John Hornor Jacobs

John Hornor Jacobs writes to beat the devil.

Jacobs’ first novel, Southern Gods, concerns a legendary blues musician - a mystery man said to have struck a deal of demonic consequence. His music can raise the dead, the story goes, and maybe so. Stranger things have happened.

Even more unlikely: Jacobs, 43, sold not only his first novel, but also his zombie-apocalypse-in-Arkansas second novel, This Dark Earth.

This month’s release of his young adult book, The Shibboleth, follows The Twelve-Fingered Boy as parts one and two of a trilogy. His fantasy novel, The Incorruptibles, the start of another trilogy, is due to be published in the United Kingdom in August.

“Within a year and a half, I’d sold every book I’d written,” Jacobs says. More, he sold books he hadn’t written - books that have kept him at work into the bat hours of the night ever since.

“It’s been,” he says, “a weird five years.”

One of Jacobs’ fictional characters talks about having “caught the slow boat to zombie town without even knowing it.” But Jacobs caught a rocket. His agent, Stacia Decker of the Donald Maass Literary Agency in New York, says this sort of streak almost never happens.

“It’s rare for an author to be able to publish everything he’s ever written,” Decker says. “In contrast, the very first novel that John ever wrote was not only published, but a finalist for the Stoker Award.” (Named for Dracula author Bram Stoker, it’s the top honor from the Horror Writers Association.)

The first thing he did about literary success was to test it a little, like a pinch to make sure it was real.

“I took my family to St. Louis,” he says. Wife and two daughters, “we stayed at the Crowne Plaza. We went to the children’s museum.”

But the main reward that comes of successful commercial writing is more writing. By day, he is senior broadcast designer for Soul of the South Television in Little Rock. By night, he is off to continuing adventure with his mercenary heroes, Fisk and Shoe of The Incorruptibles.

“Nine to midnight,” he counts the usual writing hours - this from a guy who once doubted he could stick with a story long enough to finish it.

“I had written some in college,” Jacobs says, “but I didn’t take it seriously.”

He still doesn’t cut a figure of Southern literary loftiness - not like William Faulkner drawing thoughtfully on a straight-stem brier pipe, or Tom Wolfe in his trademark white suit.

But Hemingway? Ernest Hemingway did some of his two-fisted writing in Arkansas - and to him, yes, Jacobs bears some resemblance in the brawny stance, the neat beard. Hemingway might have favored a tweed jacket over Jacobs’ black-on-black combo, but no matter. The big thing in common is knowing how to pound the keys.

Decker cites Jacobs’ “pitch-perfect characterization, a musician’s gift for pacing, and an acute sense of what scares us and what drives us.” Democrat-Gazette reviewer Philip Martin finds in This Dark Earth “a ferocious and unpretentious literary talent roaring.” Booklist describes The Twelve-Fingered Boy as “textured with hard-boiled grit.”

“From the worst offenders - the kids who’ve killed … to the druggies and potheads … They all love candy.”

• The Twelve-Fingered Boy (Carolrhoda Lab, 2014)

In November 2007 Jacobs determined to have a go at National Novel Writing Month. The annual event challenges would-be authors to bang out a novel in 30 days. No guarantee of being read, just do it to do it.

The rules define a novel as 50,000 words, about 200 typewritten pages, “difficult but do-able.”

“I was 37 years old,” Jacobs says, “and I thought if I don’t do it now, when am I going to do this?”

His 50,000 words turned out to be the start of Southern Gods, published in 2011.

The month ended, he didn’t care - he kept writing. Words broke loose like a swarm of zombies, and he set a new goal.

“If one of these books does well,” Jacobs says, “I’d write some more like that.”

For a start, he gave in to the imaginings that came of a wide-eyed childhood full of creeps and thunder - George Romero’s shambling brain-eaters from Night of the Living Dead, and Conan the Barbarian’s bloody sword.

The author credits these influences to his father, Little Rock lawyer John Jacobs, and describes This Dark Earth as “the culmination of his parenting style.” He adds special thanks for “terrifying me with tales of nuclear annihilation when I was just a boy.”

Lawyer Jacobs relates a tamer version about road trips with young John and John’s sister, Lisa. (Lisa Jacobs Moriconi. Principal and senior consultant with Legacy Capital Group in Little Rock, she is thanked in the pages of This Dark Earth for “venison chili on those cold writing days.”)

“I’d tell them stories about The Iliad and The Odyssey, and The Hobbit and Kipling the best I could remember,” lawyer Jacobs says, “and I could remember pretty well.

“When John was a little bit older, he wanted to buy books. He was a voracious reader. I told him I’d pay for all the books he wanted. I set no limit, and that was a mistake I had to rectify. He ran up a $200 bill.”

Outfitted with his first library card, the boy looted Fletcher Library in Little Rock for more stories like those that still shape his creative thinking.

“In my imagination and with fiction, what attracts me is the unknown,” Jacobs says. “The dark space under the stairs, the locked door, the book full of terrible secrets.”

Southern Gods stands as Jacobs’ only work that he calls “a straight horror novel,” the one that scared him as much as it did anybody else.

“A bunch of my fears regarding the safety of my children surfaced,” he says. The feeling seeped into the pages. Some reviews likened the book to the way H.P. Lovecraft’s stories ooze cosmic terror.

“I believe that writing is a form of self-psychoanalysis,” Jacobs says, “and when I write, I’m dredging up the raw energies of my psyche.”

But, music that can drive a strong man insane? Really?

“I like the supernatural fine in stories,” he says, “but it’s not real to me.”

This Dark Earth? - partly a comedy about “the ways human society will adapt to adverse conditions,” he says.

The Twelve-Fingered Boy? - “about abused kids with superpowers.”

Call him a horror novelist, and he says, “I’m fine with people calling me that,” but “I consider myself simply a novelist.”

“The black thing walked from the forest and took the shape of a man.” - Southern Gods (Night Shade, 2011)

His newest work, The Incorruptibles, sold overseas before it found an American publisher. The deal places Jacobs in the ranks of other American writers whose works have been set in print by the United Kingdom’s nearly 100-year-old science fiction and fantasy publisher, Gollancz.

The publisher’s lineup includes former Arkansan Charlaine Harris, whose Sookie Stackhouse novels are the basis of the HBO series, True Blood; and George R.R. Martin (Game of Thrones).

The Incorruptibles already has garnered praise from fellow Gollancz author Patrick Rothfuss of the best-selling fantasy epic, The Kingkiller Chronicle. Thanks to his book sales and prominence, Rothfuss is a major contributor and fundraiser for Heifer International in Little Rock.

“One part ancient Rome,” Rothfuss describes Jacobs’ latest, “two parts Wild West, one part Faust. A pinch of Tolkien, of Lovecraft, of Dante. This is strange alchemy, a recipe I’ve never seen before. I wish more books were as fresh and brave as this.”

Gollancz announced the acquisition with a statement from editor Marcus Gippsthat Jacobs’ new work “stands tall beside the best fantasy being published today.”

For Jacobs, whose idea of big water used to be an Arkansas fishing lake - not an ocean - the situation is perplexing.

Hometown readers will be able to buy the book online while the British publisher seeks out an American counterpart. But Jacobs is all-of a-sudden apt to be better known in London than in Little Rock. He will have to go there to find out how it feels.

“I’ve written about Arkansas extensively in my novels,” he says. “It’s the setting of my first three books. However,I’ve reached a point where I want a larger canvas. So other landscapes, both real and imaginary, are cropping up in my work.”

“A crash rattled the frosted-glass window. Booming male voices sounded from the waiting room. Then screams.”

• This Dark Earth (Gallery Books, 2012)

Jacobs adds an acknowledgements page in This Dark Earth to thank “my wife and children for understanding how important this whole writing thing is to me, for not questioning too closely my fascination with dead things.”

His wife, Kendall, is in charge of how much of Jacobs’ sometimes dead-thingy writing their daughters - Helen, 11, and Lily, 13 - are allowed to see. So far, not much.

Big sister Lily is reading The Twelve-Fingered Boy. The book is a young adult story generally for school grades nine through 12, the same marketing category as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series.

The story begins with two boys in juvenile detention - street hustler Shreve, 15, and the quiet boy of the title, Jack, 13, who can hurt people with his mystery powers when he “goes explodey.”

“She said, ‘This is good.’ And she was not surprised,” Kendall Jacobs says.

For one thing, it clears up at least some of the mystery of what Cicy’s father does off by himself at night.

“We all go to bed,” the writer’s wife says, “and he blows us kisses and locks himself in his office.”

The writing routine hasn’t taken much adjustment, she says. “I’m a morning person, and he’s a night person.” Married 15 years, she is used to expecting he will be up late.

He might be up playing guitar, might be up writing the Great American Novel. Whatever, he is the last to turn the lights off.

Jacobs does, in fact, have in mind that elusive best-of-all novel that tells all he knows. For him, the Great American Novel would be “a multigenerational Southern family drama.” It could include the true story that his grandfather wooed but lost the heart of his wife’s grandmother.

But the idea will have to wait, along with other schemes he would like to move along. He writes, he draws, he designs - why not do his own comic book?

The reason right now is the tentatively titled Infernal Machines, the second installment of the story that begins with The Incorruptibles.

The book is “so near completion, I can taste it,” he says. But it flutters ahead of him, “a pretty big book,” and still partly a book of secrets.

“We’re all incarcerado, trapped in our own bodies. Everyone except me.”

• The Shibboleth (Carolrhoda Lab, 2014)

He is alert to ideas that come “in that gray time between sleep and full wakefulness.”

The mechanics are mundane: Start with an outline,research the subject, organize and write on the computer.

The result? - already, he is dealing with some of the repercussions of fame. He has learned to be a little careful as a public figure. Among his resolutions for the year is to “be more guarded in my conversation.” But one personal thing about him, he wouldn’t mind if more people knew.

Be it known he has heard the song “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” a time or two or 10,000 times by now, and please never again. One reason he goes by the whole first-middle-last name is to break the sing-song rhythm that leads to another round.Whenever we go out, The people always shout -

If Jingleheimer Schmidt wants the kind of attention that John Hornor Jacobs is getting these days, then Jingleheimer Schmidt will have to write a book.

SELF PORTRAIT John Hornor Jacobs

DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: Jan. 5, 1971, Little Rock.

MY FAVORITE MEMORY OF GROWING UP IN ARKANSAS IS: Summers at Old River Lake - fishing, getting bit by mosquitoes, swimming [near Scott].

THE GUESTS AT MY FANTASY DINNER PARTY WOULD BE: I never met either of my grandmothers - they both died before I was born - and it would be nice to have dinner with them.

THE FANTASY CHARACTERS I WOULD INVITE TO AREAL DINNER PARTY WOULD BE: Huck Finn and Hannibal Lecter, provided I’m not being served, and Victor Frankenstein.

IN CASE OF ZOMBIE ATTACK, THE FIRST THING I WOULD DO IS: Attack or apocalypse? Attack could be just one zombie. In case of zombie apocalypse, find someplace you can fortify yet escape from, like a bridge.

SOMETHING THAT CREEPS ME OUT IS: The indifference of the universe. It doesn’t creep me out, it terrifies me.

MY FAVORITE BEDTIME STORY IS: The one I liked was Where the Wild Things Are [by Maurice Sendak]. The one I liked reading to my kids was Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich [by Adam Rex].

A QUESTION PEOPLE ASK ME IS: Do I have a mansion? I just laugh. It’s so ridiculous to think for 99.9 percent of writers.

MY SECRET FOR FINDING TIME TO WRITE IS: Turn off the radio in the car so I can think about plot and character and style and pacing. When I sit down to write, I have all that done.

IF I COULDN’T BE A WRITER/ARTIST/GRAPHICS AND WEB DESIGNER AND GUITAR PLAYER, I WOULD BE: A filmmaker.

A PHRASE TO SUM ME UP: Creatively restless.