Queer horror paints my worldview, and I write my stories not only to feature queer characters but to breathe queer themes of love, isolation, monstrous exile, and transformation, to name a few, all of which I bound tightly into the pages of Queen of Teeth.Īt its core, Queen of Teeth is a body horror story. I cannot engage with the genre of honesty without that honest perspective, and so I wear my queerness on one sleeve and my horror on the other. And even if I didn’t state it so bluntly, it’s how I operate on a fundamental level. My motto or slogan, whatever you’d like to call it, since I hopped into the crypts of today’s horror literature, has been “Make Horror Gay AF.” It’s my way of reclaiming the word “gay” from my adolescence, when it was the go-to for kids as an insult, and turning it into an all-consuming rainbow beast. We queer folk have been made out as monsters in the past, which we nowadays like to have fun with, and we’re used to escaping, surviving, and sometimes battling monsters too. Which is part of why I find horror to be fundamentally queer, like me. Horror is often about monsters, but it’s also about surviving or standing up to them.

I find catharsis through its explorations of humanity, its opportunities to process trauma and sometimes escape from it, where the out-of-control terror of the real world fades behind a fear we choose to experience and even enjoy. Horror is healing, or at least it has been for me.

There is truth in its monstrosities and what it says about the world and our emotions. Ever since I can remember, I’ve loaded my brain on Godzilla, Goosebumps, Stephen King, and everything else I could get my hands on, probably too young sometimes ( Night of the Living Dead isn’t exactly for eight-year-olds, allegedly, but that’s the same age I plucked up Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, so appropriateness is anyone’s guess).īut beyond the creature features, ghost stories, and the lovely raw chill of terrifying atmospheres and imaginations, I feel horror is the genre of honesty. I hail from the haunted woods of New York, but these days I live with my wife in Maryland, where our paranormal research is classified.Īs might be obvious, I adore the hell out of horror.

Hailey Piper here, hello! I’m the author of horror novellas The Worm and His Kings, Benny Rose the Cannibal King, and The Possession of Natalie Glasgow the short story collection Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy over 60 published short stories appearing in places such as Daily Science Fiction, Flash Fiction Online, and Year’s Best Hardcore Horror and most recently, my first novel, Queen of Teeth, from Strangehouse Books.

The Worm and His Kings by Hailey Piper