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The Past Wears a Mask: A Conversation with E. L. Chen

The Past Wears a Mask: A Conversation with E. L. Chen

Slasher Summer drops seven friends, each named after a slasher icon, back into the cabin where a cult ’80s film was shot. E. L. Chen talks to Ginger Nuts of Horror about the Final Girl, slasher tropes, the nostalgia economy, and writing diverse horror into a canon that killed people like her first. From Sweetside Motel to a Final Girl she keeps marching back onto set, Chen is the literary slasher’s sharpest new voice.

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The Backrooms is Just a British Backshift With Better Lighting

The Backrooms is Just a British Backshift With Better Lighting

“Liminal horror” has become a hipster buzzword, so here is what it actually means and where it actually lives: the back of the shop. From Skinamarink, The Exit 8 and Vivarium to Edinburgh’s Hunter’s Tryst and the council-house terror of Ghostwatch, this is the case that the Backrooms are just a British backshift, and that British working-class horror beats the American liminal void at its own game. The Americans get the empty void. We get the void plus a supervisor.

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Stephanie Campisi on The Unfinished Business and the Ghosts We Keep

Stephanie Campisi on The Unfinished Business and the Ghosts We Keep

Stephanie Campisi kills off her mentor figure on page eighteen and rehires her as a ghost. In this interview the author of The Unfinished Business talks through her middle grade ghost story: grief played for laughs, a factory fire turned labour satire, and the one death the book refuses to console. Required reading for anyone tracking where cosy horror for kids goes next.

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Steal Me by Helen Grant: A Folk Horror Novella That Reads You Back

Steal Me by Helen Grant: A Folk Horror Novella That Reads You Back

Helen Grant’s Steal Me is a folk horror novella built on fairy-tale bones, set in a small Scottish town where a bookshop sells each customer the one thing they most want to hide. My review digs into the cursed bookshop, the Grimm folklore at its root, and why this Scottish Gothic chiller about desire and temptation belongs on the same shelf as the folk horror revival.

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While They Watch by Leicole Lang: A Horror of Isolation

While They Watch by Leicole Lang: A Horror of Isolation

Leicole Lang’s debut horror novel While They Watch channels the spirit of classic isolation horror, building on sequestered distress to instil some of the most intense chills in recent literary memory. Taking time to establish character before ratcheting up the spookiness, this indie horror masterpiece delivers a slow-burn dread that explodes into pure, adrenaline-pumping fear, refusing to hand-feed answers and staying true to its uncompromising principles straight through to the end.

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Carlyn Greenwald on Her Queer Slasher What Happened to Those Girls

Carlyn Greenwald on Her Queer Slasher What Happened to Those Girls

Carlyn Greenwald’s What Happened to Those Girls drops her most moody, body-horror-heavy book yet: a sapphic YA slasher where the toxic friend group doesn’t dissolve when the killer arrives — it’s the whole point. The Murder Land author talks survivor’s guilt, autistic representation, interstitial “found footage” chapters, and why losing someone who hurt you is its own kind of grief.