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John Fram is the author of the supernatural thriller The Bright Lands and No Road Home (Atria Books, July 23, 2024), a whodunit that's equal parts closed-room murder mystery and gothic horror. His work has appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, and elsewhere. He lives in Texas with too many plants.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
A young father must solve a murder to protect his queer son from a TV preacher's dangerous family and the ghosts that haunt them.
On your nightstand now:
Red Gold by Alan Furst, The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, and Personal: A Jack Reacher Novel by Lee Child.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Old Testament and Stephen King's Bag of Bones.
Your top five authors:
Lee Child, Stephen King, Hilary Mantel, Kate Atkinson, and Alice Munro.
Book you've faked reading:
If you have to fake a book to be someone's friend, they're not a friend worth faking for.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. The closest I've come as an adult to the joy of being lost in a novel the way I once felt for Harry Potter (and with far less retroactive ick).
Book you've bought for the cover:
For a while it seemed like I had multiple copies of just about every Jane Austen novel because publishers pull out all the stops for her.
Book you hid from your parents:
Out by Natsuo Kirino. I'd never encountered anything so unflinchingly brutal.
Book that changed your life:
Njál's Saga. An old, old Icelandic saga that succeeds on just about every level, even compared to the other excellent Icelandic sagas. It's violent, it's tragic, it's hilarious, it's a vertiginous blend of fact and fantasy all told in the same steady voice, like if Gabriel García Márquez still worshipped the old gods.
Favorite line from a book:
"I choose Less," from Andrew Sean Greer's Less.
Five books you'll never part with:
I was extremely broke for most of my 20s, so moving and losing and rebuying books was just a fact of life, and I don't get too attached to them anymore. I have some untyped manuscripts in my office closet I'd be pretty scared to lose though.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The World Undone by G.J. Meyer. Not just a one-volume history of World War I, but one of the most moving books I've ever read about futility, heroism, and a cataclysm we still don't fully understand. See also: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.
If Tana French and Stephen King had a gay son, would he write a book a lot like No Road Home?
Yes.