The Tale of an Accidental Horror Writer

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First, a confession: I am a chicken.

Not just a chicken, but the chickenest chicken that ever chickened. A constant jump scare waiting to happen. The character frozen in place in the movie, unable to save herself. Jurassic Park gave me nightmares for years. I didn’t venture anywhere near a Stephen King book until my mid-thirties. And don’t even ask me about the time I accidentally walked in on someone watching Alien.

When I tell you I am the last person you’d expect to write horror novels, I mean it in the strongest possible terms.

So when I finished my third novel manuscript and sent it off to my agent with the note “What genre is this?” the email I got back made me chortle:

“Young Adult Horror!”

Horror? Ha! I, Miss Scaredy-Pants, was writing horror?

I called my best friend (who also chortled)—and then I paused. Because it was true that I wrote about things that horrified me. It was true that I didn’t shy away from true crime or thrillers, even when they skewed darkly toward horror. It was true that my stories had monstrous villains. And it was true that this particular book was based on a European ghost story.

My agent was right, I realized. I’d accidentally written a horror story. It had every hallmark: the questions about what was and wasn’t real, the creepy, unnatural child, the forest that just might swallow you up.

And for me that begged a question: could I intentionally write one? If this book was horror, was horror something I was naturally drawn to? And—just perhaps—if I stopped trying to avoid the genre, would I find something there that spoke to my soul?

As that first horror manuscript made its way to editor inboxes, I took up the challenge in those questions, plotting the novel that would become my YA debut: The Wicked Unseen. First, I cobbled together the story itself. The backdrop: the U.S. Satanic Panic—a time of extreme fear (and extreme ridiculousness). The plot: the disappearance of the preacher’s daughter (who happens to be the main character’s crush). The main character: an opinionated, queer tribute to Wednesday Addams.

Then—being a history buff and being too scared to read any horror novels just yet—I got into the history of the genre. I read about common tropes and genre luminaries. I read Tippi Hedren’s memoir and then dug deeper into the dark, abusive figure that was Hitchcock. I traced the particular patterns of American fears through eras of filmmaking. Satanists. Poverty. The occult. Death. Death. Always death.

As I read about horror, my own fear of it grew smaller. As I began to understand the scope of the genre, I realized it had been a narrow sliver of a vast pool of work that had me convinced it wasn’t for me. Like shadows in the corners, my fear of horror couldn’t survive the light of my direct attention.

While I wrote, I kept digging into the real-world context around the horrors I was writing about. What was it like to be a mortician, and how might they see death differently than the rest of us? How do you train a cadaver dog? Are bats really dangerous? What are the histories of Ouija and séances, and did they always scare us? (Spoiler: they did not.)

Finally, peeking through my fingers, ready with my other hand hovering above the pause button, I watched horror movies and read horror novels. I relied on true horror aficionados (like Sami Ellis, whose debut, Dead Girls Walking, comes out in 2024) to point me in the right direction. I needed to ease in. Horror, but for chickens, please and thank you.

I found that I still couldn’t stomach heavy gore, and over-the-top monster stories like Alien aren’t for me. But I also found horror that was very much for me. Freaky, with its perfect comedic timing and refusal to kill off the marginalized characters. Bad Witch Burning’s deep dive into depression. The horror of something we’ve culturally normalized in When No One Is Watching. Ready or Not’s commentary on wealth. And in all of those stories, a singular pattern: triumphant endings.

These were not torture porn, gore without purpose, fear without resolution. They were hard-won victories against insurmountable odds. I’d been thinking of horror (thanks to those childhood scares and a few bad examples) as a genre of despair. But what I found when I slipped outside my own fear—especially in horror by marginalized creators—was hope.

These were stories about people who truly did have the odds stacked against them, who faced down real societal monsters—misogyny, poverty, anti-Blackness, queerphobia—and who survived. Won. Even thrived, perhaps, after the credits rolled.

The horror that I hadn’t been drawn to fell into two categories and was primarily penned by white men. There was the trumped-up horror there for the shock effect (what if giant worms jumped out of the ground and ate you?!) and, worse, the horror where the marginalized people were the danger (go count how many horror villains are queer-coded—I’ll wait).

What I hadn’t realized as I wrote that first horror manuscript is that I was participating in a long tradition of marginalized authors using the genre in a different way. Instead of the terror of a giant spider or a murderous demon, we ask you to consider the terror of a woman fleeing a violent man (The Invisible Man), desperate people exploited by the rich (Hide by Kiersten White), Black people tokenized and pitted against each other by a white capitalist power structure (The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris). Instead of the long tradition of protagonists who set their own doom in motion by opening Pandora’s box, pushing past the keep-out sign, or (gasp!) being a woman who has sex outside of marriage, we ask you to join an innocent as they face down the demons society created.

When I finished writing The Wicked Unseen and sent it to my agent, this time I called it what it was: Young Adult Horror. I didn’t have to ask about the genre because I’d been immersed in it, intentional about it. I’d found myself in it and found that not only this book, but so many of the ideas queuing up inside my mind, fit perfectly here. In this space where authors before me have made way for triumphant horror, feminist horror, horror that asks us to consider if the things that should scare us most are the ones already here.

Now years into this journey, there is still some horror that my chicken brain cannot handle. Jump scares still do me in. Gore can trigger some very unpleasant obsessive thoughts. And if you recommend me a book or show with cannibalism in it, I will make a voodoo doll of you and stick it full of pins.

But in a certain type of horror, I found something unexpected. Something I now love. Something that reflects back a part of my own soul. A clear thread that whispers: You can survive, even the worst things. You can fight. You can win. You, the queer, mentally ill disabled girl. You, the one with the odds stacked against her.

I hope that in The Wicked Unseen, other readers find those truths too.

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