Today I have yet another readalike author from WHY I LOVE HORROR: ESSAYS ON HORROR LITERATURE. This time it is Lindy Ryan, who is my readalike author for Rachel Harrison.
Lindy Ryan is an award-winning author, anthologist, and short-film director whose books and anthologies have received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist and Library Journal. Several of her projects have been adapted for screen. Ryan is the current author-in-residence at Rue Morgue. Declared a “champion for women’s voices in horror” by Shelf Awareness, Ryan was named a Publishers Weekly Star Watch Honoree in 2020, and in 2022, was named one of horror's most masterful anthology curators. Born and raised in Southeast Texas, Ryan currently resides on the East Coast. She is a professor at Rutgers University.
Click here to see Lindy's website.
I have read and reviewed many books written and edited by Lindy. She 100% is a champion for women's voices in horror as quoted int he bio above.
Here is my review of the charming and terrifying Bless Your Heart. And here is the info about her February 2026, upcoming release, Dollface.
In her Why I Love Horror essay, Lindy shares themes not unlike those that emerged throughout my book, how horror taught her how to survive.
💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀
HORROR IS HOPE—AND HOPE IS A WEAPON
By Lindy Ryan
It’s a big question, isn’t it? Why do you love horror?
If you’d asked me a couple of years ago, I would’ve rattled off a lifetime of touchstones. Sneaking my mom’s Stephen King and V. C. Andrews books off the shelf. Watching Hitchcock marathons and King adaptations—Psycho, The Birds, Misery—on endless loop with my grandmothers. The nostalgia of Ben Cooper Halloween masks. Scholastic Book Fair Goosebumps hauls. Are You Afraid of the Dark? Bedtime stories from my dad: the rabbis who melted a coven of witches in the rain, the girl with the green ribbon, the Baba Yaga tales my stepmother carried with her from Ukraine. I’d have told you about my recurring nightmares. My weird fascination with monsters and transformation (I insisted my plastic vampire fangs were actually werewolf teeth). How I found Interview with the Vampire on a flea market shelf and let it change my life. The Halloweens that Mom and I dressed as Elvira and Pennywise.
Maybe I’d mention how I’ve passed that horror-love on to my own son—taking him to the Stanley Hotel, to Bangor, Maine, to the Garden District in New Orleans, to Sleepy Hollow and Salem. Month-long Halloween celebrations. Home-sewn costumes. Harvest festivals and horror conventions.
I would’ve said I love horror because horror is in my bones. That I feel at home in this cave of shadows and monsters and danger. And it wouldn’t have been a lie. All of those things are true. But none of them are the reason I love horror—they’re the evidence.
Why I love horror, I’ve come to understand, has a much different answer.
I didn’t fall in love with horror because it scared me. I fell in love with horror because it taught me how to survive.
I grew up surrounded by monsters, but not the kind you find in books or movies. Mine lived at home—alcoholism, domestic violence, abuse. Chaos that didn’t end when the credits rolled or the lights came up. Shadows that didn’t creep from closets but from the people I was supposed to trust. And it didn’t end with childhood. It followed me through adolescence in a small, conservative Southern town that hated other, into an adulthood that hunted women. Into a society where so many of the monsters no longer even bother with the mask.
Horror gave me a language for that darkness. It whispered: yes, the world is dangerous. Yes, the rules are unfair. Yes, the monsters are real. But it also showed me something else: that girls could fight back. That survival was possible. That I could outsmart, outfight, outrun the darkness, and be the Final Girl of my own story.
Horror taught me consequences, too. It showed me what happens when you split up, when you ignore the warning signs, when you open the wrong door. When you stop fighting. But it also taught me resilience—how to face the darkness, look the monster in the eye, and walk out the other side bloodied but breathing.
When other genres offered escape, horror offered instruction. It handed me a blueprint for survival. It gave me hope, strangely enough. Hope that no matter how bad things got, there was still a way forward. That I wasn’t powerless. That sometimes surviving was victory enough. And that maybe even not surviving could still be enough—because I refuse be a victim. I choose to rage, rage against the dying of the light. To be a warrior.
And so, why do I love horror? Because horror is hope.
More than that: hope is power. Hope becomes a blade you can wield. A match struck in the dark. A reminder that the scream doesn’t always signal defeat; sometimes it’s the battle cry, the howl. Horror taught me that survival is not passive. It is resistance. It is defiance. It is the audacity to keep breathing in a world that wants you silenced. Horror taught me that surviving isn’t just about making it through the night—it’s about changing the story.
It’s about making sure the monsters don’t walk away unscathed.
Horror showed me that survival is only the beginning. That once you crawl out of the basement, slam the door on the monster, wipe the blood from your face and feel your heart still beating—you realize you can do more than endure. You can fight back. You can hunt the things that once hunted you.
Because in the real world, the monsters walk into our homes, our workplaces, our communities. They legislate our bodies, police our freedoms, choke our voices. Horror gave me the language and the courage not only to stand up to them, but to strike back. To remind those monsters that they don’t get to survive me.
They don’t get to survive you, either, dear reader.
And that’s why I love horror. Because it raised me, armored me, carried me through the shadows. Because it gave me a map out of the dark and taught me to light the path for others. Because it taught me that monsters bleed, too.
And because horror—always, always—reminds me that I am not the only one who should be afraid.
💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀
No comments:
Post a Comment