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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