Interview with CB Jones about Crybaby Bridge
CB Jones is a bold writer who messes around with horror tropes, and I had a great time reading his book Crybaby Bridge, a frightening story framed as an investigation into a 90s-era incident in a small town. Telling the story through interviews piqued my curiosity, and it gave me time to sift through the clues to solve various embedded mysteries and become invested in the characters.
He’s published a variety of works, too, which you’ll find HERE.
Let’s see what he has to say for himself!
1) Did you grow up in a small town like the one in your novella? What was your youth like?
The small town at the center of Crybaby Bridge is largely inspired by the town I grew up in. When writing it, I couldn’t help but visualize it as a stand-in for the setting, no matter how much I tried to change it. There are probably writers out there who are able to create locations and settings whole cloth, but I’m not one of them. Invariably, memory always seeps in.
I think the utilization of past experiences and memories is one of the easiest ways to uncover an authenticity within one’s writing. It can also make the writing flow a little more readily.
I think that’s what I was trying to do with this story, looking back and wondering about something that might be unique to my youth that others from different backgrounds might not have experienced–whether they grew up in the suburbs or urban areas or different countries.
My youth was not unlike some of our characters’ in Crybaby Bridge. I did cruise town on occasion, but I shared the sentiment with some of them that it was never a mainstay for my socializing. I was more of an outsider and never was big on cruising town. But it was always on the periphery on the weekends as I made my way through town and in hindsight I find it to be an interesting social phenomenon that has all but disappeared with the youth of today.
One fun fact: during the early days of the COVID pandemic, the small towns around my area scheduled Saturday night town cruises as a sort of throwback experience that just so happened to fit in with the parameters of socially distanced entertainment.
2) Where did you get the idea to write a story about a crybaby bridge?
Somewhere along the way of writing chapters for what would eventually become my mosaic novel, The Rules of the Road, I realized that I had entered the realm of writing homages for various genres of horror. So, I decided to try my hand at the slasher genre.
Now I’m not the biggest slasher fan. I haven’t seen many of the classics. I keep meaning to get around to it, but it just never happens. The slashers I’ve actually seen are the ones that deconstruct the genre a bit, so I suppose it was inevitable that my little book does the deconstruction thing as well.
3) How long have you been writing and publishing?
I’ve always enjoyed reading and any time we had little creative writing assignments in school, I ate that shit up. There was a time when that was my dream job: to be a writer.
When I was in junior high and on into high school, I attempted to write a few full-fledged books. These always petered out about fifty pages in. At the end of college, I read Stephen King’s On Writing, got really inspired, and tried my hand at submitting a few short stories and starting and not-finishing yet another novel. Things got busy in my life and I didn’t do anything again for ten years or so.
On a whim, I decided to post a story on the subreddit known as R/NoSleep. This is a sort of open forum where people post their scary “true” encounters. It’s quite popular and while there are quite a bit of rules for posting, the amount of creativity that shows up there is impressive. After I posted that first story, a YouTuber reached out to me to see about narrating it. His whole channel was just narrating spooky stories set to atmospheric background music. He had over 200k followers or whatever. I granted him permission to narrate and in practically real time I got to see audience feedback to my story.
It was a motivating experience and I caught the bug and started writing and posting more stories to R/NoSleep, and eventually transitioned to focusing on more traditional avenues of publishing.
I’m in a space now where I think about writing a lot of the time. It occupies a lot of my head space, all these story ideas I want to get around to. For me, it’s just a matter of trying to carve out enough time for it with all of my other obligations.
What are your favorite things you've written so far?
I have a story that I wrote about two years ago that is probably my favorite. Unfortunately, it’s in that weird length of 10k words or so. A novelette, I suppose. These are always hard sells because the market is always looking for something shorter or something at least novella length. I am thinking about converting it to a novella, but I wonder if doing so will cause it to lose some of its magic.
4) When you were getting started, what were some favorite books or other media that inspired you?
Oh man, I could go all day. I’ll go ahead and focus on what I found when I was getting re-started. Stephen Graham Jones is/was a huge inspiration. His short story collection The Ones that Got Away really opened my mind to the unique ways that horror stories could be told and made me start kicking myself that I hadn’t gotten into this stuff sooner.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go really helped with how a story could be told. It really taps into the mind of the narrator and their memory.
Donna Tartt is a novelist that has been really inspiring over the past five years or so as I’ve worked through and savored her brief bibliography. Like Ishiguro, there is much that could be learned with the way she tells a story, particularly the way she does asides by the narrator
Shane Hawk’s Anoka and Alex Wolfgang’s Splinter were two self-published short story collections that were inspiring to me with regards to self-publishing. These are quality collections from their covers to their formatting to the quality of the writing. I sought to emulate that with my own publications.
You would think I would have some sort of oral-history novel that I had read that inspired this, but no. I know there are quite a few out there, but I had only read news articles told in this style and when I did my first draft I thought I was doing something unique, lol.
5) This novella is presented as a journalist's investigation, including interviews with locals. You got to speak in many different voices as you wrote these. Who was your favorite character to voice? Who did you relate to most (if any of them)?
I had a lot of fun with the voice behind the local historian, Bob Schroeder. He kind of talks in this sort of academic approach, I guess puffing himself up to be taken more seriously, but then every now and then I guess he slips into a more colloquial statement.
The opening prologue from the journalist perspective was challenging to pull off for me. I used some non-fiction books as inspiration. Not sure if I pulled it off!
I’d say I relate most to Skye and Stephen. That might be obvious for those that have read the book.
6) What are you working on now? What should we look out for from you?
I have a short story coming out in the forthcoming anthology from The Howl Society. It’s called Howls From the Scene of the Crime and features lots of up-and-coming authors, as well as stories from Gwendolyn Kiste, Carson Winter, and Donyae Coles.
I have a novel I keep meaning to rewrite. I think this is the year I finally do that. Maybe mentioning it here is some form of accountability. I may try and seek out more traditional means of publishing for that one, querying and the like. We shall see.
7) Do you have any more plans for The Rules of the Road?
I have several chapters/stories that didn’t make the final cut of the book. The beauty of the way those stories come about, is that the inciting incident could be removed and someone would be none the wiser. I’m working on finishing a short right now that has its “rule” stripped. We shall see if any more rules appear. The highway is pretty damn long and I’ve been driving for a long time now, trying to find my exit. All the while the gas gauge reads empty, but I just keep rolling on.
Thanks, CB Jones!
(Side note - he also published an interview with me on his Substack, Static on the Radio, which I include for the rare person who wants to double-up on interviews for the day)