Interview With CJ Leede, Author Of ‘Headlights’

Everyone, you need to run out and get CJ Leede’s new book, Headlights, immediately. If you loved her first two books, Maeve Fly and American Rapture as much as I did, you won’t want to miss this one.

Special Agent Daniel Stansfield is ready for a change. Burnt out and defeated by the job, it’s his last day with the FBI. But before he can turn in his badge, he’s summoned back to Denver, the city he ran from four years ago, with a chilling message: it’s happening again.

Seemingly innocent people are waking up on the side of the highway, with no memory of how they got there, wearing the skin of victims they’ve allegedly never met. And they each share one haunting detail: a strand of a stranger’s hair is tied around their tongue.

Now Daniel is pulled back into the gruesome cycle, and every clue leads him deeper into the shadows of his own past. He will have to confront the ghosts of his traumatic childhood and face what’s been hunting him all along― before he and the people he loves become the next victims.

To celebrate the release of the book, I chatted with CJ (read our interview with her HERE) about crafting Headlights, The Shining, John Denver, horror, and more!

PopHorror: Headlights is so good so I’m really excited to talk to you about it today.

CJ Leede: Thank you! Thank you so much for reading it.

PopHorror: In the book on page 267, Daniel says “She is so beautiful, it almost hurts to look at her,” and I need to know if that is a nod to My So-Called Life?

CJ Leede: No, I don’t know My So-Called Life. Did I steal something I didn’t know?

PopHorror: In the show, Jordan Catalano, played by Jared Leto, says, “You’re so beautiful, it hurts to look at you.”

CJ Leede: Wow! I love it. Yes, it was My So-Called Life!

PopHorror: I had to ask!

CJ Leede: Maybe unconsciously I took that in at one point in my life and kept it there until this book.

PopHorror: It’s an amazing show and was so ahead of its time. It’s streaming if you’re interested.

CJ Leede: I love it. I’m in, thank you.

PopHorror: It’s very obvious that The Shining was a big inspiration for this book. What sparked the idea for Headlights?

CJ Leede: So much! I was struggling, frankly, with a lot of grief and loss in my life. I also knew I wanted to write a Colorado book and to me, Colorado feels very much like it’s a place of a lot of possibility, and it’s beautiful, and it’s also sometimes cold and kind of formidable. To me, that felt very right. Then The Shining having so much to do with ghosts and what lingers and what might linger in certain places, and all of those things.

PopHorror: I know that music and having a playlist is really important to you when writing a book and there’s a lot of music mentioned in this book. I have to be honest, I wasn’t familiar with a lot of the songs mentioned outside of John Denver, which you may have ruined him for me forever. I love John Denver. Why him specifically and his song, Annie’s Song, and how did you choose the other songs that were featured?

CJ Leede: John Denver was not from Colorado but he loved Colorado. He lived in Aspen. He chose the name John Denver, which was not his given name, and to me, I’ve always associated him with Colorado. Rocky Mountain High and so many others, so it just felt so natural to me that I would write a Colorado book and it would have John Denver be a part of it. As far as you not knowing the other songs, that makes me happy! I love the idea of bringing folks and music together. Outlaw country is also very Colorado to me. I have family out there and they’re very Western. I don’t see the Western aspects of Colorado being reflected in books quite as much as the outdoors stuff, the stoner culture, sports, all these other things, so my Colorado is very Western and very nature focused. Those were the things that I put in and I went and visited John Denver Sanctuary in Aspen when I was editing the book and it’s an incredible place. They have a lot of his lyrics written on big boulders in the park and I think his music is quite beautiful and it felt like an appropriate thing to put with the book in my brain.

PopHorror: I saw that you recently visited The Stanley Hotel.

CJ Leede: Yes, does time exist? I was there last summer doing a bunch of last minute book research in my final edit and it was awesome. We had a really good experience. We drank one of the 217 wine bottles and wrote little Headlights quotes on it and it’s up in the restaurant now, theoretically. 

PopHorror: That’s so cool!

CJ Leede: We stayed in a haunted room! We did the tours; it was a great experience.

PopHorror: I haven’t been there yet but I really want to.

CJ Leede: It’s worth it. Estes Park is so beautiful. It was a lot of fun! There’s a killer bookstore in town, two actually, a new one and a used one. They’re so great.

PopHorror: That sounds amazing, actually. Was there anything that you were adamant about keeping in the final draft, no matter what?

CJ Leede: Probably, yeah. I was nervous that the scene that takes place in that hotel, one of those scenes, was going to get cut down or taken out, and my editor was like, “No, that’s the one thing I’m not going to touch.” I don’t want to spoil, but I got to keep that scene and I was happy.

PopHorror: I love that. Where does your love of horror come from?

CJ Leede: I stumbled into writing horror. I was handing in stories in grad school and my professor said, “These are horror stories!” And I was like, “No way, I don’t read that stuff,” and he was like, “Well, maybe you should.” I read my first Stephen King in my 20s. My boyfriend then – still now, 10 years later – gave it to me and it was The Shining. He gave me The Shining, Misery, and Doctor Sleep. They all were like, oh my god, this is exactly what I want to be reading! I just started mainlining horror after that and I haven’t stopped. It’s now been a lot of years.

PopHorror: I remember reading Misery in the sixth grade and using it for my BOOK IT! List.

CJ Leede: So good!

PopHorror: It is! I’ve never read The Shining and I will freely admit that.

CJ Leede: It’s a quick read. Doctor Sleep is a lot longer and is, frankly, amazing, but The Shining you could read in a day. It’s so scary but it’s also playful and I love it. I think it’s a perfect book.

PopHorror: It’s on my list and I have it somewhere so I’ll have to read it soon. I’m a little ashamed to admit I haven’t read it yet.

CJ Leede: There’s always more.

PopHorror: Why do you feel that so many people resonate with the genre so much?

CJ Leede: My personal feeling is that we live with these darker aspects of life all the time – mortality, death, fear, grief. I think a lot of folks don’t want to spend all day everyday thinking about them, which is reasonable and makes sense. As a horror writer, I don’t know. I’m somebody who can’t seem to look away from these things and I think as a horror reader, somebody has sat with death for how many months or years of their life that it took to write the book but you get to interact with it in a day or two if you want to or however you want to read that book, and then close it and walk away. I think microdosing these things that we already live with that are difficult to face might help us reach a better relationship to them and they’re a huge part of life. I think it’s hugely important and valuable to interact with them.

PopHorror: I have noticed that grief is a central theme in a lot of horror books and I think it’s because it makes people vulnerable and everyone deals with grief differently. I know it’s all fiction but they’re rooted somewhere in real life. Everyone experiences grief at some point in their life. I always appreciate seeing grief handled in different ways. 

CJ Leede: I think that is the beauty of the genre. And now more than ever, there’s a lot of diversity of all types and just diversity of story. There are so many ways that people tackle these ideas and I think it’s hugely helpful for any of us to sit with some of this stuff sometimes because like you were saying, sometimes we don’t get to choose whether we sit with it or not. I don’t know. My hope is always that there’s some more hope to find in looking at the dark. More light to find in the dark.

PopHorror: What’s up next for you?

CJ Leede: Good question! I’m going region by region. I did my LA book, I did a Colorado book, I did a Midwestern book. My next one is my New York City book. I’ve put out three very different books tonally and character-wise and this one is going to be more like Maeve a little bit, more like my first one in that it’s kind of like quick and dirty and loud and crazy and gross and fun.

PopHorror: That’s exciting! People still talk about Maeve Fly to this day so I think they’ll be very excited to hear that you’re going back to that type of story. I also see a lot about American Rapture and I have to say thank you for not killing a dog in Headlights like you did in the last one.

CJ Leede: I know! My editor at one point was like, “You know readers are not going to forgive you, right?” And I was like, well, it’s the story so here we are and a lot of readers have not forgiven me. And that’s fair. I get it. Frankly, I don’t know if I would either as a reader. American Rapture and Headlights are much larger books. They’re a little more sprawling, literally the characters travel more, so yeah, we’re throwing it to a city next and then my fifth book is another big one.

Thank you so much to CJ for taking the time to chat with us. Headlights is in bookstores now!