31 Days of Horror: Day 9-- Why I Love Horror, Undertaker Books Week Edition Featuring Leticia Urieta

  

 

Day 5 of my 7 day feature centered around Undertaker Books continues. From their "About" page:

Welcome to Undertaker Books, where our core values are integrity, professionalism, honesty, and transparency.

At Undertaker Books, our mission is to provide publishing services to indie authors worldwide, spotlighting new and unique voices within the realm of horror fiction. We strive to offer a seamless publishing journey from submission to publication while providing valuable feedback every step of the way.

We believe in collaboration between authors, publishers, editors, and designers to bring diverse voices to the forefront of the horror genre. Our passion lies in creating a long-lasting partnership with authors by focusing on the “less is more” concept: quality releases, not the quantity of them.

Undertaker Books is not limited to any specific theme or subgenre. Instead, we are dedicated to innovative storytelling and embracing the myriad voices that contribute to horror literature.

To our readers, we hope to bring you stories you’ll take to your grave. 

Undertaker Books is a small press on the rise, and its Founder and Publisher Rebecca Cuthbert has everything to do with that. She has organized six of her authors to contribute to this week long feature and today, you get to meet Leticia Urieta author of the Undertaker Books collection The Remedy is the Disease. From the publisher: 

The Remedy is the Disease is a collection of experimental speculative and horror stories about living with chronic pain and illness, medical trauma, grief, and the way vulnerable bodies are treated in a capitalist, individualistic society. 

However, the collection is not without moments of light. A mother's love for her hard-won daughter; blossoming friendship between patients living nightmares of chronic pain; self-love in the face of a society that ignores individuals with disabilities at best, and reviles them at worst. Leticia Urieta knows this world, rendering both dark and light with a deft hand. At once both gross, deeply uncomfortable, as well as full of love and tender care, these stories attempt to find connection in a disconnected world.

Click here for more information about this book and to order. 

Before we get to Urieta's essay, a reminder that Cuthbert is also offering a giveaway this week-- Undertaker Books prize packs for 3 winners! Click here for the rules and details on how to enter (from a previous giveaway post). Get your entries in by 5pm Central this Friday (10/9) to be entered for the week's giveaway. 

Now back to Urieta and her entry into the Why I Love Horror series.

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Horror is Hope 

by Leticia Urieta

I am a recovering scaredy cat. Seeking out fear is a thrill I’ve been chasing since I was a child. Maybe it was because I lived with an undercurrent of anxiety since I was young, when my parents divorced and I lived with uncertainty about what my family would be going forward, though I never lacked for love from them and my extended family. Still, I had panic attacks from an early age, and once almost passed out walking home from the school bus stop at the realization that one day, I would die. I had almost daily migraines for a year in first grade and was prone to severe illness. 

My family watched Gremlins, The X-Files and Stephen King’s It mini-series, giving me nightmares that lasted weeks. I started watching Are You Afraid of the Dark with my grandmother on Saturdays and wondered why I took pleasure in feeling afraid. I often struggled to name it and understand it, thus why I was drawn to young characters whose fears are validated and their voices heard, if only by one another. The more Goosebumps and Fear Street books I read, the more I felt that life was frighteningly unpredictable, but choosing when to be afraid was mine. 

As I’ve grown older, I find myself drawn more and more to horror that is less definable; stories that are not filled with clear villains or monsters, or clear endings, but are much more ambiguous, liminal, surreal. The Thing and Event Horizon are films I am sure to watch every year. While I love a good creature feature and campy slasher, I imagine my tastes have developed this way because my capacity for understanding fear has developed. Still, I did not consider myself a horror writer until very recently.

 My focus as a writer was on writing realistic literary fiction and poetry. In 2015, I was teaching full-time and attending evening classes in my MFA program, commuting and pushing my body to the brink of exhaustion. Many of my stories were a little bizarre, but still settled in the realm of reality, focused on quiet characters in the small, tender moments of their lives. It wasn’t until my second year in the MFA program when I was confronting my anger with the overt and covert racism and gender discrimination that myself and other classmates experienced in my cohort that I found my work taking a turn towards the weird, uncanny, and horrific. The stress of the program was causing a recurrence of my childhood migraine disorder, which made commuting to school very challenging. Realistic storytelling was no longer the storytelling mode that my work needed to evolve. Then, a professor lent me a copy of the Best American Science Fiction Stories of 2016, and I read a story by Carmen Maria Machado for the first time. New possibilities opened for me about how I could utilize speculative fiction and horror storytelling to shape my work. My weird hybrid collection, Las Criaturas, was the result of that creative epiphany. 

I played with some body horror in Las Criaturas, but in 2023 I found myself leaning more into work that was darker, more intimate, experimental, and vulnerable. I was living with new health diagnoses for multiple chronic illnesses, and had just had a third miscarriage, necessitating multiple uterine surgeries; my grasp on myself was tenuous, and my bodymind felt fragile. 

My husband and I decided to celebrate our October birthdays by taking a short trip to the Grand Canyon for the first time. We stayed in a cozy little cabin in the valley at the foot of the mountain range in Flagstaff. Crows would often perch on the roof at dusk, and there was something beautiful and ominous about that time as I tended my wounded heart. One night, we decided to go to a small movie theater in town to see the newly released film, Smile. The film captured so many of my own feelings at the time; a loss of self, depression and trauma as an entity chasing down your life. In one scene, Rose’s therapist comes to her home to express concern for what appears to be her psychosis. In the middle of their conversation, Rose receives a phone call from her actual therapist. As the foreboding music swells, the entity terrorizing Rose with the form of her therapist, wearing the unsettling smile of the person Rose is supposed to be able to trust most with her emotional well-being, proceeds to chase her in her own home. I left the theater that night feeling overwhelmed by the sense of dread the film instilled in me, especially considering Rose’s fate by the end. I found myself asking, are the effects of trauma insurmountable? Where does that leave those of us who are in such immense physical and psychic pain that we struggle with wanting, and sometimes not wanting to be alive? 

I wrote the stories and essay included in The Remedy is the Disease fairly quickly after that. They seemed to tumble out of me, raw and bloody, weird and, for all their fantastical plots, tender and real. I was reading nonfiction texts about disability justice and interconnected care written by the late Alice Wong, the late Andrea Gibson, and leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha as well as more surreal and absurdist work by Brian Evenson, Chuck Tingle, Megan Giddings and many others. Disability and illness stories have not always been treated with respect in horror books and media, reflecting the deeply ableist society we live in. Reading work by disabled and neurodiverse writers asks us to question, who has our society labeled disposable? How can horror be a reminder of our existence, our experiences with chronic pain and medical trauma, and the ways we connect to one another with tenderness and care? Writing this work allowed me space to explore the ways in which we conceive of our bodies as unruly, frightening, unpredictable, monstrous, and even the absurdity of being embodied at all. I allowed myself to imagine all the “what ifs” of these stories: what if vials of blood at a clinic congealed into one monstrous form as a hive mind and begin to destroy a town? What if pain became so intense it unleashed a shadow self? What if a werewolf needed an abortion? If you live long enough, as many advocates say, you will become disabled in some way. For able-bodied people, that is their greatest, most amorphous fear because our culture has told them that is the worst thing that could ever happen to them. Many of us know that isolation, lack of community and care can be worse. 

I’d spent much of early writing career building community with other writers and poets in Texas, and attending local horror readings and events like Ghoulish Book Festival in San Antonio and meeting indie horror writers and booksellers has taught me so much. This year I was able to attend Stoker Con for the first time, and what struck me most about the conference, besides the many wonderfully kind horror writers, editors, bloggers, librarians and readers I met, was how many types of horror storytelling were being celebrated there. There were common themes across these panels, including the ways in which "gothic" storytelling changes across cultures, how horror stories respond to both the past and the political present, and how horror can both imagine and reflect our realities. I was also delighted to see how much indie horror and horror comics and zines were represented, showing that shorter, accessible presses and zine culture is alive and well in horror. And most of all, it was gratifying to meet chronically ill and disabled writers, podcasters, booksellers and reviewers who are expanding the genre’s capacity for our stories. 

We live in an ever more frightening world; there is so much to grieve, and so much to be afraid of. There are few days that I don’t feel a sense of fear for those I love, and all those I will never meet, at what our collective future holds. We are facing down climate disasters, multiple genocides and fascist state control of our autonomy, down to our bodies and access to care. Every day we are encouraged to abandon one another, especially those most vulnerable people, to delay what is coming for all of us. Often, I feel like walking outside and screaming, because so many of the people around me seem to be continuing with life as though the future, even the present, isn’t slipping away. But in my heart, I know that they too are living with an undertone of dread buzzing in their ears, though they don’t always recognize how to interpret the message. 

Horror is a storytelling language for all that we cannot, are told not to say, making room for imagination and radical hope that in the face all that frightens us, love and light lives there too. 

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Bio: Leticia Urieta (she/her/hers) is a Tejana writer from Austin, TX. She works as a teaching artist and freelance writer and editor. She is a graduate of Agnes Scott College and holds an MFA in Fiction writing from Texas State University. Her chapbook, The Monster, was published in 2018 from LibroMobile Press. Her hybrid collection, Las Criaturas, was published in 2021 by Flowersong Press and was a finalist for the Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction 2022 from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her poetry chapbook, Offerings to a Tumbled Temple was published in 2025 from Purple Ink Press and her dark fiction collection, The Remedy is the Disease, is out now from Undertaker Books. You can learn more about Leticia's work at https://leticiaaurieta.com

31 Days of Horror: Day 8-- Why I Love Horror, Undertaker Books Week Edition Featuring Nicole Givens Kurtz

 

 

Day 4 of my 7 day feature centered around Undertaker Books continues. From their "About" page:

Welcome to Undertaker Books, where our core values are integrity, professionalism, honesty, and transparency.

At Undertaker Books, our mission is to provide publishing services to indie authors worldwide, spotlighting new and unique voices within the realm of horror fiction. We strive to offer a seamless publishing journey from submission to publication while providing valuable feedback every step of the way.

We believe in collaboration between authors, publishers, editors, and designers to bring diverse voices to the forefront of the horror genre. Our passion lies in creating a long-lasting partnership with authors by focusing on the “less is more” concept: quality releases, not the quantity of them.

Undertaker Books is not limited to any specific theme or subgenre. Instead, we are dedicated to innovative storytelling and embracing the myriad voices that contribute to horror literature.

To our readers, we hope to bring you stories you’ll take to your grave. 

Undertaker Books is a small press on the rise, and its Founder and Publisher Rebecca Cuthbert has everything to do with that. She has organized six of her authors to contribute to this week long feature and today, you get to meet Nicole Givens Kurtz author of the Undertaker Books collection The Spirit Room. From the publisher: 

The Spirit Room is a different kind of Southern Gothic.

Nicole Givens Kurtz delivers stories from the world left by crumbling plantations, Jim Crow, and generational poverty. Gone are the ancient mansions and good ol’ boys, replaced with southern streets and battles for justice.

The stories take place in cities you’ll recognize: Knoxville, Charlotte, Baltimore, etc… But Kurtz takes us behind the curtain to reveal the indomitable spirit of those living on the wrong side of town, to show us the battle we’re aware of, but never quite see.

The Spirit Room isn’t a ghost story collection. It’s a celebration of the Southern heart, the pride and persistence that keeps fighting no matter what pain it endures. Here amongst the horror and the history, you’ll find tales of the spirit’s defiance and determination. This is Southern Gothic at its purest and finest

The Spirit Room is a collection you don’t want to miss.

Click here for more information about this book and to order. 

Before we get to Kurtz's essay, a reminder that Cuthbert is also offering a giveaway this week-- Undertaker Books prize packs for 3 winners! Click here for the rules and details on how to enter (from a previous giveaway post). Get your entries in by 5pm Central this Friday (10/9) to be entered for the week's giveaway. 

Now back to Kurtz and her entry into the Why I Love Horror series.

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Why I Love Horror

By Nicole Givens Kurtz

Horror is a part of me. My earliest memories are infused with horrific moments. Beginning with my birth, when I arrived three months early, weighing roughly one pound, and to the doctor and nurses’ surprise, breathing, my life has been plagued by close encounters with death. I spent the first three months of my life in the NICU. Several months after being home, my head got trapped between the springs of my threadbare crib bed. My dad wrenched it open, freeing me but almost ripping my neck. At two years old, alone in my bedroom, I touched the black-tapped electrical cord for my television and inadvertently electrocuted myself. I woke up on the other side of the room. Then at five years old, I was involved in a daycare van accident. A boy, seated beside me, died. I love horror, because it is such an innate part of me.

In addition to the real-life horrors of being Black and poor in America, horror has always been a big part of my reading life. It began in grade school. My favorite book as a child was Where the Wild Things Are. I loved the idea of hanging out with monsters and rebelling against my parents. The characters were other, non-humans, beasts and hideous looking beings. As a weird young Black child, these characters resonated with me. I cannot say I was represented, but I identified with Max and with the ostracized monsters, the misunderstood, the strange. 

As a 1980s teenagers, I came of age during the slasher horror movie era. Thanks to home video and the rise of rentals, I consumed a large quantity of slasher films. The plotlines tended to retread the same ground, only the setting and characters changed. There weren’t Black characters in horror that didn’t die off in the first few pages of a novel or series. When they weren’t killed for fodder, they were turned into the magical negro, giving all of themselves for the white protagonist to level up and survive. Rarely were Black female characters the final girl.

Horror novels and short stories genuinely increased my love for the horror genre. Early on it was Stephen King, Poe, and Shirley Jackson, but when I went to college I discovered the quiet horror of southern gothic authors. Although problematic, I learned much about these subgenres of horror and the terror of everyday life. It aligned with what I already knew in my reality. 

When I found Tananarive Due’s work, I fell immediately in love. Not only was I represented, but the Black woman was the heroine, the final girl, the savior—everything that traditional horror and reality told me Black women were not. I went on to read Toni Morrison and realized that not only could Black women be included in horror, but we could write it. That sparked so much awe and hunger—a desire, if you will. As a writer, I wanted to delve into the genre, not from a reader’s perspective, but now as an author.

Another influential story is by Zin E. Rocklyn’s Flowers for the Sea. I have never read something so deeply visceral, unflinching and raw. I love horror that sticks with me, that lingers and resonates long after I’ve finished the text, and that story definitely did. It made me realize the true power of horror and its honesty. 

L. Marie Wood’s The Promise Keeper is another influential text. It’s a vampire story unlike anything I have ever read and the power of women joining together, of found family, of obsession and the depths of love in that novel bowled me over. Again, it was the raw emotions, the non-sugarcoated reality, the horror, that even now I have goosebumps thinking about.  

While living in the Southwest, I leaned into the world of New Mexico, a state by all accounts unlike any other in the entire country. Here, beneath the blue canopy and surrounded by red rocks, I encountered other cultures, Native people, and the three primary tribes in the northwest corner of the state—Zuni, Hopi, and Navajo, the Dine. Most of my students were Navajo and as I read and learned about the diverse cultures there, I realized that the westerns my parents loved were myths. Hyperbolic and exaggerated tales of white superiority in the American west. I wanted to tell those other stories, the stories of Black people, freed slaves, and former Black Union soldiers, who made their way west. Thus began my writing weird westerns. As it was, my weird westerns were horror in origin, and my short story collection, Sisters of the Wild Sage: A Weird Western Collection, encapsulates my time in the American southwest, with stories of the New Mexican territory prior to it becoming a state, its present and its future.  Only with horror could I illustrate both the terror and the triumph of living in such harsh environmental conditions alongside the even crueler conditions of racism, misogyny, and prejudice. In those horror stories, I tell tales of women, Native American, lesbians, sisters, and families that went west, seeking what the east couldn’t provide—a chance at happiness. 

Although I loved New Mexico, I was called back to the Southeast. I'm southern, born and raised in East Tennessee. I'm a graduate of The University of Tennessee, Knoxville [Go Big Orange!]  I grew up in Waffle Houses and Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. My home was filled with Prince, Dolly Parton, Rod Stewart and speaking in tongues. In a word, I’m southern.  But I was as different as the music playing in my home. 

From Faulkner to O’Connor to Jackson, I was confronted with stories where Black folks were absent or loomed in the background like ghosts, invisible, unseen. While I love the southern gothic subgenre, I wanted to see more BIPOC horror and lore.

Much of southern gothic fiction is from white southern writers. When people often think of the genre, sweeping plantation homes, Spanish moss, and mausoleums come to mind.   

Those settings ignore the bustling numbers of African-Americans who reside in the south. They ignore the more urban settings that are uniquely southern as well. New York City, Chicago, and LA do not have a lock on urban settings or the stories told within them. Southern gothic stories are haunted, horrific, and warrant a place in our dialogue about the southern gothic genre.

Hence my latest collection of southern gothic horror, The Spirit Room: A Southern Gothic Collection. This collection of short stories brings me full circle, back to my roots, and back to the type of horror I was born into. These stories are from the world left by crumbling plantations, Jim Crow, and generational poverty. Gone are the ancient mansions and good ol’ boys, replaced by southern streets and battles for justice. Here are my stories, my southern gothic, my horror—not invisible ghosts. No, The Spirit Room isn’t a ghost story collection. It’s about the southern spirit of Black people, like my grandmother, my mom, me. 

This is why I love horror. No other genre allows us to look unflinchingly at ourselves and those around us. No other genre allows for the brutal honesty that horror does. It is only when we are stripped bare—down to the truest parts of ourselves - can we see what is lacking, what is damaged, and what must be healed. Horror gives us permission to stare into the mirror and confront what looks back. 

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Bio: Nicole Givens Kurtz has been called “a genre polymath who does crime, horror, and Science Fiction and Fantasy (Book Riot).” Her horror weird western, Sisters of the Wild Sage was included in Book Riot’s “The Best of the West: 8 Alternative History Westerns.” She’s a two-time Atomacon Palmetto Scribe Award winner (2021 and 2022), a recipient of the Ladies in Horror Grant, and a recipient of the HWA Diversity Grant. With over 20 years in publishing, Nicole has over 50 published short stories and is the editor of groundbreaking anthologies, SLAY: Stories of the Vampire Noire and Blackened Roots: An Anthology of the Undead with Tonia Ransom. Author Website: https://www.nicolegivenskurtz.net

31 Days of Horror: Day 7-- Why I Love Horror, Undertaker Books Week Edition Featuring Kathleen Palm

 

Day 3 of my 7 day feature centered around Undertaker Books continues. From their "About" page:

Welcome to Undertaker Books, where our core values are integrity, professionalism, honesty, and transparency.

At Undertaker Books, our mission is to provide publishing services to indie authors worldwide, spotlighting new and unique voices within the realm of horror fiction. We strive to offer a seamless publishing journey from submission to publication while providing valuable feedback every step of the way.

We believe in collaboration between authors, publishers, editors, and designers to bring diverse voices to the forefront of the horror genre. Our passion lies in creating a long-lasting partnership with authors by focusing on the “less is more” concept: quality releases, not the quantity of them.

Undertaker Books is not limited to any specific theme or subgenre. Instead, we are dedicated to innovative storytelling and embracing the myriad voices that contribute to horror literature.

To our readers, we hope to bring you stories you’ll take to your grave. 

Undertaker Books is a small press on the rise, and its Founder and Publisher Rebecca Cuthbert has everything to do with that. She has organized six of her authors to contribute to this week long feature and today, you get to meet Kathleen Palm author of the Undertaker Books middle grade novel Within The Black. From the publisher: 

 Welcome to Nowhere, the place of lost things. 

With an abundance of cold, black fog. 

With a grumpy Caretaker who doesn’t care. 

With a wall of black that hides secrets. 

With a monster, The Keeper, who declares everything his. 

But maybe it’s a place where Will can forget. His mom died, leaving an emptiness that fills with hurt and anger. The fog offers a chance for him to exist where no one says they’re sorry, where no one looks at him with pity, where thoughts of Mom don’t crush his mind like a meteor. He discovers a place of new friends, of fun games messing with rusty robots, of feeling like himself, and learning the secrets of Nowhere. 

But the sadness never leaves, the pain doesn’t dull, and the anger grows. And he yells at his family. He hits his friend. 

Will must face his fears and acknowledge his true anger, before he sinks too far into the black and becomes a monster.

Click here for more information about this book and to order. 

Before we get to Palm's essay, a reminder that Cuthbert is also offering a giveaway this week-- Undertaker Books prize packs for 3 winners! Click here for the rules and details on how to enter (from a previous giveaway post). Get your entries in by 5pm Central this Friday (10/9) to be entered for the week's giveaway. 

Now back to Palm and her entry into the Why I Love Horror series.

💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀

Why I Love Horror

Kathleen Palm

Horror is a house. A great sprawling beast of a thing that stretches up to the sky in warped mayhem and madness. A twisted tower built of trauma and fear. A mansion made of flickering lights and crooked walls, with a basement full of skeletons and an attic full of doom.

In this house, there’s room for everyone…and, really, a room for everyone.

Each room holds a different terror from monsters, to ghosts, to serial killers, to portals to the unknown. Every resident of Horror House build a room, where we face their fears and find joy in our power. We live happily together. Smiling with too big grins. Sharing looks of understanding.

And I love this with all of my blackened heart and fog-filled soul.

Everyone faces fear, a lingering shadow from the past or a new monster hiding in their closet. In the great Horror House living room, full of comfy couches covered with cobwebs, with the walls dripping blood and the ghoul shrieking in the corner, we find space to talk. To be together.

We find joy.

We find hope. We find light in the darkness.

For all people. For all ages.

As one fabulous and short psychic once said, “Cross over, children. All are welcome. All welcome. Go into the light.”

I started building my room in the Horror House when I was a kid, though I didn’t know it. If you’d asked me as a kid if I liked horror, I probably would have looked at you funny and shook my head. Maybe because horror was (and still is) a strange word that carries this negative energy. Maybe because my mom and sisters didn’t like scary things. Maybe because I didn’t know the definition of horror. I should have recognized my love of the spooky. Every time my Dad was watching something on TV…something weird or creepy, I was drawn to it.

So I watched with my eyes and heart wide open, seeing Scanners, Poltergeist, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Gate, The Watcher in the Woods, and Gremlins. They settled into my soul. Letting my imagination run wild to the point where (thanks to The Gate) I leapt onto my bed so whatever living underneath couldn’t get me. Afraid to go to sleep and dream because I learned if you die in your dreams you can die in real life (Freddy Krueger lesson #1).

And I read. Though being a child of the 80s, scary books for kids were scarce. I bought The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull at my school book fair. How could I resist that Edward Gorey cover? That was the first book that really scared me with dark magic and a skull that wouldn’t go away. A Wrinkle in Time brought its own fear of other dimensions and beings with the power to take people to scary places. And you better believe I would pick up a Nancy Drew book with the promise of a ghost on the cover…and be upset when there wasn’t a ghost. And I certainly chose my own adventures anywhere haunted.

But never in all the times of running up the stairs in fear of some shadow devouring me or making sure not even a toe would sneak out from under my blankets, it never crossed my mind to NOT take part in the scary.

Why? Kid-me didn’t know…didn’t even think about it.

Then again do any kids know? Well, maybe some, but not me.

Looking back, horror gave me a sense of power, it gave me hope, it gave me a connection to my dad, and as much as it made me wince and tremble, it also made me smile. I was strong to be able to face the monsters on the screen and know that maybe the monster under my bed wasn’t there…or maybe it was, but I could fight it. I was powerful to be able to look into the darkness and still find hope. I was so very happy sitting in the living room laughing with my dad when something made us jump, sharing a smile when the story took a dark turn, acknowledging a cool monster, or heading into the weird (Scanners, I’m looking at you).

My dad shared his love of weird and creepy, and that stuck, it grew. The power and joy has multiplied. And I built my room in the Horror House. My stay in the creaky halls has revealed why I watch and read, why I venture into the fear.

For in the Horror House, my room is full of ghosts, full of the darkness in my head, full of the monsters I fight. Self-doubt. Depression. Not being enough. Failure. Fear of the unknown. Feelings that have haunted me since I was a kid, a time when I didn’t have a name for all my feelings. Kid-me didn’t see their power, only weakness.

Building my room has helped me face the fear, to become a stronger me.

For that is horror’s superpower. To make us see ourselves and all our dark edges and become stronger. Not just for adults.

Middle graders face fear every day, from bullies, to abuse, to depression, to fear of the unknown, to war, and hate. Kids see it all…hear it all…feel it all. They just don’t know how to react, what to say, and what to do with all their feelings. And horror can give them a place to start to understand. A place where we all go to understand, all help each other.

Whether it’s a room full of monsters, a basement where their deepest fears lurk, or an attic full of trauma, kids want to be scared, to face the monsters and find themselves. So, as kids are usually pushed out of adult spaces with a pat on the head and soft words that they will understand when they’re older, they are welcome in the Horror House. Accepted. Allowed to roam the haunted halls, not in a separate house guarded by rules and judgmental eyes, but in that monstrosity of a castle with the rest of us, choosing where they want to be. And maybe they don’t know where that is yet. And that’s okay. They’ll build their rooms at their own pace in our great House of Spookiness. (Okay, Horror House or House of Spookiness…I think there should be a vote.)

So I write for all the kids who like scary, because there’s still a middle grader who is fighting monsters living in me. I write for ages 8-12, and even 13-14, people like kid-me who don’t really know why they are drawn to horror, just know that they keep going back.

I write middle grade horror to show kids their power. I offer hope in the darkness. I offer joy in the scares. I offer a place to go to try to find the words to deal with the thoughts and fear and the unknown.

I love living in the Horror House. All ages. All people. All rooms in varying states of construction. I can stay in my room, visit others’ rooms, or simply exist on the haunted front porch swing with a glass of chocolate milk. To share fears. To understand. And in so, find friendship. All are welcome in the Horror House. On whatever floor you wish to exist, with whatever fears you bring packed in your bag. 

The house might scream a bit. It might wail and howl. But for so many of us, it’s a place of comfort, of joy, of power.

A place where we know we are not alone.

And that is why I love horror.

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Bio: Kathleen Palm is a little light, a little dark and a lot weird. Living in an old (sadly not haunted) house in Indiana, she watches horror movies, reads scary books, drinks chocolate milk, and plots how to spread light through the darkness. After getting her art degree and becoming a mom of two, she found her way into the world of writing, settling into the darkness of her truest creepy love middle grade horror, where she writes stories full of finding power and facing fears wrapped up in family and friends. She is the author of middle grade horror: The Nowhere Series (Undertaker Books), Into the Gray, Within the Black, and Out of the Nothing, short stories “Carousel” and “Wonderland Road” in the Bite-Sized Frights series, and Nightmare Garden (coming in 2027 from Emberwick Press). 

31 Days of Horror: Day 6-- Why I Love Horror, Undertaker Books Week Edition Featuring L. Marie Wood

 

Day 2 of my 7 day feature centered around Undertaker Books continues. From their "About" page:

Welcome to Undertaker Books, where our core values are integrity, professionalism, honesty, and transparency.

At Undertaker Books, our mission is to provide publishing services to indie authors worldwide, spotlighting new and unique voices within the realm of horror fiction. We strive to offer a seamless publishing journey from submission to publication while providing valuable feedback every step of the way.

We believe in collaboration between authors, publishers, editors, and designers to bring diverse voices to the forefront of the horror genre. Our passion lies in creating a long-lasting partnership with authors by focusing on the “less is more” concept: quality releases, not the quantity of them.

Undertaker Books is not limited to any specific theme or subgenre. Instead, we are dedicated to innovative storytelling and embracing the myriad voices that contribute to horror literature.

To our readers, we hope to bring you stories you’ll take to your grave. 

Undertaker Books is a small press on the rise, and its Founder and Publisher Rebecca Cuthbert has everything to do with that. She has organized six of her authors to contribute to this week long feature and today, you get to meet L. Marie Wood author of the Undertaker Books novella If it's the Birds, We're In Trouble. From the publisher:

Something's wrong in Rothwood 

Morgues are overflowing. Social media is rife with conspiracy theories. Neighbors can't be trusted. And the animals aren't acting the way they should...

Part epistolary saga, part apocalyptic nightmare, IF IT'S THE BIRDS, WE'RE IN TROUBLE by L. Marie Wood, a Bram Stoker®, Golden Stake Award-winning author, offers readers a case file of disturbing clues that lead to a horrific discovery, inviting the best and bravest to turn its pages and accept its challenge.

Click here for information about this book and to order. 

Before we get to Wood's essay, a reminder that Cuthbert is also offering a giveaway this week-- Undertaker Books prize packs for 3 winners! Click here for the rules and details on how to enter (from a previous giveaway post). Get your entries in by 5pm Central this Friday (10/9) to be entered for the week's giveaway. 

Now back to Wood and her entry into the Why I Love Horror series.

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Why I Love Horror

By L. Marie Wood

Why do I love horror? 

Because.

I could stop here and let my bio be longer than my essay, truth be told, because in the end, that is the answer. But let me try to explain.

In the same way that horror just is, the reason I love it as simple and as complex. I love it because I do. It has always been my go-to, my balm, my sanctuary. And I do mean always. I started writing horror when I was five years old. The story scrawled in crayon and pencil and acted out in something that I can only label interpretive dance now was psychological horror, though I didn’t have a name for it. My poor mother and grandmother were subjected to this expression of the tale that was inside me at a time when I hadn’t heard anything that might have influenced or encouraged such thoughts (to this day I feel sorry for them!). The tale was quiet and off-kilter and scary, and once I’d told it, I skipped away to do the little kid things that actually made sense for my age. That’s how I know I love horror. That’s how I know why.  Because it has always been part of me.

Some of us really have always lived in the castle.

Horror permeates. Even the people who don’t want to admit how much they enjoy the adrenaline rush that comes from being frightened will admit that much. But horror does so much more than that. It cleanses. It cleans out the corners, knocks down the spiderwebs, and dusts off the surfaces. It declutters, clearing out everything that isn’t useful anymore and uncovering hidden gems. Horror does all of this, leaving what matters, what needs to be examined, and then shines a light on it. The meaning will be different for every person who explores the space, which is where the beauty lies. The things we are afraid of manifest in that room; the constructs we cling to reveal themselves as artifacts there. How we navigate that space becomes an exercise in humility and it can’t be ignored, not if the experience is approached honestly… not if the horror is done well. People come away changed when horror hits home. That can be off-putting for some; indeed, it is off-putting for everyone as they evolve into one stage or another. And that is more ok than most readily admit.

Horror is not only the jump scare, the gore, the guts, the shrieking terror. It isn’t only the ghost in the foggy wood or the ax-wielding serial killer. It is also the fear of the darkness within, the din that goes unnoticed until it inexplicably quiets, the reflection in the mirror showing movement under the skin. Horror is pain, value, and disease laid bare, flayed skin revealing those terrors beneath. Horror is vulnerability – the display and the resolution.  Horror contours the expression of these human elements – repressions, biases, exclusion, illness, anxieties, at micro and macro levels - lets the consumer take stock of their accuracy, and challenges them to move forward anew. And everyone does, whether they are aware of it or not.  Because horror seeps into the very tissue of the consumer, it stays there, ready to be called up when needed, ready to be stress-tested in the real world. And it is eerily accurate, because horror, at its most base level, reflects.

Why would I love something like that? Something that forces review, something that demands acknowledgement? I don’t know. Maybe that’s my genetic make-up. Maybe I am critically focused on understanding myself, how I move, where I fit in the world around me. Maybe the era I was raised in (New York in the 1970s and 1980s, which showed me the boom of women in the workplace and the crack epidemic in tandem), my upbringing (suburban living, but city dwelling), and creative inclinations (always seeing the world sideways, as though tilting my head) converged to create a liminal space where these elements could mingle extrinsically and cast the shadow of their combined essence over my perception. Imagining it like that, like the chatter at a party, like the beginning of Marvin Gaye’s song, “Got To Give It Up”, makes sense to me about me and why I’m here, writing what I write and doing what I do. The voices in my head, the experiences they prattle on about, had to express themselves in some way… why not in the investigation of the shadows on the wall or what could be at the end of the darkened corridor ahead?

Or maybe I just think horror is cool.

Both things can be true at the same time.

I love horror because I do, because it sees me, makes me see me, makes me see that there’s someone else like me out there in the world. Sometimes that’s good. Sometimes that’s bad. But it’s always accurate.

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Bio: Celebrated psychological horror author L. Marie Wood is the winner of multiple awards including the Bram Stoker Award®, the Golden Stake Award for Literature, and the International Impact Book Award. She is also a MICO Award-winning screenwriter, an Elgin Award finalist poet, an accomplished essayist, and a playwright. Wood has won over 50 national and international screenplay and film awards, has been published in groundbreaking works, including the anthologies Sycorax's Daughters and Slay: Stories of the Vampire Noire, as well as in industry staples such as the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Nightmare Magazine, and her work has been translated in several languages. Her papers are archived as part of University of Pittsburgh’s Horror Studies Collection, in Old Dominion University’s poet archive, and in NightTide Magazine’s I Am Horror repository. Wood is the president of the Horror Writers Association, the founder of the Speculative Fiction Academy, an English and Creative Writing professor, as well as a horror scholar. Learn more at www.lmariewood.com.

31 Days of Horror: Day 5-- Why I Love Horror, Undertaker Books Week Edition Featuring Rebecca Cuthbert

Today I begin a special 7 day feature centered around Undertaker Books. From their "About" page:

Welcome to Undertaker Books, where our core values are integrity, professionalism, honesty, and transparency.

At Undertaker Books, our mission is to provide publishing services to indie authors worldwide, spotlighting new and unique voices within the realm of horror fiction. We strive to offer a seamless publishing journey from submission to publication while providing valuable feedback every step of the way.

We believe in collaboration between authors, publishers, editors, and designers to bring diverse voices to the forefront of the horror genre. Our passion lies in creating a long-lasting partnership with authors by focusing on the “less is more” concept: quality releases, not the quantity of them.

Undertaker Books is not limited to any specific theme or subgenre. Instead, we are dedicated to innovative storytelling and embracing the myriad voices that contribute to horror literature.

To our readers, we hope to bring you stories you’ll take to your grave. 

Undertaker Books is a small press on the rise, and its Founder and Publisher Rebecca Cuthbert has everything to do with that. I thought there was no better way to kick off this exciting week of feminist horror than to invite Cuthbert to tell you the story of how Undertaker Books came to be, and of course to share her own "Why I Love Horror" story as well.

Cuthbert has organized six of her authors to contribute to this week long feature. You will get to meet each of them and read their contributions to "Why I Love Horror" over the course of this week.

Cuthbert is also offering a giveaway this week-- Undertaker Books prize packs for 3 winners! Click here for the rules and details on how to enter (from a previous giveaway post). Get your entries in by 5pm Central this Friday (10/9) to be entered for the week's giveaway. 

One final note, Cuthbert herself has her own story collection with Undertaker Books that you absolutely should check out-- The Hauntings Back Home.

Now let's read why Cuthbert loves horror.

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Why I Love Horror

By Rebecca Cuthbert

No one comes to the horror genre without trunks full of whys and hows. The whys are usually sad. The hows are often traumatic. Beneath their weight, we stagger, and sometimes fall. 

But horror understands—both the struggle and the need to keep going. It shares the load, carrying it with us, or points to a place we can set it down, if only for a moment, to rest before trudging on.

I can trace my first topple back to age nine. My mother died unexpectedly, a freak heart attack that I learned (decades later) had nothing to do with genetics. We were out on a day trip. We left that morning with my mom. We came home that night half-orphans, and nothing would ever be the same. 

Small town, early 90s. Even though my mother had been a church-school teacher, a Girl Scout leader, a Little League fixture—as soon as she died, a pall of suspicion was cast over her widower and kids. Mean gossip. Predictions including, and I quote, that my sister and I “would end up pregnant and smoking Marlboro reds before [we] graduated high school.” (I may be a weirdo, but I’ve never been pregnant. I don’t smoke, and neither does my sister, who grew up to be a lawyer AND a judge. Those gossips can suck it.)

It wasn’t just the nasty adults, though. Kids didn’t know how to act around me and my siblings, and for a while, it was hard to connect with friends. I always felt different, left out and lonely, even when no one was being purposefully cruel. (Though there was that, too—one little boy on the bus told me “Haha, I got a mom and you don’t.” Thirty-odd years later, those words still cut me.)

There was lots of dissociation, though I didn’t have a word for it until well into adulthood. Frankly, there’s not none now.

Back then, I found myself reaching, more and more, for ghost stories. Tales in which the dead are never truly gone. It doesn’t take a therapist to figure out why. 

And the older I got, the more the patriarchy encroached—from “You’re too pretty not to smile!” to sexual harassment and worse. I don’t need to explain. Every woman knows. 

Each one of those offenses, another weight to carry. I stooped lower and lower, until I could have licked the ground just by sticking out my tongue.

And so I turned to feminist horror for refuge. In that space, carved out mostly for and by women and femme creators, I was heard, and I was comforted. Instead of offering temporary storage for my rage, feminist horror invited me to throw it onto a communal bonfire. To dance around the flames with my sisters. To throw my head back and howl and scream and sob, free of judgment. What weary woman wouldn’t want to stay there?

Other subgenres doled out relief, too. Grief horror handed me an empty five-gallon jug for my tears. Gothic horror guided me to an empty corridor, shoved a candle into my hand and told me to run as fast and long as I wanted, putting distance between me and my fears. Eco horror saw me choking on the helplessness I felt at the earth dying all around me, led me to a basin and held my hair back while I vomited until the heaving stopped. Folk horror brought me to a clearing in the forest, knocked me to my knees and told me to release my anxieties over a confused faith in prayer. A being older than any one religion would listen, then laugh.

Horror does not make us light or whole or perfect. Horror accepts we’ll never be any of those things.

So when D.L. Winchester and Cyan LeBlanc approached me early in 2024 and said they were starting a horror and dark fiction press and needed an editor-in-chief, what they were really offering me was a chance to contribute to relief efforts. To help bring into the world the kinds of books that had, for years, given me both reprieve from pain and permission to hurt. 

We’ve published over 40 titles since opening our doors. The very first book we put out is a novella called INK VINE, written by Elizabeth Broadbent. It features Emmy, a young woman crushed by generational poverty, trapped in a small southern town that would rather see her die than escape. She works as a waitress in a strip club, and every man there feels entitled to her time, her attention, and her body. 

I worked as a waitress, too, for many years. As I read Broadbent’s story, it was like I was still holding a tray, still smiling in the face of sexual harassment, still hoping it didn’t hurt my tip that I’d dodged some customer’s wandering hands. 

And now, when I read the final scene of INK VINE, it’s like a deep, cleansing breath. A release of the stress those memories bring me. 

Then there’s Charlotte Platt’s TREASURED GUEST, in which a Scottish hotel called The Basker and its ghostly staff members choose the wrong traveler to imprison in their uncanny luxury suite—a veteran named Stephanie who will fight bloody tooth and ragged nail to get home to her girlfriend. Plied with every amenity but her freedom, Stephanie battles not just her hellish captors but hopelessness, self-harm, and an entity with glowing golden eyes hiding deep within a stygian pit. The Basker’s concierge keeps insisting Stephanie is their most treasured guest, but all she wants to do is check out.

I will never say no to a good ghost story, but what really hooked me with TREASURED GUEST was its violence. Not ladylike to say, I know, and that’s just it—gender roles mean nothing when a person is fighting monsters. Stephanie must do what, on some level, at certain times, I’ve wanted to do: grab a fire poker and swing. I don’t want to give too much away, but Platt’s story is just excellent, full of familiar tropes applied unexpectedly, with twists and turns that mimic the labyrinthine chambers of The Hotel Basker itself. 

More recently, we published Leticia Urieta’s THE REMEDY IS THE DISEASE, a story collection full of Latina characters facing the daily horrors of living with disabilities in a world that refuses to acknowledge their existence, much less their value. The injustices, the shoulder-shrugging apathy of bureaucracy and those who claim to be public servants will boil the reader’s blood, and open their eyes to what is happening, every day, to their friends and neighbors managing chronic conditions. When Urieta gives her protagonists agency—to get revenge, to make connections, to determine their own courses of treatment—she gives them the dignity and respect they have always, inherently, deserved. 

I do not see myself—a privileged white woman with easily managed medical conditions—in this collection. That’s its point. That’s its magic. It’s not about me. THE REMEDY IS THE DISEASE does the monumental job literature has always done: shows us others’ lives, encourages compassion, points out inequality and asks us to do something about it. And the collection does it all with gorgeous prose and compelling plotlines. 

I could praise Undertaker Books titles all day—one of editing’s joys is getting to know a book from the inside out, and we have dozens to brag about. But the point is this. With Undertaker, the guys and I are doing our best to create a haven for the lonely, the outcast, the grieving, the angry, the desperate souls who turn to the horror genre, again and again, not because it’s the only community that will have us, but because there’s nowhere else, really, we want to be. 

Join us. Rest. Lay your burdens down, if only for a moment, before trudging on…