This week I have a special 6 day feature centered around Creature Publishing. From their "About" page:
Based in Virginia with roots in New York, Creature Publishing specializes in feminist horror, dark speculative fiction, women-driven thrillers, spooky fantastical fiction, literary fiction, and the like.
Founded in 2019, Creature has served as a platform for stories which challenge the status quo, offering titles with a broad and inclusive, transgressive and intersectional, understanding of what horror is and who can make it. As Creature has grown and evolved, our initial interest in horror’s potential for social commentary and catharsis, as well as its potential to cross into other genres and subvert genre altogether, has led to our more formal adoption of writing within the realm of thrillers, sci-fi, and fantasy, particularly when fear or horrific elements continue to play a role, but always where the writing is innovative and powerful, the stories reflecting and widening our understanding of others and the world.
About the Name & Those Delightful Spines
Our books have won or been finalists for the Bram Stoker Award, the Ladies of Horror Fiction Award, and the Foreword Indies. Our books are creatures—living, forceful entities with desires of their own, capable of inspiring fear, passion, anxiety, dread. The illustration on the spines of our books speaks to this idea. Our name is also a nod to the content of the genre itself; horror is full of creatures, human and nonhuman and all things in-between. They can be sinister or benevolent, familiar or “other.” The monster under the bed, the monster in bed with us, the monster inside. Our creatures have bones to pick. We like it that way.
Grace Daly (she/her) is a disabled author who lives near Chicago with her pets. She spends most of her free time with her dog, who is a very good boy. Her fantasy novella, The Star of Kilnaely, is forthcoming in 2026. The Scald-Crow is her first novel.
Daly is not only making waves as a talented new voice, she is also extremely open and honest about her disability and how it informs her writing. Last month she had this article in The Lineup-- 6 Dark and Disturbing Books with Disability Representation.
Reminder: Creature is offering a giveaway this week; a five book prize pack of Creature titles for one winner. Click here for the rules and details on how to enter. Get your entries in by 5pm Central this Friday (10/17) to be entered for the week's giveaway.
Now here is Grace Daly sharing why she loves horror.
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Why I Love Horror
By Grace Daly
When I first became disabled, I quickly learned acknowledging my illness in any way was intolerably rude. In the beginning, when conversations would die and people would break eye contact, I thought the problem had to do with my whining. This made intuitive sense; nobody likes a whiner. So, I tried different approaches: I stated my limitations matter-of-factly, or I made jokes, or I would use a casual, offhand tone, like I was discussing a baseball team I didn’t particularly care for.
But none of that worked. No matter how I brought it up, the moment the word ‘disabled’ fell from my lips, every social interaction sputtered out like a guttering candle. Awkward interactions with strangers and acquaintances were bad enough, but the stain of it spread further. Eventually, I realized I couldn’t delve into my symptoms with my family, my partner, or even my doctors. They didn’t want to hear details. They didn’t want to dwell on my suffering. The knowledge of my suffering made them suffer.
I didn’t want to make them suffer. I cared about them. So, my illness, my day-to-day lived experience, became my private, filthy secret. It still is, to some extent. I tell people I’m fine. I attend events that will leave me flaring for days. I’ve learned every euphemism in the book, purchased clothes and purses large enough to hide my mobility aids and pill bottles, and apologize every time I slip up and the ugly truth of my disability is seen.
Because it’s rude to make someone see my horror show of a body. It’s rude to make them see me.
But humans are social animals, and, like anyone, I longed to be seen for all of me. I didn’t want to hide such a fundamental part of myself away. I wanted connection that accepted my disability. My solution, precocious bookworm that I am, was turning to literature. As a habitual fiction reader, I eschewed the traditional disability memoirs in favor of novels, certain I would find depictions of chronic illness I could relate to and feel seen by.
Instead, I found an absolute desert where the disabled characters ought to have been. In the rare book in which they were present, disabled characters were propping up inspirational messages for able-bodied readers, as if chronically ill folks were an army of treacle-sweet Tiny Tims. The even-rarer novel which resisted that urge would feature disabled characters so fully self-actualized they felt like caricatures. Disabled joy abounded: these characters knew they were worthy of love and respect, and they demanded it, and they got it, and they also usually solved a murder or rode a dragon or something.
It felt nothing like my experience.
Eventually, I stumbled into horror. I had always been a coward; I cried the first time I watched “Silent Hill” in high school and then cried again during “Cabin in the Woods” in college. But now, battling a demon encoded into my very genes, I found I wasn’t terrified. I was exalted.
The victims would be broken and tortured and shattered, but in horror, they had one blessed relief: they were allowed to suffer. In fact, the more their terror and weakness was expressed, the more their stories were celebrated. The character’s misery wasn’t papered over in an effort to appeal to the sensitivities of readers. They were loud and boisterous and, yes, rude in their suffering, and this suffering was acknowledged as real.
And the terrors themselves! The monsters and twisted perpetrators, so often disabled and disfigured, spreading their own pain in a rebalancing of the cosmic scales. Of course, the utilization of disabled bodies as a source of horror is in itself ableist and reflects our society’s disgust and disregard of disabled people. Many folks much more thoughtful and respectable than I have written excellent examinations of this facet of the horror genre; if I had less internalized ableism, that’s probably what this essay would be about. But on some deep and shameful level, I have to admit: living in a disabled body can often feel horrifying.
This is what draws me to not only reading, but also writing, horror. The pressure I feel in my day-to-day life to be polite about my disability, tiptoe around my pain and limitations, and put on a brave face is immense. The social penalties for failing to do so are immediate and inescapable. In horror, the opposite is true: the ruder I am, the realer I am, the more righteous and rambunctious my rage becomes, the more the readers feel seen. The more the readers see me.
I’d like to, someday, make peace with my disability. I’d like to have the self-esteem and self-acceptance to truly connect with representations of unbridled disabled joy. I’d love to honestly decry the representations of disability which present it as less than human. But I’m not there right now. Right now, I suffer and right now, there are few places where I’m allowed to be honest about how that feels.
In horror, my suffering doesn’t have to disappear. It can take center stage. My body is a horror show, and folks just might line up to buy a ticket.
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