When Tim Paggi asked me for feedback on an early draft of How to Kill Friends and Eviscerate People, he described it as “hybrid cosmic horror/corporate self-help.” The man knows how to pitch, for sure. But his interest in cosmic horror is timely, and mixes well with the grim realities of post-Covid professional life.Cosmic horror, for the uninitiated, is defined loosely as a protagonist realizing they live in an indifferent, comfortless universe in which they mean nothing. Common themes include fascination with the unknown, the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, and the confrontation of things beyond human comprehension and morality. Cosmic horror was popularized by H.P. Lovecraft and further developed by writers like August Derleth, Victor Lavalle, and Stephen King.At first glance, this all seems far removed from the contemporary American workplace. But look at how Elon Musk and Amazon treat their employees. Look at who the president is. Hell, look at your own job’s filing and data storage systems that no one understands, or its convoluted hiring processes (and proliferation of fake job listings meant to scare current employees), or the inscrutable decisions passed down by management. Does any of this seem like a particularly caring universe to you?If your answer is no, then Tim Paggi’s new book, How to Kill Friends and Eviscerate People, is of interest. It’s written as a parody of 1990s professional self-help books, capturing that genre’s overconfident bombast as deftly as it exposes the connections between office work and existential dread. And where Lovecraft’s protagonists were ultimately helpless, How to Kill Friends and Eviscerate People’s Jenny Johnston (credited as co-writer) flourishes and hopes to inspire the reader through their own evil rise to power. Tim was gracious enough to answer some questions about his book in this exclusive interview for the Baltimore Fishbowl, which has been lightly edited for brevity.DK: You’ve written about office culture a lot – what about the modern office lends itself to fiction?TP: I’m a big fan of the Netflix show “I Think You Should Leave.” It’s an absurd sketch comedy show usually written by and starring Tim Robinson. Something like half its sketches take place in offices. He’s either freaking about how hungry he is, having a restroom mishap, or getting caught playing computer games, and the situations explode in insane ways. I think shows like this use offices because they’re engineered spaces meant to be formal and dry, almost churchlike, which magnifies anything awkward or tense that occurs within them. DK: ‘Church-like’ is a good description. As a follow-up, what about it compelled you to dip into horror with this book?TP: The idea of writing what I call “office horror” occurred to me during COVID. Once a week, I would go into my job in this big office building and walk through silent halls and empty rooms. It was so eerie. And of course, anxieties were generally running high. I thought to myself I’d never read a horror story about an office, so the idea felt new and exciting.They’re purgatorial and kind of existential, but offices aren’t inherently scary. So I’m forced to stretch my imagination. What about an office where you’re ritually sacrificed if you don’t hit your KPIs? What if all your bosses were controlled by a demonic force that wanted to steal your soul? Those scenarios intrigue me because they’re outrageous, but they speak to deeper issues about labor and identity. DK: Demonic control of management isn’t even far-fetched, really. As a follow-up to that follow-up, what about cosmic horror struck you as relevant to the moment?TP: It’s easy to imagine a corporation as a cosmic entity. They exert huge influence over our behaviors, thoughts and emotions, right? In my fiction, I take it a step further: where do corporations come from? What if they serve purposes that their employees, boards, and shareholders don’t understand? Office workers are obsessed with hierarchy, but why do those at the top assume they understand the most? I’d suggest they often understand the least. This brings me to Thomas Ligotti. His novella My Work is Not Yet Done is hands down THE quintessential masterwork of office horror. It might be a tad dark for many readers, but Ligotti portrayed the office as an existential battleground and a microcosm for our entropic universe. His characters toil away at trivial tasks against a backdrop of nightmarish black magic. That was so cool to me. Like Kafka on bad acid. That influenced me a lot.DK: Oh yeah, Ligotti rules. How much self-help literature did you read in preparation for How to Kill Friends…? Did you learn anything from it that could be applied to fiction beyond this book?TP: In my twenties, I worked as a copywriter for a publisher of self-help and get-rich-quick titles. A lot of How to Kill Friends, like the bullets and subheads, is influenced by that. Part of the reason self-help is compulsively readable is because it not only offers solutions but speaks to its audience’s fears. What implications are wrapped up in Dale Carnegie’s title? That you don’t have friends or any measurable social standing. If your story can speak to that dark, secret fear that the American Dream is slipping away, then it can hook a reader. Also, these books feature confident, highly capable narrators. Throughout Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, she’s constantly flexing. She’ll be like, “I was having smoothies with Mark Zuckerberg, and he asked me to do a humongous project. I’d never done anything like it before, but I knew I needed to get out of my comfort zone.” It’s pretty entertaining.DK: Speaking of confident, highly capable narrators, tell us a bit about Jenny Johnston – why is this book’s narrator given a co-author’s credit here?TP: I love the idea of someone encountering this book in the wild and going into it blind. At what point do they wonder if the narrator is real, and at what point do they get a grip on the narrative itself? It starts as a self-help book with a straightforward story, but veers into some unusual directions. I want readers to be constantly reevaluating it, and playing with authorship is a big part of it. Jenny herself is both the perfect office worker and a homicidal witch. The darker and stranger her circumstances become, the saner and more self-justified she views herself.DK: That’s a really good way to phrase her character dichotomy. It’s been said by people way smarter than me that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Is that something you think about as you observe American office culture?TP: The formulaic interviews, the birthday parties with grocery store cake, the meetings that could have been emails, the outdated programs, the paperwork, the bland fashion. For some reason, a reason that I don’t know has ever been articulated, all this is valuable for capitalism. It is about collecting people and arranging them like figurines in a children’s playset.Just out of undergrad, there was one temp job where I showed up and they had me sit in an empty room for two hours before a man came in and introduced himself, very nicely. He then showed me a cubicle and told me to answer the phone when it rang. It usually rang once or twice a day, and I’d answer and have no idea what the caller was talking about. I wouldn’t even take a message. There was nobody to give it to. I only saw that one man one more time, in passing. He asked me how my weekend was and nothing else. Nobody asked anything of me. I did that for like two months.By now, you’re probably thinking that I must be an absolute drag to work with. But I make sure to work for places I believe in and to reject toxicity and have as much fun as possible. The danger for the worker is going on autopilot, or, worse, getting sucked into the rat race.DK: I would never call you a drag under any circumstances. As a follow-up, has the rise in popularity of remote work (and the desperate attempts to memory-hole it and force people back into the office) affected your perception of the office as a social/productive space?TP: This is the subject of my current work in progress, a horror novel about remote work. It’s interesting to see how different organizations handle it. When COVID hit, I was doing my job at a fully remote capacity within a week. A lot of workers were. But some people never made the jump and kind of floundered. It’s been a boon to white collar workers overall but presents a brand-new flavor of existential struggle.Launch Party for How to Kill Friends and Eviscerate PeopleDecember 11th at the Mercury Theatre, 1823 North Charles St., 7-9 pmFeaturing readings by Tim Paggi and Justin Sanders, and an immersive soundtrack by Cex.