What is it like to be a queer horror writer in 2015? We caught up with four up-and-coming writers of the dark, surreal, and horrific — Meghan McCarron, Brit Mandelo, Rahul Kanakia, and Carrie Cuinn — to ask about their experiences in the genre. Here, they offer their insights into genre, identity, and the strange attractions of fear.

Tucked away behind an unassuming warehouse façade at the far eastern end of the San Fernando Valley is one of the most gleefully horrific places in Southern California: Dapper Cadaver. Founded in 2006 by husband and wife team BJ and Eileen Winslow, Dapper Cadaver is a horror prop shop that services the film and television industries, haunted attractions, amusement parks, carnival sideshows, private parties, and even disaster preparedness training courses.

Most people never expected me to go back to Pinhead in literary form; the expectation was that I would go back to him in a movie. That never felt right to me. Pinhead is a rather literary figure. He speaks with a Shakespearean cadence, so I wanted to make sure that was in the performance, if you will, of his farewell, and I couldn’t do that on a movie screen.

Kc Wayland is the writer and director of the zombie horror podcast We’re Alive, a full-cast audio drama that has racked up over 32,000,000 downloads. David Cummings is the host and producer of The NoSleep Podcast, an award-winning anthology series of original horror stories. He has also appeared on the Pseudopod horror podcast and The […]

Lucy Snyder is one of those rare genre-hopping writers who are equally at home in horror, science fiction, poetry, or nonfiction. Throughout her career, she has (almost gleefully) defied clichés and reveled in contradiction: She was born and raised in what she calls the “cactus-and-cowboys” area of Texas, but her work is often urban in setting and tone; she has published collections of both erotica (ORCHID CAROUSELS) and humorous essays about computers (INSTALLING LINUX ON A DEAD BADGER).

William F. Nolan may be best known to readers as the co-author (with George Clayton Johnson) of the science fiction classic Logan’s Run, but Nolan is also a prolific mystery novelist, biographer, screenwriter, and poet whose horror work just earned him the 2015 World Horror Convention’s Grand Master Award. In addition to dozens of short stories, Nolan’s horror credits also include screenplays and teleplays for such films as Trilogy of Terror and Burnt Offerings. At eighty-seven, Nolan is still active and excited about the future, and we sat down to talk at the annual Vintage Paperback Show in Glendale, California, which he’d driven down from Oregon to attend.

In 1988, a college student named Richard Chizmar decided to start a horror magazine. Now, more than a quarter-of-a-century later, that magazine — Cemetery Dance — has become one of the horror genre’s longest-running print magazines, and Chizmar has become a respected publisher, editor, author, and screenwriter. Cemetery Dance Publications recently published its 300th book, and Chizmar’s Hollywood work (with co-writer Johnathon Schaech) includes an adaptation of Bentley Little’s “The Washingtonians” for Showtime’s Masters of Horror series.

There’s a kind of magic to short stories. I love them, I really, genuinely love them. They’re these beautiful, compact worlds that you can explode without consequences. You can just do things in short stories, you can make anything happen and you only have to convince the reader that it’s real for about thirty pages. That’s tremendously liberating.

My books do have a sort of romantic community at the end — people coming together. But on a more basic level, I always see them as being about power, in the same way that Harry Potter books are pitched to a population of young people who really have no power. Superheroes are also stories about power. My books are always about someone obtaining a power to replace the previous sort of power that they held.