Did our last episode leave you feeling…off? UNCANNY, perhaps? Ease your troubled mind with a perfectly normal chat with T. E. Hartley, the author behind “Changes.”
What inspired "Changes?"
As a teen, I got really into villains and shapeshifters. On the TV show Heroes, the villain Sylar — a shapeshifter — really resonated with me. He was so desperate to feel loved that he consumed and imitated what made others loved. As a closeted queer person, I understood the deep desire to figure out how to imitate and mime the mainstream in the hopes that you can pass in a way that would make you belong, and how every effort would just push you further from real belonging. But there's also this queerness to shapeshifters and their relationship to their physical bodies, right? Being a network television show, Heroes didn't really go the extra mile in any of those areas, but it did link shapeshifter fiction and queerness in my brain. Ultimately, I decided my take was more about the link to mental illness and the cycle of abuse, the way we can hate ourselves so much that we erase ourselves.
How do you connect with the idea of the UNCANNY in horror? What sufficiently walks the line between real and fantastical to set you ill at ease?
All the most horrific parts of my life were calls that came from inside the house, so to speak. I think there's nothing more monstrous than the people we love and trust because it's a very vulnerable position to come at something from. To me, the uncanny is about the way it convinces you to let your guard down, it lulls you into this sense of security, and because it has done that, it hits a lot harder. I also think there's an interesting element of perception in it that goes both ways — that which seems familiar can have depths we don't understand, or horrors we can't fully perceive. Humans depend upon our senses, but those are ultimately a really garbage way of making judgments, and the uncanny highlights that.
Your piece weaves a story of violence and loss (or gain, depending on the viewpoint) of identity as we bite back at those who tread us down. How did you come to and develop that theme?
I started questioning how people respond to abuse and trauma — how hard can someone push back against the violence done to them before they're no longer justified, and instead just perpetuating? These things can really change a person, and change can be messy. So in "Changes," I think it's really about the protagonist picking up the violent behaviors from the abusers who modeled them, then using that violence to murder the person they used to be because they blame themselves and not their abusers for the abuse itself. When you choose to become hard and violent to survive a hard and violent world, you're implicitly suggesting that it was your softness that caused the violence against you. And in a way we have to do this, right? We can only control ourselves. But for me, the ultimate horror and tragedy for victims of trauma and abuse lies in the possibility of waking up one day and realizing you've become the person who hurt you — because now you're hurting others in the same way. You internalized those models for how to engage others and treat others. Obviously, the metaphor for that is to literally become your abuser, to physically transform. I wrote this story as a representation of that cycle of abuse.
How did you get into horror? What do you enjoy in the genre? What scares you?
At the risk of being cliché, I read a lot of R.L. Stine as a kid, but the first adult horror book I read was Pet Sematary, which I read and watched (way too young) in middle school. And Pet Sematary is kind of uncanny, right? It's about looking at a child and seeing a not-child, just like "Changes" is about looking at yourself and seeing the not-self. But at the same time, it's intriguing, there's something desirable for the protagonist of Pet Sematary about having Gage (the child) back to life, and he can't let go of it. I really appreciate that horror exists at the intersection of what repulses and attracts us, and to be really effective, we need to be able to work both levers.
What’s your writing process like?
It'd be sort of disingenuous to sit here and pretend I have One True Process that work for me every time. I feel like figuring that out is my life's work. But I have a tendency to start with a thematic premise — a sort of fantastical or science fictional representation of a theme I'm interested in working with. For me, those things always start symbolically. I've never been the kind of writer who can genuinely build off a cool aesthetic alone and deepen it. I have to start at the deep end of the pool, and then sort of fill in everything from there. With short stories, it's usually one really long, intense writing session where I kind of puke out all of my feelings at once, and steadily go back to revise in some kind of coherence and narrative. "Changes" actually started as my first NaNoWriMo attempt, though, so I have about 20,000 words of junk content that got me here because I hit that mark and realized I didn't have anywhere else to take it after the protagonist commits to this.
How does identity play a role in your writing?
Recently I've thought a lot about how hard I used to work to see myself in cishet stories, and sort of begging for scraps of acknowledgment from the mainstream. But I've realized that a single token queer isn't enough for me because, to me, identity is in the bones of a story. To me, being a part of a marginalized group intrinsically sets you up to write about certain related themes and to be interested in those ideas and emotional experiences. That content can feel really queer, even when it's not explicitly there, and in that way, even when I'm not writing explicitly queer rep, I feel that I'm still producing queer work. Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey is a good example of what I'm talking about — as I recall, no one is textually queer, but the writer is, and as a result, the handling feels very different, the places they choose to explore are different, the themes they choose to talk about and the lens on what it means to belong is very different.
What role do you think horror plays in the LGBTQ community?
I think queer people have a very special relationship to monster stories and the uncanny in particular because so many of us went our whole lives being told we are monsters or made to feel like monsters and learning to love and embrace ourselves despite our supposed monstrousness. So monster horror feels like a comfort, like coming home, in that way. The uncanny, though, I think is where queer people really have to confront what actually scares us because many of us have sort of seen under that veneer — people who claim to be loving, who give the appearance of kindness, but who have teeth. I think in that way, the uncanny is a good way for queer folx to process how the ordinary can be horrifying, and some other genres are a way for us to sort of find comfort in the ways people call us horrific.
What’s next for you, creatively?
I'm still working on short stories right now, and I've had a little bit of luck in trying to place those, which is exciting, but I think I have a lot of learning to do about accessing my own identity in my fiction. So I'll be attending some workshops and classes this year to that effect while I work on my monster-romance fantasy novel set in the Old West, which I'll probably query by the end of 2021. You can find me @tehartley on Twitter if you want to get updates on that.
Any great horror recommendations?
It's so hard to call it horror because I think that fails to encapsulate it, but definitely The Devourers by Indra Das for more queer shapeshifters, and Wilder Girls by Rory Power for queer body horror.