Pride Month 2025: An Interview with Newton Webb
What is your book about?
My books explore the horrors humans inflict on one another, cannibalism, gaslighting, serial killers, and mad science. I’ve published fifteen books now. Even though I include supernatural creatures and cryptids in many of my stories, I always focus on the human element. Beneath the gore and the ghosts, there is a consistent theme: power, the abuse of it, and what happens when ordinary people are pushed too far. I write my stories to unsettle, to provoke, and to tell my personal truth through the lens of horror. I’ve written nearly a hundred short stories now and show no signs of slowing down. You can expect to see plenty more from the Newt.
What are you looking to express to readers with your work?
Before I became a full-time author, I lived a double life. As a gay man working in the financial sector, I wore a tailored suit as camouflage. At many of the client sites I worked at, it was a sackable offence to be openly homosexual. By day, I presented a polished, professional façade. By night, I wandered through the gay districts. I toed the line and banked the salary, but it felt dirty and morally corrupt. I was surviving, not living. That double life took its toll. After the suicide of my boyfriend and years of repression, I broke down. Everything I had buried came crashing to the surface. I ended up on medication and in and out of crisis centres. I couldn’t function in my professional or personal capacity. Those years were devastating, and I’m still recovering. But it marked the end of the lie. I quit the financial industry and walked away from the version of myself I had built to survive. I haven’t worn a suit since. I’m done hiding. I’m done sanitising myself to appeal to the mainstream. It cost me dearly, both financially and personally, but it led me to find my voice. All of that bleeds into my work. I strive to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. Not all of my stories feature LGBTQ characters, but they often explore the coded realities, unconscious bias, and quiet violence that our community lives with. I want readers, especially those who’ve felt erased or marginalised, to feel seen. In The Braemoor Incident, the creature that devastates the village isn’t the monster. It is the man who created it.
There’s a cathartic pleasure in ensuring that evil men face the consequences they deserve.
Why choose horror?
Because horror is honest. You can say anything in horror; you don’t have to be filtered, and there is less pressure to hit genre expectations. Horror welcomes the messy, the taboo, the things other genres turn away from. It isn’t interested in being polite or focusing on marketable universal fantasies. As a gay man, I grew up surrounded by people who wanted queerness to be hidden or sanitised. Horror never asked that of me. The first movie I watched was Hellraiser when I was eight years old. It defied gender norms and showed me that you can be monstrous, sensual, and furious all at once.
Horror let me explore the parts of myself that didn’t fit the neat boxes.
Horror gave me the language to talk about pain, repression, desire, and defiance.
Horror doesn’t flinch.
Neither do I.
Born at RAF Halton, Newton Webb is a British horror author and father to a perpetually grumpy tortoise. He is the author of fourteen published books, collects Venus Flytraps, and is a notoriously pedantic fish keeper. His internationally bestselling collected works, Tales of the Macabre: Volumes 1-3, contain stories inspired by splatterpunk and classic gothic themes. His fiction frequently blends gore with psychological tension, reflecting influences that range from heavy metal to ancient mythology.
