Interview with Juan Martinez

I don’t read much horror because I tend to be a baby when it comes to getting scared. But when I heard about Juan Martinez’s novel, Extended Stay, I knew I had to check it out. It follows two siblings from Colombia to a hotel in Las Vegas after their family is lost to an atrocious massacre, but the horrors of the past don’t leave them.

This literary horror novel isn’t an easy read, but it is an important one that looks at how capitalism exploits immigrant labor. Juan Martinez is an incredible writer and brings to life this story with remarkable acuity. While I haven’t gotten the opportunity to meet him yet, I can tell you he’s very kind and approachable.

I’m so happy he agreed to this interview!

Extended Stay is a really striking novel, quite unlike anything else I've read. Did that make it hard for you to find a publisher? Can you talk about the novel's path to publication and finding a home with University of Arizona Press?

It really is such a strange novel, and the strangeness definitely played a part in how the novel made it out into the world. Like, I had signed with an agent a while back—someone who was super excited about the novel but wanted a more conventional structure, particularly in the latter third, where people really want for the uncanny and unexplainable to become less so. Basically, he'd read a draft and ask me to make it less strange, and I'd try, but the novel would become stranger. That's what the novel wanted—more weirdness. And to the agent's credit, we went with the version I wanted, and he tried to sell it, and it came super close, but it didn't quite find its place. But then a really amazing genre editor with his own imprint at a big traditional publishing house wanted it, and almost immediately he found out that his imprint had been shut down. And then I saw that Camino del Sol, the storied University of Arizona Press Latinx series, had a new editor, this amazing champion of Latinx writers named Rigoberto Gonzales who I deeply admire. I reached out to him, he read it, liked it, took it on. But OMG—yeah. Definitely a journey.

What inspires you? What keeps you going when writing and publishing gets tough? 

I'm inspired by writers I love—those long dead, those who are totally and definitely alive. And I'm lucky enough to teach writing for a living, so I'm constantly in these amazing spaces with students who deeply care about writing—so it's a good reminder of how difficult it is to engage in any sort of creative act. I know we're at a challenging moment when it comes to publishing, but it's never easy. I try to write through other projects even as I'm submitting things, just so I won't spend all of my worry and energy into waiting.

Can you share a few reading recommendations?

I love horror, and I feel that there's so much excellent horror out there, and so I'm constantly pushing Thomas Ligotti, a weird sui-generis writer who's half Lovecraft and half Bruno Schulz. And for contemporaries I am in awe of Paul Tremblay and Chicago's own Cynthia Pelayo. I'm also halfway through Tobias Carroll's In the Sight (not horror! just awesome! and short!) and Elizabeth McKenzie wrote one of my favorite oddball novels last year, The Dog of the North. Check it out for sure.

Is there a song (or songs) that ties into your novel in some way?

So the hymn "Abide With Me" pops up repeatedly in the novel—it's historically appropriate but (full confession) I first ran across it in a super spooky form in the zombie movie 28 Days Later. Also in there? The "Three's Company" theme song—which I think brings me back to the first answer: I love this novel, but it's a total weirdo of a beast.

Thank you, Juan!