There is a fine line between sexual arousal and the shadows where horror awaits. “Laura Lau Will Drain You Dry” walks that line with an unapologetic grace. Tell us something about the inspiration behind the words.
Sexist old boys’ culture in high school? Lol.
That age is when you’re still coming into yourself and your body, and doing that while simultaneously figuring out relationships and sexuality in an environment that doesn’t favour you can create a lot of problems and things for you to unpack later. (This is me, unpacking.) Some of Del’s quotes in the story are borrowed from texts my friend’s shitty high school ex sent her.
I knew what I wanted this story to circle around, and I found the frame and tone in stuff like Jennifer’s Body, slightly campy and unapologetic cult classics about a hot girl sucking blood. I also have to mention Singaporean writer Amanda Lee Koe’s short story “Chick” (in her groundbreaking collection Ministry of Moral Panic), which is not horror but was the first time I read about a teenage girl who was unequivocally terrible and sexual and unapologetic. That changed my brain chemistry a bit as a seventeen-year-old and I’m sure that DNA has found its way into this six years later. Looking back while writing this answer, it also uses second person, which was something that happened here in revision and demands you put yourself in it, which I really like for something confronting. I love the monstrous feminine when it’s unabashed. I always have the inclination for nuance and self-reprobation/reflection in character, and then I’m like oh, sometimes that’s the problem and she can just go around being sexy and killing people and not feel bad about it, as she deserves. In fiction. Obviously.
As for the mosquitoes: I live in the tropics.
Women are focal points in horror, whether victim, bystander, or monster. Here loss of face, body shaming, sexual assault, and entomophobia all curl around the exploration of sex, sexuality, and what it means to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood. What is it about sex and horror that make them such delicious bedfellows?
It just gives you so much potential tension, physicality, and intimacy to play with, especially with body horror and especially with feminine bodies. Female narratives (and trans, more broadly, but I can’t speak on that) lend themselves so naturally to body horror and sexual inflections because of how much our bodies are a war zone in society and daily life. Female sexuality has so often been designated monstrous in and of itself, and women have so much capacity for rage because of the way they’ve been designated. I think the best horror is really taking what’s already simmering under the surface and dialing it up to eleven and using that newly exposed rawness to really get to the meat of it. Horror can sometimes feel cathartic in the way it lets repressed things explode, which is why it tends to be particularly resonant with marginalized perspectives. I also grew up religious, so personally . . . [Gestures vaguely in extra contention.] Sex can also convey so much about power dynamics in this viscerally intimate way/space that works for the genre. Horror relies so much on heightened emotion and tension, and that overlap is pretty obvious.
This story invoked thoughts of the feminine divine and nowhere is this more evident than in the line “You are a slut, you are a bitch, you are a connoisseur.” Laura embraced her transformation, reveled in it, while Del was drained to the nothing of “this bitch.” What can you tell us about that final line? Was it part of the original draft or was it woven into the story with revisions? How do these two perspectives resonate with you as a writer?
That line was definitely something that came in only for this final draft, which was a complete overhaul. There’s so much power in taking words systemically used against you and finally going so what and also I wasn’t a bitch before but now I will be! I just take a lot of joy in the desperate, hollow malice of that ending phrase. Previous drafts were entirely from Laura’s perspective, but I felt like it was dragging trying to set up the environment she was reacting to. In the end the epistolary was my way in. The texts, and even the title, which I intended to sound like gossip, do all the worldbuilding in the bite-sized form of other people’s voices, and it felt fitting to turn that on its head with the power dynamics in the last line. I’ve always called this monstrosity rather than divinity, but really what is a god but a monster people believe in?
You are both a Clarion West graduate and the 2022 Octavia E. Butler memorial scholar. If you could reach out to the younger Wen-yi, what would you say about her future as a writer, both good and bad?
Oh wow. I think it would be, look, you will be writing again, and it will be a full-time part of you and not just something squirrelled away in the gaps of the day that you don’t tell anyone about. Look, you will one day stop feeling so shit about yourself and be old enough and have the distance to break it down, and it will be okay. And look, we dreamed of this.
There are parts about being a writer I wouldn’t recommend (hello, trying to make your hobby a job), but I’m excited for her to be here and for what’s to come. I don’t think she could have imagined the community and creative energy that Clarion West was—I finally cracked this story with said energy over like two hours in a bubble tea shop in Seattle after struggling with drafts for a year.
What’s in store for you in 2023? Are there any projects coming up that readers can look forward to?
I have a story in the upcoming anthology Reclamation (Outland Entertainment) that’s girl body horror of the more eco kind, and I have a YA horror novel that at the point of answering this question I can’t say anything about, but hopefully by the time the story’s actually published, I can! You can wander onto @wenyilee_ on Twitter and Instagram to find out. I’m also always writing about feral girls and I’m currently working on a historical fantasy about a Chinese female secret society in postcolonial Singapore that’s leaned increasingly into the body thing across revisions. I’m looking forward to going on submission with that manuscript and hopefully getting it out into the world.
