What inspired this peek into the darkness?
Right around the time that the #metoo movement was really at its apex, I read a fantastic article—I wish I could find it again to link—but the crux of it was, “Bad sex for men usually means a lack of pleasure, while good sex for women often means an absence of pain.” That hit me so hard for a lot of reasons. And I thought, what if that dynamic was flipped, or at least equalized? What if men had to face the potential of pain at every sexual encounter the same way women do? What if they had to trust us not to hurt them the same way that we have to trust them? How would things change? And I think for me the real horror was the realization that these might not necessarily be good changes. That the central power dynamic itself might not change, and how that could lead to some really horrifying things.
What is it about the connection between adolescence and horror that stirs the imagination?
Being a teenager is horrifying! There is the horror of your body suddenly being outside of your control, for one, and it’s so messy and gross and bloody and smelly and hairy and you have all of these feelings, all without your consent. But I think there’s also the horror of the way your relationship with the world changes, also without your consent—friends are suddenly hitting on you, strangers are judging you (or worse, following you in parking lots), teachers are sending you home because the way you dress this new body is “distracting.” I always fall back on Freud’s idea of unheimlich, which is the German expression for uncanny, but means essentially “a place that should feel like home, but doesn’t.” For a lot of adolescents, your body, your home, the society that you live in—all these familiar homes suddenly aren’t.
Would you have wanted your lower teeth pulled as a child?
Oh gosh, part of this story is inspired by my own real dental misadventures (the upper set kind). I had braces for eight years as a teen. Eight years! My adult teeth came in basically sideways, so I can absolutely appreciate the necessity of proper dental care. At the same time, my teeth are also too big and crowded together, so I also had a massive overbite and an orthodontist saw this as an opportunity for all kinds of Dr. Frankenstein experiments. Starting at age twelve I had several complex contraptions installed in my mouth to bring my jaw forward and widen it to make room for my too-big sideways teeth. It was horrible, and twenty years later, I still have a little bit of an overbite. So, if I were facing the same situation with my lower set? Please God, yank a few of them. But leave the rest! If only for the whispered threat, “You know I have teeth down there.”
You collect lunch boxes? Tell us more!
This is one of those things where I got one as a gift, and then friends and coworkers saw I had one and started buying them for me for my birthday, and now I have about thirty. Which is not great when you move every couple of years, but now it’s morphed into a legitimate obsession. My absolute favorite is my Portal Warning Signs lunch box, which has a bit of advice that we should probably all follow: “Remember, if a future you tries to warn you about this test, don’t listen.”
Do you have a personal connection to the Appalachians?
As a teenager I lived in Southern Ohio, fairly close to the Kentucky border. I had a beat-up old 2004 Escort and liked to explore, and was right at the perfect age where I could begin to understand and appreciate the complex history of the area: these beautiful landscapes juxtaposed against the pride in a coal mining tradition that devastated said natural beauty, juxtaposed again against the absolute calamity that the loss of those jobs wrought. I remember driving through the Cumberland mountains, through all of these absolutely hollowed-out towns, and stopping at a gas station and the attendant had maybe a dozen teeth. Like a teenager, I joked about it later. Because that’s always the joke, right? Appalachians and low IQ and bare feet and missing teeth. As an adult I can reflect on using humor to separate myself from the horror of someone else’s circumstances, and I think that’s one of the reasons I write horror, now—to not look away from it, to see the humanity there.
What’s next for Ashlee Lhamon? What can readers look forward to in 2024 and beyond?
I actually have an apocalypse story coming out in Salamander Magazine soon, so anyone who liked this story can check out more of my work there. I’m currently in the process of finishing a SF murder mystery novel, too, so we’ll see what happens with that!
