API/AANHPI Heritage in Horror Month: An Interview with Jessica Gleason

API/AANHPI Heritage in Horror Month: An Interview with Jessica Gleason

    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…
API/AANHPI Heritage in Horror Month: An Interview with Kelsea Yu

API/AANHPI Heritage in Horror Month: An Interview with Kelsea Yu

  What is your novella about? My next book, Demon Song (out from Titan Books on September 30), is a modern gothic horror novella inspired by The Phantom of the Opera. The main character, Megan, is a Chinese American teenager who—along with her mom—is on the run from an abusive man. They seek refuge in an ancient Beijing opera house. There, Megan finds a Chinese mythology book and begins reading the tale of Baigujing, the White Bone Demon. Soon, myths begin to bleed into her life as dreams and reality blur, and Megan must discover the true, horrifying secret of…
API/AANHPI Heritage in Horror: An Interview with Geneve Flynn

API/AANHPI Heritage in Horror: An Interview with Geneve Flynn

  What is your story about? “If I Am to Earn My Tether” is a horror short story about sand piracy, colonialism, and living with the choices our ancestors made. It features the Malaysian myth of the polong, a tiny homunculus born from the blood of a murder victim, and her pet grasshopper, the pelesit. It was published in Silk and Sinew: A Collection of Folk Horror from the Asian Diaspora by Bad Hand Books in May this year. The collection is edited by Kristy Park Kulski and includes short fiction and poetry by Ai Jiang, Nadia Bulkin, Christina Sng,…
An Introduction to API/AANHPI Month by Frances Lu Pai Ippolito

An Introduction to API/AANHPI Month by Frances Lu Pai Ippolito

  The first thing I think of when I sit down to write this introduction is a well. It’s a deep one, made of chipped stone blocks in the courtyard of an abandoned house somewhere between Anhui and Guangdong in the late 1930s. My 7-year-old grandmother is hiding in an empty residence with the women of her family – her mother, Popo, Nai Nai, and her 5-year-old sister. Her brother and father are missing, and the oldest sisters fled their Anhui home weeks ago with neighbors. The well is important because that is where my grandmother encounters her first ghost.…