They always tell writers that they should write what they know…something that always puts me on edge when what they’ve written is a horror story.
Which is not to say you should be worried about writer A.G.A. Wilmot. While there are a lot of real and personal connections between them and the main character in their new horror novel Withered (paperback, Kindle), as they explain in the following email interview, it’s those personal connections that make this haunted house story, “…a different sort of haunting.”
Photo Credit: Jaime Patterson /
Hidden Exposure Photography
I find it best to begin with an overview of a book’s plot / set-up. So, without spoiling anything, what is Withered about, and when and where is this story set?
Withered is about a number of things. It’s about life transitions: starting over somewhere new while at the same time actively trying to recover from illness and regain control over your life. It’s about learning the limits of one’s control and how to let people in when you’ve closed yourself off.
And in the broader sense, it’s about an ongoing spectral war, a battle of wills, I guess, that risks levelling a small town.
As for its timing and setting, I envision it being around 2018, 2019 or so — a time when covid isn’t a part of our daily lives. Beyond that, it’s left ambiguous.
Where it is set, however, is a little more involved. The town the book takes place in, Black Stone, is a Derry, Maine-like spin on where I grew up, a small west coast city called White Rock. White Rock is considerably larger than Black Stone, especially these days, but I wanted to take this story in particular, which is a rather personal one, and set it where I could really see and smell and taste and feel and touch the place for myself. I don’t live in White Rock anymore, but having spent my entire youth there, from age five to twenty-six, it feels like a part of my DNA.
Where did you get the idea for Withered? What inspired it?
Actually, Withered started life as a short story titled “Heart Strung” that I’d written…gosh, at least four or five years before starting the novel. That entire story (plus a little extra) is contained within this book, as Analiese’s tale.
As for what inspired the novel, well not to put too fine a point on it, but in the time between writing the short story (I say “short,” it was close to 10,000 words — so basically a novelette) and starting the first draft, I had finally started the hard work of addressing my own decades-long battle with anorexia and associated issues. And the deeper I went with all that, the more I kept coming back to this notion of the body as a haunted house — as a thing that on some level you fear, yet it’s also your home, and maybe you have to reconcile that conflict somehow.
Why did you decide to make Ellis 18-years old as opposed to 8 or 28 or 58?
Because in many ways, being totally honest, Ellis is me. I’ve struggled with my body pretty much my entire life, from the age of seven on. Around 17-18, anorexia took hold of me. I dropped half my body weight over the course of Grade 12 and was entering into some pretty dangerous territory as a result. I did get help at that stage, not enough to push the anorexia all the way into the recesses — that would come many years later — but enough that I was able to move on with my life. Even still, like Ellis, I had to take a gap year after high school, just to get myself to a safe place again. A more stable place, I suppose. So a lot of the decisions around Ellis were made to mirror my own life, with a few alterations here and there. You know, to keep it at least a little fictional.
It sounds like Withered is a haunted house horror story. Is that how you’d describe it, genre-wise?
Hmm… For the most part, I think, yeah. Though I like to think of it as a different sort of haunting. I wanted to go a little further with the notion of a haunted house. Mental health plays a large role in everything I write — it’s at the root of a lot of the horror I love, actually — so I try to marry the two. I don’t want to spoil anything, but for me, it is a haunted house tale, but in a less-traditional sense. A more personal sense.
But how scary is Withered? Like is it just freaky and weird, or is it the kind of thing that’s going to scare the crap out of me like that time when two cats got into a fight outside my window while I was playing Silent Hill at 1AM?
See, this is difficult to answer, because fear is such a personal thing. Like, I don’t get scared reading books — pretty much ever. I feel a bit of tension sometimes; sometimes I get a little unnerved. But I can’t recall ever being outright scared, because for me, it’s the auditory side of things that really messes me up. (It’s not horror per se, but to this day, the sound of the alien signal in the movie Contact is one of the scariest sounds there is.)
And scares aren’t really at the forefront of my mind when I’m writing, either, if I’m being honest. I love horror (it’s far and away my favorite genre), I use the tools of horror, but I’m not sure I know how to engineer terror. I think more than anything, I seek to unnerve, to unsettle, to maybe disgust a little bit. But I can’t say whether or not it’s going to be scary — that’s for the individual to decide. And I think it will hit harder, too, be scarier, depending on what you as the reader bring to the table. I dig pretty heavily into specific mental health issues as well and grief and loss, and I think it’s the weight of those things and how they sit on your shoulders (or not) that will determine its impact.
Withered is your second novel after The Death Scene Artist. But Death Scene was published under your government name, Andrew Wilmot. Is there a reason why Withered is credited to A.G.A. Wilmot and not Andrew Wilmot?
Yup, there’s a reason for this: plainly, I’m trans and non-binary. As a matter of fact, it was back in 2018 while working on edits for The Death Scene Artist (which is in many ways a story about someone in denial about their gender) that it all finally clicked for me after ignoring decades of signs, persistent background thoughts that were only getting louder — things like that. I went with A.G.A. — my initials — at my father’s suggestion, to give myself some space and ambiguity. Because while I don’t have a deadname-like relationship with my birthname, I do like having the flexibility to play with names and have used a couple of others with close friends and family. A.G.A. gives me a certain degree of freedom in that regard.
Speaking of The Death Scene Artist, are there any writers, or stories, that had a big influence on Withered but not on Death Scene?
At the risk of sounding a little arrogant here, no, not really. I’ve definitely been inspired by authors, sure — at least one upcoming project is heavily inspired, at least tonally and structurally, by the authors Emily St. John Mandel and Sequoia Nagamatsu, and another by Tear author Erica McKeen — but I have to confess that when I write horror, I often feel more inspired by films and television shows than I do by books. For Death Scene, there was definitely some Eyes Without A Face, some The Skin I Live in, a skosh of The Thing. For Withered, it was more horror films and shows rooted in mental health — specifically the Netflix adaptation of The Haunting Of Hill House, and later on A Ghost Story and the recent Fear Street trilogy (to the latter, if I have my druthers — that is, if Withered becomes a success — I’d love to build out the town of Black Stone with future stories set there).
Given its cinematic influences, do you think Withered could work as a horror movie?
I really do. Hell, I’ll say straight up: that would be a dream come true. I’ve always adored film and for many years wanted to be a screenwriter (I have some experience there, but not much). If I had the chance, with the right director and cast, I would leap at the chance to see my work make the transition to the big screen.
And if someone wanted to adapt Withered into a movie, who would you want them to cast as Ellis, their mom, and the other main characters?
This was much harder than expected, if I’m being honest. So much of this book is personal — Ellis and Quinn’s relationship is based heavily on my own relationship with my fiancée, Jaime — that it’s kind of like trying to fancast my own life. That said, going mostly on vibes but also somewhat on appearances…
Ellis: Bex Taylor-Klaus [Scream], Elliot Page [The Umbrella Academy]
Quinn: Dominique Fishback [Swarm], Dominique Thorne [Black Panther: Wakanda Forever]
Robyn: Connie Britton [9-1-1], Kate Siegel [The Haunting Of Hill House], Kristen Bell [The Good Place]
Cynthia: Jill Scott [First Wives Club]
Bill: Colman Domingo [Fear The Walking Dead], Winston Duke [Us]
Honestly, one of the problems we both ran into — I discussed this with my fiancée, Jaime — is that there is an unfortunate lack of young Black actresses who are visibly fat / plus-sized. Which is something we’d love to see change. I think the likeliest of scenarios, if Withered were to ever become a film, would involve finding two unknowns for the lead roles. Because it’s important for us both that Ellis and Quinn be represented accurately, and to not erase any aspect or aspects of who they are.
So, is there anything else you think people need to know about Withered?
Let’s see… I want people to go into this knowing what they’re in for. That this is not an ultra-aggressive horror book looking to shock and appall. This book deals openly with eating disorders, size discrimination, and aspects of queerness. I put these things in my work because they matter, to me and to my friends and loved ones. I address these things openly because the stigma that surrounds mental health is still very real; because queer and trans issues are currently a target for the uneducated dregs of society; and because fatphobia is still an acceptable public prejudice for so many people.
Finally, if someone enjoys Withered, what haunted house horror novel of someone else’s would you suggest they read next?
I don’t know if it qualifies as a haunted house novel, just that it takes place in a house and feels like something of a haunting, but Erica McKeen’s Tear is my favorite book of 2023. Obviously there’s Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Ai Jiang’s Linghun and Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is For Witching are also excellent choices. Those are the first titles that spring to mind.
As for the why of these…I mean Jackson’s is self-explanatory — it’s an absolute classic of the subgenre. The others I simply loved.
