Chloe Lauter is a writer and publicist based in Los Angeles. Her debut novel is The Flayed Man, a July 21, 2026 release from Penguin Random House’s Skull House Press imprint.

Congratulations on your debut! Could you give us a little introduction to The Flayed Man?

Thank you! I’m so pleased to talk about The Flayed Man. It’s an atmospheric horror novel about sacrifice, generational curses, and what we owe the people that we love.

Ellis is an ER nurse hiding a vampiric curse and struggling under the weight of her ailing mom’s demands. When she loses access to the blood they both need, she ventures into the Mojave Desert to find more, despite her mom’s warnings of an ancient, hungry entity waiting there.

What initially drew you to this idea? At what point did you think, “Oh, yeah, I’m going to write this”?

I wanted to connect this idea I’d had about vampires, my curiosity about medical procedure, and my fascination and fear of the desert. Once the story took shape, I was fully committed!

The Flayed Man is about a lot of things, but one of them is a quickly declining caregiver relationship between Ellis and her mother. What made vampirism the vehicle to examine this kind of relationship?

Their vampirism forces Ellis into the caregiver role, and it’s the reason she resigns herself to their codependent dynamic. No one else can care appropriately for her mom. It’s the heightened version of when people feel obligated to stay in an unhealthy relationship.

I could feel Ellis’s exhaustion throughout the novel, which makes the character of Veer a breath of fresh air when she first shows up in Ellis’s life. How did you approach that relationship?

Veer is the outside perspective that Ellis has been missing. She’s fun, she’s brash. At first they seem like complete opposites, but as they get closer, you start to see the parallels.

This is a very tense book, both in the obvious scary parts but also in the relationships between the characters. How did you maintain this balance—to keep things tense where it needed while also allowing us to breathe a bit—throughout an entire novel?

I was inspired by neo-noir books and films, which move quickly and are heavy on suspense. I also aimed for richness in every relationship, whether romantic or familial. I think that automatically creates opportunities for both tension and breathing room.

There’s a road trip aspect to this book that I quite enjoyed. Do you have any strange road trip stories that helped inspire these scenes?

I love a road trip! At times, the drive between Los Angeles and Las Vegas feels like being on another planet, the way the landscape changes.

There’s something inherently vulnerable about a road trip, too. Stopping for gas in an isolated area, driving through a town you’ve never been to before. There are two sides to that vulnerability: fear of the unknown versus the freedom of possibility. The direction you take depends on who’s in the car with you.

The Flayed Man offers us a very different take on vampires. How did you go about choosing the aspects of vampirism to keep versus what aspects you didn’t need?

The characters consume blood, but other than that they don’t have many classic vampiric elements. In a lot of vampire media, vampires are sexy, wealthy, or socially powerful, and have no difficulty accessing blood. I was interested in vampires who, instead, struggle to fulfill that basic need. If they’re forced to organize their entire lives around getting and maintaining access to blood, what do they have to sacrifice?

An article on your newsletter Shelf Promotion said this is not autofiction. Did people actually think you were writing from real experience? What was the research process like as you were brainstorming/writing The Flayed Man? Did any of your work as an entertainment publicist help you at any point while writing this book?

You’d think that the whole vampire thing would have spared me from anyone thinking it was based on real life! I’ve been surprised though.

I did a lot of research for the hospital scenes. I read a triage nursing manual, but I also spent time on nursing and paramedic forums to get a feel for the everyday experience. Like, how do people who are actually doing this work talk about it? What are their little gripes? Their victories? I’m sure there are things that a real triage nurse or paramedic will look at and go, you got that wrong, but hopefully nothing so egregious it distracts from the story.

I also read quite a bit on dementia, a mix of textbook type material and personal essays exploring the disease and its ripple effects across caretakers and loved ones.

What was it like working with Soft Skull Press?

Publishing a book is a collaborative effort, and everyone at Soft Skull has been incredible collaborators. The first time I spoke with my editor, I could tell that we were seeing the book through the same lens and he’d help me make it the best version possible.

On that same newsletter, you said your favorite movie is Resident Evil (2002), which is an excellent choice. What films, books, etc. really inspire you to write?

Resident Evil (2002) actually marked a turning point in seeing myself as a “horror person.” Before seeing it, I was convinced that horror media was too scary for me. Afterward, I realized that I’d been way over-generalizing. Big jump scares are still not my thing, but I have a good time with creatures and body horror.

I pulled from a wide variety of inspirations while writing The Flayed Man. I’ve said this elsewhere, but Shannon Burke’s novel Black Flies was a huge inspiration. It’s this incredibly striking literary novel about EMTs, and it absolutely influenced my approach to writing the horror of the everyday. I read a lot of Brian Evenson, thinking about suspense, pacing and body horror. He does all of those things so well. And queer neo-noir films like Bound and Love Lies Bleeding, for the balance of tenderness and brutality.

Any thoughts about the new Zach Creggar Resident Evil film coming out soon?

I’m looking forward to it! I enjoyed the structural elements of Weapons, so I’m excited to see what his take on zombies looks like.

Other than The Flayed Man coming out, what else is next for you? Do you have any writing projects you can talk about that you’re excited to work on?

I’m working on something really fun but I can’t talk about it just yet! If you’d like to be in the loop when I can talk about it, sign up for my newsletter (shelfpromotion.substack.com).