Christina Henry writes every book by hand. All 19 of them. Not notes. Not outlines. The whole thing, longhand, in a notebook, every time. That was the first thing that broke my brain a little. It was not the last.
She sat down with me for just over an hour, and I walked away thinking about our conversation for days. Not just because she's brilliant (she is), but because she has this way of talking about writing and stories and fear that made me feel like someone finally said out loud what I've been trying to articulate for years about why we read horror in the first place.
We talked about her origin story (she started writing her first "novel" by hand in a notebook at age 12), her unexpected path to publication, the way she eventually had to fight against being typecast as "the retelling girl," and what she's working on next, including a new book called Pinfeathers that she says is going to make people go, "What is this?" Honestly that just makes me want it more.
But there was one moment in the conversation that I keep coming back to. We were talking about why horror works. Like, really works, and why we keep returning to it.
Here's that stretch of my talk with Christina:
Rachel: So you brought up One Yellow Eye by Lee Radford as a book you think will be a classic. Tell me why.
Christina: It's about a zombie apocalypse, but the real story is this woman who is a doctor, and her husband gets infected. And instead of killing him or turning him into the authorities, she hides him in her apartment while she tries to find a cure. The book is so much about love and devotion and when can we let people go. I've kind of wished I'd heard more about it. I feel like not enough people are talking about this book.
Rachel: That is exactly what the best horror does. The zombie or the haunted house or the possession, those are just the mask. The sugar-coated candy that makes the story palpable. The real horror is something like: I'm a single mom. The person I love most in the whole world is dying. I have the tools to help because I'm a doctor, and I still don't know if I can save them.
Christina: Right. And that's why we keep reading it and why we keep watching it, and why when people look at us like we're weird transgressive creatures, we're like: actually, it's a cool club. Maybe you want to be in it.
Rachel: Yes. Exactly. We're all really empathetic and talking about really hard stuff. Come sit at our table.
She's right. The genre doesn't ask us to be comfortable with monsters. It asks us to be honest about ourselves. Horror hands us the darkest possible version of ordinary human experiences, grief, powerlessness, love that won't let go, and it wraps them in something fantastical enough that we can bear to look at them directly.
That's not transgression. That's empathy, dressed up in a costume.
We covered her full origin story (the Gymboree phone call that changed her life is genuinely one of my favorite publishing anecdotes I've ever heard), the way she writes without plotting, why she almost got trapped in the retelling box and how she got out of it, and what she's watching and reading that she thinks will be a classic twenty-five years from now.
And if you've been sleeping on Christina Henry's work, check out The Place Where they Buried Your Heart and let me know what you think.
See you next week!