Welcome back for Part Three in our June author roundtable! Today, I talk with these nine featured authors about some of their favorite books from the past few years as well as what they hope for in terms of the release of their own new books.

So let’s get started!

All of you write in the horror and dark fantasy genres. What have been some of your favorite works of horror, both films and books, that have been released over the last few years?

GABY TRIANA: You know, I enjoy stories about haunted houses and I hadn’t felt like I’d seen a really good haunted house movie in a long time when James Wan came out with The Conjuring. It was a slow-burn, classic tale of haunting with just enough special effects to make it creepy without going over the top. Add that it had a gritty 70s tone, and I felt like I was watching the classic movies I grew up with. I know that’s earlier than what you meant, but I find myself watching it over and over again. I also really enjoyed Midsommar, which had me revisiting The Wicker Man.

ZIN E. ROCKLYN: Definitely the short story collection WOUNDS by Nathan Ballingrud and the film HIS HOUSE on Netflix.

REGINA GARZA MITCHELL: There are so many to choose from! Goddess of Filth by V. Castro, Children of Chicago by Cynthia Pelayo, The Possession of Natalie Glasgow by Hailey Piper, Boneset & Feathers by Gwendolyn Kiste, and Somer Canon’s A Fresh Start are all books that I really enjoyed. Of course, Death’s Head Press is putting out some wonderful books as well. The other books in the Splatter Western series are incredible. There are many more that I’m missing, but I’ll stop there. Filmwise, I enjoyed Terrified (Aterrados) and Mandy, and I just watched the Joe Lansdale documentary, All Hail the Popcorn King, which was a real treat.

STEVE TOASE: Beneath the Rising by Premee Mohamed
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno Garcia
Vicious Creatures by Sarah Gordon
Spit Myself Out by Tracy Fahey

The 2017 film Ghost Story
Midsommar
Get Out
Us

EDEN ROYCE: I am so behind on my reading and film watching – it’s a shame! But a few films come to mind: Sweetheart, Head Count, His House, and Lace Crater. As for reading, I’d say Hoodoo by Ronald L. Smith, a wonderfully spooky (and award-winning) middle-grade novel; Nine Bar Blues by Sheree Renée Thomas, a stunning collection of Southern Gothic tales that include horror, folklore, dark fantasy, and a touch of whimsy; and I Spit Myself Out by Tracy Fahey, a fantastic collection of short horror based around the female body from puberty to menopause.

V. CASTRO: For films I have to say Hereditary, Us, Raw, Get Out. For books there are too many!

So many women in the indie horror community have produced top quality work. All the women emerging in the horror community are amazing. They all deserve a big round of applause especially because they lift each other.

EV KNIGHT: Two favorite books that immediately come to mind are Mexican Gothic by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia and The Boatman’s Daughter by Andy Davidson. Both are very gothic in nature which for me is a draw. I like the atmosphere and the slow burn of a good creepy tale. The Taxidermist’s Lover by Polly Hall is another one. It actually reminded me a little of your novel The Rust Maidens in its literary prose type of writing that I absolutely love and envy as I can’t manage to write about terrible things in a beautiful way like that.

As for films, the 2020 film Relic had me holding my breath several times without realizing it. The claustrophobic scenes were done perfectly and the theme of the story, the beautiful but unsavory ending was just perfect.

A film from a different end of the horror spectrum that I absolutely loved was Spontaneous which is listed as comedy/sci-fi but for me, it’s more horror than sci-fi. Either way, its perfect and engaging, terrifying and thought-provoking.

Lastly for films a 2019 release called Freaks, a Canadian film about a little girl who is kept inside her home for the first seven years of her life by a paranoid father. This is one of those films where you find yourself questioning reality the whole way through. Loved it.

I’d of course be remiss if I didn’t mention Lovecraft Country—the HBO series that has me anxiously awaiting season two.

MARIA HASKINS: The most recent horror novel I read was Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians, and I absolutely loved it. It was riveting. I also read an ARC of E. Catherine Tobler’s novella The Necessity of Stars, and while it’s a science fiction story rather than horror, it has some dark and shimmery threads of quiet, unsettling horror running through it. Another ARC I read recently was Cadwell Turnbull’s upcoming novel No Gods, No Monsters. It’s out later this year and it is stunning. Really audacious storytelling and a fresh take on monsters and cosmic horror. A new thing for me is anime! Inspired by my daughter, I’ve been watching Demon Slayer, and I’ve really loved getting into that world and those characters and seeing how that show twists and turns the usual tropes of demons and demon slaying on its head a bit.

S.L. EDWARDS: *cracks knuckles* This is the part where I get to plug other folks? This is the part where I plug other folks.

I’ll start with someone who I just had a conversation about today: Mer Whinery. Mer writes about southeastern Oklahoma, where a lot of my family is close too. And his stuff is just…so horrifying and charming and dangerous all at once. He has the ability to really set a tone and create a sense of terror, more than almost any writer I know. If anyone hasn’t read it yet, I really recommend starting with The Little Dixie Horror Show and going from there.

Sarah Walker was also someone I talked about today. She’s recently done a bang up job as one of the editors on A Walk in Darker Wood, a folk horror anthology which contains a lot of my other favorites. William Tea, another friend of mine, needs to come out with his debut collection already. And William, if you’re reading this: I write the intro. You hear me?

Then I’ll just name off a few folks I think are mandatory reading: John Langan’s Wide Carnivorous Sky remains one of the greatest weird horror collections of all time. S.P. Miskowski’s I Wish I Was Like You is one of the most compelling, emotional and devastatingly original novels ever. Period. I’ve never seen a writer break every rule like that. Nadia Bulkin’s She Said Destroy was also eye opening. Just, incredible stuff. Those three are my “big three” contemporary writers. Not that we don’t have other phenomenal writers, but they never fail to make my jaw drop when I read them.

We’ve got…a lot of people I think have produced some stories that I really, really enjoyed. Jonathan Raab, Erica Ruppert, Alana I. Capria Linares’ Mother Walked Into the Lake was another phenomenal one. Laura Mauro made me feel actual emotions with her collection Sing Your Sadness Deep and I was on a plane. That was embarrassing. Can Wiggins always manages to knock it out of the park, so if you see her in anything, please pick it up. Sean M. Thompson wrote an alien novella I rather enjoyed. John Linwood Grant, who has the ability to produce great fiction in a variety of genres. I’m not unconvinced he didn’t make some deal with a Yorkshire devil for his writing talent. Matthew M. Bartlett. I could go on.

Films? I recently watched La Llorona directed by Jayro Bustamante. The film is absolutely tragic and horrifying, because yes, there is La Llorona. Obviously the supernatural is there. But the greater tragedy is that beyond that, the story may as well be true. Without giving too much away, the film was inspired by the trial of General Efrían Ríos Montt, who briefly served as president of Guatemala during the nation’s civil war. Ríos Montt was a monster, even by dictator standards who was convicted for genocide against the Mayan people in his own country. However, there was…some complication with the verdict, I honestly don’t know much beyond that, and he did not die in prison. The defense of not just Ríos Montt, but for many heads of states who grossly violate the human rights of their citizens is that there is a greater conflict, some internal enemy, that needs fighting. General Videla of Argentina, the only Argentine military dictator to die in prison, claimed at his trial “Yesterday’s enemies are today’s government,” and never apologized for his actions in the nation’s dirty war. We are…regrettably, even seeing this now in the United States, where we have a very loud faction saying that violence against specific groups and protest movements is legitimate because of some connection to “Marxism.” La Llorona I think, does a very good job of showing us what nations will try to let themselves get away with if given enough cover. And what people will find themselves complicit in, if they’re not careful.

What’s your biggest hope for your new book? What would you like to see during the course of the release that will make you personally feel like it’s a success?

GABY TRIANA: I hope MOON CHILD resonates with readers on a deep, emotional level. I put my heart and soul into the story, dug into anger I’d repressed, in a way I hadn’t done with any other book before. The haunting happening at the Sunlake Springs is a direct reflection of the turmoil inside of Valentina’s soul, stuff that’s been bubbling under the surface all her life. I really hope readers connect with her anger, regardless of her situation.

ZIN E. ROCKLYN: I want at least one person to connect with Iraxi, understand her plight and feel emboldened by her choices.

REGINA GARZA MITCHELL: I already feel like it’s a success because it’s being read. It seems like an obvious thing, but you never really know if people will read what you put out there. I’ve never had the dream of quitting my day job and being a best-selling author, but I would like to see my work have meaning for people in the way that some of my favorite authors’ work has for me, to see it resonate with them in some way that makes them feel seen or understood.

STEVE TOASE: I think the first big success was getting published by Undertow.

As I’m not that well known as a writer being with a publisher where people trust their quality means readers will pick up TO DROWN IN DARK WATER because it’s an Undertow book as much as because it’s a Steve Toase book. With writers like Priya Sharma, Laura Mauro, Simon Stranzas, Georgina Bruce, and the much missed Year’s Best Weird Fiction, people trust Michael Kelly to put out good books. Knowing he liked something in my work enough to put out a collection felt like a huge achievement.

I think any collection means people are going to have stories they click with and stories they don’t, but if people find something that they enjoy, then it will be a success. I’m very lucky that the reviews so far have been really good, and I was so happy to get a positive review in the American Library Association’s Booklist. Libraries play a huge role in getting books to people who may not be able to buy a copy outright, and librarians can be key in matching books to readers.

EDEN ROYCE: I’ve already realized my biggest hope for my book – I really wanted my mom to love it and feel it captured the South and our people in a realistic, yet magical way. She inspired much of the story and my long talks with her were some of the highlights of creating Root Magic.

V. CASTRO: I feel the praise before the release has already made it feel like a success considering the subject matter. This is a book about a hate crime against a Mexican woman. This is about her vengeance and redemption.

Being a Mexican American woman writing her history and truth makes me feel like a success.

The next step is to see it made into a film.

EV KNIGHT: I hope that Children of Demeter shows off my versatility as a writer. I know my first novel The Fourth Whore was intense and gory. Some of its subject matter turned some readers off. I hope those readers give Children of Demeter a chance as it is so different. I wanted to write a unique “haunted” story which I think I have. So for me, success looks like positive reviews that note the differences between the two books and their different types of horror.

MARIA HASKINS: It sounds basic, but I just hope some people read it! And I hope people will connect with the two new stories in it, “Blackdog” and “Dragon Song”. “Dragon Song” is my very first viking-horror-fantasy tale, and “Blackdog” is a story that I’ve worked on for a long time, basically since 2015 or so. To me, it’s almost like a superhero origin story in a way. I’m just excited to see what people think about my stories, old and new, when the collection comes out.

S.L. EDWARDS: I hope people have fun reading it. And that they tell me so. It may sound odd, given the other topics I’ve covered in this interview and the subject matter in the book. The book deals with depression, with isolation, with cancer, electoral politics and polarization, and so on. But the stories were a sort of therapy for me. I think the kindest thing someone ever said about Whiskey was that it “read like a writer going through some shit.” Which was true, and remains true. But I had fun going through some of this shit. And I hope that readers do too.

Huge thanks to these fabulous authors for being part of our June author roundtable! Please pick up their books and support their work!

Happy reading!

Welcome back! All this month, I’ll be spotlighting a brand-new roundtable featuring nine fantastic authors who have new books out this year! From short fiction collections to novels, and from horror and westerns to the witchy and the weird, we’ve got so much talent and such a wide array of books to spotlight!

So let’s take it away, shall we?

Congratulations to all of you on your new book releases! What can you share about your new book and the inspiration behind it?

GABY TRIANA: Thank you! My latest gothic horror novel, MOON CHILD, is The Shining meets The Craft. A young woman becomes the fifth member of a coven needing her help opening a spiritual portal inside an abandoned Florida hotel. The inspiration behind the story was more my own spiritual journey away from Catholicism which is characterized by Valentina.

ZIN E. ROCKLYN: Thank you! FLOWERS FOR THE SEA is about a pregnant woman trapped on a boat with the last of humanity. It all started from a prompt and took off from there when I thought about the horror of pregnancy without the wild circumstances. Even “easy” pregnancies permanently change so much of your body and it bugs me out that people go through it.

EV KNIGHT: My new book is titled Children of Demeter. It is about a vanished cult from the 70’s who worshiped the Goddess Demeter. They lived on a commune and since their sudden disappearance, nothing has grown on the land. Sara Bissett, a sociologist trying to escape her own past, buys the place with the intent of writing a book about the cult. Strange things begin to happen making Sara question her sanity and the stories told about the cult by the people in town.

The inspiration came from an idea I was playing around with as I wanted to write a haunted house story. I wondered if the house could become a womb and those inside, rather than developing/evolving, would instead devolve/change into something less human. From there, the story just took off and “evolved” into its current iteration.

REGINA GARZA MITCHELL: Thank you! Shadow of the Vulture is number 9 in Deaths Head Press’s Splatter Western series. (The books are not related and can be read in any order.) My book takes place on the border of Texas and Mexico and is told from a Tejana perspective. The focus is primarily on women: a shape-changing witch, a soldier and her dead friend, a healer who wants to be a vulture, and a cantina owner. There’s a mix of knife fighting, gunfighting, and brujería. Juana, the ex-soldier is the main character. She is angry and ruthless and brutal about the way her world has been impacted by colonization. The story was inspired by stories I heard growing up, books I read on Chicana feminism, and books on Texas history written from Tejano and Mexican American perspectives.

STEVE TOASE: As a collection there are many inspirations behind the stories, but some of the main themes are grief, loss and inevitability. Rather than the jump scare I tend to write a sense that the story is heading to an outcome and that feeling of helplessness (which I think is more horrifying) builds the terror in the story.

For specific stories I tend to draw on lots of different sources. These include family hobbies and day trips, as well as places we’ve visited. Folklore has always been a huge influence on my writing, so the myth of Baba Yaga found its way into The Jaws of Ouroboros, and traditional ideas about borders inspired Grenzen, a story set on the motorway between West Germany and West Berlin at the time of the Cold War.

EDEN ROYCE: Thank you so much! It feels like it’s taken forever, but it’s finally here!

Root Magic is a Southern Gothic novel set in 1963 in my home state of South Carolina. While it was written for a middle-grade age group, readers of various ages can enjoy this take of magic and mystery, haints and hags, all woven together with historical themes still relevant today; racism, school integration, police brutality, and a return to the practices of folk magic and herbalism.

I read and watch movies in my (ever dwindling) spare time and it has always been difficult to see rootwork and conjure magic portrayed on screen and in books as evil. Especially by people who don’t know the reasoning behind why these practices have such negative connotations.

It goes back to colonization where people were enslaved and brought from various countries on the African continent through the Transatlantic Slave Trade to what is now the United States. Enslavers wouldn’t allow these people to practice their religions or spiritual rituals under penalty of severe abuse, even death. Enslaved people were also not given medicines. So these disenfranchised people had to hide their prayers, ceremonies, their use of herbs and roots from those enslavers. And when you hide to do something, even something innocent, your actions are seen as wrong.

I wanted to do my part to show these traditional medicines and practices aren’t the evil many take them to be. So I wrote Root Magic to show rootwork in the manner it was always intended: a way to protect and heal the rootworker and those they loved.

V. CASTRO: The book I would like to talk about is The Queen of The Cicadas from Flame Tree Press. When the reboot of Candyman was announced I thought of what a Latinx version would be like. Immediately my mind went to my great grandparents who were migrant workers. The experiences of Mexican Americans and Mexicans are not often told through our own voices and I wanted to do that. BUT HORROR.

I also want to mention it began as a novella and morphed into a novel after multiple rejections.

MARIA HASKINS: Six Dreams About the Train is my short story collection. It contains 21 stories, 2 of them previously unpublished, and I’m ridiculously excited that Trepidatio Publishing picked it up. I owe a big debt of gratitude to author Angela Slatter who encouraged, supported, and helped me get the collection together in 2020 when I was dealing with a lot of stuff in addition to the pandemic. It was a tough year, but working on that collection, and finishing the two unpublished stories for it, was one of the things that helped keep me going.

S.L. EDWARDS: Thank you! Well, The Death of An Author is a collection of weird fantasy and Cthulhu mythos. They are stories that I liked, but did not fit with the overall tone of my debut collection, Whiskey and Other Unusual Ghosts. The stories have a pulpier feel than the stories in Whiskey, skewing more towards Clark Ashton Smith than Edgar Allan Poe.

If I were to pitch it, I would say the book has sword and sorcery, weird westerns, vampires, dragons (lots of dragons) and overall feels on the whole more optimistic than “Whiskey” did. The characters fight back, more like action stars than terrified horror protagonists. You have gunslingers, pizza delivery drivers with combat training, hospice nurses, and even a telepathic shark monster.

The second half of the collection really focuses on what I call my “Congressman Marsh cycle,” which spun out of my political panic in 2016 and thereafter. Most of those stories will be original to this collection and were sort of responses to the news that I saw. They are, admittedly, much harder stories to read now and I do sort of expect some ridiculous one star reviews on Amazon motivated by some people who are unwilling to admit that they saw the same damn things we all saw. But I can’t do much to stop that.

How long did your new book take to write? Did anything happen along the way that changed the course of the book or its release?

GABY TRIANA: I wrote MOON CHILD across four months in 2020 between ghostwriting projects.

ZIN E. ROCKLYN: In total, I’d say the book took about two months to write, but spread over about two years, lol. I had a R&R (revise and resubmit) that took some time for me to find my way through, but I managed!

EV KNIGHT: The book took about three months to write and one to edit. I took a month-long break while writing it to write my novella Dead Eyes for Unnerving’s Rewind or Die series.

Covid, of course seemed to affect everything when it came to the publishing part, but also, there was a lot of political and civil unrest in this country for awhile and it just didn’t feel right to be publicizing my book when attention needed to be drawn to liberty and justice FOR ALL.

REGINA GARZA MITCHELL: It took me about a year and a half to write this fairly short novella. My day job is pretty demanding (and is actually a day/night/weekend job since I teach evenings and online), and part of that work involves research and writing. That doesn’t leave much time or space for other types of writing, so my fiction writing time is pretty limited. As I was writing, I was also working on a research project that influenced the trajectory of the book, so you’ll see some nods to Gloria Anzaldúa in the story. It took longer than expected for me to write the book, and I had to ask for an extension…and then COVID hit, and my writing time went out the window. So I submitted my book quite a while after the original deadline, but Jarod and Patrick at Death’s Head were incredibly kind about it and easy to work with.

STEVE TOASE: It’s taken a few years to get to the point where I felt happy pitching a short story collection. Basically, I wanted to have enough material to be able to make a choice rather than publish everything I’d ever written. The past few years have been good in terms of selling stories. I think the big development for me in terms of the book’s direction was having stories in Shadow and Tall Trees 8 and Weird Horror #1. This meant I was hitting that sweet spot for Undertow; getting the right note of weirdness and horror.

EDEN ROYCE: I wrote the first draft during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Root Magic didn’t start out life as a novel. I initially wrote it as a collection of short stories because the idea of writing long form fiction was so staggering to me I needed an abbreviated time – and apparently an international writing event – to push through and get the work completed. I’d written up my outline/notes beforehand and wrote furiously for a month. After that, I let the manuscript sit a while then wrote sections to connect the separate stories into a novel.

As far as things that happened along the way, I had a title change and had my release date pushed back from Fall 2020 to January 2021.

V. CASTRO: The first draft took me a few months to write. I’m a fast first drafter, but after multiple rejections it became clear I should expand the story to novel length.

Never get stuck on rejections because sometimes it is exactly what you or the story may need!

At the same time American Dirt was released so I had a lot to say about identity and hate. Many of my emotions are expressed in the book.

MARIA HASKINS: The collection includes stories from 2015 and onward. Putting it together in 2020 was a challenge for a lot of reasons, but it was also a project that felt doable for me. I had a really hard time working on brand new fiction because the year was such a dumpster fire, but going through my old stories and putting the finishing touches on the two new stories was less of a challenge. It was also interesting for me to look at my work as “a collection”. It made me feel a sense of pride and accomplishment as a writer that was sort of slipping away during that year.

S.L. EDWARDS: The book, ironically, was ready to go almost immediately after Whiskey and Other Unusual Ghosts. I think one thing we should talk about more, though, and I know this happens to other writers but I don’t see it being normalized is what you might call “the first book blues.” After Whiskey’s publication I was feeling much more confidant about my writing. Maybe in retrospect, overconfident. I’d like to think I wasn’t arrogant, but I had much bigger expectations than were justified.

Then, for reasons beyond anyone’s control, the publisher had to close and I was left in 2020 what felt like entirely alone. Something similar happened with The Death of An Author, in that there was an interested publisher, but the deal just didn’t get worked out. Again, no fault of anyone. But indie press does not make a lot of money for the most part.

So the release was delayed. New stories were added. A lot of new material was added, ironically some of it coming from out of my really dark moments in 2020. I was, for instance, one of the last passengers to come back from Bogotá on a commercial flight before the world shut down. I had only learned in one day that Colombia’s government planned to close the country and my airline did not notify me in advance that they had cancelled my flight. So, the day was just one of dread and panic I’d never really experienced before. It’s a very, very visceral and hard memory for me to this day. One day, I’d like to go back to Bogotá to get a bit of closure.

But this informed stories like “The Last Mayflies Out of Bogotá,” which will be original to the collection. 2020 also informed some of the rewrites of earlier stories which are included in the collection. It did not, ironically, inform my story “A Slower Way of Starving,” a story about two pizza delivery drivers in a town contained during the spread of a pandemic. That story was written for the now infamous pizza anthology, well before COVID. It was rejected, but now you all get to read it if you want to.

And that’s it for Part One in our month-long roundtable! Head on back next week as we discuss more about these authors’ fabulous new books!

Happy reading!