Tessa Gratton Newsletter #36: the season of horror
This year Natalie and I are going to be in New Orleans for Halloween, and we are going to the Anne Rice Vampire Ball and let me tell you I am counting down the days because it will be fun, yes, but also because that is how long I have to figure out what to wear.
As I mentioned in a recent newsletter, I am a fan of the summer these days, even though it frequently comes with heat indexes over 100* F. But I also love the autumn, because I’m not that kind of monster. For most of my life, it was my favorite season, and once I started moving into my “witch era” around the age of 16, Samhain/All Soul’s/Halloween nailed that preference into place—I’ve always been inspired by the changing seasons, and by ghosts, monsters, death, and the rituals humans come up with to relate to those things. I’ve tried to capture some of that in several of my books, most notably Strange Grace and Blood Magic, which was my debut novel and consistently called horror.
I certainly don’t call it that, though, I can see it if I squint at it with prairie gothic glasses on. I’ve never set out to write horror, though.
My wife, Natalie C. Parker, has. She loves horror, from books to movies to TV, and her first YA horror comes out TOMORROW. It’s a frightening, beautifully written queer horror novel that made! me! cry! both from grief for the characters and that perfect bittersweet joy of my favorite kind of ending. So I asked Natalie if she’d write something for my newsletter. Without further ado, my brilliant, creative, hot wife…
“A few weeks ago, Tessa and I took a weekend trip to visit her brother, his wife, and their two boys. I had with me a finished copy of Come Out, Come Out my debut young adult horror novel about three friends who experience something dreadful one night when they’re thirteen years old. One of them ends up dead, and the other two lose intrinsic parts of themselves, specifically the self-knowledge that they are queer. It's one part ghost story, one part conversion therapy nightmare, and five parts queer angst with a sprinkle of euphoria, but at the end of it all I like to think of it as "horror with heart."
I brought the copy with me intending to use it for artsy, on-the-road promotional pictures, but it mostly ended up sitting on various tables, adding a splash of color here and there. While it was adorning the dining room table one afternoon my three-and-a-half-year-old nephew picked it up and asked me to read it to him. In spite of my very rational arguments to the contrary—that is it scary, too long, and there are no pictures, he insisted that we read it together because he needed to know what happened to the brother.
I was confused and had to think through the main characters in my book to make sure that there were, in fact, no brothers. When I asked him what he meant, he pointed to the cover where a small figure perches atop the dilapidated house, and with a frown if great concern, he explained to me that the little brother was trapped and we needed to read the book to find out why.
Without digging into my nephew’s psychology too much, I found this fascinating. He, a little brother himself, had intuited so much from the artwork and found in it a kernel of fear that was nested in his own life. He was so insistent, so urgent about this that Aunt Tess and I took turns reading sections of the book to him (don’t tell his parents) until he felt as though he had the answers he needed and could set the book down in peace. He had exercised his concerns by listening to the story.
Fast-forward a day and we were on the Texas beach. It was blisteringly hot, but the ocean was less hot, and we spent hours playing in the surf and building sandcastles every day. But this same nephew asked me over and over again to take him out beyond the break where the waves became ‘talm’ and we could just…chill. With his neon-colored life jacket and goggles, he was happy to hold my hand and lay back against the water, letting the talm waves rock him for much longer than I would have expected of someone so young. It was a good lesson in relaxation.
But while he was reaching his prolonged moment of zen, I was scanning the murky waters and doing my best not to tell him that I was looking out for one of the single most terrifying creatures on the planet. Because there are only two things that scare me: zombies and jellyfish.
It’s true that I am afraid of both, but it’s a gentle, controllable fear. Zombies aren’t real (I hope), and I’ve gotten pretty good at avoiding the wrong end of a jellyfish. My fear of these things comes with a kind of delight—the kind of thrill I enjoy when a part of me knows something is extremely unlikely to actually hurt me. It’s the same thrill I chase when I crack open a new horror novel or dive into a scary movie.
In spite of this, I didn’t write Come Out, Come Out for the thrill. And while there are eerie and fantastical elements in this book there are also some things that truly scare me because they can hurt me: homophobia, transphobia, gender dysphoria, religious extremism, and conversion therapy. They are terrifying because they are very real, they have sharp edges, and I can’t control when I encounter them.
I wrote Come Out, Come Out because the very act of coming out can be terrifying. I wrote it because sometimes our fear is a light in the dark, it reveals and uncovers danger, and guides those who follow behind us. Most of all, I wrote Come Out, Come Out because I have experienced the everyday horrors of being queer in this world. But as often as I have been afraid, I have been exquisitely joyful, too.
But in retrospect, I wrote it because, like my nephew who needed to experience the story to soothe his fears, I needed to write this story to remember that sometimes the greatest resistance, the greatest resilience, is telling others that the horrors are survivable. And there is reason to hope.”
Thank you, Natalie! Let’s go back to the beach!
The book comes out tomorrow, and there’s still ten hours left for you to get really sexy poster if you want to preorder:
Click here to see all purchase options!
But if you preorder from The Raven Bookstore in Lawrence, KS, you can get a slightly different poster, black with rainbow iridescent lettering. I personally like the rainbow poster better, but the iridescent is very slick. Join us on Wednesday, August 28th at The Raven for a launch event!
Follow Natalie on Instagram for more details and more incredible work. She also has…her own newsletter!
As always, thanks for reading! I’ll be back in September. - Tessa
