(Book recommendation) Stepping back into the nightmare: Neil Kleid opens a new, darker toybox

Jacket art: Return to the Motherfreaking Fun Factory (Blackstone Publishing) by Neil Kleid

Not all childhood memories grow sweeter with time. Adults know this. Children learn it. Neil Kleid takes it to heart.

Now, that darker side of childhood is ensconced in “Return to the Motherfreaking Fun Factory” (Blackstone), Kleid’s debut horror novella. Building on a career that has been wrapped around graphic novels and comics, this is the author’s first prose offering.

And an offering it is. The story begins a decade after five children entered the twisted domain of an eccentric toymaker, forced into a deadly competition for prizes with life-or-death consequences. Four of them made it out are now adults — each carrying the weight of the past. Making a pact, they vow both revenge and to rescue the one left behind.

For Kleid, the idea began with a familiar character, a late-night thought experiment on social media and a question about what happens when childhood nightmares don’t stay in the past.

“I have always kind of felt — and people have said this in the past — that there’s a dark, sarcastic, Roald Dahl undercurrent of menace to the character, right?” Kleid said, reflecting on the Willy Wonka inspiration behind the story. “Obviously he’s supposed to be happy and, you know, about imagination and joy … but if you go back and watch the original, the (Gene) Wilder take, you can see it in a whole lot of scenes. The boat scene, just how he deals with the children — there’s this sense of like, ‘I’m messing with you.’ Like, ‘I know that you’re not great kids and I’m going to teach you a lesson.’”

That undercurrent of menace got Kleid thinking about the children who emerged from Wonka’s own fun factory. What happened after they left? What if the lessons they were supposed to learn didn’t take? And, what would those children become as adults?

At the time, Kleid was immersed in horror literature by writers such as Stephen King and Joe Hill, along with graphic novels exploring generational trauma and the legacies people inherit. The concept initially took shape as a heist story, but his growing interest in horror pushed it in a different direction.

“I really was trying to look at it from the lens of an ‘It’-type place,” Kleid said, while noting how stories such as “Locke & Key” examine characters confronting the consequences of things they did as children. “When these kids grow up, who are they, what would they do, and what happens when they come back for revenge? That’s really how I got from one to the other.”

The shift from comics to prose presented its own challenges. Kleid had spent much of his career telling stories through a combination of words, images, panel sequences and the work of artists. In prose, he had to build those worlds entirely through language.

“When you write a novel that can’t rely on a pretty picture or a panel for the reader to convey the sense of space or character or color, you have to convey that visual through words, through dialogue,” Kleid said. “What I enjoy about that is I can be as descriptive as I want, or I can be as quick as I want. … You get a little bit more, what I call, elbow room, a little bit more breathing room to create the psychological space to make that character feel a little bit more three-dimensional.”

That additional room also gave the author new ways to control the story’s pace and suspense. Rather than follow a straightforward chronology, “Return to the Motherfreaking Fun Factory” moves between the childhood ordeal and the adults’ return a decade later.

“In comic books, we use page turns or ends of issues to really heighten suspense and anticipation,” Kleid said. “Being able to do that with a chapter turn, a chapter break, allowed me to really jump not just between moments, but also timeline to timeline, and really juxtapose what was happening to those characters 10 years ago versus what’s happening to them now.”

That structure serves a story in which the past is never entirely past. The childhood experience and its adult consequences occupy the same narrative space, with the jumps between timelines allowing the reader to see both what has changed — and what has not.

The factory itself plays an important role in that unease. A place associated with toys, imagination and childhood pleasure becomes the setting for a story about the exact opposite: danger and the lasting effects of frightening experiences.

“Good horror stories aren’t always just about jump scares or blood or gore or what have you. It’s about, how do I pull your knees out from under you and make you feel a little unsettled,” Kleid said. “When you do that with places from childhood innocence … when you talk about danger to children, it’s really creepy and unsettling. Especially as an adult or as a parent, that’s frightening.”

One of the inspirations for the book’s opening sequence came from an experience close to home. While walking through the back room where his children kept their toys, in the middle of the night Kleid encountered a toy that suddenly began singing on its own.

“That stuff, it’s frightening,” Kleid said. “And so, it really, really established a fantastic place to start from, and then it’s just world-building from there.”

For someone who works visually, horror also presents a personal test. Kleid said he can experience a primal response to certain horror conventions on screen. Writing the material, however, meant finding ways to create that same sense of dread through the reader’s imagination.

“The challenge for me is to overcome that visceral reaction and basically say, listen, this has got to introduce some sort of feeling and some sort of sense of unsettling nature into my reader, and I want them to understand that this location, these characters, this moment is something that should make their knees buckle,” he said.

For all its menace, the book also deals with questions that extend beyond the mechanics of horror: guilt, atonement and the ways people change over time. Those subjects connect with a recurring interest in Kleid’s work — the legacies passed between generations, whether through families, mentorship or the expectations people carry into adulthood.

“As a writer, you write what you know,” Kleid said. “When I started writing, I was the son. I wasn’t married, I didn’t have kids and I was really sort of dealing with that, wanting to be my own man and looking back to my dad, looking back to my mom, trying to figure out who I was at that time. And now, 20-some-odd years later, I’m looking at it from the lens of a father, having children of my own, and being able to see, how am I different? What has happened in my life and what have I learned?”

That change in perspective, from child to parent, has given Kleid a different lens from which to examine the relationships that shape people. In a story built around the long shadow of childhood, questions of identity and inheritance have a natural place.

The novella’s title, meanwhile, emerged from a much lighter exchange.

While brainstorming with his editor, Brendan Deneed, at Blackstone Publishing, the pair went through a series of possible titles. Many of the conventional options seemed too much like young adult fiction. Kleid eventually threw out an alternative as a joke, adding an emphatic expletive — one they would have to tweak if the novel were to be published — to the name of the factory.

“Jokingly, I was like, if we called it “Return to the Motherfreaking Fun Factory,” that would be something different,” Kleid said. “And he was just like, ‘That’s a great title.’ And I’m like, ‘No, no, no, I was kidding!’ We literally went through like two to three more weeks of spit balling other stuff, and we were like, honestly, we can’t beat that title.”

The title stuck, and the published book is now available in an image-wrapped hardcover edition from Blackstone.

Kleid, meanwhile, is moving on to his next projects. He’s deep into outlining another horror novel, pitching new comic projects and preparing for convention season.

But looking back at his first venture into prose horror, Kleid said he hopes the book does more than deliver its share of scares.

“I hope people like the book, I hope people pick it up and share it around,” Kleid said.  “I hope it makes them feel something. And I hope that feeling is one of unsettling terror.”

Reach Tom Mayer at tmayer132435@gmail.com.