Hello, Monsters! Sit around the dying fire with us and get to know Hailey Piper, the author behind the bone-chilling “Scarlet Hide Molly” in our latest episode, WITCH!
What inspired "Scarlet Hide Molly?"
The seed was a mental image of a blood-drenched woman standing atop a leaning snowy mountain, a blizzard swirling around her. I wondered what she was doing, and why she was covered in blood. The story, and the stories within the story, were how I found out.
How do you connect with the idea of WITCHES?
Across many cultures, whether venerated, feared, or shunned, the idea of the witch links to womanly empowerment. Mysterious, knowledgeable, powerful, and often my stories tap into that key vein of power whether they use witchcraft or not. In fiction, witches are extremely versatile, and that’s one of the aspects I enjoy about them. A witch can play magical helper as easily as antagonist. She can be the protagonist too, and either be helpful or hurtful. It’s fun to play with pushing will into the world through word, tool, or concoction. We’re reminded that anything’s possible.
Your piece is a fresh new piece that nonetheless sounds like a literal old wives' tale, both in its framing and construction. How did you develop that feeling? Was any part particularly challenging or easy to write?
There’s a tradition of telling stories about people stories, a sort of framing device to tell multiple stories at once. We don’t see it much anymore, but it does pop up, noticeably for me in various issues of The Sandman, and I used it for one chapter of my novella Benny Rose, the Cannibal King. It’s a fun device especially in horror, partly because we all love telling ghost stories. The challenge was that I hadn’t come up with the stories before sitting down to write them, so I kind of went with the women’s personalities and thought of what kind of stories they would tell.
How did you get into horror? What do you enjoy in the genre? What scares you?
I think I’ve always been into horror since I was little. It’s fun to be scared, and monsters thrilled me then, same as now. To me, horror is the genre of truth. A fearful character is true to themselves, and often I think (and hope) we can feel for them most then. Probably what scares me is when that empathy has drained away. I feel like we see that too often these days.
What’s your writing process like?
The zero draft is my friend. Every idea, line, character, et cetera that comes to mind gets jotted down at some point and put into a file. Maybe I know just where it belongs, maybe I don’t, but I have it if I need it. Enough of those notes connected to the same idea starts to built into a full prose organism, and then I start fleshing out in between those notes. That probably sounds more straightforward than it actually is; I do a lot more mixing, matching, and rearranging than I like to think about.
How does identity play a role in your writing?
Each story demands a piece of its writer. Hopefully it gives that piece back by the end, but it probably won’t be the same. I learn a lot about my insecurities through writing.
What role do you think horror plays in the LGBTQ community?
Unfortunately, there’s real life. I feel like some of us live a horror story at home, others walk into horror when we leave home. Classrooms, restrooms, public transit, work, family, strangers. The world is rife with horror for us, and we often just try not to break the often arbitrary rules just to get by. But I also genuinely believe things are getting better, especially narratively, and while we have been painted as monsters in horror fiction past, we’re digging into horror and finding ourselves too. Monsters Out of the Closet’s intro says it best. “So monsters we became.”
What’s next for you, creatively?
I have more short stories coming this year, a book due out next spring that may or may not have been announced when this goes out, and I’m working on a new queer horror book that’s still deciding whether it will be a novella or a novel.
Any great horror recommendations?
I recommend people checking out pretty much any of Caitlin Kiernan’s short fiction, where The Very Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan is a good place to start. Joanna Koch has penned a fascinating werewolf tale in their novelette The Couvade. One of my favorite books of 2019 was the gory yet beautiful To Be Devoured by Sara Tantlinger, and she also edited the wonderful all-women horror anthology Not All Monsters. Check out Cirque Berserk by Jessica Guess for a surprising slasher tale, and Hell’s Bells by Lisa Quigley if you’re up for a rock-solid witchy novella.