliant writer in his own right. He's such a good, ruthless, mean editor. He would just highlight something and go, “Tell us what this is. I want to see it.” He was really good at finding opportunities for me to come up with a fun turn and put it in the book.

What are some of the references that were on your mind while working on Shitshow?

I was thinking about the horror movies in the ‘80s that I would watch at my friend's houses, because I wasn't allowed to watch them at home. And Fangoria magazine. [When I was a kid,] my mom would take me to the grocery store and drop me in the magazine alley.

Nowadays, I can't even think about dropping my child and walking away. But in the ‘80s, no one gave a shit.

I’d just sit there scaring myself with the Fangoria magazines, and I wanted to capture that sort of crazy energy of ‘80s and early ‘90s horror I was watching on the screen of my mind. I pitched it a love letter to those movies of the ‘80s and ‘90s, during the time when the movie execs were snorting their lunches. This would have been greenlit because they were all so high.

They're like, “Haunted toilet? Sounds great.”

Exactly! I wanted to capture that feel. And then the last thing I'll say is that I grew up in Bartlesville, Oklahoma—35,000 people, something like that. It’s a small town.

They have a little teeny amusement park called the Kiddie Park. It has a merry-go-round and two little roller coasters and a bunch of other little things. It's adorable, and it's tiny. My parents took me and my friends there all through the summers, from age eight to maybe fourteen. Even though I've been to other carnivals and county fairs, it was that place that formed this very deep, abiding love for carnivals for me. I visited recently, and it's still there.

I know what you mean. To me, carnivals really evoke “my parents dropped me off somewhere and I'm not being supervised.” That kind of liberation.

You could smell the old grease for the funnel cakes, Will I ever eat a funnel cake again? Honestly, I was already super thrilled about funnel cakes, but it's like calamari. Carnival calamari. Oh my God, I should have used that. How did I not use that?! I've blown it as a writer. Blown it.

We'll put it in the newsletter!!

You do lots of things—you write books, you make art, you’ve been practicing environmental law for most of your career. How do you keep all the plates spinning? And how have these very eclectic experiences forged your perspective on the world?

I think I've had help from a solid dose of undiagnosed ADHD, probably. My friend, horror author and artist Gemma Amor, has described it not as a deficit of attention, but as a surplus of focus. That's me. I am interested in so many things, and I love to do them. I love creating. It keeps my soul alive.

I did practice environmental law from 2001 to the present. I’ve dialed back my time at the firm because I lost the passion I had for it. I was getting just drained by the being a trial lawyer, traveling all over and constantly being in trial. Even if I hadn't developed this new passion for writing, I still would have phased out of my job.

Also, I have one daughter, and I was traveling all over constantly. I [want] to be here for my daughter—I'm not going to wake up one day and she's leaving high school, you know. That was a big, big part of it.

It just so happened that at the same time, around 2015, I went, “I'm going to be a writer.” I don't travel around trying cases constantly, so I do have time during the week to write and do art. I get to take my daughter to school and do grocery shopping and be very present. That's everything to me.

And now you're on the Stephen Graham Jones schedule of three books every two years.

It's been one every two years, but in January, we did the next deal with Angry Robot for two books, one in 2026 and one in 2027. I didn't set out to make this happen, but L.P. Hernandez from Sobelo was like, “Hey, do you have anything for us?” And I'm like, “You want Shitshow? I got Shitshow!” The Daytide thing happened that way, too.

Look, I'm mortal. I'm not gonna wait for [a Big Five] publisher for everything. Sobelo has been a dream! I’m going to get [my books] out in the world. I'm going to have a backlist, so if people find me later, they can go read this stuff that's already out there.

I've learned that approach from other writers I really admire, like Hailey Piper. I don't even understand how she puts out what she puts out, because she's doing sometimes four books a year. Gemma Amor does traditional, indie, and self pub. So, I'm putting work out. I don't really care [how], as long as it gets out.

I did want to ask about that! Some people view publishing as a hierarchy, but that seems less true in the horror space.

I had to get to the point of not being a perfectionist. [For example,] there was a second book we offered Angry Robot. It’s my witch book, Kill Me With Fire. It is a very, very nasty little book, okay? And they were like, “We want this. Can we talk about it?”

So I talked to my editor, and she was like, “Look, the team has read the first fifty pages. We really love it, but it's there's a lot of tough stuff to stomach. Could you dial it back?” And I was like, “No. I will sell it somewhere else. I'll write you a whole different book, which will probably be just as bad.”

But it brings me to the point, which is that there was an article that came out that recently saying the Big Five is killing art. Because they are. We are confounding art with entertainment, and that's because of social media.

I always, kind of jokingly, say the Big Five are cowards. They want to genre-bend, but they want someone else to do it first. If someone else succeeds, they want to be the second ones to do it. That's what they really want, because they're all covering their ass, right?

I don't think you can compare indie to Big Five, really. You're going to get things that would never be published by Big Five, because they're niche or just not meant for a mainstream audience. Angry Robot is a traditional, middle-sized publisher. It's in all the bookstores, but it's not Big Five. But even they are like, “Oh, it's a little hard for us, a little much for us.” If I write a book that fits their model, great. And if I write something that's a little too extreme, I'm gonna put it somewhere else.

Well, I really loved Shitshow, and I’m looking forward to reading your next few books, too. Can you tell us a little about what’s ahead?

I haven't written like anything new in months, other than a couple short stories, which is very unusual for me! I'm doing so much revising and editing right now.

I have a book called Daytide that’s not officially announced yet, but there's some stuff leaking out about it. It’s a horror fantasy, 500-plus pages, fully illustrated, and it's a limited deluxe edition of 350 copies. It's coming out at the end of February from Rapture Publishing, which is a very small publisher that puts out chapbooks. I'm finishing the art for that, the cover and end papers and fifteen to twenty interiors.

Literally, I have up here on my desktop the edits for Worry Box, which is my next Angry Robot horror novel that comes out next September. I gotta get that back to them, and then I cannot wait until I can actually write a new thing.

The fact that anyone reads any of my books…you could have read Nat Cassidy's books. You could have read The Last House on Needless Street. Like, why did you waste your time reading my books? I feel almost guilty. It takes eight to ten hours to read a novel.

It means so much to me that people saw a book called Shitshow and went, “I'm gonna give my time to this book.”

Up Next: Girly Demonic Stories to Explore After Play Nice

Is anyone else reading Rachel Harrison’s Play Nice? I finished it last week, and I think it’s her best yet. I’ve started compiling a list of some of my favorite girly demonic horror stories! If you enjoyed my list of horror stories about Spiritualism, this one will be similar in format. Just, demons and mental illness and girlhood this time around.

As an aside: I’m currently reading ‘Salem’s Lot for the first time, and I realized that both that book and Jaws are celebrating their 50th anniversaries this year. 1975 also brought The Fog, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Dario Argento’s Deep Red. What a year! I’m 200 pages into ‘Salem and totally immersed. I don’t think those guys are in the Lot just to sell antiques…

Scare Me! is a free weekly horror newsletter published every Thursday morning. It’s written by Michelle Delgado, featuring original illustrations by Sam Pugh. You can find the archive of past issues here. If you were sent this by a friend, subscribe to receive more spooky interviews, essays—and maybe even a ghost story or two.