Sadie Hartmann, aka Mother Horror, is the co-owner of the horror fiction subscription company, Night Worms, and the Bram Stoker Award-nominated editor of her own horror fiction imprint, Dark Hart. Her non-fiction book about horror books, titled 101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered, for Page Street Books, is coming in August 2023.

She lives in the PNW with her husband of twenty-plus years, where they stare at Mt Rainier, eat street tacos, and hang out with their three kids. They have a Frenchie named Owen.

Thank you for agreeing to do this interview! It seems like a perfect fit to have Mother Horror finally join us at Nightmare Magazine. For those readers who might not yet be familiar with you, would you mind introducing yourself?

I’m so honored, Gordon! I’m a huge fan of the magazine and I’m excited to get to know you better through this exchange. As far as introductions go, I could start at the very beginning and just say, I’m a longtime lover of books. I used reading as a way to leave behind the pressures and awkward phases of growing up. I know that so many people out there can relate. Fast forward all these years later, and nothing has really changed. I still use books as a way to escape into their pages; decompress, relieve stress. It’s just that now I’m in my late forties, celebrating twenty-seven years of marriage this year. We have three kids; two sons as “bookends” with a daughter in the middle. Our oldest is twenty-six, our daughter twenty-four, and our youngest son is seventeen. So, I feel like my husband and I are finally in this new season of life where we have these adult children and the whole family dynamic is different. People always ask me how I have so much time to read and write reviews and I mean, first of all, it’s part of my job, but secondly, it’s a lifestyle that changes and adapts to where you’re at in life. You know? Ten years ago, when all the kids were at home, there were other priorities and time constraints and I fit reading in as a hobby when I could. Now, I just have more time to pursue my passions and it has been this evolution into where I’m at today. Small adjustments here and there.

I think it might be interesting to start by asking about that sobriquet “Mother Horror.” When did that first come about, and how does it fit you? As long as we’re talking origin stories, do you remember who in your life first got you hooked on horror and on horror literature, in particular?

My friend and business partner, Ashley Saywers, gave me the nickname “Mother Horror” during an annual reading challenge I was hosting on #bookstagram called “Season of Horror.” I would encourage readers to build out these curated stacks of horror books they wanted to read during October. Eventually, we had so many books we wanted to read, we kept extending the timeframe of our “Season of Horror” until one year, I pretty much abandoned all other genres in favor of exclusively reading what horror has to offer. Ashley remarked in a comment on one of my posts something about how I’m like Bookstagram’s horror mother, like a den mother? Others chimed in and riffed off her comment and the nickname “Mother Horror” sort of stuck. I changed my username on Instagram, and now it has become this “thing.”

Which is a great lead-in to your sub-question about who first got me hooked on horror, and that would be my own mother by way of Stephen King. He is her favorite author and she had all of his books in her library, so naturally, when I started sneaking off to my room with armloads of Stephen King, she not only encouraged me but also wanted to discuss my reading experience afterward, like our own, personal family book club.

As a self-declared “horror advocate,” you do so much cool stuff, but I think many of us first became aware of your through your horror book reviews for a number of different outlets. How did you get started with reviewing books and did you see it as a means to any specific end when you began?

So actually, Bookstagram was the catalyst for the professional book reviewing part of my journey. Because of the nature of my bookish account being so dedicated to a niche genre, it attracted some industry professionals including my editor at Cemetery Dance, Blu Gilliand, and my editor at SCREAM Magazine, Richard Cooper. Independently of each other, they both reached out to me to see if I would be willing to write reviews for their platform/publication and I accepted both jobs. It was interesting how both of them mentioned to me that they were interested in providing space for a woman’s perspective on horror. Obviously, I felt qualified to fill their need in that regard, but I was only sharing my reading experience casually on Goodreads. I write like I talk. I wasn’t sure if that would translate to a professional, paid outlet. Would I have to change my voice? Would I need to up my writing game, so to speak? But fortunately, both editors had been following me on social media and wanted me to just talk about books the way I do on social media without changing anything, so that kicked things off. From there, other opportunities presented themselves, and I began to lean into what was happening. There was the hope that this could be something I could do as a career, but I can’t say I was chasing down an end goal. Everything that has happened arose out of just a natural balance of making myself available for whatever could come along and then deciding which avenues I was well suited for by just trying things on to see what fit and what was not for me.

In addition to reviewing, you’ve also developed a reputation as a curator of horror fiction, and nowhere is this more readily apparent than in Night Worms—a monthly horror subscription service which you co-founded with Ashley Saywers. Could you start by telling us a little bit about what Night Worms is?

I love talking about Night Worms! So what folks might not know is that Ashley and I have been friends for a while. We formed a friendship online. She lived here in the PNW, and I lived in California. My husband and I moved our family to Washington in 2017 and soon after, Ashley and I met up in real life, which was just the greatest. We had both repped for a horror fiction subscription service (which will not be named), and so we understood, from a consumer’s perspective, what we liked and didn’t like about the service. That service imploded, leaving a hole that we decided we could maybe fill. In December of 2018, we took our first 100 pre-orders, and over the years have developed and grown our business into what it is today. We love curating our monthly packages. We have meetings where we talk about upcoming packages and make decisions about which books we want to include, and the goodies we’re putting together. It is such a joy to receive feedback from our customers thanking us for introducing them to new favorite authors. We also make an intentional effort to use independent artists for our sticker and magnet designs. Our in-house artist for the theme graphics and custom bookmarks is an indie artist, too. Most of our beverages are from women-owned or operated businesses. If we have the means to support small businesses and entrepreneurs like us, we aim to do it.

I’m sure readers and authors alike are dying to know: How do you decide which books to put into the monthly packages? What goes into curating a cohesive and exciting package of horror literature each month?

Ashley and I are avid horror readers that also enjoy building out our own personal libraries of books. If we hear of a title we want for ourselves, something we would buy (even if we haven’t read it yet), we reach out to acquire it for the package if we know it’s something our clientele would be interested in as well. Our customers tag us in their review posts and give us feedback on social media, so we listen to them and take all of it into consideration when making our selections. We have developed very good working relationships with publishers, authors, and other industry professionals, so we feel we have the most current information about upcoming books. We definitely invite publishers to email us and let us know when they will have a horror title coming out as soon as possible. Working on a pre-order schedule, we plan our year several months in advance, because the process takes a while from inquiry to arrival. We also have great analytics on our website so we’re able to see, in real time, the way our customers respond to various packages—the excitement for certain releases versus maybe a bit more hesitancy about others, and that informs our decisions as well. Our subscribers are handing us their hard-earned money to curate good books for them, so we take that very seriously.

While I imagine there’s a certain amount of predicting audience desires, you can’t please everyone. To that end, you had a recent Twitter post where an individual took umbrage with Night Worms’ February package, which included books with “hidden agendas”—here, specifically a “trans agenda.” However, you’ve stood firm on not just representing the diversity in contemporary horror but championing it. That’s exactly what we love to see here, so I was hoping you could just take a moment to address the importance of promoting inclusive horror fiction.

Ashley and I feel very strongly about inclusivity and diversity. Horror is written by all people for all people, so we believe it’s important to make sure that we purchase and distribute books that represent the full picture of what horror has to offer. So many customers have expressed to us their gratitude for introducing them to horror books outside their sphere of influence, so the hope is that the more inclusive we are, the more diverse voices become the norm. We want to foster a community of readers who celebrate that with us and those who are offended or even angry about this don’t really know us or know what the genre of horror is all about. We don’t have any regrets if they choose to cancel their service. We’re not willing to bend when it comes to loving the full spectrum of diversity within the genre.

Over the years, your social media reach has grown organically, from sharing what you love, to becoming a horror influencer, to even getting Stephen King to occasionally retweet you. You can and do shape the way horror is talked about by lots of people, but has having that kind of audience changed how you engage with horror? Is there a different way that you engage with the community now than when you first started, such as maybe reviews versus curatorial or editorial work?

This question made me really sit and think! The way I promote horror and review books has evolved based on an ethos shaped over time by experience. I’ve learned a lot about myself and what drives me. I’m learning how to communicate to the general public about the books I’m reading in a way that supports my opinion that every book has an audience; my passion for getting the right book in the right reader’s hands. When I first started sharing reviews, I wasn’t aware of the much larger picture and scope of influence, so that has all drastically changed. I feel a greater sense of responsibility knowing that there are people watching me: fellow readers, industry professionals, publishers, authors, friends, family, and you mentioned Stephen King, I mean, that’s an incredible weight of awareness . . . to understand that he’s seeing what I’m saying about books in the genre that he loves . . . it’s surreal. I don’t take it lightly.

With your well-established reputation for curating already published fiction with Night Worms, it’s no surprise that you’ve since made the step to curating new fiction by editing short story anthologies and even working on your own novel and novella lines with small presses. So that I don’t leave anything out, could you tell us just a little bit about what you’ve been doing recently?

The offer to write a book in 2022 was a big disrupter! It forced me to make some adjustments to my workload. I had to go on hiatus from my reviewing platforms to minimize deadlines. These days, I’m running Night Worms with Ashley; wearing the hat of the EIC of Dark Hart Books, an imprint owned by Dark Matter Magazine—we just released the sixth and final book in the My Dark Library line of novellas for Cemetery Gates Media—and I am the brand ambassador for Pandi Press. I also spend a few hours a day reading books so I can review, recommend, and promote them. That’s really important to me. As my visibility grows, I find myself spending a lot of time doing interviews, writing forewords/introductions, and blurbs as well. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that it takes up a significant amount of time during my work week.

Let’s talk about anthologies first, because at the time we’re doing this interview, Human Monsters, which you edited with Ashley Saywers, has been nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in an Anthology! First, congratulations! Second, as someone who came from working with full-length books, was there a shift in how you dealt with short fiction? Does what you look for in a short story differ from what you look for in a book-length work?

Well, congratulations to you too on your nomination. Best of luck to you and Rebecca J. Allred. Short fiction is actually my favorite vessel for horror. I don’t know if there are other readers that love anthologies and short story collections as much as I do. I’m sure there are, but I really, really love them. Reading submissions for Human Monsters was an exciting time in my life. It was the first time I had experienced anything like that before, you know, apart from reading the submissions for My Dark Library. But these were two totally different experiences because MDL was basically a solo effort (alongside Joe Sullivan, of course) picking six individual stories that would eventually get published independently of each other as a collective. Human Monsters was something my best friend and I worked on together which was fucking ridiculously fun in and of itself, plus we had seriously cool people reading all the subs with us, so it was this collaborative exchange of excitement over the stories we were reading. Our group chats were ongoing throughout days, weeks, months, and I remember feeling like it was the coolest thing I had ever been a part of. The horror industry knocked my socks off. So much talent.

Over the last few years, it seems like the novella has really had a resurgence as an ideal length for horror. As part of this, you’ve teamed up with Cemetery Gates Media to develop the My Dark Library novella series. What makes novellas so appealing, and how did My Dark Library come about?

I agree! I love seeing novellas everywhere now. Honestly, it’s my favorite format for horror. Longer than a short story but not quite a novel, the ideal sweet spot. I feel like it’s the perfect package for delivering a quality dose of fear and injecting it straight into the heart. I came up with the idea for this novella series while I was browsing Pinterest one day and saw this collection of books from the 1950s, children’s stories actually, and they were different books written by different authors, but all branded the same way. The cover art for each one was different, it was just the branding, the spines, and a few added details, that made them a collection. And the idea for the novellas smacked me between the eyes. I emailed Joe at Cemetery Gates Media, he was my first choice for this kind of a project, and he was immediately excited about it. We fleshed out the details, I wrote up a call asking for novellas and specific things I was or was not looking for, and now all six of them are out in the world representing subgenres I love by talented new voices in horror.

Similarly, you’ve also teamed up with publisher Dark Matter on the Dark Hart imprint, which looks to be focused on novels from “unique perspectives” and which “reflect the ever-evolving landscape of the horror genre.” What can you tell us about this project, and what’s coming up soon?

Dark Hart is a passion project, really. I feel like there are strong voices in horror fiction that get drowned out by the taller trees. The canopy is up there soaking up all the sunlight and enjoying the ecosystem of the industry while the forest floor is decomposing in the darkness. I want to use my platform and my ability to identify voices readers are looking for as a launchpad into that ecosystem to give them a fighting chance to thrive. It’s not a guarantee, obviously. But it’s worth the effort, and hopefully the extra visibility and support will kickstart some careers and help readers find undiscovered talent. To be totally transparent, this side of the table is not my favorite. I’m struggling to establish a publishing schedule that works for me in my already active lifestyle of book promotion, but I’m willing to hang with it for a while to see if I can find my groove, so to speak.

From being so involved with horror literature at every level, what kind of recent trends or developments have most caught your attention? Are there any that you’d like to see more of? What about less of?

Yes! The two coolest trends I have fallen in love with and want to see more of are small books, like just very small, pocket-sized books, and interior illustrations. Not every book needs to be a standard-sized hardcover or paperback. Those of us with massive libraries enjoy our little side stacks of tiny books. They’re easy to transport in our purse, backpack, or lunch bag. They’re so fun and collectible! More, please. Also, I love interior illustrations and I wish more books had them. Even just a scattering of six or maybe a little detail for each chapter, I don’t think we grow up and suddenly stop enjoying picture books. I will always love them.

Although you’re most known for your work on the reviewing, editing, curating, and now publishing side of horror, I do believe you have written a few short stories that were published. How did you find being on the other end of the pen, and is that something you’d like to do more of in the future?

I realized that writing fiction was too much of a distraction from reading. I just enjoy being on the consumer end of a fiction book versus the creation end of it. I mean, nonfiction was different because I was writing as myself in my own voice, but the creation of characters and worlds and stories proved too much for me. I am completely in awe of people who do it so well.

You’ve also written a pretty impressive nonfiction book, 101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered, due out August 8, 2023. What can you tell us about the genesis of this project?

So my editor, Alexandra Murphy, reached out to me to see if I would be interested in writing a book like this. It had never crossed my mind, but once the seed was planted, I could see myself enjoying writing a book like that. I started getting excited. My brain was alive with all the ideas and directions it could go in. So I accepted the proposal and then from there, the process began. I almost immediately knew it would be about modern horror because I was already aware of lists on the internet comprised of horror books from “all time,” you know? There’s no reason to publish something that already exists by doing a quick Google search. I also understood that my authority/credibility only goes so far back. While I have been a longtime reader of horror fiction, I didn’t discover indie horror fiction until around 2016, but once I did, I dove in hard. So, I wanted to work within my area of expertise. I had a few Zoom meetings with the team at Page Street and then got to work on the outline based on collaborative ideas and expectations. It has been such a fun and rewarding process. The people at Page Street, especially my editor Alexandra, are an amazingly supportive and creative group of people.

What was the process like selecting the books on this list? Did you draw mainly from the many books you’ve already read, or did you have to do a lot of digging and additional research?

I basically went through my Goodreads account for every single year and compiled a master list of my favorite books that I have read. Then I culled that list. Then I identified books I felt could be on the list that I hadn’t read yet, read them, and then decided if they would be added or not. I had a very specific criteria I wanted those books to meet that I won’t share, but each book was measured against a pretty rigorous selection standard. I’m proud of the final list.

Okay, moment of truth (and no spoilers, unless you want), which was harder to pick: Number 1 or Number 101?

Well, thankfully, it’s not a least to greatest list. The 101 are in no particular order, so they’re all on a level playing field. But narrowing the list down to 101 was extremely difficult. I could have easily included more . . . I was going to say something to emphasize this but, I’ll just wait until the book comes out.

I was very much struck by a social media post you made earlier this year, which said: “Reading is not a hobby, for me personally, it consumes my life. So not really a job or a career either, more like a lifestyle. My . . . personality.” How did reading come to be such a central part of your identity, especially in a world where we see people lamenting more and more how little they can bring themselves to read? How have you managed to hold onto it?

Oh man, reading is home base. My “olly olly oxen free” safe zone from the whole “tag, you’re it” game. I hide in my books, and I’ve been doing it since I was a child. I would come home from school or playing outside and just disappear for a few hours. My mom, an avid reader herself, allowed it. Uninterrupted long, long hours of just escaping the world in a book. If I didn’t have that as a coping mechanism, I’d be so lost. I love movies and music the same way, but nothing is quite like the mental exercise of taking an author’s hand and stepping inside the pages of their world. Reading is the greatest gift.

I think we also all want to know: How many books do you currently have in your living space? Also, how big is your physical TBR (to be read) pile and how do you manage to avoid getting crushed by these (literally and/or metaphorically)?

My husband thinks there are currently like 4,000 books in our house right now. And I don’t think that’s too far off, actually. Considering we have the current Night Worms order downstairs plus my personal collection upstairs. Easily 4,000 plus. My physical TBR pile I try to keep around twenty to thirty books. And I don’t read more than three to four at a time. Usually two physical books, maybe an audiobook for the car or working out, and two on the Kindle. This used to feel overwhelming, but I kept reminding myself that it’s a good problem to have, and I guess my brain has come to accept that as true. Ha!

Finally, what’s coming up next for you? In addition to those projects already scheduled, is there anything new that you’re working on and can share with our readers?

I think I’m really just trying to do less projects, honestly. A wise woman at the Merrimack Valley Book Festival (Ellen Datlow) told me to say “no” more and not do so much. I’m going to listen to her, it’s good advice. Plus, I like to just keep my schedule flexible for surprises. Life is full of unexpected opportunities.