“Women’s issues horror fiction” has bloomed into its own hot subgenre, and no one is more thrilled than me. On some level, this subgenre arches back across generations (see: the gothic novel)—but I’m referring more specifically the spate of novels that has crashed onto the market since 2021 or so.

As I write from within the sidelined shadows where the horror genre lurks, I am reminded of the four hours I spent in that busted-ass, stinking shack. The people, the music. The communion. I think about the exploration we do as writers of horror.

We hear of people dying in the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention, reaching a twenty-year high in 2025 alone, and this is unsettling. But what particularly chills me to the bone is the February 2026 report on the decapitation of four Haitian women deported from Puerto Rico.

I, like many of us, am always scared. A friend of mine once asked me why. And the first thing that came to my head was to show him Junji Ito’s “The Enigma of Amigara Fault.”

I can pinpoint one of my earliest moments of existential unease. I was nine years old and, defying my religiously conservative parents, snuck into the local movie theater to watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I didn’t understand the social politics of the movie at the time, and while faintly aroused by Jessica Rabbit I remained thoroughly confused by the idea of bestial human/toon marriage.

Southern Gothic lingers impolitely in doorways. Forget theme; the genre itself is liminal, slouching somewhere between literary fiction and the h-word: lauded and discarded, high-brow and tawdry, praised and shamed. Tell about the South, right? But for all its liminality, Southern Gothic seems obsessed with physical location.

An important feature of childlore is that kids spread it to other kids, independent of adult instruction. Because as soon as parents got involved (or teachers, or adult authors of books marketed for children), that wasn’t really ours anymore, was it? That was somebody else’s lesson, written for us.

It is something that is just accepted: forests are places where things become lost. There is a dark, entangled history that grows in the shadows of the woods, weaving through myth and legend—through stories we have told and warnings we have whispered into the night. The forest is the void of the unknown, a ravenous mouth that picks clean the bones of trespassers because the forest has a stomach, and that stomach has never been full.

Raised in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, known for the uncanny woods one oughta avoid at night, I know fear. Growing up, fireside ghost stories (i.e., oral horror storytelling) felt too real. At church, I swore the shadows . . . lingered down corridors.