Interview with Author Joseph Murnane: It Eats Your Hunger and Dead Rabbit (2025)
The talented Joseph Murnane shares some of his elegant prose in reflections on his novel It Eats Your Hunger and his novella Dead Rabbit. exploring how dangerous appetites become terrifying tales.
It Eats Your Hunger
“It Eats Your Hunger is the kind of horror that takes up residence in your soul. It’s Hunter S. Thompson, it’s Kerouac, and it’s Straub. It’s shocking that this is Joseph’s debut novel. Many of the most seasoned writers couldn’t pull off the level of raw grit and honest, saw-tooth prose this book punches with.”
—Gage Greenwood, Author of On A Clear Day, You Can See Block Island
Ren has a problem, and it’s not his heroin addiction.
Or that he’s wanted for murdering his stepfather.
He’s being haunted by something far worse than the ghost of his dead sister.
When he hitches a ride with Lefty, Jersey, and Geena, a group of itinerant addicts on the run from their own problems, he starts to believe maybe things are looking up.
But there’s something wrong with Lefty. Something unnatural.
Something that wants to see them all dead.
Can Ren stop it in time, or will he end up torn apart on the side of the highway?
Or worse?
Dead Rabbit
From the award-nominated author of It Eats Your Hunger comes the story of Adam Bell, a young man who accepts a job at Wild Mountain Wolf Sanctuary, a hidden facility in a secluded corner of the New Mexico desert. The work is hard but fulfilling, helping Adam come into his own and take hold of his humanity. However, beneath the earth, The Rabbit Man is awakening, a wretched terror hellbent on stripping that humanity away. Plagued by horrific visions and running out of time, he has a choice: fight to survive or become nothing more than a forgotten Dead Rabbit.
The Interview
1, Horror Class-ification. Before I read Gage Greenwood’s blurb (above), I’d already thought of your novel It Eats Your Hunger as blending aspects of Kerouac and Thompson with the supernatural horror genre (I didn’t think of Straub in particular). Are these authors influences, and if so, how? If not, why do you think people like me see connections? Your novel as well as your novella Dead Rabbit engage significantly with aspects of road narrative and American regionalism common to both Beat and Gonzo writing but also often—like a focus on disaffected, introspective youth coming of age, which you also have—qualify works as “literary.” Do you think of your work as literary? Why or why not? What’s at stake in calling a work “literary horror?”
JM: Thompson is probably the biggest influence in the bunch for me, but it wasn’t intentional. When I got that blurb back from Gage, it honestly made me quite weepy. It really meant a lot to me. Thompson is probably my favorite writer and was the reason I majored in journalism in college—at least until general life pulled me away from academia. I’ve always been attracted to the way he can swing from the most outlandish, probably-not-true-but-who-knows beats, over to deep, hard hitting truths that are as undeniable now as they were when they were written. Seriously, go back and read some of the essays in The Great Shark Hunt, maybe swap out the name of a politician or two, and it’ll be hard to tell they weren’t written for the era we live in.
Not too long ago, I did my first speaking event where I read a few pages of Hunger and chose a topic to talk about in a mini-lecture. I decided to talk about “the truth in the lie,” as I like to call it, which for me is the heart of what I’m always shooting for. Especially with Hunger, it exists because I needed it to. It really helped me to process some things I still hadn’t quite allowed myself to feel, even years after the truths my lies are based on. I don’t just want to write scary stories, though of course that’s always at the forefront of my mind—this IS horror, after all— but I want to write stories that really mean something to people. I never saw a point in trying to write something until I felt like I really had something important to say. Does that make me literary? I honestly don’t know. I like to think it does, but in the end, I’ll leave that definition up to the people that encounter my body of work. For me, I’m just trying to say the things I need to in an entertaining and meaningful way.
2. Hunger I: The Feeding Experience. Another commonality It Eats Your Hunger shares with works by Beat and Gonzo writers is that it reports, in a fictionalized manner but with accuracy your afterword links to experience (and that I can partially confirm with my own experience), first-hand perceptions influenced by various drugs. To what extent do you set out to create fiction about altered states of consciousness? How might representing characters in altered states enhance your options for characterization? You represent various drugs that lead to diverse experiences: cocaine, LSD, a variety of opiates. Are you cataloguing different drugs’ highs and lows as characters take them to feed their appetites? Why or why not?
JM: Well, it’s not something I intend to make too much of my work about. I’d hate to pigeonhole myself, but addiction will come up as a theme from time to time. It’s been too much a part of my life not to. In Hunger, it’s not so much a cataloguing as a tool of characterization. They all have different “poisons.” so to speak, and in turn, I consider each of the different central characters little pieces of myself. Stuff like dream sequences, psychedelic trips, and the like all served to enhance this feverish, disoriented state that I spent so long living in. That being said, I feel like I got most of what I needed to out on the subject, and I’m looking forward to other ideas I’d like to explore. Take for example our protagonist in Dead Rabbit. As it’s also semi-autobiographical, we do get a mention of addiction at the top as part of the inciting incident that puts Adam in the setting of the story, but I was very intentional in not revisiting those feelings throughout the story, because while it played a role, it’s not what that story was about.
3. Hunger II: Inviting Monstrosity. The title It Eats Your Hunger suggests something undesirable feeds on the desire to feed…. Your book doesn’t focus on appetites for food or non-alcoholic beverages; it focuses on intoxicating and self-destructive appetites. What’s different about these appetites, and why do they invite an it that wants to feed on them? What’s so delicious about them? Are they evil appetites? Does your book make any moral judgments about such appetites in general or at all? How do you think an it that eats such appetites qualifies in the moral realm?
JM: To put it simply, these appetites stem from a need for comfort. They thrive on fear, pain, and sadness, providing a sort of mental kill switch that allows us to turn away from those feelings. The “It” that they invite comes in all sorts of forms, but they mostly take the shape of consequences. They’re delicious because they let you look away, but they’re insidious because all those things are still there, just out of frame, waiting for you when you wake up, only now they’re a little bigger, a little harder to carry.
Are they evil appetites? I actually fully reject that they could be. Selfish, maybe, but evil? Is it evil to be in pain and seek relief? I think not. Especially as somebody who’s been there, it was important to me NOT to moralize over the actions they took. Lefty is an asshole. He’s manipulative, mean, aggressive, and all kinds of bad. He also deeply loves his brother, even if he rarely shows it. And just like anybody else, he’s in great pain. Sure, he commits some evil acts under the spell of his addiction and trauma but no, I wouldn’t call him evil. He plays his hand, and it brings him where he’s going, but in the end, he’s just hurting like so many of us, and I have great love for him.
4. They Do Not Mean To, But They Do. In the cluster of young people at the center of It Eats Your Hunger, traumatic pasts are the norm. In their historical moment and/or the present, do you think they represent the condition of youth? If so, what has given rise to that condition? If not, why put this exceptional group in the center? At least as many parents and stepparents in your novel seem to be abusive as not—why these extraordinary circumstances, or, to borrow from Stephen King’s Christine, do you think “part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids?”
JM: Hunger isn’t really trying to make a statement about society, the youth, or anything on such a wide scale. This story is about me, and to a lesser extent, some of the people I came up with. However, it’s become a lot more acceptable to talk about and acknowledge these traumas in the public sphere, so it can seem like there’s more of that, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think we just talk about it now, and that’s great. That’s how we heal. As for how it pertains to the characters in Hunger, I’ve known a lot of road-bound punks in my day, and so many of us have similar stories. I think that’s part of what put us on the road to begin with. Whatever mistakes get made along the way, we step out onto the highway, not looking for trouble, but for freedom. It doesn’t matter if we’re running away from or toward something—some of us just need to run.
If it does speak to anything in wider youth culture, I like to think it’s speaking to a mentality that’s dying out. Kids now are encouraged to feel their feelings a lot more than I was in the 90s, and even more than generations before me. There’s still a lot of work to do, but in my opinion, the kids are going to be okay.
5. Being a Monster. Your characters in It Eats Your Hunger have more in common than trauma. Theft and other smaller crimes don’t seem to faze them, and more than one of them commits murder while others aid and abet. Do you expect readers to find your characters sympathetic and/or relatable? Do their traumatic pasts and/or material circumstances and/or other factors mitigate their more questionable acts? What’s scarier or more monstrous about this novel—the supernatural elements or the characters’ downward spirals and escalating depravity?
JM: This sort of goes back to what I was saying earlier about refusing to moralize over the decisions they made. These are people forever living in fight-or-flight mode. Whatever pain they inflict isn’t born out of a desire to cause harm, but of the tools they have at their disposal to survive. We all like to think we’d be above certain actions, even in the worst of scenarios, but how can we know? Do I expect readers to empathize with them? I don’t know, but I certainly hope so. If I did my job, I painted a picture of people at their most human, which is to say their most flawed. Understanding will always have more value to me than judgment, and as somebody that’s done things I would have told you never could have happened until they did, I really believe most people are just a month of bad luck away from making some pretty questionable choices themselves. As for the last question, the human side is always going to be scarier to me than the monstrous, because that’s us. That’s what we have to contend with. I don’t believe in any demons other than the ones we build ourselves.
6. The Big Good Wolf. Your afterword for your novella Dead Rabbit also links it to personal experience, working with a wolf refuge, and your admiration for the animals shows in both It Eats Your Hunger and Dead Rabbit. In the horror genre, wolves usually get a bad rap, serving Dracula-types or being of the undesirable were- variety. To what extent is Dead Rabbit a redemption of the wolf for the horror genre, an entry that shows them as beautiful creatures in harmony with nature? What’s so majestic about wolves, anyway (this is your invitation to gush, please)? While wolves are in harmony with nature, they’re also connected with the cosmic… why?
JM: Yeah you actually really nailed it here. People have such misconceptions about wolves, especially in media. They’re so often depicted as monstrous, ravenous enemies, and I’ve always hated that. When Adam arrives at the sanctuary and meets a wolf for the first time, he looks into its eyes and falls into tears, thinking of everything that brought him to that moment. That’s pretty much exactly how it happened for me. That first encounter was one of the closest things I’ve ever had to a religious experience. It’s so hard to describe, but I encourage you to meet them for yourself. There’s a lot that people don’t understand about them, from their absolutely vital role in their ecosystems, to their family dynamics, to how differently they’re wired from dogs. Take for example the “lone wolf” stereotype. Whenever I hear somebody describe themself as a “lone wolf,” I can’t help but smirk because there is only one thing a lone wolf is doing, and that’s searching for a family. To be a lone wolf as a point of pride is to deny yourself one of the most important things that make us what we are.
As for the connection to the cosmic, we only need to go back to the moment we’re looking into those eyes. You can feel the depth there. Wolves have such deep insight and intuitiveness that’s so hard to quantify. That old cliche, the one about looking straight into your soul, isn’t something I could ever feel in such a concrete way until I looked into those eyes and felt seen in a way I never had through the eyes of an animal. As a matter of fact, I never really believed in the concept of a “soul” until my relationship with wolves showed it to me.
I lived at Wild Spirit for a year, and during that time, we lost plenty of animals to old age, illness, etc. When a wolf passes away, something interesting happens. The others mourn in such a clear, direct way. Their playfulness drops, their body language changes, and while usually any howl is cause for the whole facility to break into chorus, when a wolf is in mourning, they often howl alone, with the others just…holding space? It’s a different sound, one you feel in your bones. It’s not a wild, raucous song like the typical sounds we’d expect to hear. It’s the mother, weeping over her child’s casket as it’s lowered into the earth, and it’s impossible to hear without being profoundly affected.
7. The Gothic Manuscript. Dead Rabbit uses a trope as old as Gothic/horror itself, the “found manuscript” that becomes part of the manuscript and eventually allows the past to become an integral part of unraveling the mystery of the present. Why did you decide to include the diary as part of your story? Why include images of the handwriting? To what extent did you think of the tradition of manuscripts in Gothic/horror (recall that Frankenstein and Dracula are both made of letters and diaries)? Do you want Dead Rabbit to appear to be more in line with tradition, or would you prefer people to see it as an unconventional departure from horror’s touchstones?
JM: I initially decided to use the journal entries as a purely structural/mechanical choice. My goal for the story was always a 30k novella, and I knew we were going to spend a significant portion of that just travelling and world building. The journal entries were a way to sort of say “the horror bit’s coming. Bear with me!” I wanted to spend all the time I needed on pure character, while also making sure it’s clear from the outset that this is still a horror story. Also, yes, I did intend for this story to be more in line with traditional horror writing. I love epistolary stuff, and after the experimental fever dream of Hunger, it was quite refreshing to tell a more traditional creepy mystery. And showing the actual handwritten journal entries? That was all my wonderful editor Jyl Glenn’s idea. She even hand wrote them herself and formatted them into the final product. At the time, I didn’t intend on this one having an audiobook, so that extra flair was sort of a way to bring a little theatricality to the text. And if I can plug Jyl for a second, I highly recommend checking out her website for anybody in need of an editor who’s going to put their all into enhancing your voice.
8. Hunger III: Meat. Dead Rabbit and It Eats Your Hunger both deal with supernatural hunger. How do the hungers in the two works compare? A wolfish hunger seems like something to fear, but ultimately The Rabbit Man becomes the ultimate source of fear in the novella. Why? I ask this question even having seen David Lynch’s Rabbits: what makes rabbits scary? Your Rabbit Man, like your wolves, has a cosmic dimension. Why would a cosmic entity have a rabbit form? What about a rabbit—physically, psychologically, sexually—makes it significant to humanity and beyond?
JM: The Rabbit Man all comes down to my real-life experience, namely the scene where RB and Adam go hunting. That’s exactly how it happened in real life, and I’ve always carried that. The original concept was completely born out of killing a rabbit wastefully, and what revenge from a supernatural entity might look like. I’m a bit of a pantser though, so as I went, it all grew into something else on its own. The hunger aspect here is sort of a nod to the phenomena of rabbit starvation (which was almost the title!). It’s incredibly lean meat and can’t keep a person going on its own. If all you eat is rabbit, it just isn’t sustainable long-term. It’s really fascinating to look into so I encourage digging that up! The significance of the rabbit to humanity and beyond isn’t something I put much thought into. I can only truly honestly speak from my own perspective, and I tried to keep a narrow focus on that, but if I had to draw one line between them and us, it would be that universal need for companionship, love, safety, and the consequences when that need is denied.
As for comparison, the hunger in IEYH is more about a craving for relief from existential horror, while the hunger in DR is about physical need as a symptom of greater problems, so I sort of look at them as two sides of a coin.
9. Audiobooks. You were kind enough to share audiobooks of It Eats Your Hunger and Dead Rabbit with me. I think I’m weird in that I look at the words as an audiobook reads to me, but doing so increases the enjoyment immeasurably. How do you imagine people generally using your audiobooks, and what do you think is the importance of audiobooks, especially for indie/rising horror authors, in general? Your audiobooks feature Tom Jordan, whose articulation is as crisp as his tones are mellow and soothing (except during moments of character distress, of course). What do you think makes him a good match for these two stories? Do you see yourself doing audiobooks in the future? Why or why not?
JM: By day, I’m a chef. I work alone, and I listen to audiobooks almost every day. It’s how I keep myself in words when I struggle to pick up a book to physically read. I struggle with depression and anxiety, and sometimes I just can’t connect with physical reading because my thoughts are too scattered. I think audiobooks are so important to accessibility, and without them, I wouldn’t be the reader or writer I am today. Tom specifically just lines up perfectly with my audio goals. I was maybe 10k words into Hunger the first time I heard his work on Andrew Van Wey’s Head Like A Hole, and I just fell in love with it. I wrote the rest of Hunger with him in mind. He really elevates the material in such a way that when I’m listening through and proofing his work, I can’t even believe that I wrote it! Whenever possible, I will always have audio available, and while I have other narrators I plan to work with for specific stories, Michael Crouch and Joe Hempel both high on my list, Tom’s always going to be my default for as long as he’ll have me. Like I said before, I originally didn’t plan on doing an audio for DR due to budget constraints, but Tom read it and actually came to me with an opening in his schedule, asking me if he could produce it at a royalty share rate, so we were able to make a deal.
10. Access! How can readers learn more about you and your works (please provide any links you want to share)?
JM: I distribute through KDP, so my work can be found on Amazon primarily, and is included in KU! I also sell signed copies from my personal shop:
Also, I’m featured in several anthologies. One unannounced that I can’t mention here yet, but Crumpled, organized by Jyl Glenn, as well as another called Phobophobia by Jyl Glenn and Savannah Fischer, which is an exploration of unique fears. That one was released on June 30th.
Also keep an eye out, because Jyl and I are partnered up on an Iron Maiden tribute anthology, which we’ve just finalized the TOC on, that will be releasing around October.
On socials, I’m active on Facebook for my main profile and an author profile: Joseph Murnane-Author
IG: 2_Buck_Yuck and joeykoyote4752
TikTok: Joseph.murnane
About the Author
Joseph Murnane lurks at the mouth of a cave off the banks of the Eno River in Durham, North Carolina, with four hellish animal companions and an eldritch queen of terrifying beauty. They say you can see him there just before dawn, but only out of the corner of your eye, and only if he wants to be seen.