She built a monster world that hunts one girl’s own fears.

Tatiana Schlote-Bonne on the Cave Horror of What Feeds Below | Interview |

The Void has rules. Petra knows the upper layers well enough to guide strangers through them: where the carnivorous plants cluster, which passages collapse after rain, how to read the silence before something hungry arrives. But rules are not the same thing as safety, and the Sixth Layer does not follow the same contract as the world above. In What Feeds Below, Tatiana Schlote-Bonne’s third novel (October 2026, Bindery Books), a treasure-hunting job goes catastrophically wrong, Jade vanishes into the deepest darkness Petra has ever faced, and the descent that follows becomes both a rescue mission and an argument with everything Petra thought she understood about the place she has worked her whole life.

Compared to The Descent and Annihilation, the book fuses cave-diving terror with ecological wrongness and anchors it all in an opposites-attract friendship that gives the horror its emotional stakes.

Schlote-Bonne arrived in horror at speed. Her YA debut, Such Lovely Skin (2024), trapped a Twitch streamer in a house with her own demonic doppelganger. Her adult debut, The Mean Ones (2025), turned a summer-camp ritual into a study of PTSD and the violence of passing as normal.

Now she builds an entire world, a chasm with its own economy, its own biology, and its own appetite, and the result is a novel that feels less like a setting than a living system. We sat down to discuss the architecture of the Void, the creatures that call it home, and what it means to design a world that wants something from the people who enter it.

The Void’s monsters are not random. Every one was built to hunt one set of fears: Petra’s own. Horror here grows out of cordyceps, deep sea life and a friendship pushed past its limits. Survival means learning to be selfish. That costs Petra nearly everything she thought she knew about herself.

Tatiana Schlote-Bonne on the Cave Horror of What Feeds Below

I want to start before the book begins, before the layers had names and the City had a function. What was the first image, the first fragment of this world that you wrote down, and how long did it sit with you before you understood what it wanted to become?

I was watching Made in Abyss and thinking about how if the Abyss existed in our world, it would probably be mined and looted for profit and turned into some tourist attraction. “The Abyss should have a gift shop” was basically the first kernel of an idea that spurred this story.  

The Void is organised into six named layers, and Petra prefers the upper ones because “the dangers are better understood.” That implies a shared body of knowledge among guides: certain threats mapped, survival strategies codified. What are the rules that govern the upper layers when the book opens, and how did you decide where to draw the boundary between the understood territory and the unmapped dark below?

Kids play in the First Layer and there are restaurant and tour attractions around the edge, so it’s pretty open and exposed and known. The first two layers have been picked clean of gems and valuables. As far as understood territory versus the unmapped below, I was thinking in terms of what’s reasonable for people to traverse within a day, like the unmapped areas have only been explored by the people willing to crawl through tight caves and traverse many miles of treacherous dark terrain (so, not many people but enough desperate ones to keep the Void creatures fed!) 

The vertical architecture of the Void reads almost like video game level design, with each layer a harder difficulty setting, its own hazards and rewards. You have spoken about gaming’s influence on your work before, but here the game logic is embedded in the world itself rather than appearing as a game-within-the-book. What did that structural choice free you to do that the explicit gaming frame of Such Lovely Skin could not?

Inventing a whole new world in which this Void exists did give me a lot more creative freedom than just planting a fictional video game into our world, but it was a lot more work. The Void has a video game-esque feel to it since it was inspired by many games I love: Baldur’s Gate 3 (the Underdark specifically), Magic: The Gathering creatures, The Last of Us, The Forest (love the caves in that game). When developing the layers of the Void, I was thinking about how things could get freakier and worse as the characters go deeper. I also love ARK: Survival Evolved and knew I wanted some ocean thalassophobia, so that game inspired the underwater layer!

The synopsis mentions both “vicious monsters” and “carnivorous plants,” but the title promises something that feeds. That suggests an active, deliberate hunger. When you were designing the entities Petra encounters, how much of their behaviour emerged from ecological logic, a food chain or evolutionary pressure, and how much from something more intentional or even intelligent?

The creatures have evolved both from living in the Void and their close exposure to the Core and its mutating properties, as well as evolving in response to the Void divers and tourists as a food source. I thought it would be particularly horrifying if the creatures evolved appendages meant to lure tourists (fake gems on the tips of their tails etc.), like spider-tailed horned viper in the real world. 

In real cave systems, life adapts to absence: eyeless fish, translucent amphibians, fungi that fruit in total darkness. Did you work from a principle of biological corruption, taking familiar organisms and subjecting them to whatever force the Void exerts, or did you build the creatures from an entirely alien blueprint?

In high school, I saw that Planet Earth episode about the cordyceps growing out of the ant’s head and that image has always stayed with me, so that definitely made its way into how some of the creatures / fungi work in the Void. When I was drafting the story beats and figuring out the worldbuilding for What Feeds Below, I researched deep sea creatures and parasites.

I also looked through the D&D Monster Manual and my favorite black mana and Golgari Magic creature cards. But I didn’t want just any random horrifying thing to be attacking Petra and company—I wanted the monsters to trigger some innate fear or insecurity of Petra’s and so I first figured out her character and then developed the monsters to make them as challenging and scary as possible to her specifically. 

You designed an entire ecology for this place, and I am curious about the personal attachment that comes with that work. Do you have a favourite among them, a creature that was especially satisfying to conceive or write, not necessarily the most dangerous but the one that felt most yours?

I really like the bonedrinker!

The City of the Void sits at the edge of a chasm that extends for miles into the earth, and an entire economy is built around guiding tourists into it. That is sociology, not just world-building: who profits, who takes the risk, who gets to treat a monster-filled abyss as an adventure destination. How much of the City’s relationship to the Void, its economy, its unspoken rules, the things it knows and chooses not to act on, did you develop as scaffolding that never made it onto the page, and how did you decide where the reader’s knowledge should end?

I developed a bit more that didn’t make it onto the page, but part of what I love about writing in first person is we’re limited to Petra’s PoV and so this made it easy to decide what’s on the page and what’s not. If it wasn’t directly pertinent to what Petra was trying to achieve, I didn’t include it since I wanted the story to feel urgent without much meandering. I don’t like reading lots of exposition and so I tried not to have too much in this book. 

Your two previous protagonists, Viv in Such Lovely Skin and Sadie in The Mean Ones, are both profoundly isolated women. Petra begins What Feeds Below anchored to another person. Jade is her world. Was that shift from isolation to entanglement deliberate, or did Petra’s voice arrive with Jade already in it?

Before I started writing anything at all for this book, I knew it would be a story about two girls in a co-dependent friendship. So I started developing Petra’s character with Jade already in the picture since I needed to understand what exactly about Jade drew Petra to her, and it let me balance the two girls’ personalities. 

There is a moment early in the book where Petra agrees to do the descent Jade’s way, against her own instincts, because Jade’s approval means everything to her. That decision is the hinge on which the plot swings. How did you approach voicing Petra’s internal negotiation in that scene, the moment where love overrides self-preservation, without the reader losing sympathy for her judgment?

Petra’s misbelief is that she’s only successful with Jade, and so in her character’s mind, the choice to go on this quest makes perfect sense. I wasn’t really worried about whether the reader would lose sympathy or not but rather my focus was on making sure that Petra was developed enough for the reader to believe and understand why she would make this choice (and her later objectively bad choices, but again, to Petra these choices make sense considering her previous experiences, losses, and trauma.) 

Looking across your three novels, each one moves further from domestic interiors. Such Lovely Skin takes place largely in Viv’s house and school. The Mean Ones push outward to a cabin and a summer camp. Now What Feeds Below plunges into an entirely constructed world; this looks like a deliberate expansion of scale. Was it, or did the Void arrive fully formed and demand to be built?

After writing two books grounded in our world with speculative elements, I wanted to escape to a secondary world. I was watching a lot of anime at the time this idea came to me—Made in Abyss, Attack on Titan, Apothecary Diaries, Delicious in Dungeon, Frieren—and I thought that a book with those same type of “friends on an adventure through a dungeon/impossible situation” story would be a blast (plus, make it horror!) 

Your MFA is in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. That is an unusual pedigree for a horror novelist. How does your nonfiction training show up in the way you build horror on the page, specifically in the authority of your descriptive passages and the interiority of your narrators?

I think the close interiority of my narrators is very similar to how I write nonfiction. This is less true in What Feeds Below, but a lot of the material I wrote about during my MFA (dad trauma, mom problems, abandonment, toxic relationships etc.) appear as backstories for my protagonists in my novels.  

The Mean Ones arrived only a year after Such Lovely Skin. Still, it represented a significant pivot: from YA to adult, from supernatural tech-horror to psychological folk horror, from a teenage protagonist to a woman approaching thirty. What did writing Sadie teach you that you carried forward into Petra, and what did you have to unlearn?

Writing Sadie taught me that I should keep writing about flawed characters stumbling through relationships and life until their mistakes force them to figure out their own problems. Sadie and Petra feel similar in the sense that they’re wrapped up in toxic relationships that they can’t see for what they really are, which makes them frustrating to follow but it’s a necessary part of their growth. I do feel like Petra is easier to sympathize with since she’s so young, while Sadie is still grappling with some arrested development. 

You occupy an interesting position in contemporary horror. You move between YA and adult, between psychological horror and full-throated fantasy, and your work draws equally on gaming, film, and literary fiction. Do you feel allegiance to a particular subgenre or tradition, or is the through-line something other than category?

All my stories are character driven and the through-lines are my flawed protagonists. I approach each story by asking who is the best (by that I mean the worst) person to face the challenges the situation presents (evil video game, camping trip, caving adventure) and I develop the world and plot in tandem with the protagonist and their inner problems. 

The YA horror fantasy space is having a moment. Readers who grew up on Coraline and The Graveyard Book are now in their twenties and thirties. When you are writing for a YA audience about two teenagers who guide rich tourists into a monster-filled chasm to escape poverty, what do you assume that audience can handle that adult readers sometimes cannot?

I was actually assuming that the adult readers could handle more than the YA audience! I’ve heard from my high school teacher friends that the teens love manga these days, and so my hope is that they will give What Feeds Below a try! 

You have mentioned The Babadook and The Orphanage as touchstones for grief horror. But grief operates differently in What Feeds Below. Petra’s loss is not memorial but immediate and urgent: Jade is not dead, she is missing, and the clock is running. How did you build and sustain dread across a novel where the central engine is not the aftermath of loss but the active, ongoing terror of losing someone who might still be saved?

It was easier to build and sustain tension with this book since there is a clear ticking clock of needing to save Jade. The nature of the Void and its rules (you turn into an insect creature if you stay too long) works well for its own ticking clock as well, and so I felt like this book had the most natural built-in tension of them all!

The synopsis asks, “Who do you become in the face of absolute darkness, and what would you do to survive?” That question implies transformation, and early promotional language hints that Petra risks becoming a monster herself. Without spoiling anything, can you talk about the line between survival and self-loss? Is there a version of surviving that is itself a kind of death in this book?

I wrote the events of the story so that Petra would have to realize that by prioritizing Jade over herself, she’s lost her sense of self and the only way to survive is to reclaim that. There’s a line in the book about survival requiring selfishness, and I think that is true and an important point the story makes (within reason, of course!) 

Your sentences carry an almost physical momentum. In The Mean Ones, Sadie’s weightlifting becomes both metaphor and literal armour. In What Feeds Below, the physicality shifts from the body to the environment: the cave presses, the terrain fights back. How do you build dread at the sentence level when the threat is not a monster you can see but the space your characters are moving through?

For all my writing, I think in terms of sensory detail. I’m always asking myself what a reader is seeing, feeling, and hearing in every scene (sometimes smelling and tasting too!) What Feeds Below was really fun and challenging because I got to play around with removing some senses, like when Petra can’t see in the dark or when she can’t move because she’s trapped. 

Looking back at Such Lovely Skin, what is the one craft decision you made in that debut that you would now, two books later, advise a newer writer against? Not a regret, exactly, but a lesson the book taught you by being finished and read.

I have learned that if you include pop culture references, there are readers who won’t like that at all, which is fine. I personally am pro-pop culture references and enjoy knowing what the characters are watching / playing / listening to etc. 

You were awarded the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Diverse Worlds grant in 2020 for a project called “The Afterlife Memoirs.” All your published novels have been horror. Is there a version of your writing life where creative nonfiction or memoir took the lead instead, and what does horror give you as a writer that those forms do not?

Before horror, I was writing a lot of personal essays and memoir. Horror lets me write about the same things I was writing about in grad school (toxic relationships, dad problems, mom problems, mean girls, etc.) but I get to have more fun doing it! It also brings a new level of freshness and excitement to the same old things I was writing about, as well as a new lens to explore them. Horror is very cathartic. 

We have talked about descent, about caves, about the hunger of darkness. But the title What Feeds Below gestures at something with an appetite: not just a place, but a thing that consumes. In your understanding of horror as a genre, what is the relationship between being fed upon and being seen? Is being consumed, in some terrible way, a form of recognition?

I suppose that as an author I have some need for my work to be consumed!  

What Feeds Below by Tatiana Schlote-Bonne 

The darkness isn’t empty. It’s hungry.

At the edge of the City of the Void, a massive chasm extends miles into the earth, its treacherous terrain overrun with vicious monsters and carnivorous plants. For orphaned best friends Petra and Jade, guiding treasure-seeking tourists down into the Void is the only way to earn enough to pull themselves up out of the slums for good.

Petra prefers to play it safe and take jobs only in the Void’s upper levels, where the dangers are better understood, while Jade wants to risk a descent to the deepest and most mysterious Sixth Layer. Because the deeper they go, the better the payout, and the sooner their dreams can become reality. Their friendship is Petra’s whole world, and Jade’s approval means everything—so Petra agrees to do it Jade’s way.

When their job goes wrong and Jade is lost in the Void, Petra must plunge deeper than she’s ever dared to save her friend. But she doesn’t know the truth of the Void . . . or what really waits for her in its depths.

---

Ginger Nuts of Horror: The Heart and Soul of Horror Reviews

---

Every feature is designed to help sell your work, build your audience and connect your horror story with readers who are actively looking for their next frightening read. Our horror book reviews and features include backlinks to your website, publisher page or Amazon author page, a full synopsis, relevant author information and a universal purchasing link that directs readers to their local bookseller or preferred retailer.

All editorial coverage is provided completely free of charge. We do not charge authors, publishers, filmmakers or creators for reviews or features. Ginger Nuts of Horror exists to support the horror community and help great books, films and independent voices find the audiences they deserve.

With a large, engaged social following and an 18-year archive of trusted horror coverage, Ginger Nuts of Horror is a horror review website built to support authors, filmmakers and creators. Our coverage spans horror novels, indie horror, gothic fiction, folk horror, psychological horror, supernatural fiction, dark fantasy, horror films and the wider creative world surrounding the genre.

Whether you’re an established horror author, an indie filmmaker, a publisher, or a debut voice in indie horror, we offer opportunities to place your work in front of dedicated horror fans, readers, viewers and genre enthusiasts. A feature on Ginger Nuts of Horror can help improve discoverability, strengthen your online presence and give potential readers a clear route from discovering your work to finding out more or making a purchase.

Although our coverage is free, we do have a Ko-fi page for readers, authors and supporters who would like to help us continue promoting horror books, films and creators. All donations are entirely voluntary and greatly appreciated. Every contribution helps support the time, research and ongoing work involved in running an independent horror review website.

Explore our horror book reviews and horror movie reviews, discover the kind of horror coverage we publish, then get your horror book or film featured today.

---