Wicked Turns Dark: Gregory Maguire on Oz, Power and Monsters

To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Wicked, we bring you something rare and unexpected. Years ago Corey sat down with Gregory Maguire for a candid, hilarious and deeply thoughtful conversation about the moral complexity of Oz, the origins of Elphaba, the impact of politics on fantasy, and the loose ends that make his work feel so human. The original audio has been lost to time. But with the help of AI we rebuilt the conversation from Corey’s transcript. And because it is Horror Heals we could not resist adding a twist. The recreated Corey voice is performed as a British woman named Imogen, which gives the entire interview a surprising charm.

What makes this conversation special is how timely it still feels. Gregory speaks openly about public rage, war, art under pressure, and the ways fantasy helps us process the truths we cannot face directly. He talks about readers who misinterpret his work, fans who adore his characters, and the younger audiences who discovered Wicked through the musical and wanted more. He also shares early and often painful stories from his first book signings, which proves that even bestselling authors start small.

Corey opens the episode by explaining why The Wizard of Oz has always carried a streak of horror. Baum’s original books, the classic MGM film, and the darker modern retellings all share unsettling elements. Flying monkeys. Bewitched forests. Shifting reality. Dreams that turn against you. For many of us, Oz was our first exposure to the uncanny, long before we had the vocabulary for horror. It is no surprise that fans of Wicked often overlap with fans of the horror genre.

This special episode blends nostalgia, literature, Oz lore and the darker emotional themes that make Wicked endure. Whether you came for the witch, the musical, or the monsters under the yellow brick road, this conversation shines a light on why Gregory Maguire’s world continues to resonate.

Is horror good for mental wellness? Of corpse, it is.

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Horror Heals is produced by How the Cow Ate the Cabbage LLC.

Is horror good for mental wellness? Of corpse it is.

Transcript

Corey & Kendall Stulce (00:06.538)
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Corey & Kendall Stulce (00:11.982)
Hello, boys and girls. It's your old pal, John Cusir, the voice of the Crypt Keeper. And I want to welcome my good fiends of the Horror Heals podcast. Is horror good for mental wellness? But of course it is. I delight in the delicious deaths of pitiful people on the silver screen.

So get ready for a hell of a good time with my new fiends Cory and Kendall on the horror heels podcast

Corey & Kendall Stulce (01:02.082)
Welcome back horror heliacs, it's Cory, and today we're doing something a little special. Since it's the holiday season, we've decided to give our guests a little break and instead bring you a different kind of treat. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the book Wicked by Gregory Maguire, and with the Wicked sequel making headlines around the globe, we thought it was the perfect moment to revisit an interview that means a lot to me. Years ago, I sat down with Gregory for a candid, funny, and incredibly sharp conversation about Oz,

storytelling, politics, and magic. The original audio is long gone, but through the strange and delightful sorcery of AI, we rebuilt the interview from my original transcript. And because this is Horror Heals, we could not resist giving it a twist. My voice in this recreation is performed as a British woman named Imogene. Apparently this is the multiverse where I host the show with better elocution and a stronger tea habit. Gregory is as honest and hilarious as ever.

What surprised me is just how timely the conversation still feels. The themes he talks about, from empathy to authoritarianism to the dangers of forcing the world into binaries, hit just as hard today as they did when he first published Wicked. And before we jump in, I want to make the case for why an Oz episode belongs on a horror podcast. If you've listened to Horror Heels for more than five minutes, you already know I believe horror is everywhere if you know where to look. L. Frank Baum's Oz books were Disoriented, Uncanny,

and full of creatures that would fit right into a horror anthology. Flying monkeys, glassy-eyed poppy field trances, a child wandering a dream world full of threats and decoys. The movie adaptation is gorgeous, but it is also nightmare fuel. And Wicked takes all of that underlying darkness and turns it into a rich, human, unsettling moral universe. I would even bet many of our listeners were Oz kids before we became horror fans.

We recognized early on that strange worlds are where outsider hearts feel right at home. So today we bring those worlds together. A little Oz, a little horror, and a wonderful conversation with Gregory McQuire resurrected through the magic of technology. All right, let's click our heels together and get started.

Corey & Kendall Stulce (03:15.704)
Do you have any interesting early stories from your Wicked book signings? The fourth signing I ever did for Wicked was in a bookstore in Chicago a week after it came out in the fall of 1995. There was an early snowstorm which swelled my crowd from two to seven, I think. Five were unhoused people who came in to get out of the cold. Two were friends of my brothers. Four of them immediately fell asleep in the chairs. Needless to say, nobody bought a book.

The fifth person began to argue with me. Wicked is the story of a green skinned girl named Elphaba. He said, no, it's not. He hadn't read it. He was just cranky. He was mad at the world and I happened to be standing there. Really, he was mad at the snowstorm. It was very hard. The last big signing I did, there were 350 people there. I've come a long way in 10 years. I guess that was your first book critic. He was my first critic.

and he knew just as much as any other critic. I was slightly daunted. One time I was in San Francisco for a reading with an even smaller group. A friend of mine came and didn't buy the book and I was so mortified that I bought it myself and gave it to her as a present. What kind of friend comes to a signing and doesn't buy a book? The only other two people there had a loud public fight the moment I finished speaking about whether it was worth spending the money. She wanted to. He didn't.

He won, they walked out, that reading resulted in one book sale, and it was to me. There are many ways to be humbled in this world, and I find new ways every day. You can go from being a centerfold in People magazine to being treated like a biohazard. It's all in a day's work. How early did you come up with the title for the sequel to Wicked, Son of a Witch? I had the title ten years ago and used to say it as a joke. It was a punchline.

If I ever write a sequel to Wicked, I'll call it Son of a Witch. Would you like to buy a book? I never really expected to use it. Then several things happened. The musical came along and not only did it reawaken my interest in the story, it brought me a whole new readership. Extraordinarily powerful readers, girls ages 9 to 14. They were reading my adult novel, which has sex, politics and sex clubs. Things 9 year old girls really shouldn't be reading.

Corey & Kendall Stulce (05:42.942)
they didn't care about any of that. They wanted to know what happened to the nine-year-old girl who was taken off in chains at the end and never seen again. That's who they cared about. As letters like that multiplied over the past couple of years, I started thinking more about that character. At the same time, the photos from Abu Graib were flashing across front pages. My own children were sitting at the breakfast table when I couldn't hide the paper fast enough.

The question became unavoidable. What is happening to these people? Those two impulses fused and lit the fuse that made me not just want to return to Oz, I felt I had to. I had to take an unintended landing there and find out what was going on ten years later. Might it become a trilogy? It has crossed my mind to this extent. If a book demands to be written, I won't stand in its way.

But I won't produce a book simply to satisfy readers who want to know what happens next or to make money. I'm comfortable enough now that I don't have to do that. I resist the notion that specifically attends to the fantasy subgenre that the story of good and evil ends in one final battle where everything is resolved, where the orcs and Ewoks and Muggles all weigh in with the angels, pixies and Darth Vader. That's not how the world works.

The liberals are never going to defeat the conservatives. The conservatives are never going to defeat the liberals. The question is, how do we keep going? Where do we find personal strength? I think I'm already being criticized a little for leaving too many loose ends in Son of a Witch. But my life unravels daily. My life is full of loose ends. I want the fantasy to have moral punch and believability. The characters have to live with loose ends the same way you and I do.

If another book comes, don't expect the chorus to come running out at the end singing the hallelujah chorus having once and for all solved things. That's not likely to happen in my life. That's going to make the movies a tougher sell. I think so too. And yet I try to provide consolation where consolation can genuinely be found. One of the main themes of Son of a Witch is solidarity. Lear has achieved something Elphaba, his probable mother, never does.

Corey & Kendall Stulce (08:03.928)
She's a hermit, an Emily Dickinson on steroids. He doesn't have her passion or power, but he learned something she never could, the capacity to collaborate in the good sense. The book is really about solidarity. Have you ever read Leo Leone's picture book Swimmy from the 1960s? It's very much like the passage in Son of a Witch, where the conference of birds flies together to form the shape of a witch. In Swimmy, the small fish are threatened by a larger fish,

so they swim together to look like an even larger fish. That's the lesson of the 1960s, how we managed in part to change public thinking about the Vietnam War. It's equally valid today. The musical has lots of younger fans, and there are heavy themes in the book that the musical changes some. Your reaction? I blinked once or twice, yes. I held out expressing my feelings for a couple of days.

But it really only took me about five minutes of talking to the composer Stephen Schwartz before I realized he understood exactly what he was doing. What he was doing was in sympathy with the themes of my book. I didn't care how much the plot changed and it did change in some significant ways. I wrote the book for the themes, not the plot. As long as the themes were honored and the message communicated, he had my blessing and he took my blessing and ran with it.

He told me as we walked in the woods while he was wooing me into the project that Wicked had been optioned by Universal for a film. A movie version would cost 110 million dollars. Movies rely on close ups for acting and wide shots for spectacle. The clash of war, the sweep of landscape. Movie actors work primarily through reticence, tiny clues to emotion, fine for a movie. But my story is 19th century in scope and moral passion.

It can withstand characters striding to the footlights and singing their hearts out, as in a Shakespearean soliloquy. There are big enough emotions that it would not embarrass me or the audience. I was completely convinced. Then he explained how the show might open. The curtain rising on the citizens of Oz, the witch dead, the chorus singing, No one mourns the wicked. When he reached the end of that explanation, I thought, I get it. You get it. It's a deal.

Corey & Kendall Stulce (10:25.184)
I didn't say it that day, but that's how I felt. How involved were you in the musical's development? Legally, I was granted the right to approve or reject the composer, lyricist, book writer and director. Once I signed off on any of the four, I was not entitled to be told anything further about the development. Essentially, it became a collaboration between the composer, lyricist, book writer, director and my book, not a collaboration with me. That suited everyone fine.

They kept me updated from time to time and I didn't pester them. I only asked for special permission once or twice to come down. I wanted to watch an audition and I wanted to see a dance rehearsal. But I didn't see the show until it opened in San Francisco for paying audiences in late summer 2003. What was going through your mind that night? God. I went in thinking I should have brought a paper bag from Neiman Marcus in case it was horrible.

I needed to flee with my dignity. But I was converted about four minutes in. The reason is the spectacular opening. Glinda descends from the flyspace in a mechanical bubble, singing, funny, and delivering a haunting meditation on wickedness, how the wicked die, how no one grieves for them because they don't deserve it. Then the story slips into flashback. After Glinda's dazzling entrance, the doors open and Idina Menzel rushes on stage in her green skin,

carrying a carpet bag. The audience goes wild for her before she speaks or sings a word. They were already on her side because of my book. 1,700 people roaring their approval, welcoming her back. The hair on the back of my head stood up, and it has pretty much remained upright ever since. Even before the story gets going, audiences understand that however angular or shrill she might appear, the witch is more honest than the wizard in Glinda.

She's not the demon portrayed in the movie or Baum's original novel. Everyone gets it. The one little thing I noticed about the universe ten years earlier, now everyone gets it every night of the week. That's thrilling. And Wicked, the novel is closing in on two million copies in print. People are getting it. I hope they also get what the book means, but I'm glad they're getting it at all. What does the colour green mean to you now?

Corey & Kendall Stulce (12:51.178)
It's interesting how green can run around the whole moral compass. It can mean corruption, the putrefaction of a corpse, the lack of vitality. It can also mean the opposite, spring green, renewal, the return of virtue. It can mean money, which is the root of all evil, at least in America. And it can mean innocence, my salad days when I was green in judgment. Primarily in Wicked, it signals that some of us are marked to be different, really that all of us are.

We aren't clones marching out of a hive. To me, green represents the individual soul, the certain uniqueness that belongs to each of us. Its disappearance at death is the strongest suggestion that a soul exists at all. It's also a helpful reminder that life isn't black and white. Americans, more than Europeans, tend to force complicated questions into binaries of right or wrong, good or evil. Green reminds us that there's a third way. The one thing Americans aren't good at

is finding third points of view. In your book, Wicked seemed to comment on politics, prejudice, AIDS, and it still does in the musical. Were you thinking about the present moment? Exactly. I didn't want it to be a direct analogy to the current moment. I wrote Wicked during the first Gulf War. I was thinking of Nazism in Germany, anti-Semitism in England in the teens and twenties, American soldiers in Vietnam, particularly under Nixon.

who I think was more dishonest about it. I wanted readers to twitch their noses like Elizabeth Montgomery in Bewitched and think, this reminds me of something about history, but I didn't want it to correspond to any single event. In Son of a Witch, I had similar motivations. The Abu Ghraib photos made me flinch and twitch like anyone else. I still wanted it to feel like an allegory, not reportage. I'll admit this, when I recorded the audio book and reached the emperor's lines, he developed a bit of a drawl.

a lazy way of speaking. I have a limited number of voices I can do. Have any readers completely misinterpreted your work? Yes, not many. Maybe one for every 800 or 1000. I've had a couple. One reader mailed a copy of Wicked back to me with the front page torn off and the back page torn off. She glued the back page, with my photograph and hometown, onto cardboard and scrawled in marker.

Corey & Kendall Stulce (15:15.864)
Please return this filthy book to this pervert circling my face in the name of the town. She didn't sign it or provide a return address. I couldn't write back, terribly sorry you didn't like my book. Perhaps you'd like another. Mostly though, people say, wow, you've taken the alternate universe fantasy genre, where magic is a lively force like gravity or time, and made it topical. That's the one twist I've brought to the genre that I'm proud of.

Do you think you'll continue writing for young readers? It has become harder for me and I'm not sure why. Over the past six years my partner and I have adopted three children now ages seven, five and four. Maybe having little ones at home makes me more intense about trying to process the ills of the society we live in or maybe I just want to escape the screaming and lose myself in a fantasy world as a coping mechanism.

just trying to remain a more or less functional new dad. I am about to work on a new children's book, tentatively titled The Tooth Train, about a rogue tooth fairy who gets separated from his tribe and is not properly trained, so he does everything wrong. Are your kids interested in writing? No, they're sensibly steering in every opposite direction they can find. Are they eating Frank Baum yet? Not yet, they're still young.

I took the seven year old to see Wicked on Broadway about a year ago. All the kids have seen little clips on TV. They know all the characters. Madame Morrible, Dr. Dillamond, the wizard. They know the witch looks scary, but is good. They know Glinda. They don't really understand that this is my iteration of someone else's story. When they eventually see the Wizard of Oz film and learn the green witch is really scary, I don't know what it will do to them. It's going to send them into therapy.

and I'll be responsible. Child Protective Services will come and take them away. Terribly sad. Can you recall your first time seeing The Wizard of Oz? My parents were very strict in an old-fashioned way. They didn't let us watch movies on TV at all, except for The Wizard of Oz and Mary Martin flying around in Peter Pan, which was very confusing. Here's a lady dressed like a boy and a man dressed like a lion in lion pajamas.

Corey & Kendall Stulce (17:36.0)
and everyone pretends not to notice. Talk about pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. The artifice is so obvious to adults. Kids think, wait, that's not a man. That's Mary Martin. Watching the Wizard of Oz once a year was almost a liturgical event in our family. Speaking of rituals, you asked earlier if I had any. That was a ritual. We all had to pee right before it started.

Or there would be seven damp spots on the sofa by the time the flying monkeys appeared. I was the middle child of seven. The next day, because I was something of a young impresario, the entire neighborhood would play Wizard of Oz as an acting out game. We'd cast it. After a few rounds, the kids would get bored, and since I loved bossing people around, I would start improvising. You be the witch this time. You be Dorothy. Dennis, you be Captain Hook. You can come and marry the witch.

You too can have two babies and call them hooky and crooky. I gave them new things to play and they ran with it until they ganged up on me, stuffed me in a garbage can and ran off to ride their bikes. I always wanted to play the witch, but Mary Martin didn't persuade anyone to cast me in any cross gender roles. I always had to be someone dull like the Tin Man. My sister Annie was a very capable witch for many years. She still is. Ever heard of a sing-along Wizard of Oz?

No, I haven't. But I've always had my own second verses to some of the songs. If Dorothy was perched on the tail of the hogpen singing about a Club Med style wonderland where troubles melt like lemon drops, look what she got. A fascist dictator wizard, witches clawing after her footwear, trees throwing poisoned apples. It was a nightmare. There was nothing fun about it. Her life was in mortal danger.

She definitely did not go where troubles melted like lemon drops. She didn't get her money's worth. I always thought there should be another verse. Like when the wicked witch leers from the crystal ball and transmogrifies from Aunt to the witch. Somewhere over the rainbow, she's there too. And the dreams that you're scared to dream really do come true. That would have told it like it was. She should have packed some heat. I don't mean to be camp. I don't even have a closet.

Corey & Kendall Stulce (19:56.62)
There's no closet to hide a pair of shoes. That was one of our special holiday episodes, and I hope you enjoyed this trip back to Oz as much as I did. Revisiting this interview reminded me why Gregory's work has stayed so deeply woven into our culture. Wicked is fantasy, but it's also about politics, identity, grief, and the messy humanity that sits in the gray spaces. In other words, it shares a spiritual home with horror. Both genres ask the same question. Who gets labeled a monster?

and who gets to tell the story. If you grew up watching The Wicked Witch Melt or The Flying Monkeys swoop through your living room once a year, you already know that horror and fantasy have always danced together. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with the Wicked fan in your life, or the Horror fan, or preferably both. If you want more deep dives into the stories that shape us, stick around. We have some amazing guests lined up for next year. Until next time, thanks for listening.

And when someone asks, is horror good for mental wellness? You tell them of corpse it is. The Horror Heels podcast is produced and presented by How the Cow ate the Cabbage, LLC.