horror writing – Digital Fantasy Diary

Liam is a budding content creator who specializes in guided meditation videos. Seeking to grow his following, he jumps at an Airbnb listing for a spiritual retreat in the Adachigahara mountains of rural Japan. At the end of a long journey, the stylish cabin enclosed within a verdant forest is everything Liam could hope for. The beautiful young woman who manages the property offers a warm welcome, but there’s something strange about her smile…

I was extremely honored to contribute to this year’s 13 Days Advent horror anthology. My story, “The Smile of the Mountain Demon,” is about a 21st century yamauba who entraps a YouTube influencer with Buddhist pretensions by using Airbnb and the language of New Age spirituality. The young man is looking for a scenic “spiritual retreat” to use as a source of content, and the yamauba is looking for a tasty snack.

This story is based on the medieval Adachigahara folktales in which a cunning yamauba entraps a less-than-devout Buddhist priest, as well as Minako Ohba’s beautiful and heartbreaking short story “The Smile of a Mountain Witch.”

If you’re interested, I’ve posted my story on AO3 (here), and you can download a free digital copy of the anthology via its page on Itchio here:

🌟 https://13daysadvent.itch.io/13days-demons-divinity

The illustration that accompanies my story was created by the brilliant dark fantasy artist Maxyvert, who posts strange and ethereal paintings on Tumblr (here), on Instagram (here), and on Twitter (here). This artist takes commissions for both digital and physical watercolor portraits (here), and it was an amazing experience to work with them.

I’m honored to have an essay in one of my favorite online magazines, Cosmic Double. “A Monstrous Little Mermaid Story” is about how I discovered the joy of queer transformations in HP Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth.”

“A Monstrous Little Mermaid Story” is free to read on the Cosmic Double website here:
https://cosmicdouble.com/2023/01/08/a-monstrous-little-mermaid-story/

I originally created this essay as something of a writer’s statement for a short story called “Don’t Eat the Fish.” The story is about the uncanny space at the intersection of queerness, disability, and economic precarity, but I also think it stands on its own as an unsettling work of body horror. I workshopped this story for years as I slowly developed my skills, and I worked hard to polish the narrative voice and sharpen the genre effectiveness while also being as honest as I could about the nuances of my own personal experience.

I generally try to keep overt identity politics out of my writing, which isn’t a value statement as much as it is a personal preference. It’s not as though my stories aren’t informed by my identity or social environment. Rather, both my identity and my environment constantly shift and change, and my stories generally aren’t about myself to begin with. Still, because this particular story was so strongly informed by my positionality, I spent more than a year submitting it a series of literary magazines dedicated to raising the voices of queer, disabled, and economically precarious writers.

Unfortunately, every single magazine I submitted the story to was like, “Oh damn, that’s truly upsetting, and this story is not Positive Queer Representation™ enough.” Usually, when I have a story rejected, I’m lucky enough to get a personal note from an editor along the lines of, “This isn’t a good fit for us right now, but we all enjoyed this piece and would love to see more work from you in the future.” With this story, the response was inevitably: NO.

I therefore wrote this essay as a way of processing what my story and its literary influences meant to me. I’ve long since accepted that the story itself will never be published, but I’m truly grateful to Cosmic Double for being willing to publish an essay that may not be Positive Queer Representation™ but still attempts to represent what I believe is a very real aspect of nonbinary (and trans!) queer identity. That takes courage, and the essays I’ve been reading on the site led me to believe that the editors are open to an earnest investigation of what it means to feel “monstrous.” If you’re interested in well-crafted essays from unexpected points of view, please check them out!