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.
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
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