Firstly, I want to say how much the prose really grabbed me. The story had a wonderful juxtaposition of beautiful, rich prose—which was often used both to highlight the tension in the two main characters’ relationship—against the unfolding grotesqueries. I’d love to hear more about how you approached this aspect.

More than anything else, I think that clarity is only half of the job, when it comes to horror prose—I want things to be both glorious and awful, to have a kind of mental mouthfeel that’s delicious and creepy and gross, one which makes you long (yet maybe fear) to speak it out loud. But particularly here, because what I’m echoing is the language of worship, of prayers and curses, of contortionate blasphemies. I want it to be poetic from top to tail, half murder ballad, half chorale. That’s what I was going for, anyhow.

The story was also thematically very interesting. We ostensibly have a group of people with a particular destiny, but there is also something deeply sad in their predicament. I found myself empathizing as their own fears and needs opened up to us. Could you give us some more insights about the themes you were exploring here?

I’ve wanted to do something about the idea of the Antichrist for a long time, particularly a female version thereof, but one that wasn’t tied to the concept of motherhood. Part of it comes from wanting to feminize every possible type of monster, which is an urge I’ve had since . . . childhood, basically. But also because I’ve always found the basic The Omen-type narrative kind of surface-level, especially when compared to something like Marjorie Bowen’s Black Magic, whose main character not only spends most of the book presenting as a different gender but also eventually ends up getting themselves elected Pope in order to bring down the Church and Holy Roman Empire from within. “Men spoke of Antichrist . . . I thought, could I be he?” (Well, no—but yeah.)

I also wanted to do something that really got into Damien: Omen II’s particular moment of doubt and pain, which mirrors Jesus’s own realization (as per his time in the desert/garden, or Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ) that unless he participates in his own sacrifice, that sacrifice will be worth nothing. Both salvation and damnation require you to be complicit in order for them to come to fruition, and the horror of being essentially born as a tool to bring about something you don’t even get to share in is a particularly Antichristian one. Then add in the whole thing of being “given” incredible power but only so that you can destroy the world around you, in order to bring about the End Times and a battle you supposedly can’t possibly win . . . that rings even harder when you’re female, because there’s nothing scarier than a woman with power, right—one who likes using it? Who revels in it, in fact? (Or, indeed, two.)

The first thing that occurred to me was that for the Antichrist gambit to have any chance to succeed, there couldn’t possibly be only one potential Antichrist in play at any given time—I mean, why put all your eggs in one basket, especially if you’re already playing with a stacked deck (not being God, and all)? But then again, you probably wouldn’t want the Antichrists teaming up with each other, either, any more than you’d want them individuating enough to decide to opt out of the whole game entirely. You’d want to pit them against each other, see how powerful the survivor would become after killing and/or eating all their rivals/siblings. And yet . . . as I first noted back when I started writing fanfiction, the interesting thing about cis-swapping characters who’ve originally been established as male is that nine times out of ten, their female versions will tend to be a lot more open to the concept of cooperation. As we see with Little Horn and Beata “The Nail” Callendar, hopefully. I’d love to see what happens with them later on.

 I feel that this story is a good reminder for us about what horror has the capability of elucidating. It needn’t be a genre which we can reduce down to simple jump scares and gore scenes. This story cuts through all of us. I felt that I was turning inside myself as I was reading, and as the characters explored their options. What are your own thoughts on the capabilities of the horror genre, or the horror short story?

Horror has always been where I saw myself reflected most accurately, from a pretty early age. Over the last fifteen years, I’ve come to understand that that probably has a lot to do with my having always been an undiagnosed neurodivergent woman in a neurotypically-inclined world—and this also probably explains why my baseline reaction to the Antichrist concept is not so much to go “oh wow, that’s really horrible” as it is to go “oh wow, that’s really horrible . . . for that kid.” I know what it’s like to be seen as different, born “wrong,” apparently unable to prevent myself from being just too damn much in all possible ways: too smart, too odd, too dark, too horny, too angry. Some of that certainly made its way into “Little Horn,” as it has into most of my stories.

But I’m also a mother who passed her neurodivergence on to a son whose autism diagnosis came when he was three and a half, which means I understand the other side of it, too—all the guilt, all the love, family as a trap and a gamble, genetics as destiny (or maybe not); family as forced growth on either side, something that makes everyone who participates in it both prospectively better and prospectively worse. Horror is the perfect matrix to explore all of that through, in my opinion . . . but then again, where else would I be doing it? I’m a horror girl, in a horror world.

In terms of it being a short story, meanwhile: some time back, I wanted to write a whole Antichrist(s) novel, but I’m actually glad I went the other way with this idea—it allowed me to clip and squish, to find just the right frame for what could have been a huge, sprawling mess of duelling iconography. And it allowed me to make a bunch of really dumb Hieronymus Bosch jokes, too.

 I know you have publications almost too numerous to mention, and awards, and even stories which have been developed for TV. It would be great if you could let us know a little more about what you’re currently working on, and also what other work we can look forward to.

Well, my short story collection Blood from the Air just won the 2023 Bram Stoker Award, my second win in that category, which left me both amazed and grateful, and I just came back from an incredibly fun visit to Spain, where three of my books have been translated and published by La Biblioteca de Carfax. I’m also working on two novels and shopping another collection, plus Simon Bestwick and I have a horror culture podcast called No Darkness But Ours that updates less frequently than it should, but more often than it otherwise might. I’m happy to say I’ve always got something going on.