Today I have another readalike author from WHY I LOVE HORROR: ESSAYS ON HORROR LITERATURE the amazing Gwendolyn Kiste who is a readalike for Cynthia Pelayo in the book:
Gwendolyn Kiste is the four-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens, Reluctant Immortals, Pretty Marys All in a Row, The Haunting of Velkwood, and the forthcoming In These Gilded, Ghostly Hearts. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in outlets including Lit Hub, Nightmare, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, CrimeReads, Titan Books, The Lineup, and The Dark. She's a Lambda Literary Award winner, and her fiction has also received the This Is Horror Award for Novel of the Year as well as nominations for the Shirley Jackson, Premios Kelvin, Ignotus, and Dragon Awards. Originally from Ohio, she now resides on an abandoned horse farm outside of Pittsburgh with her husband, their excitable calico cat, and not nearly enough ghosts. Find her online at gwendolynkiste.com.
But full disclosure and shout out to Gwendolyn. I asked her to be in my book very early in the process, but she was too busy with other projects and let me know immediately. I am so appreciative of this and her for even considering. As promised, when it was completed, she read my book and gave me a great blurb.
I love all of Gwendolyn's books but her latest, The Haunting of Velkwood was one of my favorites of 2024, so much so that I gasped with joy when she won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel this past June.
I was already going to ask her to be a part of this year's Why I Love Horror essay series and then found out, that her next book, In These Gilded, Ghostly Hearts, is coming Fall 2026 from Creature Publishing, the very small press I will be featuring later this month here on the blog.
I feel this was all meant to be.
Now enough from me, here's Gwendolyn Kiste.
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Why I Love Horror
by Gwendolyn Kiste
Anytime I’m asked about why I love horror, I can’t help but think of a famous scene in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 dance classic, The Red Shoes, a film which could potentially be called its own form of body horror. At a high-end party, an iron-fisted director asks our protagonist ballerina, Victoria, why she wants to dance. With barely any hesitation, her reply is “Why do you want to live?” A little flustered, the man responds by saying, “I don’t know exactly why, but… I must.” She stands firm and says, “That’s my answer too.”
I must. Just like Victoria, that’s my answer as well. I must love horror, because to me, it’s like breathing. It’s like the air in my lungs and the blood in my veins. It’s been with me my entire life. My earliest literary memories are of Edgar Allan Poe and Ray Bradbury. My earliest film memories include Aliens, Gremlins, Universal Horror, and Hammer films. When I was twenty, I met my husband when we were both independent horror filmmakers. Every aspect of my life has been brimming with the horror genre. It’s entangled in me like a symbiotic entity, and I can’t imagine it any other way.
And now more than ever, I’m grateful for this genre and what it’s taught me, because horror is everywhere, both the fictional variety and the literal kind. It practically goes without saying at this point, but we’re living in truly terrifying times. Book bans have become commonplace. Our rights—to our bodies, to love who we love, to even just walk down the street—are dwindling by the day.
But we’ve got one light in particular in all our lives right now: there’s no genre that can respond to these times in quite the same visceral way as horror. Horror faces everything head on; from death and destruction to grief and gore, horror never flinches, and it never compromises. It doesn’t have to. It tells the plain, unvarnished truth. That’s one of the many reasons I’ve always loved it so much. I can be myself in the horror genre, and I can express my truth. I don’t have to turn away. I don’t have to pretend. The world can be a truly frightening place, and horror doesn’t ever sugarcoat that fact. Trauma is not only allowed to exist in the genre, but it’s front and center. You can talk about the things that scare you, and instead of being ostracized, you’ll find other people in the horror genre who will look right at you and tell you: I know what that feels like too. It’s a genre that deals with pain, but it’s also a genre that deals with empathy, and I take such refuge in that.
Every day, the future seems to become bleaker. But when I look around at the genre and the way we can leverage our words to fight, I’m heartened a little bit more. Horror is filled with shadows, but horror is also filled with light. It’s about the Final Girl defeating the slasher killer. It’s about the exorcism of the innocent and the ghosts being vanquished from the haunted house at last. Horror gives us a roadmap for how to keep going. And right now, that feels like the most important resource of all.
Horror is resistance. It’s rebellion. The genre’s very existence pushes back against so-called polite society. Growing up, I was always the weird girl, the one who preferred bats and monsters to frilly dresses and talking about crushes. I was also always the one who spoke up, even though little girls were never supposed to do that. But in horror, it’s always the girl who speaks up. She’s the one who goes to battle, and let’s be honest: she usually wins. Horror gave me a sanctuary then, and it’s giving me a sanctuary now. The genre shows us all the things that are worth fighting for. And together, we have to go and make good on that fight.
I must. I must love horror, because it’s the way through, the glinting promise at the end of the tunnel. It reminds me that there’s a way out. Horror is ours. It belongs to all of us. And the future is ours too, even if the people in power don’t want us to believe that.
Keep going. Keep fighting. Keep reading horror. We must.
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