LIZ KERIN: I\u2019m a spec fic, horror, and fantasy buff with a background in film and TV. I\u2019m obsessed with super dark female-driven narratives (particularly coming of age stories) that have something important to say about the world we live in. I\u2019m the author of the NIGHT\u2019S EDGE duology (those sad mother\/daughter vampire books), and THE PHANTOM FOREST (my debut, a dark fantasy that\u2019s being re-released this spring!).<\/p>\n
JENNY KIEFER: As a Kentucky native, most of my work is set in Kentucky–at least all of my novels. It’s not just because I’m familiar with the state (the summer after high school, I traveled around the state working as a mascot for the state fair!), but because Kentucky has such a strange history and varied geography. There’s rolling hills, giant rock columns, cave systems, sinkholes… there was even a meat shower. A lot of my writing also involves body horror, whether it’s someone’s body transforming into something it shouldn’t or just visceral descriptions. I LOVE doing research and often find that there’s always something weird that really happened that I would have never thought to include on my own.<\/p>\n MAE MURRAY: I’m Mae Murray, and I’m the author of I’m Sorry If I Scared You<\/em>, which was released in November of last year. I’ve also edited two anthologies, The Book of Queer Saints Volumes I<\/em> and II<\/em>. The first volume was nominated for a British Fantasy Award, and is definitely what I’m best known for. My work focuses on queer, working class stories, mostly set in the American South. I also like to write Indigenous stories that deal with the loss of identity that comes with being part of the Indigenous diaspora.<\/p>\n FRIDAY ELLIOTT: Hello! I’m Friday (she\/her\/ella), a Seattle-based Chicana newbie horror author originally hailing from the Motherlode in central California. While I often joke that spanglish is my first language, I really think flavor is! My lexical-gustatory synesthesia gives me a unique relationship with words, as I’ve tasted them all since birth. I’ve used this superpower for fifteen years to make immersive teas inspired by pop culture, art, books, music and more in my day job as CEO & Head Tea Witch at Friday Afternoon Tea. For the past few years, I’ve been exploring the other side of that superpower in writing sensory-forward melancholia cusp with heavy influence from Mexican horror, folklore and magical realism. I’ve had a few short stories published here and there and currently have three fairly experimental, ambitious, hopefully tasty full-length writing projects on my table!<\/p>\n SONORA TAYLOR: I have been writing and publishing for almost nine years. I write both novels and short stories. My horror tends to be quieter, dark, feminist, and twisty.<\/p>\n CYNTHIA G\u00d3MEZ: I write horror and other types of speculative fiction, set primarily in Oakland, where I make my home. I mostly write feminist horror and I especially love themes of revenge, retribution, and resistance to oppression. Sexual harassers or greedy developers or brutal cops facing consequences, etc etc. My work has appeared\/will appear in Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Luna Station Quarterly, Nightmare Magazine, and numerous anthologies. My first collection, The Nightmare Box and Other Stories<\/em>, was released from Cursed Morsels Press in July 2024.<\/p>\n Our theme for this year’s Women in Horror Month is all about villains. How do you craft villains in your own work? In your opinion, what makes a good villain?<\/strong><\/p>\n SHANTELL POWELL: I don’t often use physical villains in my writing. In a lot of my stories, the villain is colonialism or capitalism. Drunken white men with untreated PTSD are villains in a couple of my stories, but the real villainy is the system which chews up people and regurgitates them as monsters. I think the best villains represent things\/people who have terrorized you personally. I guess that means I need to hurry up and write scary stories about corrupt cops and vicious teenage girls.<\/p>\n ZIN E. ROCKLYN: I LOVE VILLAINS. they’re my absolute favorite to write. Villains have the same goal as I do: to think about your place in the world and how it affects others. I craft them from experience and from my own dark side. A good villain makes you challenge the status quo.<\/p>\n MAE MURRAY: The villains in my work tend to be people who wield their power in cruel, destructive ways, and they’re often rooted in real-world issues. My villains are colonizers, white men, police officers, rapists. Sometimes my villains are the philosophy of a place. Lack of education, lack of resources. For me, the best villains are the villains we encounter every day, who are allowed by society to commit atrocities and thus normalizing them.<\/p>\n The other side of that coin is the villain that is fashioned by society because of the normalized atrocities. The villain who isn’t really a villain, but a person or creature out of place, out of step with a strange and violent world.<\/p>\n CARLIE ST. GEORGE: I don\u2019t necessarily subscribe to the notion that every villain thinks they\u2019re a hero, but I do think that villains who believe themselves to be reasonable can be extremely effective\u2014even when they\u2019re absolutely not. It\u2019s not about thinking that their actions are righteous or correct, only that they\u2019re understandable, rational. What anybody in their position would do. A villain who\u2019s convinced that everything they\u2019ve done is reasonable can be\u2014depending on the story\u2014tragic, hilarious, or deeply creepy.<\/p>\n My own villains tend to be manipulative and possessive, convinced of their own entitlement: they want, therefore they deserve. Or I\u2019ll write girls seeking bloody revenge … but are those girls really villains? Like the good meme says, God forbid women have hobbies.<\/p>\n SONORA TAYLOR: A good villain is someone or something that’s scary because they seem unbeatable or only able to be taken down with the utmost effort of the protagonist or, more likely, their own folly. In addition, a great villain is someone the reader empathizes with and is subsequently horrified that they empathize with them.<\/p>\n But then there are times when we want our fictional villains to be violent and power-hungry because they like violence and power. Nothing more involved than that. Because sometimes our villains are like the ketamine-guzzling black hole in the White House and the orange shitstain who just got elected. They\u2019re not complicated; they\u2019re cartoons. And in fiction and art, it\u2019s fun \u2013 and, paradoxically, realistic \u2013 to have some plain old cartoonish villains. Especially when you really give them their thorough comeuppance.<\/p>\n In the novella I\u2019m editing now, I gave my readers one of each. And I have another character who\u2026 let\u2019s just say I\u2019ll let the reader decide if they\u2019re a villain or not. This character was absolutely my favorite character to write, because what can be fun with fictional villains is the way they act more freely than most of us ever do. This character does not give one solitary fuck about being kind or being good or whether they hurt other people or not, and that gave an energy and a fire to their dialogue that were so freeing to me. And terrifying.<\/p>\n Since it’s Women in Horror Month, let’s talk about female villains in particular. Who are some of your favorite female villains in the horror genre, and why do you love them?<\/strong><\/p>\n LIZ KERIN: I think female villains work best when they get to be the protagonist of their own story – an anti-hero. For example, I never considered Carrie White to be a villain, but technically I guess she is. We see her FIRST AND FOREMOST as a traumatized, outcast young woman. We understand her pain and what motivates her violence, so that when said violence descends, it feels so deeply justified and visceral. Another one like this is Ji-won from Monika Kim\u2019s THE EYES ARE THE BEST PART. We say, \u201cGo off girl, eat those juicy blue eyeballs! F*ck your mom\u2019s godawful boyfriend.\u201d On the opposite end of the spectrum, though, you have a character like Maeve from CJ Leede\u2019s MAEVE FLY who tells the audience right off that bat that she doesn\u2019t NEED a traumatic reason to be violent, thank you very much. That\u2019s equally subversive and intriguing!<\/p>\n SHANTELL POWELL: I grew up infatuated with evil queens, whether from old Hercules movies or Disney cartoons. Maleficent is a were-dragon. How awesome is that? And although I don’t consider her a villain, Medusa’s ability to turn her attackers into stone with a single glance is delicious. And then there’s Annie Wilkes from Misery<\/em>. She crosses the line from fanatical devotion to violence in a believable and unforgettable fashion.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Shantell-Powell.jpg\")
<\/a>SHANTELL POWELL: I’m an emerging author based out of so-called Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. I’m a Two Spirit Indigiqueer swamp hag and elder goth. I was raised by a nomadic family in an apocalyptic cult on the land and off the grid. My writing reflects my upbringing. Frequently ecologically-based, it plays with religious themes in a sacrilicious way. I also write through a decolonial lens while I work at Indigenizing myself. I don’t have any books (yet!), but my work has been published in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies.<\/p>\n<\/a>ZIN E. ROCKLYN: My name is Zin E. Rocklyn and I write dark fantasy and horror stories. I mostly enjoy writing the dark works, works that make people uncomfortable, make them think about their role in the world and how insignificant it may be.<\/p>\n<\/a>CARLIE ST. GEORGE: I\u2019m Carlie St. George. I\u2019m from Northern California, and I primarily write contemporary dark fantasy and horror short fiction. I\u2019m particularly fond of ghost stories, fairy tales, weird slashers, and playing with unusual narrative structures. My story \u201cForward, Victoria\u201d was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award, and my debut collection YOU FED US TO THE ROSES came out in 2022 from Robot Dinosaur Press.<\/p>\n<\/a>LIZ KERIN: Wickedness takes root in people when their fears and insecurities start running the show. They fear this person, or this entity, or this horrible outcome\u2026 and they\u2019re willing to eradicate that fear by any means necessary. When I sit down to write a villain, the first thing I ask is what they fear, and why. If that character\u2019s anxiety feels grounded and realistic – even if we\u2019re dealing with a WORLD that\u2019s anything but – then I believe that villain will come to life on the page. For example, in the NIGHT\u2019S EDGE books, you might say there are actually TWO villains because there are two characters infected with this vampiric illness who live in fear of being caught and hospitalized. One of them depends upon her daughter to survive and spends years draining her lifeblood (both literally and figuratively), and the other keeps purposefully spreading the disease in order to find safety in numbers. Both of which are totally villainous, but also totally understandable reactions to a horrific situation.<\/p>\n<\/a>JENNY KIEFER: I think the best human villains have a complex motivation and the best non-human villains have an unfathomable motivation–or maybe no motivation. In This Wretched Valley<\/em>, you could almost argue that I explored both. The cursed\/evil\/malicious earth itself is unknowable and mysterious, purposefully left a little vague in its workings and intentions. But the humans who go to this space are also villains, in a sense — every human who ends up there wants to use the land for their own gain, whether it’s colonization, murder, or fame and fortune. My next book, Crafting for Sinners<\/em>, is about a bisexual woman trapped in a craft store owned by a religious cult who wants to use her for a ritual. It has human villains and it took a few edits to get it right and make them into a villain that wasn’t one note or “cartoony”. I hope I hit the right chord.<\/p>\n<\/a>FRIDAY ELLIOTT: I haven’t put a lot of thought into villain craft in my own writing (though I sure will after this conversation), but I can speak to this idea in my tea work! My synesthesia associates complex and distinct flavor profiles with archetypes, feelings, characters, and so on. I’ve found a villain-inspired tea will always have three dimensions to my palate: smoothness, depth, and bite. In my mind, a good villain must be enticing or intriguing (a smooth texture with floral aroma), must have something ugly hidden inside of them with an edge of uncomfortable relatability (depth and complexity of flavor), and they must shock you in some way (a surprising counternote with a biting edge to break the line of the flavor profile). Now that you’ve asked and I’ve had the opportunity to dissect this, I’ll definitely be reverse-engineering the flavor structure to match villains in my own writing and fill them out as characters!<\/p>\n<\/a>CYNTHIA G\u00d3MEZ: I think there\u2019s room for different kinds of villains in fiction, because in real life there are different kinds. Sometimes they have all kinds of complicated architecture to their motivations and this whole story that they\u2019ve twisted so that they\u2019re the good guys. Take somebody like Ronald Reagan. He caused tremendous damage and death and destruction while justifying every one of his actions, twisting them into a story where it was fine to let people with AIDS waste away and die because his God had cursed them with this affliction, and it was important to invade and destabilize countries because capitalism was supposed to be a force for good. (Spoiler: capitalism was not, in fact, a force for good.) It\u2019s always interesting to engage with how our fictional villains justify their actions to themselves, because fiction is about empathy, and when we see the ways that fictional villains justify the horrible things they do, it can help us to recognize that same kind of justification when we see it around us.<\/p>\n