31 Days of Horror: Day 4-- Why I Love Horror by Lindy Ryan

 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. 

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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.

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31 Days of Horror: Day 3-- Why I Love Horror by Gwendolyn Kiste

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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31 Days of Horror: Day 2-- Why I Love Horror by Nat Cassidy

Welcome to the first Why I Love Horror essay of 31 Days of Horror 2025. Today I am featuring Nat Cassidy. Why is he first and today? Many reasons.

First, Nat is a readalike for Clay McLeod Chapman in WHY I LOVE HORROR: ESSAYS ON HORROR LITERATURE, and this year, I am featuring a few of the readalike authors here on the blog.

Second, Nat is the author of one of the best Horror books released this year. Not so far. This year, end stop. I have enjoyed all of Nat's books but When the Wolf Comes Home is his best so far.  

I have a lot more to say about it at this link from my Library Journal starred review, but here is a preview of what you can find there.

Three Words That Describe This Book: the power of fear, immersive terror, pulp homage

After a particularly bad day at work at a 24-hour LA diner, aspiring actress Jess finds a young boy whimpering outside her apartment complex and brings him inside. But this is no ordinary boy, and the father who is looking for him is a monster who will stop at nothing to get him back. So opens Cassidy’s latest Horror novel (his best to date), as he consciously frames his story about “daddy issues” as an homage to classic pulp Horror and chase novels with clear Twilight Zone influences, but this description only scratches the surface. Full of action, adventure, blood, and twists, the tale is anchored by the evolving relationship between Jess and the kiddo, who are the beating heart at its terrifying center. Reader beware, as the text warns, “No one will be spared,” but not in the way anyone will anticipate. The horrors encountered here will burrow much deeper, forcing a confrontation with the power fear holds over all. 

Nat also graciously agreed to do an interview with me in LJ to be paired with that review. You can access our conversation here.

Third, today is Yom Kippur. I wrote this post a few days ago and set it to run today. I will not be online as I observe the most important Jewish Holiday of the year. Nat himself is Jewish and he wrote about it in the afterward for Nestlings and how his Judaism made its way into the story. Click here (and scroll down) to read my review of Nestlings where I write about this in more detail.

Thank you to Nat for not only agreeing to write an essay for this year's 31 Days of Horror but also for managing to both make his writing style and personality shine and still give us a serious look at Horror. This is funny on the surface, but the second you start thinking about the words, you realize it hits much deeper.

Take it away Nat Cassidy.

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WHY I LOVE HRUH

By Nat Cassidy

Roughly 135,000 years ago, a young hominid named Hruh lived amongst a tiny, isolated clan deep in the wilderness. 

Hruh was an imaginative, anxious fellow and, much to the chagrin of his small community, he voiced those imaginative anxieties to everyone within earshot. He would think of the worst case scenario—worse than worst, because he would embellish details, exaggerate threats—and then inflict the what-ifs upon his mother, his father, his siblings, his cousins.

It had been this way ever since he first learned to communicate. It didn’t win him any friends. He was often, to borrow a later parlance, on thin fucking ice.

In fact, his name meant something like nuisance, annoyance. It had come from the squealing noises he’d made as a baby, but as any of his family would have attested, the morbid ramblings he spouted off once he got a little older were no less obnoxious than his infant shrieks.

No one wanted to hear it. They cursed the very existence of their limited language for making Hruh’s awful stories possible. You’re making us worry about things that don’t even exist, they’d say (and I’m paraphrasing here). The world is scary enough! Leave those obnoxious details out of it. It’s not useful!

Useful was the most important concept to Hruh’s family. They didn’t have these particular words to describe themselves, but his was a family of stubborn rationalists. A peculiar breed that has been with our species since time immemorial. One that puts no value on the ephemeral.

Hruh couldn’t help himself. He’d never admit it, but a deep, intrinsic part of him actually enjoyed the sensation of jumping at shadows, of causing alarm in others, of looking into the dark recesses of a cave system or a copse of trees and imagining the most hideous breeds of creatures his mind could conjure and then being weirdly relieved when reality served up something a little less insane. It was fun. And it was useful. He didn’t know how, but it was.

Then one day, the monster arrived.

Something somehow none of them had ever seen before.

A massive—they didn’t quite have the word for it, but let’s say cat. With two gigantic teeth the size of a grown man’s forearm jutting out of its skull. And a horrible case of mange, which had rendered its face, neck, and head completely hairless. It was a truly abominable, uncanny sight. Very much like something Hruh’s feverish imagination would’ve conjured up. It glided into Hruh’s family’s cave with silky grace, unhurried, a low and almost hypnotic bass note churning in its throat.

Practically each member of Hruh’s clan had the same response when they saw this abomination: they were stunned into stillness. Their brains were like a narrow entryway, trying to admit too many new thoughts in at the same time, causing a pile up at the threshold.

Hruh’s brother tried to put up a fight, but he was quickly dispatched by one of the monster’s massive incisors. After that, everyone else seemed to accept their fate almost immediately. Only their bowels and bladders had sense enough to run.

Some 134,947 years later, a British writer named Richard Adams would name the sensation tharn (which, incidentally, was Hruh’s clan’s word for a small, purplish berry that should only be eaten when one’s bowels moved stubbornly slow). Hruh would never get the chance to read Richard Adams—a shame, since everyone should give him a try—but he would’ve recognized the concept of tharn immediately. He saw it embodied with every one of his clansmen.

Not him, though. The freakish, naked tooth-cat inspired no such reaction in him.

Because Hruh’s first though of seeing this creature, hearing its rumble, seeing the way the shadows of the cave and their small fires twisted and warped the animal’s already terrifying features, was:

I’ve been here before.

He experienced no overwhelming, circuit-frying novelty. He simply recognized the threat for what it was. He’d played out scenarios like this again and again in his mind. He was afraid, but fear was nothing new to him. He knew how to live alongside it.

Fear had also shown him every place in the caves where he could hide during such an incident as this. He was able to stay safe as the beast slinked past, tore the others apart, and eventually left. 

It all happened so quickly. 

He was the only survivor.

After leaving the mangled remains of his clan—and I suppose it should be said he did feel bad about not being able to save them—Hruh eventually went on to find a new community. 

He wandered far, and one day found others who were like him, who weren’t afraid of fear, who leaned into the even-worse-worst-case-scenarios, who found themselves comforted by the darkest imaginings. Hruh was determined to keep his new clan safe, to not make the mistakes his previous family made. He made story-sharing a priority. Every night—and sometimes during the day. 

The darker the better. 

The scarier the better. 

The more useful. 

It became a tradition. A skill.

And his children lived on.

***

Lately, I’ve been formulating a hypothesis. 

Horror, as a genre, is such a massive tent. We’ve got invisible demons rubbing shoulders with city-sized monsters while unkillable masked slashers shoot the shit with mournful ghosts. It’s a fool’s errand to make too many generalizations.

But my hypothesis is a generalization. And a pretty accurate one at that, I’d wager.

Here it is.

I think almost every horror fan—and this includes horror creators, since all of us come to the genre as fans first; why else would we own so many black t-shirts with Dario Argento titles on them?—possesses two distinct personality traits. 

First, we’re all anxious as hell. We all tend to imagine how things can go wrong. We walk into a room and we’re automatically writing the first draft of some new Final Destination-type movie in our head: here’s what could kill me, here’s what could maim me, here’s where a masked psycho could hide, here’s how I could embarrass myself, here’s how my heart could break. The world is an amusement park map, only it’s full of emotional and physical peril instead of rides.

That’s a big part of why we love our genre so much, after all. Horror stories give us such satisfying confirmation. I was right! we get to think. See?! THAT’S why I never go upstairs / into the ocean / near abandoned lunatic asylums / home to visit my parents!

As a little bonus, we get to feel some justifiable bravery, too. Because, this time, we chose the danger. We didn’t wait for it to come to us. We bought the ticket. We opened the book. You don’t get to rule my life, Fear.

Horror lovers know anxiety like their closest (though not always dearest) friend. But there are plenty of people who are naturally anxious, and a lot of them hate horror. They say things like, Why would I ever want to watch or read something that scares me? The world is scary enough as it is!

That’s where the second trait comes into play. The trait that truly sets us horror fans—the children of Hruh—apart.

We’re all optimists. Whether we’re aware of it or not.

This doesn’t necessarily mean we think good things will happen. But I do think it means we all think good things are possible.

The anxious people who don’t like horror don’t like horror because it only reminds them that bad things happen, with no additional benefit. But every time a horror fan engages with a horror story? A deep, primal part of our brain kicks in, one that thinks (and I’m paraphrasing here), Okay, then how would *I* survive in this scenario? What mistakes do the characters make? What do they do right? 

How can I use this?

Sure, the kills are fun. The dread is delicious. We get a little twisted kick out of the taboo-pushing.

But it’s also all useful.

Horror fans love life. We love living. We understand there is no true horror in a story unless the thing at risk of being lost is precious. We believe survival is always possible, even if it’s only the remotest possibility. And that’s why, night after night, our clan gathers around the fire, to share these stories of failed survivorship, of heightened peril, of gruesome, garish torment. 

Because we’d like to keep on surviving, thank you very much.

We are the children of Hruh, after all. 

It’s in our DNA.

***

By the way, you might like to know that Hruh lived a long, long life and died at the ripe old age of 35.

Anthropological records show he might have even been working on one dilly of a cave painting. Something involving small town secrets, plucky children, and maybe even a killer trickster with a white face and orange puffy hair (but I’m paraphrasing here).

He’d never know the legacy he’d leave behind.

All the imaginings his lineage would conjure forth and inflict upon their stubbornly rational, appalled brethren with morbid glee.

Hruh went on to have a long line of inheritors. 

One of them is me.

One of them is you.

***

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Why I Love Horror,
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