What is your novel about?
Easy Bake Covenant is personal for me. I poured a lot of myself into the MC, Laura. At its heart, Easy Bake Covenant is a story about a little girl working through her demons, both literal and metaphorical. She’s gifted a peculiar Easy Bake Oven and, through it, she unwittingly makes a deal with the devil. She’s lost and angry, but grabs her power back and uses it to become strong and independent. To be clear, it’s not a fairy tale. Laura is fierce and funny, and her happy ending may not be what you expect.
What are you looking to express to readers with your work?
I often tell people that I see my writing as a [hopefully] entertaining way to spend an afternoon. If you want to see something else in it and take that with you, that’s wonderful, but you don’t need to. That being said, I try to present occult themes with a side of sass, to lift up flawed women who face horror head-on, to explore undercurrents of generational trauma, to inject humor into horrible situations, and to evoke dream-like feelings that make readers almost remember that one nightmare they could never fully grasp.
Why choose horror?
I experienced a traumatic event as a child, one that gave me unexplained nightmares for years. I had no idea this event had occurred, but when I found out, the pieces started to snap into place. Vague, I know. But what I learned from my experience was that horror was never as scary as real life. Instead, when I crept down the stairs as a child, sticking my head through the bannisters to watch Tales From the Crypt when I should have been in bed, I was enchanted. I’m on a constant search to find something that creeps me out, but I’ve found that horror never scares me. What it does provide is a way for me to laugh in the face of danger, a way for me to work through my trauma on the page, a way to connect to the readers who’ve experienced difficult times and lived to tell their stories. I don’t think any other genre really does that in the same way that horror does. There’s beauty in the darkness.
Jessica Gleason finds writing horror therapeutic. So, she puts her nightmares to paper for your enjoyment. She often draws from her AAPI culture and lived experience to bring occult-flavored and slasheriffic horror to life. If you look hard enough, you can catch her singing hair metal karaoke somewhere between Chicago and Milwaukee. Her daytime persona is a college professor in the American Midwest. Jessica’s recent releases include “Madison Murphy”,(Cupid’s Arrow Publishing), “Playing Hooky” (Unnerving Books), and “The Dangerous Miss Ventriloquist” (Evil Cookie Publishing). Pre-orders for her upcoming book, Easy Bake Covenant (Burial Books) is open now! Follow her on Instagram or Threads (@j.g.writes), where she hosts the #WeWriteHorror challenge.
Pre-Order Easy Bake Covenant HERE.
