An Interview With Chase Dearinger On His Debut Novel
In the desolate hills of Eastern Oklahoma, the residents of Seven Suns are haunted by more than their own personal dramas. Bones crawl from the earth, shape-shifting entities slip into different skins, and a theoretically impossible black cougar roams the countryside. Chase Dearinger intertwines the complicated lives of a pseudo-step-father, a troubled teen, and a reluctant sheriff as their stories come together to face This New Dark.
Chase Dearinger is an Oklahoma native who now lives in Kansas with his wife and two daughters. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in magazines around the country, including Bayou, The Southampton Review, Short Story America, and Heavy Feather Review. He currently serves as the Chief Editor of Emerald City, a quarterly online fiction magazine, and directs the Cow Creek Chapbook Prize, an annual poetry chapbook contest. He is a professor of creative writing and literature at Pittsburg State University. This New Dark is his first novel.
I sat down with Chase to talk about his writing process, reconciling literary and genre fiction, and the inherent horror of liminal spaces.
