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Includes 𝘼 𝙏𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙙 𝙞𝙣 𝙏𝙝𝙧𝙚𝙚 𝘼𝙘𝙩𝙨 and 𝙏𝙚𝙘𝙝 𝙋𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙘𝙚 𝙏𝙧𝙤𝙪𝙗𝙡𝙚𝙨.
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𝘼 𝙏𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙙 𝙞𝙣 𝙏𝙝𝙧𝙚𝙚 𝘼𝙘𝙩𝙨 + 𝙏𝙚𝙘𝙝 𝙋𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙘𝙚 𝙏𝙧𝙤𝙪𝙗𝙡𝙚𝙨 are in the "English isn't even my 1st language!" bundle.
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#SFF #QueerAuthor

Two of my books are part of the "English isn't even my 1st language!" bundle on Itch-io.
20 stories by multilingual authors for just $17.

Includes 𝘼 𝙏𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙙 𝙞𝙣 𝙏𝙝𝙧𝙚𝙚 𝘼𝙘𝙩𝙨 and 𝙏𝙚𝙘𝙝 𝙋𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙘𝙚 𝙏𝙧𝙤𝙪𝙗𝙡𝙚𝙨.
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Author Spotlight: Black Sapphic Vampire Romance author Liza Wemakor

Liza Wemakor (she/they) is a writer and a Ph.D. candidate in UC Riverside’s English Department. Her fiction has been published in Strange Horizons, Anathema Magazine, Baffling Magazine, and elsewhere. Her debut novella, Loving Safoa, was published by Neon Hemlock Press in February 2024.

AUTHOR LINKS:

Website: www.lizawemakor.com

Instagram: @lizawemakor
Bluesky: @lizawemakor.bsky.social

Book Link: Loving Safoa (Neon Hemlock)

Book Elevator Pitch for readers/book clubs

If you enjoy paranormal romance with literary stylings, you will enjoy Loving Safoa!

Your novella, Loving Safoa, is out now with Neon Hemlock. What were your main inspirations behind this sapphic vampire novella?

I wanted to write a vampire story that reflected underrepresented elements of my worldview. It seemed sensible to lean into Safoa’s experience of being an undocumented immigrant in the Western world across a long expanse of time, and to demonstrate how this extended period of uncertainty and precarity forces Safoa into survival mode. Meanwhile, she is also recovering from the trauma of being held captive by a sadistic colonizer for a number of years, as well as experiencing new kinds of freedom in New York, and eventually Maryland. 

Cynthia, on the other hand, feels orphaned — she is navigating adulthood without her mother or any other parent, yet becoming a maternal figure to her students. She also feels a level of insecurity about her connection to her motherland, as a Ghanaian-American woman, and faces this head-on in her relationship with Safoa, who she imagines as a pure embodiment of African identity. Safoa and Cynthia’s lives are quite complex, and together they tell a story of diasporic reunification. 

The novella features woven stories from different places and time periods, from 18th-19thC Ghana to a near-future Maryland. How did you decide what segments of these characters’ lives to include, and were there scenes and times that you played with but ultimately decided to cut?

I wanted to maintain a focus on Cynthia and Safoa’s romance, so I omitted some portions of their lives before they met; I may have explored more of those past moments in a longer project, like a novel, but a novella length felt right for this story. I wanted the passage of time to be a bit surreal, because it is surreal to have lives as long as Cynthia and Safoa’s. Time itself and the details of their lives are a blur.  

I was seriously toying with showing glimpses of Safoa’s life in London — her lovers, and her brief skirmishes with other European predators. I would’ve emphasized how she was simultaneously powerful and vulnerable to exploitative people, which motivated her departure to the U.S. after a few decades. I didn’t include these scenes because Cynthia may have been lost in the larger narrative — there wouldn’t have been as much of a balanced representation of their lives, and Safoa would have taken over the story. 

How does vampirism and the donor concept work in your novella, and is this based on any folklore? 

I was very inspired by Jewelle Gomez’s approach to vampire networks in The Gilda Stories — vampire communities that are explicitly political, and whose politics have been informed by their previous experiences of being hurt, exploited, and truly loved.

I was also inspired by Octavia Butler’s approaches to both community and feeding in Fledgling. Shori depends upon a host of human companions and vampires while navigating a white supremacist vampire hierarchy. Shori’s companions also gain a lot from her presence, in a symbiotic fashion.

Tamara Jerée wrote beautifully about these dynamics in her Strange Horizons essay, “How to Make a Family: Queer Blood Bonds in Black Feminist Vampire Novels“.

There was a hint of Ghanaian folklore in the novella, though I took creative liberties. Safoa and a character named Yaba occasionally refer to the first vampire they met as ‘ɔbonsam’ — or a demonic entity. In some Ghanaian folklore, there are vampiric, humanoid creatures called ɔbonsam or sasabonsam that have very long hair, like Safoa does at some point, and live / feed on people in the forest. I didn’t opt to include other details like sharp teeth and bat-like features in my depiction of vampires. Tongue feeding was more fun for a smutty sapphic story.

At some point in my life I encountered myths related to the obayifo (another West African vampire) as well, and I took liberties with the factoid that they are phosphorescent, i.e. when Cynthia noticed a blue aura around Safoa’s body.

Can you tell us more about Cynthia – where did she come from, and what made you set her as a schoolteacher in the early 1990s at the start of this novella? How did you develop her character, her voice, and her desires (e.g. to be an “everlasting elder”)?

I am one of those people who insists on a vaguely-defined, somewhat secretive spirituality that undergirds my writing practices. In the spring of 2021, Cynthia and Safoa appeared to me almost effortlessly, and I was compelled to write about them. Not long before that, I’d gotten into the Ph.D. program I am at the end of now, and I started writing feverishly before my time and energy became more limited. Cynthia and Safoa were fascinating to me, and their chemistry was palpable; at times I blushed when writing and editing their sex scenes, because it felt like an intrusion upon their privacy. 

Cynthia’s life resembles my life in some ways, but not all. I haven’t lost my mother, and she (Cynthia) has spent more of her life in New York City and Maryland than I have, but her anxieties about her authenticity as a Ghanaian diasporan and her interest in teaching certainly resonate with me. I am sure that some of my own subjectivity informed how I wrote Cynthia, though a lot of it was subconscious. 

I had a moodboard for both Cynthia and Safoa, and Cynthia’s moodboard included images of the actresses Nicole Beharie and Moses Ingram, and the model Dede Mansro. I was interested in channeling not only the softness of their appearances, but the moodiness and subdued seductiveness they are able to convey. 

Regarding the choice to begin in the 1990s: it was a perfect fit both aesthetically and politically. The 90s was a period of intense political maturation for educators, artists, and the general public. There was, especially for queer black people, queer people of color, a mingling of death and renewal — an increasing awareness of identity (and its constructedness) mingling with the optimism of entering a new millenium. The perfect setting for politically conscious vampires to come into themselves.

Can you tell us more about Safoa, the vampire, her Ghanaian roots, her relationship with tattoos and her place in her communities across time as a body artist, and how she came to be shaped on the page? What was the character development process like for her, and was there research involved to craft her journey from 1799 onwards – if so, what research did you do?

A pattern that is emerging in my answers to these questions is that I placed Cynthia and Safoa in historical moments that were hotbeds for social resistance. I wanted Safoa to live through multiple eras of Black and African resistance, and I wanted readers to see her putting in the work to pursue what she saw as her purpose in life, which was being a body artist from the beginning, and then evolved, through meeting Cynthia, to include more social pursuits. 

In writing Safoa, I revisited a few books from a class I took in college about pre-colonial African history, and I read a few books and articles about West African empires and West African mythology. I also made an effort to research some of the geography (landscapes and flora) of West Africa, and brushed up my knowledge of some Twi terms and phrases, which I grew up hearing from my maternal family. Ultimately, only some of these details made it onto the page, because making the world feel lived in required me to look at these landscapes through Safoa’s eyes.

What research did you do for the different settings in the novella, and what sociopolitical/ideological projections were you going with for the development of your near-future Maryland setting to avoid it being a utopia/dystopia?

I wanted each of the major settings of the novella, 19th century West Africa, 1990s New York City, and 1990s / 21st century Maryland, to reflect major political movements of their time. Safoa’s time in the part of West Africa we now know as Ghana was inflected with rising anticolonial sentiments. New York City is and was sensational for the community organizing within its boroughs, though it was not without the risk of violence (see: the 2003 murder of Sakia Gunn in the nearby Newark, New Jersey). Like New York City, the DMV is and was a major locus of queer arts organizing (especially literary arts) and queer political organizing, which I aimed to reflect in Cynthia and Safoa’s commune involvements. 

I wouldn’t say I was consciously avoiding the story being classified as a utopia or dystopia, and this defiance of categories came about because I had naturalistic inclinations in the writing of this novella. I wanted my writing to reflect how deeply traumatic and how stunningly gorgeous people can be. For the Maryland commune in particular, I wanted to hint at the fact that there were conflicts commune members had already worked through before Cynthia and Safoa arrived, and working through these conflicts laid the groundwork for Cynthia and Safoa to soar, as cooperative leaders in their new community.

Would you ever consider expanding upon the story of Cynthia and Safoa, perhaps in a connected story, and/or are you moving on to other projects (if so, what’s next?!)

I would love to write a short story or novelette focused on Safoa’s time in London / Europe, when the time seems right to do so. I’ve written several short stories that I’m proud of since Loving Safoa came out in 2024, and it’s just been a matter of finding the right magazine at the right time for the stories that haven’t been published yet. I also have a few short stories that are in partial states, that I am slowly finishing as my dissertation takes priority. 

I also have a novel project that is half-drafted! The novel project follows a polarizing, and potentially revolutionary, celebrity musician. 

Beyond my own fiction, I am a nonfiction editor and finance manager for Anathema Magazine, a venue dedicated to speculation fiction by and for queer people of color that is relaunching after a 3-year hiatus — yay!  

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Author Spotlight: Black Sapphic Vampire Romance author Liza Wemakor

Meet Liza Wemakor (she/they), author of paranormal vampire romance, LOVING SAFOA, out now with Neon Hemlock. This multi-POV novella spans continents and eras, and Cynthia & Safoa’s romance stands the test of time.

Author Spotlight: Vampire Fiction Author Lucius Valiant

Meet Lucius Valiant, a Danish-British author, and learn more about his series, The Thornhill Vampire Chronicles.

Author Spotlight: Vampire Fiction Author Talia Wall

Meet Talia Wall and her dystopian vampire series, ‘Until Equinox’ trilogy! Books 1&2 are out now, and Book 3 is coming soon.

Author Spotlight: Vampire Fiction Author Eule Grey

Meet Eule Grey (she/they), a Sculpture artist, disability activist, and disabled author of queer, sparkly books. We talk about disability and sapphic elements in their work.

Author Spotlight: Horror & Vampire Fiction Author C. Lenz

C. Lenz is a Canadian author and scientist who lives with her wife Zoey in Hamilton, Ontario. In this spotlight interview, she discusses her monster-vampire slasher, Thyrst Festival.

Author Spotlight: Vampire Fiction Author Frankie Sutton

Frankie Sutton writes paranormal and urban fantasy, and talks to us about her novel, Vampiric Crush.

Author Spotlight: Gothic Weird Fiction author Nikoline Kaiser

Nikoline Kaiser (she/her) resides in Denmark, and writes short stories, novels and poetry. She has published several pieces in both English and Danish, and been longlisted for the Lee Smith Novel Prize. She writes about grief, love, horror, sexuality and one time about a woman turning into a tree.

AUTHOR LINKS:

Website: nikolinekaiser.dk
Social Media: @nikolinekaiser on Instagram, bluesky and reddit

Read a free sample:
The Dreaming of Man (Amazon Look Inside feature)

Book Club/Reader pitch for The Dreaming of Man:

A queer spin on Lovecraft meets Shakespeare’s Macbeth in a historical crime-turned-horror novella.

Your novella, The Dreaming of Man, was released in 2025. What was the writing journey like from first idea to query-ready?

I wrote the novella all the way back in 2019, and I actually wrote the first draft – which hasn’t changed a whole lot, aside from being cleaned up – all in one afternoon. I don’t think I took any breaks. It was one of those stories that had to come out all at once, or I feared I wouldn’t finish it.

It received a lot of rejections over the next couple of years, until it landed with dave at Neon Hemlock Press.

It sounds tacky, but I truly believe it found it’s right home with Neon, and the experience I had with the press has been wonderful. I had huge input in the final version, including getting to pick the artist to make the cover — J.J. Epping, a dear friend and someone I knew could nail the creepy feeling I wanted the cover to convey.

What are the pros and cons of being a Danish author writing in English, and what advice would you give others writing for an Anglophonic market?

The biggest con is definitely my own insecurities about playing with the language; I feel I can’t get away with as much, because publishers and readers might perceive it as a mistake instead of a deliberate bending of the language rules.

And then there’s the time differences for events, and not being as physically close to the market, particularly for events.

For anyone else in the same position, I would recommend familiarizing yourself as much as possible with both the Anglophonic and your local publishing world. Some works might fit better in one cultural context than the other.

What are your main Weird Fiction and Gothic Horror influences, and what are your favourite themes and elements from these genres? Which can readers expect to find in your novella (if you can let us know in a non-spoilery way)?

I am actually fairly new to these genres; I used to avoid horror at all costs, until I fell over some video essays on how much queer exploration there often is in horror. And then we started reading gothic fiction at university, and I fell in love with the genre.

Ann Radcliffe’s works – especially “The Italian” – are amazing and show so much of what still works in horror today. And for anyone writing in these genres, I recommend reading “The Castle of Otranto” by Horace Walpole, the first every Gothic horror. It reads as fairly silly now, but it is basically one long checklist of what to include in a classic Gothic story.

“The Dreaming of Man” contains a bit of body horror, which has always fascinated me. People’s relationship with their bodies, the things we think of as “horror” about bodies across history and cultures, can vary so much.

And then I’m just a big fan of the eerie, which is something Radcliffe nails, and which always unsettles me more than some big, scary monster. Not that a big, scary monster isn’t fun, too. I’m a big Godzilla fan.

How did the title come to be, and were there any alternatives you considered?

The title was inspired by a passage in Macbeth, which is also included as a prelude to the beginning of my book. The last part reads: “… Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse / The curtained sleep.”

There’s a lot of layers to this quote, starting from the top: nature is dead, and sleep often seems like death to the casual observer. And then of course we dream in our sleep, and that’s both an obscuring and a revelation of the real world. And then “curtained sleep” which can be taken quite literally as a bed curtained off, creating another barrier against the real world, even on top of the barrier of sleep.

Basically, the characters have done everything they can to cut themselves off from the horribleness of the real world, but it still comes back to haunt them in their dreams.

I think that’s ultimately what horror is: not just “what if your nightmares were real?” but also “and what if you couldn’t shield yourself from them?” Not physically or mentally. And then there’s also a double-layered meaning in the title, but I’ll let the text reveal that on its own.

The working title was “Lovecraft goes Queer, Shakespeare goes Queerer”. I’m not sure that would have gone down for publishing.

The town of Osmund has been compared with Innsmouth (The Shadow Over Innsmouth, H.P. Lovecraft) and Dunsinane (Macbeth, Shakespeare) – were these conscious influences, and were there any others that inspired the setting?

Definitely very deliberate influences, especially Innsmouth. The style and feel of the town is one that permeates modern Weird Fiction and Gothic Horror, so even without reading Lovecraft, I think it can latch onto you. But there were a lot of inspirations from real life as well.

I’ve always lived in port cities, and I grew up sailing with my family, so sometimes you would arrive at some really small places, with old boats and older buildings. Thankfully never as scary as those places in fiction, but then again, we mostly went there during the summer. Things look very different in the dark, or during Fall and Winter when everything’s gray and only a few plants are still blooming.

What queer representation can readers expect in this novella, and also in your other available work?

There will almost always be at least one stray lesbian somewhere — though not always! And I try to be broad in my understanding and love for the whole queer community. I figure out myself a lot through the stories I write, even when the characters and settings have very little to do with my personal life. Fiction is both exploration and understanding, and like a dream, I think it can reflect both the reality we live in and the reality we hope to see one day. So, the answer is: mostly lesbians! Or bi women! I love women of all kinds, so I’m biased. There’s technically no lesbians confirmed in “The Dreaming of Man”, but just because I didn’t write it in the text doesn’t mean the women aren’t kissing behind-the-scenes!

Do you have anything else to plug here that is currently out or coming soon? What should readers look out for?

I have two short stories coming out, one called “Puppet Show” with Estrella Publishing, in their publication “Celestial Glossary”. It’s an introspective piece about re-defining yourself after an accident and following your stranger impulses despite what the world around you is telling you to do. It’s out January 30th.

And then later this year – date still unconfirmed – I am part of a sci-fi anthology, with a short story about people living in huge, moving, mechanical animals after the end of the world. I try to post more on my socials as we get closer to publication, so keep an eye out.

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Author Spotlight: Gothic Weird Fiction author Nikoline Kaiser

Meet Gothic Weird fiction author Nikoline Kaiser (she/her) and her novella THE DREAMING OF MAN, out with Neon Hemlock.

Author Spotlight: Paranormal Ecohorror author S.M. Mack

Meet S.M. Mack (she/her), author of DEATH VALLEY BLOOMS. Find out more about this queer ecohorror novella and how it came about!

Author Spotlight: British Gothic Horror author Laura Clarke Walker

Discover a new seaside town of Gothic secrets – COLDHARBOUR, by Laura Clarke Walker (she/they). Meet this British author and find out more about her work.

Author Spotlight: Queer Cyberpunk author A.E. Bross

Meet A.E. Bross (they/them or xe/xem), a nonbinary author of queer cyberpunk Snow White retelling, CyberSnow. Find out more about their latest novella!

Author Spotlight: Queer Cyberpunk Author Stefanie Carter (AKA Wayward Sparx/Fox N. Locke)

Meet author Stefanie Carter (they/them) who writes as Fox N. Locke and Wayward Sparx. They are a UK-based English Sci-Fi author, working on a nonfiction book about cyberpunk, and here to talk about their Trans+ collection of stories, TRANS_LUCENT.

Author Spotlight: Gothic SFF Author Morgan Dante

Meet Morgan Dante (they/them) and their body of work – Gothic, queer, and deliciously unsettling.

Author Spotlight: Paranormal Ecohorror author S.M. Mack

S.M. Mack (she/her) is a 2019 MFA recipient in popular fiction from USM Stonecoast, the 2017 first place winner of the Katherine Patterson Prize for Young Adult Writing, and a Clarion 2012 grad. Her short fiction has been published in Fireside Fiction, Vine Leaves Literary Journal’s “Best of 2015” anthology, and the Clarion class of 2012’s seven Rainbow Anthologies, among others. Her novella Death Valley Blooms is part of Neon Hemlock’s 2025 Novella Series.

AUTHOR LINKS:

Website: whatsmacksaid.com

Bluesky: @whatsmacksaid.bsky.social
Instagram: @what_smacksaid

Death Valley Blooms Links

Neon Hemlock Publishing
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Kobo

READ A SAMPLE: Amazon Look Inside Feature

PITCH FOR READERS/BOOK CLUBS:

Every decade or so, vast quantities and varieties of wildflowers bloom all at once in Death Valley. But unbeknownst to the wider world, these super blooms are powered by a woman’s life. Mar’s mother was called a decade ago, pulled underground to be used like a battery, and she herself has begun to feel Death Valley’s presence. Mar has an ace up her sleeve, though: neither she nor her brother will ever have children. Is it enough for the desert to release its grip on her family?

What was the seed for your novella, Death Valley Blooms, and how did this sprout into the novella published by Neon Hemlock?

My Clarion class put out seven charity anthologies to help raise money for attendee scholarships.

Clarion lasts for six weeks from June to August, so we challenged ourselves to write a story from scratch each year, focusing on a different color of the rainbow.

My Yellow Volume story started at the (erroneous) assumption that all dirt in the southern Californian deserts is yellow, or at least yellow-ish.

From there, I did some daydreaming about how the ground might interact with people; I went from “skinning your hands and knees when you fall down” to “what if the blood spilled from a minor injury isn’t enough? What if blood isn’t enough? What if the ground eats you whole? Why would it do that?”

By the end of the first draft I knew I had something special, but I also knew I’d never be able to tease out the subtleties hiding in there under our short timeline. So I set it aside for a few years, and picked it back up during grad school.

Within the novella are themes of consent and autonomy, but also the futility of people’s actions against a landscape that will outlast them. Where did these themes come from, and why explore them here?

One of my childhood refrains was “I can do it myself!” even when that was not objectively true. It insists on boundary-setting for both consent and autonomy—anyone who overrides one will inevitably override the other.

Death Valley Blooms’ main character, Mar, is very much a product of that mentality. She is determined to break her family’s curse, even though generations of women have succumbed to Death Valley’s call. She fights for her autonomy and nurtures a lifelong grudge against the curse for stealing her ability to consent. Because, of course, that’s what curses do: render those trapped under its power unable to protect their emotional, mental, and physical selves.

I also spent a lot of time thinking about climate change versus an individual’s effect on their environment. The physical world does not care how frightened or overwhelmed you and I are by wildfires, flash floods, or water scarcity. But if one small part of the world—Death Valley, in this case—reached out and demanded payment or help from an individual, how could we possibly say no? Even culpability and guilt aside, how could a single family of individuals possibly resist nature’s force? They can’t.

What to you was psychologically interesting about a family dealing with constant absences and returns? 

I had a lot of undiagnosed anxiety when I began writing Death Valley Blooms, and one of the things I obsessed over was my parents’ ages. I have a good relationship with both, and for a year or more I just could not see past the knowledge that I’d outlive them, and that that was somehow the best outcome.

One of the more tragic ideas I couldn’t shake was the prospect of losing time—losing years—that could be spent in one another’s company: how much better would it be to “only” lose your mother (or sister, or aunt) for twenty years, rather than forever? Furthermore, how difficult would it be to accept and move through the resulting grief, then have those feelings and growth invalidated when the missing loved one returns? What does that do to a close-knit family when it happens over and over again?

What LGBTQIA+ rep can readers expect to find in this novella, and why is this rep important to you to include?

There’s no reason not to make characters queer in one way or another—or rather, there’s no more reason to make them queer than to make them straight. A story doesn’t hinge on the gender or sexual orientation of side characters, and even “boring,” everyday representation is a good thing.

For example, Mar’s closest friend is openly bisexual; she’s divorced from a man and dating a woman. It comes up in casual conversation a few times, but that’s all.

I identify as simply queer now, but I spent many years identifying as asexual, then as aro/ace (and so on and so forth as my perception of myself changed), while living in a near-constant state of fury and frustration at how hard it was to find ace main characters at all, let along ace main characters outside romantic subplots.

I didn’t plan for Mar’s aro/ace identity to become a strength, but it’s an important part of who she is. Part of why she’s so family-oriented is that she doesn’t care about finding a romantic partner. Her family is perfect the way it is, if only she could defy Death Valley and bring everyone together again.

The other queer rep I’d like to highlight is Mar’s aunt, Lucy, who is a trans woman. She’s got her own issues going on over the course of the story, but she doesn’t stand in the spotlight, either. I wanted to create a path for her to simply exist as a regular person dealing with a family curse and an increasingly desperate niece. (“Regular” is doing a lot of work here, I know.) But I wanted to remind readers that the environment does not give a rat’s behind about human-imposed boundaries, whether those be gender strictures or geographical boundaries.

Death Valley’s curse falls on the women of Mar and Lucy’s family, and both Mar and Lucy are women.

Death Valley is a character in the novella, much like the human characters. What was it like to develop this aspect of the novella? 

As a younger writer, I participated in a workshop where one colleague had a television background, and we talked a lot about the “white room syndrome,” where a scene entirely ignores its setting. The discussion left an impression, and over time my writing evolved from dutifully including setting descriptions to centering the setting alongside the characters.

Our surroundings in real life aren’t sentient, but speculative fiction is the perfect place to look beyond that natural end place. I’ve really loved trying to get into the headspace required to embody an inhuman, unpredictable, and nearly all-powerful true-neutral character, a vast ecosystem with little to no way of communicating directly with my human characters—sometimes I think of Death Valley’s character as alien as the actual location feels when visiting. And I’m definitely going to keep doing this in future stories!

For example, I have another story I’m working on about eating disorders with a gargoyle sent to live in exile in a different California desert.

Do you have anything that you want to share with readers, anything out now, or coming soon?

I’m in the middle of a companion novella for Death Valley Blooms! It picks up slightly before the end of Death Valley Blooms and is from a different character’s point of view. I have a beautiful cover created by the incomparable Rose Mayer, who also did the original, and I’ll be releasing the companion story sometime during summer 2026. I’ll be posting updates on bsky and via my author newsletter, which readers can sign up for on my website.

Like This? Try These!

• Author Spotlight: Queer SFF Author M.T. Envy Date August 27, 2025 In relation to Author Interview
• January 2026 Media Round-Up Date February 1, 2026 In relation to media round-up
• The Sussex Fretsaw Massacre Date November 4, 2023 In relation to Book Review
• #AmReading Shout Out! Paranormal Debut SOUL’S CHOICE by Kerri Davidson (@bagoflettuce) Date October 8, 2019 In relation to Book Review
• Author Spotlight: Vampire Fiction Author Frankie Sutton Date February 28, 2025 In relation to Author Interview
• Author Spotlight: SFF Short Fiction Author Elad Haber Date July 10, 2024 In relation to Author Interview

Author Spotlight: British Gothic Horror author Laura Clarke Walker

Laura Clarke Walker (she/they) is a writer, teacher, and lover of all things Gothic. When she’s not immersed in the world of Coldharbour, she can be found drinking espressos darker than the night, listening to podcasts in other languages, and running around her local lakes.

AUTHOR LINKS:

Website: lauraclarkewalker.com

Instagram: @lauraclarkewalker

Amazon: Coldharbour

PITCH FOR READERS/BOOK CLUBS:

Three generations preyed upon by pure evil. Two lost souls drawn to each other in the darkness. One compelling story of love, loyalty, and betrayal. A spellbinding mix of murder, magic, and romance, Coldharbour is a thrilling Gothic fantasy full of Nineties nostalgia.

Your debut novel Coldharbour is out now with Rowanvale Books – congrats on your debut! Can you tell us about your indie publishing journey from the premise of your book to publication? How did we get here?

Thank you so much! Well, this is a long story, as I came up with the first character in 2005 and wrote the first draft in 2009. However, I only started taking Coldharbour seriously as a project to be published around 2021, especially as it had become a very personal story to which I really wanted to do justice.

In 2024, I queried agents for a while, but ultimately I decided that maintaining a certain level of creative control was more important to me than gaining literary representation. It’s a completely different journey for every author, but I’m so excited to be hybrid publishing and for Coldharbour to be now out in the wild!

Coldharbour is a Gothic paranormal mystery with 1990s nostalgia, set in Essex. What brought these elements together for you in terms of genre, tone, and setting?

I’m really passionate about the state of British seaside towns, which have been on the decline for a long time, and decayed settings are a huge feature of the Gothic.

Also, we think of the Millennium and we think of looking towards the future, but I can also remember the dread over the millennium bug and how everyone became extremely retrospective – there was a sense of the fin de siècle to everything.

Plus, the paranormal was having a heyday in the Nineties – shows like Charmed and Buffy were an important influence on me growing up, so I definitely pay homage to them in Coldharbour.

What sort of representation can readers expect, and what makes this rep important to you as the author?

There’s a whole variety of representation in Coldharbour, including a range of sexualities and gender identities, ethnic backgrounds, and neurodivergences and disabilities. It can sound a bit like I’m ‘box-ticking’, but it’s just my reality as a neurodivergent Queer person of colour.

I really craved representation growing up and I think the way that the sociopolitical landscape is shifting at the moment, hearing from diverse voices is more important than ever.

What is your favourite trope/theme that appears in this novel? Can you tell us about any that you play with or subvert?

My absolute favourite trope in Coldharbour is the haunted house that reflects the protagonist’s psyche, which really is as Gothic as it gets.

The house in question, 1 St Augustine’s, is loosely based on some that I’ve lived in and I really feel that it, like the town, is a character in its own right. There are locked doors, mysterious bloodstains, things in wells which shouldn’t be, all hinting at the dark family secrets Alex must try to unravel throughout the novel.

However, the love story between Alex and Elizabeth is unconventional: Alex is a single mother in her thirties and Elizabeth has certainly had her own life, so they come together with a certain maturity (and reticence) that comes from being a bit older compared to a lot of relationships depicted in fantasy works.

Also, I really try to avoid the standard romance tropes around love triangles and miscommunication, mostly because the characters have bigger things to worry about!

The most significant trope I subvert is ‘bury your gays’, in which Queer characters tend to die in service of the plot or their loved one’s character development. It is a harmful trope that’s still used prolifically, so while Elizabeth does die, it’s only temporary – because her Power is resurrection. Whether the resurrection always goes to plan, well, that’s for readers to find out!

Let’s talk about your main character, Alex Wilde. How did you develop her from the initial idea, and what makes her who she is? What has been your favourite reader response to her so far?

To be honest, the initial Alex was a very generic protagonist. I was only sixteen when I first devised her and she was very active, enthusiastic, enquiring, just not necessarily interesting.

Alex has evolved as I have.

I really needed to go out there and experience everything adulthood has to offer (both good and bad) before Alex could become a well-rounded character. Homecoming and grief run through the current Alex like Brighton rock, neither of which I could’ve written authentically when I was a teenager.

This Alex is an unreliable narrator and reluctant heroine, which is influenced by many of my favourite books.

Shirley Jackson’s work has been a crucial part of my writing journey and I can definitely see aspects of Eleanor from The Haunting of Hill House in Alex, especially in terms of her mental health.

Readers are usually very sympathetic to Alex as a character, but they tend to respond particularly to her relationship with Elizabeth. The word ‘compelling’ has come up several times and I can’t ask for much more than that!

Elizabeth also sounds really intriguing; where did she come from as a character, how did she develop as you drafted & revised? Were there any moments between her & Alex that you ended up cutting but wanted to keep, or any bits you really enjoyed writing that you couldn’t part with in the final edit? 

I recently described Elizabeth as ‘cold but also compassionate, confident in her abilities but self-conscious as a person, secretive but protective’, so she’s definitely one of the more complex characters in Coldharbour!

She’s also one of the last ones to reach their ‘final form’, as she was an amalgamation of three characters from the pre-2021 story, but once she came together, there she was: Elizabeth the Unkillable.

Elizabeth is particularly morally grey and like Alex, that’s influenced by some of my favourite characters in books and other media. I don’t think I’ve ever cut anything significant for Elizabeth, but I always say that the night of the storm in the first Coldharbour is one of my favourite ever scenes of the entire series.

Minor spoilers, but both Alex and the reader finally have enough pieces of the picture that is Elizabeth Black to decide exactly who she is.

What has been your favourite feedback on the novel so far/favourite reader response?

I have loved all the reviews that have mentioned the atmosphere and the tension in Coldharbour – this was an area of the book I spent a long time cultivating, so to have seen it pay off with readers has been fantastic. I know that Gothic literature can be very particular, so I was really worried that people just wouldn’t get it and I’ve been so happy to discover that actually, people both understand and enjoy the book.

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Author Spotlight: Queer Cyberpunk author A.E. Bross

My name is Addy (they/them or xe/xem) and I write under A.E. Bross. I love to write across genres, though at the moment only have fantasy and modern romantasy published. I’m a lot of things—queer, agender, disabled, autistic, exhausted—but I’m nothing if not a jack of all trades and a master of none. It’s why my other job is as a librarian. On top of that, I’m parent to a teenager (who also wants to be a writer), spouse to a poet, and grandparent to two very different kitties.

AUTHOR LINKS:

Website: addyelsewhere.com

Bluesky: @aebrossbooks.bsky.social

Universal Links to Books: books2read.com/ap/xXJm2G/AE-Bross

Download a 10% Sample on Smashwords:
Read a CyberSnow Sample

Book Elevator Pitch for readers/book clubs:

A reimagining of the classic Snow White, Bianca Nieve is the only child and heir to the fortune of the Nieve Corporation. When she finds herself on the wrong side of the law, she’s forced to flee into the streets of a city that she’s only seen from afar. There she finds help, comfort, and maybe even the will to oppose her own legacy.

Your latest release is CyberSnow, a queer cyberpunk retelling of Snow White; what inspired you to meld this fairy tale with this genre?

When the idea first struck me, it was just a passing thought. I wondered what fairy tales might look like in a genre that seemed so set apart from the original telling. Then, the more I looked at it, the more I wanted the challenge. I loved how well Snow White fell into the dynamic of cyberpunk and thought it would be fun to explore it.

How did you tackle the elements of the fairy tale that require more sensitivity, such as the translation of the fantasy dwarf element into a cyberpunk world?

At this point, many of us are aware of the antisemitism that sort of undergirds the entire concept of the fantasy dwarf. I wanted to remove that from my storytelling, but I also wanted to have a place for little people in my story.

There have been so many opportunities for this fairy tale to be told in a way that doesn’t Other marginalized folks, and we don’t see that in popular media. I remember back a few years when Peter Dinklage was calling out Disney for not being progressive with their depictions of the dwarfs in their live action remake of their film. That’s just stuck with me, so I made the little people in my retelling some of the prime movers of the story. I wanted the depiction to eschew the gross stereotypes and just let them be as nuanced as they are.

What sort of representation will readers find in the story, and why was it important to you to include this representation? What was your process to ensure this representation was created sensitively?

There’s a fair bit of representation, I think.

First and foremost, the MC Bianca Nieve is autistic. The narrative never outright says she is, but her symptoms and expressions and coping mechanisms all come from my own autistic experience. It’s very much an ‘own voices’ situation with her.

Taja, my second MC, is a trans woman. This I had to do some research for, including talking with trans women regarding certain aspects of transition and life in general.

Depictions of life for little people was a bit trickier. I had to do a lot of research when it came to accommodations and differences in every day life. I watched a lot of interviews with little people and dove into accessible home design, as well as accessibility needs in public spaces. Also the different kinds of dwarfism and how that could or would affect life. We all know that no one group of people is a monolith, so it was a lot of gathering perspectives and treating each one with the importance that it carries. There were so many things that folks of the taller persuasion don’t even dream of thinking of. Counter height, furniture, bathroom utilities, driving and mobility aids. It blew my mind.

What were the main influences for the corporation and the city – how did you go about developing this world and its socio-political conditions?

If I’m being honest, I drew a lot of influence from what is going on in the world right now, specifically in the United States. There is a lot of sway that large corporations currently hold over decisions being made in the U.S. government, and I used a lot of what I was seeing in the news and a lot of what I was hearing from individuals who were being harmed and fed it into this story.

While Bianca Nieve is the Snow White equivalent, and the heir to the giant corporation, Taja, is another POV character from a very different background; tell us how & why you chose the POVs found in the story, and how they help you to bring out themes of anti-capitalism and acceptance within the novella?

I wanted a different kind of riches to come from Taja’s POV. In the original story, Snow White’s love interest isn’t a real part of the tale, so much as he’s supposed to be the reward at the end, when Snow White has somehow survived all of the trials her stepmother put her through. I wanted Bianca to have someone who could help her through those trials, to make them less frightening. So that meant someone who had been in the city, who knew the ins and outs, but also knew a whole slew of different people with wildly differing personalities and that they all somehow fit, despite having their disagreements. I think that’s where the acceptance comes in.

As for the anti-capitalism, I wanted to make it so Taja was successful, but not in a monetary way. Yes, we all have to deal with the system we are in, but Taja gets to take repair jobs she wants, (try to) keep her sister out of trouble, and be a helping hand, and is still managing to stay afloat. She’s finding her success in a different way, away from money, and I think that’s important. In our society, we’re constantly sold nice things or vacations or standards of living. I think it’s important to find that place where you can get by, but you also make your own nice things. I wanted someone who could show Bianca (and the reader) that. Thus, Taja.

Can you share your favourite reader reaction or editor reaction to the book out of context?

My critique partner, who is also my spouse, wrote in big letters, “I’m sorry, WHAT?” next to a part later on in the story. While his writing is not normally very legible (it’s taken years for me to be able to decipher it on sight) he wrote the “WHAT” so big that I could have read it from space and had to laugh. I’m hoping I get a few more people with reactions like that when the book is released.

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