Thank you so much for sharing “Courtney Lovecraft’s Book of the Dead” with us at Nightmare—what a great story! Where did the initial concept come from for you?

I’ve been wanting to write this story since 2008—the title came to me in a flash, exactly as it is, while driving late at night on a back country road in upstate New York not far from where I grew up (and not far from Poughkeepsie, where the story is set). Initially I thought it was a cursed-album story, about a dead grunge rocker whose unfinished final album was about to be released, which would (of course) drive all its listeners mad. That story never achieved lift-off, but pieces of it bounced around in my brain for seventeen years before finally coalescing into this story.

I’m a huge fan of the format being a podcast. It can be tough to write, almost more a script than a story, but when it pays off (as it does here) it’s immersive and clever. Why did you want to present this story as a podcast?

I love an unconventional format story!! So many of my favorites, from Ted Chiang’s “Liking What You See: A Documentary” to Ken Liu’s “The Man Who Ended History” to Carmen Maria Machado’s “Inventory” are stories that are pretending to be something else, a script or a list, et cetera. It’s actually very hard to do right, but the payoff when you succeed is significant! And I always wanna try to challenge myself.

I actually have a love-hate relationship with podcasts? Like I hate 93% of the ones I’ve listened to? There are tons of great ones but I’m very particular with what I listen to—much more so than with what I read—so quite frequently even when a podcast has a million things going for it, one thing will turn me off. Like I loved everything about Welcome to Night Vale except for the host’s voice, which made it impossible for me to listen to it. So I guess this is me trying to create the perfect (utter nightmare) podcast of my dreams.

A drag queen spirit medium? How is this not a thing?!? I’m in love with Courtney Lovecraft; could you let us know the genesis of her character?

Awww, thanks, glad you love her. I do too. Initially, when I first started playing with this story and all I had was the title, she was much closer to Courtney Love—a burning ball of feminist rage, a grunge rocker whose career was tanked because she refused to play the game, scorned and maligned and ready to burn down the whole world. I really do adore Courtney Love; Hole’s album Live Through This was such a transformative salvation moment for me—in the end I knew this character had to be her own thing, something beholden to no one.

Watching the way the world has been going to hell lately, and the way that drag queens and trans folks have been used as wedge issues and boogeymen to scare people into voting against their own self-interest, I realized that Courtney Lovecraft had to be someone who came from that lineage of fierce radical freedom-fighter artists, whose global platform has grown in the age of Rupaul’s Drag Race but have refused to sanitize or clean up their act or tamp down their rage.

In an interview, the iconic drag queen Sasha Colby said something like—drag for her was a tool to empower people who had been disempowered. And that sparked the essence of Courtney’s character and her journey. There’s a paraphrase of that in the story, spoken by a university scholar of drag.

“Courtney Lovecraft’s Book of the Dead” is a fierce depiction of queer rage that feels timely and, depressingly, seems like it will be timely for some time into the future. What were your thoughts channeling this injustice into your work?

This is just another day in the rage-roaring hellscape inside my head. Queer rage has been my primary writer fuel since 1997, and as long as there’s a patriarchy there will be ample fuel for the fire. So many of my stories and novels are rooted in the glorious queer-specific emotion that combines anger and pain and grief and joy and community and love and lust and defiance; if I can make people feel what I feel, the simultaneous love for and rage at the world, I’ve done my job.

I saw on your website that you do library and school visits, which I first want to thank you for doing; it’s important work! And dangerous work, as LGBTQIA folks and drag artists already know. Could you tell us a bit about your experience doing these visits?

I love speaking with schools and libraries, doing workshops for young writers, etc. It’s definitely happened that there are folks in the room whose beliefs are the exact opposite of mine in every way, but they’re typically too polite (and too outnumbered) to make much noise about it in the moment (in one case, they just rage-tweeted about it for their five followers afterwards). I do believe that while people in groups can gleefully do terrible things, most folks are rational enough to also be capable of listening to another perspective or focus on commonalities instead of differences. The problem is how easily they drop that rationality altogether.

Is there anything else about “Courtney Lovecraft’s Book of the Dead” that you’d like to make sure our readers know?

Just that I love horror, and I am so happy to be back here, and I love Nightmare, and I am so happy to be back here! My first award nomination (and win!) was for my story “57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides,” which y’all published back in 2014 and which went on to win the Shirley Jackson Award!! So thank you for your service to horror!

What do you have coming out in the future for us to look forward to?

My novel Red Star Hustle drops 10/21/2025—an outer-space noir about a happy-go-lucky far-future rent boy who’s framed for murder and has to clear his name while keeping one step ahead of the badass lady bounty hunter (and mech pilot) who is assigned to his case. Saga Press is publishing it as part of their launch lineup of Saga Doubles—a reimagining of the old pulp format where two short novels would be published back-to-back in the same cover! I’m paired with the incredible Mary Robinette Kowal—two space crime capers that take place in a shared universe (we put little easter eggs all over the two texts to connect them).

And I just launched a newsletter—Undercover in the Apocalypse (undercover-in-the-apocalypse.ghost.io), half writing advice & updates; half epistolary science fiction story addressed to an army of shadow operatives, artists, and warriors undercover in a hellscape.