Dave Housley Talks Craft and Kraft with Hobart Lit Journal

Okay, tell us about your book!

It’s a novel about a group of people whose co-workers win the lottery. The book follows the people who do not win the lottery over the course of the next year as they shoot off in various (mostly bad) directions. It’s told in short chapters from seven different point of view, including a rather incompetent ghost of a man who jumps off the building in the first chapter and then comes back to haunt the lottery winners. I think it’s dark and also funny and nearly every thing that’s annoyed me over thirty some years of working in offices found its way in there as well. I was really happy that Matt Bell called it a “bighearted office comedy” because that’s really what I was going for.

If The Other Ones was a metaphoric recipe, what would the ingredients be?

I love chili, and one thing I love about it is the mix of flavors – you’ve got hot and also sweet, a base and some flavors kind of dancing around at the edges, all of these ingredients eventually combining to make one cohesive thing. I think all of those things could generally be said about this book: it’s a little dark and hopefully a little funny. It's character driven literary fiction but also very much driven by plot, and part of that plot involves two people who buy guns. It’s realistic but there’s a fair amount of mystery and one of the characters is a ghost. So yeah, I think this book is one of those chilis where you run out of a few things and have had one too many chili-making beers to get back to the grocery store so you improvise.