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.
Tatiana Schlote-Bonne is the author of the YA horror novel Such Lovely Skin. She has an MFA from The Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. When she’s not writing, she’s either gaming, lifting weights, or teaching people how to lift weights. She is of Japanese, Mexican, and European descent, and lives in Iowa.
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 Tatiana Schlote-Bonne sharing why she loves horror.
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Why I Love Horror: What My Dad and I Talk About Because We Can’t Talk About Anything Else
Tatiana Schlote-Bonne
Before my father hit me for the first time, before he would deny ever doing so, before the restraining order, before, before, before—we watched Army of Darkness.
I was seven years old and we sat on the couch, cheering for Ash as he fought a water-logged Deadite in the pit. Dad’s parrot preened his feathers on his shoulder; Monty, the ball python, lounged on his heated rock in the tank beside the TV. Blood and mud splattered across the screen as Ash fought his way to the surface.
“It’s not real,” Dad said whenever someone was impaled or shot with Ash’s boomstick. “Just fake blood.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m not scared.”
The only scene that scared me was the one where Ash is chased through the woods on his horse by an invisible force. It was the camera shaking, the evil getting louder and splitting through trees, the feeling of something unseen but inexplicably immense in pursuit, the lack of escape. The scariness was fun though, exciting, a squirming in my stomach. My favorite part was when Ash’s girlfriend, Sheila, turned evil and her hair got bigger. I thought, I want to be her when I grow up.
Those were the days when Dad got to be the cool weekend parent, when we watched all of the Evil Dead movies, the Alien franchise, Hellraiser.
Then things changed.
We moved in with my dad’s new wife. He started working more and coming home less. But there were still moments of connection: I left one of my Goosebumps on the table, Piano Lessons Can Be Murder, and the next day, Dad said he’d read it. “But these are scarier…and you’re probably old enough to handle them.” He gave me a couple weathered paperbacks he kept in the bathroom, Watchers and Phantoms by Dean Koontz. At twelve years old, I found the descriptions too long, the cast too big, the characters boring, but I pushed through, and when I got to the scary parts—the mutated baboon-bear creature, the severed heads in ovens—I relished the gory images my mind conjured. And when I told my dad I’d read his books, I beamed.
My dad introduced me to horror and he was also the first person to make me feel fear. When I was in trouble with his wife for some little thing—misplacing my retainer, leaving clean clothes at the bottom of the laundry basket, wearing her earrings—Dad came home, his boots stomping down the hall to my bedroom. He towered in the doorway, his eyes black. His voice got unnaturally deep and low, his jaw flexing. His bottom teeth bared in a way that can only be described as monstrous. Then he charged. His presence filled the tiny room.
There was no escape.
That feeling of being chased, grabbed, trapped—I would remember. I would use it in all the horror stories I’d come to write. So far, my characters have all had dead dads, overly nice dads, or overly nice dead dads. I am interested in using horror to explore more complex themes I’ve experienced: girlhood, isolation, manipulation, finding inner strength and self-forgiveness, than my dad problems. But that fear he caused lives in every antagonist.
After our last fight when I was fifteen culminated in my dad sending me to live with my mom’s ex-boyfriend, we did not speak for years. There was a restraining order, a change of guardianship. I thought my relationship with my dad would only be a memory. But in my early twenties, because I wanted apologies that would never come, because I wanted closure, because some part of me missed him, because, because, because, I called him. After the initial screaming matches, accusations, hang ups, we got tired and circled around to small talk. Then we started chatting on the phone occasionally. Then we met for lunch.
Now, I’m thirty and our relationship consists of brief text message conversations that I initiate, and once a year I fly to San Diego and we go out to eat because I’m not allowed at his wife’s house. We barely know each other. There is not much to say to a parent who didn’t do much parenting. To break the silence when we meet for lunch during my yearly visit, I ask what horror movies he’s watched recently.
There is a spark in his eyes, an uptick in his tone, and soon we’re talking about how Charlie’s head got lopped off in Hereditary, how it looked lying there on the road in the brief moment it’s shown on screen, how we both rewound and paused to take a closer look at the bloody mess, the broken jaw, the ants. He asks me what he should watch next; the first film that comes to mind is Heretic. I know that, like me, he will appreciate the film’s take on religious control, the claustrophobic setting, the pie scene. He says he will check it out, then he leans closer and says he is proud of me. He shows everyone my books. He’s happy I’ve become a writer—my daughter, a horror author! He thinks this is thanks to him.
I let him have this, because in a way, he is right.
When I return to Iowa, I don’t expect to hear from him until I make contact again. But my phone vibrates and I’m surprised to see that my dad, for once, has texted me first.
Louis: I watched Heretic. Great film, spooky. Smart too. What other recommendations do you have for me?
I feel a warmth toward him that I haven’t in a long time. I respond: Talk To Me, Smile, Smile 2 (definitely watch this one!)
Louis: OK, will do.
It’s not the relationship I want, or needed as a child, or wish we could have, but it’s something.
It’s something.
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