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Joe Vallese coedited What's Your Exit? A Literary Detour Through New Jersey. A Pushcart Prize finalist and notable in Best American Essays, his creative and pop culture writing has appeared in Bomb, Vice, Backstage, North American Review, Southeast Review and Popmatters. He is clinical associate professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. Vallese is editor of the anthology It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror (Feminist Press), which includes essays from 25 queer writers probing such films as The Ring and Jaws.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
Through the lens of horror, queer and trans writers consider the films that deepened, amplified and illuminated their own experiences.
On your nightstand now:
I'm reading Joseph Osmundson's Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between, a beautiful and haunting hybrid text that dramatizes the structures, cycles and evolutions of viruses in ways that laypeople can really grasp, visualize and meditate on. Osmundson wrote it in the darkest days of the Covid-19 pandemic and draws striking parallels to the early days of HIV and how decimated queer communities and cultures have been rebuilt and reimagined as a result. It's taking me a while to get through it because I find myself holding my breath as I read and needing to take breaks from it.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I had such eclectic taste as a young reader and that remains true today. I was in love with Judy Blume as a kid, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing in particular. I also found the humor of Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar to be satisfyingly dark. And then I'd go and pick up something completely inappropriate like William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist or Stephen King's Misery because--perhaps also inappropriately; sorry for outing you, Mom and Dad--I was completely addicted to horror from a young age and always wanted to read the books those movies were based on. I also had a real penchant for those novelizations of horror movies they used to release, sometimes before the movie itself was even in theaters. I remember 1992 being a particularly fruitful year for me in that respect: Bram Stoker's Dracula, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Candyman, Alien 3. I didn't realize that Single White Female, however, was actually a tie-in with the original John Lutz novel SWF Seeks Same, which is absolutely bonkers and very, very different from the Barbet Schroeder film.
Your top five authors:
Oh, this is tough, but I'll give it a try. Even though my heart was broken a little bit when I did a master's thesis on the heavy hand of Gordon Lish in his work, I'm still very much a disciple of Raymond Carver.
Discovering David Leavitt's stories as a newly out of the closet gay man in my early 20s left a considerable imprint on me.
I've yet to find a single sentence by Alexander Chee that I'm not completely in love with.
I stumbled upon the late Laurie Colwin's novels in college and, even though--or perhaps, because--the characters and the plots feel so far from my own life and experience, I'm still so taken with the brightness, wit and optimism in her work.
Torrey Peters's debut, Detransition, Baby, is definitely my favorite novel in recent memory. I so love its unapologetically queer and trans spin on the '90s Jennifer Aniston pregnancy-induced love-triangle romcom that I can pretty safely predict Peters will be a favorite of mine for years to come.
Book you've faked reading:
Anna Karenina. For some reason it seemed like something I needed to check off my list but every time I attempted it, I just checked out.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Wonder When You'll Miss Me by the late Amanda Davis. I'm not a big re-reader aside from texts I teach, but the first time I read this novel, I had to stop and re-read paragraphs, and then pages, and then full chapters before I could move forward. It's a disservice to the reader to say too much about it, but it's part rape revenge fantasy, part bildungsroman. It's one of those books that makes you wonder, as a writer, if you'll ever be able to craft something as inventive and pitch-perfect and if you should even try. That said, if a film producer happens to be reading this, I volunteer to write the film adaptation for scale.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I'm obsessed with those '80s Vintage Contemporaries paperback covers and have to resist the urge to buy them blindly on eBay because, more often than not, the stories inside don't really match the tone of the cover art. More recently, I decided to give Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life a try because I loved the cheeky, provocative way it uses Peter Hujar's "Orgasmic Man" and it seemed to complement the book's heft. My feelings about the novel that lives in between the front and back covers, well, that's more complicated.
Book you hid from your parents:
Like a lot of closeted gay boys, I mostly hid anything that had been declared "for girls," like the Baby-Sitters Club or Nancy Drew. Our town library had a very detached, all-business, older German woman as its librarian, and she thankfully never batted an eye.
Book that changed your life:
Speaking of amazing covers! It was, collectively, hands down R.L. Stine's early Fear Street novels. As an aspiring writer who was obsessed with horror movies in part because of my deep, complicated sense of queer kinship with the "final girl," I felt particularly seen by the Fear Street series. The template the books provided also felt, respectfully, like something I could realistically achieve myself--early lessons in "craft," if you will. In fact, when I had the flu one summer when I was 10 or 11, I used my dad's old grad school typewriter and wrote my own full-length Fear Street entry. It wasn't half bad.
Favorite line from a book:
My favorite line of prose is actually from a personal essay by Judy Ruiz called "Oranges and Sweet Sister Boy":
"My self is wet and small. But it is not dark. Sometimes, if no one touches me, I will die."
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
André Aciman's Call Me by Your Name. I didn't have any expectations or any interest, really--it was a few years before the film gave it new life--but it grabbed me in a way few novels had before or have since. I'd love to Men in Black myself, forget everything about it, and then open it again for the very first time.
Writer you'd like to switch places with:
Stephen King and I share a birthday, which was very exciting to learn when I was a kid, as I'd been devouring his novels since around the fourth grade. I thought it was fated, of course, that I'd be the second coming of King, but unfortunately, I just can't write as quickly or prolifically as he can. In the original, twisted ideas department, though, I think I could hold my own.