The Black List recently announced the seven winners of its inaugural Unpublished Novel Award, introducing the world to seven writers across various genres from children’s and young adult fiction to adult crime, horror, and literary fiction.
Debutiful recently chatted with all seven winners and is excited to introduce the world to each writer, discover why and how they write, and learn more about the book that won them the award.
Meet David Barringer, winner of the Horror award for his manuscript, A Box Came For You. Barringer has done it all. He’s worked as a freelance journalist, lawyer, design writer, novelist, graphic designer, editor, photographer, and teacher. His screenplay Summer Clubbing, adapted from his own novel, was an Official Semifinalist in the Los Angeles Crime & Horror Film Festival 2021, a Quarterfinalist in the Screencraft Horror Screenplay Competition 2020, and an Official Selection in the HorrorHaus Film Festival 2020.
We asked Barringer to give readers a brief insight into his writing life and his Unpublished Novel Award-winning manuscript, A Box Came For You.
Can you introduce readers to who you are as a writer and what interests and informs your writing?
I have an eclectic background. I was pre-med in college but went to law school. I wrote for New York magazines and for the auto industry in Detroit. I surfed opportunities. I wanted to write novels but didn’t know how.
Now in my fifties, I’ve been drawing on my eclectic background as a novelist who finally knows what he’s doing. For the past decade, I’ve been editing a dozen novels while hiding from the world.
Understanding myself as a novelist took a long time and a lot of effort. I learned, finally, that I’m a novelist who writes about the positive transformation of a single, active, self-aware hero, and I like to introduce an element of science fiction or the supernatural into the story.
My heroes can be people, animals, or hybrid creatures. I’ve written novels that could be classified as rom-com, coming-of-age, wish fulfillment, horror, tech noir, and sci-fi. But in each one, I’ve written a novel with the DNA I mentioned above. That’s what they all share, the skeleton inside each novel that represents who I am. I believe people can change for the better, but only if they rise to the challenge.
The announcement over at Lit Hub gave a quick preview of what your book is, but I always like to ask the writer what their book is really about. So, what’s your book?
A young man, 25, wants to get away from his abusive mother and escape his small town in Michigan, where he’s been left behind by his peers, and so in his desperation to kickstart a new life in Los Angeles, he steals moving boxes out of an eerie shipping container. He does a bad thing because he wants a place of his own.
A curse crawls out of those boxes and traps him in his apartment, and this curse forces him to confront his past, specifically his mother. You can’t grow if you don’t deal with your pain. So that nugget of truth kept me focused on the hero’s experience. It’s not about a generic box and a random curse. It’s about the hero trying to skip over painful parts of his life and fast-forward to freedom, and a monster pops up and says, “Not so fast.”
How did this story come to be? What were the highs and lows (so far) of writing it?
I was helping my son move into a new apartment, and I thought, “Boxes! What’s cheaper than boxes?!”
It was summer 2021, and I was trying to come up with a cheap concept for a horror movie. My brother Michael Barringer is a filmmaker, and we wanted to make a horror movie. Boxes seemed like a great idea. They slide out of a dark hallway. Something rattles inside them or oozes out of them. Tape rips off in the middle of the night. And they’re cardboard. Cheap!
So the movie concept started with one of those “wouldn’t it be cool if” kind of thoughts. Wouldn’t it be cool if someone took the wrong moving boxes and unleashed a curse?
I was already seeing the cardboard box replace the glowing egg on the poster for the movie Alien, and I was hearing Brad Pitt in Seven howl, “What’s in the box?” I was hooked.
Once I began thinking about the story, I realized I didn’t want to be limited by the parameters of low-budget filmmaking: cheap props, minimal sets. In a novel, I can do anything, and it’s free! So I had fun pushing the drama and developing the monster. If I ever make this into a movie, I’m gonna need a lot of CGI.
Early on, I knew I needed to project myself into the hero’s perspective, so I made the hero a young person going through a rite of passage: moving to a new place to live on their own. I could relate to that, especially to the feeling that you’ve fallen behind, and you don’t know if you can catch up to everyone else. So I found my way into the life of the hero through that sense of existential panic, which drives him to take the boxes, and it’s a choice you sympathize with.
Funny enough, I couldn’t get a handle on the story by thinking of it as a horror story. Horror is what the reader feels. I had to think of it as a monster story. I can write about a monster. That’s great fun. So my hero had to battle a monster in order to make it through his rite of passage, to overcome the ghosts of his past and move on with his life.
I wrote the first draft of Box in the fall of 2021. It was the first novel I wrote after resolving to take a sabbatical away from teaching in order to focus on writing. I’d been mulling over the story since the summer. I’d written notes and dreamed of the story. I wrote the first draft in one month, in a thrilling rush. I was pumped. Then I had people read it, and I edited it for years: the usual process of rereading and rewriting.
What has this Award opened for you? Where are you in your journey?
The award has been a boost of hope. I’m driving on this writer’s track, and sometimes it feels like I’m driving in circles and going nowhere. Do I quit? I know I won’t quit, but now and then, I feel pretty low. So when this award arrived, it gave me a boost of speed, a boost of hope.
I had professional author photos taken. I upgraded my website. I’m posting on social media. I keep writing here and there. I’ve never had an agent, so I’m mentioning the award in query letters to agents. Fingers crossed.
I’ve had many stages in my writer’s life. Most recently, I’ve been a teacher. I taught middle and high school for eight years. In fact, every spring, I taught eighth-graders how to write a monster story. Every year, the students surprised me. They were impressively creative.
I stopped teaching in June 2021 to edit my novel manuscripts and write new ones. I haven’t published fiction in twenty years. This is a reboot of my life as a novelist, a late-bloomer’s second or maybe third act. So I’m fired up, and I’ve been productive. I’ve written six novel manuscripts in the last five years.
I’ve really enjoyed this time of my life. I had to force it. As empty-nesters, my wife and I made the decision to seize the day. We’ve had to downsize and penny-pinch, but I wouldn’t trade it. I have what all writers dream of having: time!
What does your writing routine and space look like?
I write in the finished basement of my in-laws’ house in Michigan. I have my desk facing the pond where the egrets high-step and the turtles sunbathe and, in winter, the snow piles up in the woods.
My wife and I travel to see family and friends, so I take my laptop and write wherever I find space: on a couch in North Carolina, at a kitchen table in Florida, in a cafe in Brooklyn. I keep a journal. I write essays. I take notes on the next novel. I reread a manuscript and make edits. I don’t set word-count goals or page goals. I just make sure to open a document and write something every day.
When I’m writing the first draft of a novel, however, that’s a totally different thing. That’s not practice. That’s the game. I generate the world of the novel in my imagination, and to sustain that world, I need to be left alone. The world collapses if I’m drawn into helping people, making dinner, mowing the lawn, talking on the phone. I need to hide in a cave and make marks by firelight—you know, with my MacBook and Ugg slippers.
What can we expect from you in the future?
Novels. Lots of novels.
To paraphrase Neo from The Matrix.
The novel I really want to publish soon is one called Ogre Boss because it’s funny and timely.
Handsome ogres in velour tracksuits who smell like baked goods have smashed their way into government institutions in a cartoonisly dystopian America, and my hero, Val, joins a secret organization on a mission to rescue a VIP from their clutches.
If I had to do that awkward thing novelists are supposed to do, which is to reference other works in a “this meets that” mash-up pitch, then I’d say Ogre Boss is like if George Saunders had written his version of The Princess Bride after watching Idiocracy.