If there’s one thing we all know about ghosts, it’s that physical contact has no effect on them. You can’t wave a ghost away, or shove them out of your house, while threating them with physical violence falls on deaf ears.
Well, unless you’re Shay from A. Lawrence’s Ghost Punch novels. She can punch them. And she will.
In the following email interview, Lawrence talks about this humorous cozy supernatural horror series, and its newest installment, Night Terrors (Kindle).
They say you should write what you know. But I wonder if the person who came up with that phrase would think about someone writing what they know when also writing about a viral apocalypse.
Well, now they, and you, can find out, courtesy of author C.J. Leede and her new apocalyptic horror novel, American Rapture (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), in which things, and she, get very personal.
To learn how, and why, and other things, check out this email interview.
Genre can be a tricky thing, and never let it be said I don’t listen to an author when they tell me a book is one genre or another. Or a couple genres at the same time.
Which brings me to author Caitlin Starling, who, in the following email interview about her horror novel Last To Leave The Room — which is now available in paperback a year after originally being released in hardcover, Kindle, and audiobook — explains that while it has a scientist who may be sinking a city, and there’s an “impossible locked door,” and has some sci-fi flavor, Starling says, “it’s straight up horror to me.”
As she says in the following email interview, Ellen Datlow has edited the annual anthology series The Best Horror Of The Year, “…(in one form or another) for 37 years.”
But in that same time, she’s also assembled collections of horror short stories around a theme or type of scare, including Body Shocks: Extreme Tales Of Body Horror, Screams From The Dark: 29 Tales Of Monsters And The Monstrous, and When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired By Shirley Jackson.
Which brings me to her latest thematic anthology, Fears: Tales Of Psychological Horror (paperback, Kindle), which has stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Josh Malerman, Stephen Graham Jones, Priya Sharma, Margo Lanagan, and others.
In the following email interview, Datlow talks about how she defined the term “psychological horror” for this anthology, as well as how she chose the stories to include in it.
The idea of mixing fantasy and history is not new. Mike Mignola’s Hellboy and B.P.R.D. comics have been doing it for years, as have the Wolfenstein games, and David Mack’s Dark Arts novels did it as well. But unless I’m mistaken, writer and artist Clayton McCormack is the first to send Vikings into the first World War. As for what the Vikings think of this idea, well, for that you’ll just have to read McCormack’s new graphic novel Bloody Hel (hardcover, digital). In the following email interview about it, McCormack discusses what inspired and influenced this horror / fantasy / history mélange.
It sounds like a cookbook. Maybe by some nice who lives in the suburbs of New England. But it’s not. Instead, Catherynne M. Valente’s new novella Comfort Me With Apples (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook) is actually a romantic horror story. In the following email interview about it, Valente discusses what inspired and influenced this story…but does so in what she implies is an appropriately cryptic way.
It’s October, and that means it’s time to read some scary stories (though, really, when is it not?). But while writer Eric LaRocca says the ones in his short story collection The Strange Thing We Become And Other Dark Tales (paperback, Kindle) are “mainly horror stories,” he also says in the following email interview that they’re driven by sorrow and grief.
The phrase “witch hunt” is used a lot these days, often by people who don’t understand that it only applies if the people being hunted aren’t actually witches (or, in the case of the current mis-users, actually criminals, bigots, or just generally bad people). But what if the Salem Witch Trials actually did involve real witches? Such is the idea behind Brom’s new illustrated horror-infused fantasy novel Slewfoot (hardcover, Kindle), which he both wrote and drew. In the following email interview, Brom explains what inspired and influenced this story, as well as why it comes fully visualized.
The term “cryptid” refers to a creature that people believe are real, even though there’s no proof that they do. But while Bigfoot and The Loch Ness Monster are two of the more famous cryptids, they’re not the only ones. In John L. French’s new novella When The Moon Shines (paperback, Kindle), he tells a horror-flavored crime story that involves the snallygaster, a cryptid from Maryland. In the following email interview, French not only discusses what inspired and influenced this story, but also how the book is the first in a series of cryptid-centric stories called System Paradoxa that will be initially (but not exclusively) be available in The Cryptid Crate, a new monthly subscription box that, on a quarterly basis (January, April, July, October), will feature exclusive items made just for that box.