My guest today is Bram Stoker Award-winning author Hailey Piper, who (just like Premee Mohamed a few weeks ago) has not one, but two releases coming up! An abduction novel called She Isn’t Herself Tonight and a horror novel about movies, This Movie Doesn't End the Way We Want.

You can find Hailey at Instagram and Bluesky.

In some personal news, my short story Audit of the Collapse and Convalescence of Minds is now out at Reactor! I’d be a lot happy if you give it a read. It’s also available as an ebook wherever ebooks are sold.

Tell me more about She Isn’t Herself Tonight and what made you write it.

She Isn't Herself Tonight follows Rabbit, a two-time alien abductee who at 30 years old tells her live-in boyfriend about her experience, only for him to dump her and kick her out, sending her life into a spiral of heartbreak, body transformation, strange encounters, and malevolent reflections as she anticipates a third alien abduction.

I was struggling between different concepts at one point, and Rabbit came about amid the characters I was working on. She was immediately captivating in her mixed sense of pain and hope, and I had told myself if I ever wrote a weird girl lit book, it was going to involve alien abductions, for the sake of kid me and her UFO obsession. It's out October 27th from Saga Press/Simon and Schuster.

Now I want to know more about This Movie Doesn't End the Way We Want. When I was starting to write fiction, I remember I wrote a horror piece set in a movie theater. It was a very rookie piece, so I'm quseite curious to see it well done in your book!

This Movie Doesn't End the Way We Want takes place first in 1994, when three girls go to the movies to see an obscure film and only one girl comes out, and in 2024, when fresh disappearances show the survivor that the movie isn't done with her yet.

It's based on my 2020 short story "Toad Man, Toad Man," which stuck in my head (possibly because of its song). I started thinking about what was really going on in that theater and what happened afterward. Writing the novel let me explore everything beyond the story, especially how the survivor is holding up (not great), and it also let me show my love of cinema. Sometimes horror fiction isn't just about sharing our fears but about slightly ruining the things we love.

You have a large oeuvre of horror fiction. This is very impressive and inspiring. To which themes do you find yourself coming back in your stories?

My four pillars in writing are queerness, weirdness, empathy, and awe. I value sincerity in what I read, so I value it in what I write, too. I think we're frequently encouraged to run from our feelings and emotional self-awareness, and I don't think that helps us understand ourselves or our connections to others. For where I end up getting to at times, I find myself working with malleable reality, centering queer folk as default rather than as othered by persecutors, and how we lose the future when we fail to address the undead tyrannies still haunting from the past.

What is a piece of fiction that you think didn’t get enough attention?

Countess by Suzan Palumbo. I think people missed this because they hear "lesbian Caribbean Count of Monte Cristo in space" and get a different, quippy concept in mind rather than the grim, emotional, uncompromising, confrontational novella this is, one that exposes the hollow nature of certain popular narratives. Horror fans should absolutely be giving it a shot.

How do you think the horror genre as a whole evolved (or is evolving) over time?

Horror continues to reflect us and our anxieties, and I love to see those develop, such as incorporating defunct businesses in the way of fallen decadence in the Gothic, or increased consideration of technology, or the crumbling dating scene. I hope to see more evolution in the coming years, such as hauntings that reflect a change in status quo, or slashers moving on from repeating their predecessors into giving badges to the killers. As times change, so too will horror.