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Lee Mandelo (he/him) is a writer, critic, and occasional editor whose fields of interest include speculative and queer fiction, especially when the two coincide. His debut novel Summer Sons, featured in publications ranging from NPR to the Chicago Review of Books, is a contemporary Southern Gothic dealing with queer masculinity, fast cars, and ugly inheritances. His most recent book, Feed Them Silence, is a near-future science fiction novella—and there’s also a t4t historical Appalachian horror novella in the works. Mandelo has been a past nominee for awards including the Nebula, Lambda, and Hugo Awards, and is currently living in Louisville while pursuing a PhD at the University of Kentucky.
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Stories have compelled and fascinated me for as long as I can remember! There might not be an answer to the question of what inspired me to start writing in general, it’s just always been there as something important to me. With specific projects though—for example, Summer Sons—usually I start with a single scene, or emotion, or character, that commands my attention. I’m not a “write daily” guy; I find that expectation tends to create burnout and doesn’t leave artists enough time to reflect or grow, but I do journal regularly—so, I’ll note down those seeds of ideas and over time see if they start to germinate something bigger.
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Anything that provokes strong feeling, I’m into that—and horror, alongside erotica, devotes itself so well to powerful, bodily emotions. As a weird gay child of the ’90s, I was probably destined to love horror. There was such a huge boom in scary books, movies, and so on by LGBTQ+ artists going on during that decade. Unsurprising, given things like the HIV/AIDS epidemic, alongside government abandonment and surging social persecution through the late ’80s onward. I didn’t have that context as a kid, but I had the materials, and they left strong impressions on me!
Looking back now, I feel like being drawn to horror—a place where stories about being an “outsider” and also experiencing extreme dread and fear could be made somehow safe to explore, in their own strange way—was only natural.
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Lor Gislason (they/he) is a non-binary homebody and the author of Inside Out. They are also the editor of Bound In Flesh: An Anthology of Trans Body Horror. Find them on Twitter @Lorelli_ and their blog lorgislason.wordpress.com
Andrew Robertson is a queer horror writer and editor. He recently released a dual-author short story collection with Sèphera Girón, Dearly Departed, available from the Great Lakes Horror Company. The collection represents their favourite frights and gravest hits published over the past decade.
Andrew has three short stories heading to the Moon as part of Lunar Codex. A project by Samuel Peralta, Lunar Codex is archiving the works of over 30,000 artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers from 156 countries in tandem with NASA’s Artemis program and the Writers on the Moon project. These stories will be part of the largest single collection of contemporary artwork ever put on the Moon and will fly there on the first commercial lunar flight in history.
A lifelong fan of horror, his writing has appeared in multiple anthologies and literary magazines. Recent work includes the social media critique Sick is the New Black which appears in the all-gay anthology Pink Triangle Rhapsody, edited by Andrew Wolter, available from Lycan Valley Press. Andrew is currently working on a novelization of the same story, exploring themes of queerness, addiction, fame, and a culture locked in the thrall of online obsessions.
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As a kid, I was always fascinated with mythology, ghost stories, the paranormal, and storytelling. If you told me we were going to visit a haunted castle, I would lose my mind. And I absolutely loved when someone would sit us all down and tell us a fable, a grim tale, or a legend. That should happen more, by the way, that skill is becoming extinct. The best were the ones that scared me. The words seemed so powerful, crawling up the back of your neck like when someone would sing a sad song.
As early as grade three I was starting to come up with story ideas, and by grade five I was in a writing group creating the adventures of Mr. Bones, a dog detective in a seedy city populated by anthropomorphic animals, both good and evil. It was very Gotham, very noir.
That led me to think about mutations, and by that point, I was a die-hard X-Men fan. Wolverine and Storm were the parents of my early drive to do more than just put some words on a page. The Chris Claremont-era of The Uncanny X-Men is pure gold, what a storyteller! The outsider status of the heroes, the way they did everything they could to help humankind but were constantly recast as villains due to political interference from the right wing, and being generally misunderstood- that was very attractive to a queer kid growing up in the 80s.
Everywhere I looked, people I knew were just like me were villainized, and blamed for GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) before it came to be known as AIDS. How do you grow up feeling okay about yourself when there are people out there wishing death on you, afraid to help you, and making you the centre of a problem that wasn’t yours alone? That was the moment I started to sympathize with the villain because I knew not all villains were evil. I wanted to tell those stories from the other side. It was all born out of darkness so it had to be horror.
Later in life, when I came across The Power of Myth with Joseph Campbell, it all fell into place. As a species, we need stories and mythology, and if we look closely at these cultural threads, we could realize we are all coming from the same principles and beliefs. It’s a shame that part often gets obfuscated.
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There are so many layers in a horror story, where the outsiders and weirdos are always regarded as objects of scorn and hate, and it often begins with a misunderstanding. We know so much of society is close-minded, but keep finding new ways to show just how bad it is. The themes of horror are just holding a mirror up to challenge our very basic, sheeplike way of being in a society where discomfort equates to something bad instead of an opportunity to grow and experience something new and confusing. There is this desperation to keep everything and everyone the same. How boring, right? But horror breaks that in half and shows you both sides. Horror is the antidote and makes any impulse a possible storyline.
There is also the othering that takes place, whether the characters in horror books and movies are evil or just perceived to be– that was again very attractive to a queer kid growing up in the 80s. Think about Frankenstein’s Monster. The blame fell to the monster as the easiest outsider to shake a pitchfork at, but none of it was his fault. I could relate to being othered and blamed for things that had nothing to do with me. We are born into a society that has turned us into scapegoats, and the foundation for fear-based religious and political fundraising efforts. Our society likes to lay blame, like the AIDS crisis that continues to this day. Easier to blame gay men and junkies because they were historically disproportionately affected, the cause of it all…but that isn’t necessarily true. So much of what was hung on queer people wasn’t true, but we became a horror trope, and now we are taking our trope back.
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Photo credit: John Kaczanowski
Wendy N. Wagner is a writer and Hugo award-winning editor. Her books include the forthcoming cosmic horror novel The Creek Girl (Tor Nightfire, 2025), The Deer Kings, The Secret Skin, and the Locus best-selling An Oath of Dogs. Her short stories, essays, and poems have appeared in seventy-some publications, running the gamut from horror to environmental literature. She is also the editor-in-chief of Nightmare Magazine and the managing/senior editor of Lightspeed. She lives in Oregon with her very understanding family, two large cats, and a Muppet disguised as a dog. You can find her at winniewoohoo.com.
Joe Koch (He/They) writes literary horror and surrealist trash. Their books include The Wingspan of Severed Hands, Convulsive, and The Couvade, which received a Shirley Jackson Award nomination in 2019. His short fiction appears in publications such as Vastarien, Southwest Review, PseudoPod, Children of the New Flesh, and The Queer Book of Saints. Joe also co-edited the art-horror anthology Stories of the Eye. Find Joe online at their website and on Twitter.
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Writing evolved from the same need that drove me to do visual art fifty years prior. I need to make things, be creative, invent little games and problems to solve, and come up with ideas to chew on in order to be happy. I’d taken my art as far as I wanted to and began writing seriously as an experiment in a different medium. So far it’s worked out pretty well.
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The horror genre has always delighted me. Some of my earliest childhood memories involve watching classic black and white horror films on Saturday afternoon TV’s “Creature Feature.” As a kid, I wanted to be a vampire instead of a boring human. I was a teen during the eighties horror boom, exposed to King and Straub, but also many books outside the horror genre that had dark, thoughtful, and absurdist elements like Samuel Beckett and Camus. I didn’t read them for school; I’ve always read quite a lot of fiction and nonfiction out of sheer curiosity.
Anyway, horror for me signifies the letting down of mundane barriers to experience and knowledge. In this genre, there’s the possibility that anything can happen, and as a creator, you don’t have to play nice. I like that freedom.
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Michael R Collins was born at a very young age in the wilds of southern Idaho. After a few decades, he finally got his fill of all the sagebrush and rattlesnakes he could eat, so he struck out into the world. After slinging some bass guitar and general shenanigans in Austin, Texas, he currently lives in Pennsylvania with his partner Mel. He is a Bi author who has published four novels. His most recent novellas are Verum Malum, Miracles for Masochists (with James G. Carlson), and Dick Wiggler and Other Useless Superpowers (writing as Mick Collins) as well as penning a few alibis. (Just in case.)
Ruth Anna Evans is a writer, anthologizer, and cover designer who lives in the heart of all that is sinister: the American Midwest. She has been composing prose of all types since childhood but finds something truly delightful in putting her nightmares on the page. She has self-published the horror collection No One Can Help You: Tales of Lost Children and Other Nightmares, along with novellas, novelettes, and several short stories. She is the editor of Ooze: Little Bursts of Body Horror. Her work has also appeared in Livestock: Tales from the Un-herd, Deadly Drabbles by Hungry Shadow Press, and she will have work appearing in Dark Town, an anthology from D&T Publishing.
Follow Ruth Anna on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, or at her website for updates on her work.
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I’ve written since childhood off and on. My bachelor’s degree is in writing, and I was a newspaper reporter for several years. But I never had much luck at fiction until about 2020. I was having huge amounts of anxiety about the pandemic and didn’t have any outlet for them. Instead of going stark raving mad, I began a story. It took me months and months to get that first novella out, but once I did, and once I realized it was horror, the floodgates were open. Writing brings so much meaning to my life. And when people read your writing and connect with it in some way, that’s even more meaningful. It just builds and builds.
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Horror, for me, is all about processing a world that is just too awful to contemplate without the buffer of fictional stories. I have always been incredibly soft-hearted about the horrific things that happen to people; I can’t read or watch certain things or it just overtakes my brain. In fiction, though, I can let some of those horrors out of my mind. It gives me some peace.
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Eboni J. Dunbar (She/her) is a queer, black woman who writes queer and black speculative fiction. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her partner. She received her BA from Macalester College in English and her MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. She is a VONA Alum and the former managing editor for the Hugo Award-Winning FIYAH Literary Magazine.
Out to his family and friends since he was sixteen, L. Stephenson’s short stories and poetry have been haunting horror anthologies and online magazines since 2018, the best of which can be found in his recently-released mini collection, Candles, Bullets, & Dead Skin. Graduating university in 2010 with a degree in Film & TV Screenwriting, Stephenson released his first novella, The Goners in 2021. Originally the beginning of a trilogy that has now fused into his debut slasher novel, The Boatmore Butcher, due out in September of this year through Dark Ink Books.
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I was just fascinated by books as a child. I loved everything about them: the lettering, the feel of a page, the cover, the smell. The dream was to have a book of my own one day, clasped between my hands.
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It started at a very young age, all because of the colour purple. It was my favourite colour and was very prominent in the design of some of the most popular villains, from Ursula in The Little Mermaid and Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty to the Joker from Batman. And even though the colours changed, my interest in evil fictional characters only got stronger and darker as I grew older.
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Brent Lambert is a Black, queer man who heavily believes in the transformative power of speculative fiction across media formats. As a founding member of FIYAH Literary Magazine, he turned that belief into action and became part of a Hugo Award-winning team. He resides in San Diego, but spent a lot of time moving around as a military brat. His family roots are in the Cajun country of Louisiana. Currently, he has a novella A Necessary Chaos upcoming from Neon Hemlock and is part of the upcoming cyberpunk/solarpunk anthology Fighting the Future and Black horror anthology All These Sunken Souls. Ask him his favorite members of the X-Men and you’ll get different answers every time.
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For me, I think it was a convergence of multiple things that inspired me to write. I loved superheroes as a kid and those epic stories were planted firmly in my head early on. Then I moved on to books like the Chronicles of Narnia, Animorphs and just devouring myths from across the world and thinking I wanted to grasp some of what felt like raw creation. I was also a military kid and with all the moving around, there just wasn’t any way to build lasting relationships outside of my immediate family. A lot of loneliness and a need to control *something* came out of that. I naively thought (and still think, to some degree, despite knowing better) that writing could be a form of controlling the chaos of an ever changing world.
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I’m newer to writing horror but have always been a fan of it. I think what drew me to horror was that the lack of control so many characters experience in horror felt familiar and, in some ways, comforting. Like I said, I was a military kid and that involved a lot of moving around. Instability in many ways was my stability, and it could suck. But seeing characters running away from monsters in their dreams, their campgrounds, their homes, etc., made me think, “Well at least you ain’t I gotta deal with *that* kind of problem!”
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James Lefebure is a Scottish-born, Liverpool-living horror author. Splitting his time between watching horror, reading horror and writing horror, he can often be found arguing with people that Jason would whoop Michael. His two novels The Books of Sarah and God In The Livingroom have proven to his long-suffering, fantasy-reading husband that James will probably never write a story about dragons or an orphan with a destiny. He’s a part of two LGBT horror anthologies—We’re Here and The Horror Collection: LGBTQIA Edition. He can be found on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. He does have a Twitter, but doesn’t understand how it works enough to use it. His website has recently been launched and contains more information on where to find him.
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I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a young horror reader. (I blame Christopher Pike and R.L Stine). Although, life got in the way and I didn’t sit down and actually write my first book until the pandemic hit. I was working in the NHS at the time so had to go into work, but couldn’t see anyone after my shift. So, writing became my outlet to help get my head out of the stress of working in a hospital during the outbreak.
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I love that at its core, horror is about examining the most human elements of yourself. It’s about fear in its most primal form. It’s not enough to just be scared, it makes you examine what it is that’s scaring you. I think it shows the core truth of anyone when they’re in a situation that is making them confront their biggest fears.
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Arley Sorg is an associate agent at kt literary and co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine. He is an SFWA Solstice Award Recipient, a Space Cowboy Award Recipient, a two-time World Fantasy Award Finalist, a two-time Locus Award Finalist, and a finalist for two Ignyte Awards. Arley is also a senior editor at Locus, associate editor at both Lightspeed & Nightmare, a columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and an interviewer for Clarkesworld. He is a guest critiquer for the current Odyssey Workshop and the week five instructor for this year’s Clarion West Workshop. Arley is a 2014 Odyssey graduate. His site: arleysorg.com. Twitter: @arleysorg Facebook is… a weird number.
Vince A. Liaguno is an award-winning writer, anthologist, editor, and an occasional poet. He is the Bram Stoker Award®-winning editor of Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet (co-edited with Chad Helder), the acclaimed Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology (co-edited with Rena Mason), and the forthcoming Unspeakable Horror 3: Dark Rainbow Rising. His debut novel, 2006’s The Literary Six, was a tribute to the slasher films of the eighties and won an Independent Publisher Award (IPPY).
Corey Niles was born and raised in the Rust Belt, where he garnered his love of horror. His debut horror novel, Blood & Dirt, was released from NineStar Press in August 2022. His writing has appeared in over twenty publications, including issues, anthologies, and collections from Nightmare Magazine, the Horror Writers Association, Ghost Orchid Press, and Lycan Valley Press. You can keep up to date with his recent and forthcoming publications at coreyniles.com.
Joshua Viola is a 2021 Splatterpunk Award nominee, Colorado Book Award winner, and editor of the StokerCon™ 2021 Souvenir Anthology. He is the co-author of the Denver Moon series with Warren Hammond. Their graphic novel, Denver Moon: Metamorphosis, was included on the 2018 Bram Stoker Award® Preliminary Ballot. Viola edited the Denver Post #1 bestselling horror anthology Nightmares Unhinged, and co-edited Cyber World—named one of the best science fiction anthologies of 2016 by Barnes & Noble. His first novel, The Bane of Yoto, won the USA Best Book Awards, National Indie Excellence Awards, International Book Awards, and Independent Publishers Book Awards. His short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, including DOA III: Extreme Horror Anthology, Doorbells at Dusk, and Classic Monsters Unleashed. In 2022, he became the creative director of comics and novelizations for Random Games’ videogame franchise, Unioverse, a new series from the veterans behind Grand Theft Auto and Donkey Kong Country and the writers of Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Halo 4. When he isn’t writing and editing, Viola dabbles in art. In 2020, he collaborated with his husband, Aaron Lovett, on AfterShock Comics’ Miskatonic #1 Cover Alpha Comics variant. As a video game artist, he worked on Pirates of the Caribbean: Call of the Kraken, Smurfs’ Grabber and TARGET: Terror. Viola is the owner and chief editor of Hex Publishers in Denver, Colorado, where he lives with his husband and their son.
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I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. In elementary school, I was writing fan fiction before I even knew what that was. In middle school, I wrote a sequel to one of my favorite movies, and my English teacher asked if I’d plagiarized, which was a huge compliment and encouraged me to keep at it.
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Growing up in an ultra-conservative home where even Disney wasn’t always allowed, I had an automatic attraction to darker things. Horror movies were forbidden fruit that I couldn’t get enough of. Eventually, I started hiding VHS copies of those movies under my mattress (along with various other things…), and my love for horror movies started to show in my writing by the time I was in high school.
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Gretchen Felker-Martin is Massachusetts-based horror writer and film critic. Her debut novel, Manhunt, is out now from Tor Nightfire. You can follow her work @scumbelievable on Twitter.
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I don’t think it was any one thing. Bob Flanagan, the famous masochist and performance artist, had a wonderful spoken-word poem about the roots of his masochism, and he lists just hundreds and hundreds of factors, and it’s like that for me. The woods of rural New Hampshire, Monica Furlong, James Gurney’s Dinotopia, my childhood asthma, watching Clive Barker movies and Alien too young, being bullied for being fat and queer, Isaac Asimov, Stephen King, my nightmares, my queerness, having sex way too young, naked vampire Monica Bellucci coming out of the bed in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, dinosaurs, the ocean, being abused, hating math.
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I’m a sadomasochist, I’m kinky, and my body is deviant to the rest of the world because I’m fat and trans, so I’ve always loved controlled pain and discomfort, and when you’re reading horror you’re inflicting something on yourself and you get this chance to learn what disgusts you, what frightens you, and why. I was a glutton for punishment from a very young age. I used to ask my father to reread scenes from bedtime stories that gave me nightmares.
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Larissa Glasser is a librarian-archivist from New England. She writes dark fiction centered on the lives of trans women, library science, and heavy metal. Her work is available in Other Terrors: An Inclusive Anthology (William Morrow), Tragedy Queens: stories inspired by Lana Del Rey and Sylvia Plath (Clash Books), and Transcendent 3: The Year’s Best Transgender Themed Speculative Fiction (Lethe Press). Her debut novella F4 is available from Eraserhead Press. She is on Twitter @larissaeglasser
Britney Everlong began writing at an early age, her first book being “The Whatchamacallit”, written at the age of nine. It would be some time before her first published work, “Pegasus Bay”, would come to pass, at the age of eighteen. Now, Britney is a writer, mother, free thinker, occasional actress, lover of music, and all-around weird lady who enjoys writing horror and sci-fi stories in her spare time.