She’s not the final girl. She’s the reason there isn’t one.
It takes a truly unique voice to create something that feels both disturbingly fresh and deeply unsettling. Enter Amber Dean, whose debut novel, Hysterical, is doing just that by shattering the conventions of the serial killer thriller. This isn’t a story about a monster lurking in the shadows; it’s about the monster bred in the quiet, desperate corners of the human heart. Set against the gritty, intoxicating backdrop of New York City’s underground nightlife in 2013, Hysterical introduces us to Jessie Anne, a young woman whose consuming desire for her best friend, Tinsel, slowly curdles into something far more predatory and violent.
In this exclusive interview on Ginger Nuts of Horror, Dean pulls back the curtain on her creative process, revealing how she moved away from the trope of the emotionless psychopath to craft an unreliable narrator whose obsession feels not just terrifying, but tragically recognisable. She discusses the challenge of writing a character whose mental illness is the engine of the horror, not just a convenient plot device, and how her own experiences in the burlesque and fetish scenes of New Orleans and New York bled into the novel’s authentic, destabilising atmosphere.
For fans of dark, transgressive fiction that prioritises psychological depth over cheap scares, this conversation is an essential look at the making of a modern horror story where the final girl is nowhere to be found.
Unravelling the Monster Within: An Interview with Amber Dean on Her Debut Psychological Horror, Hysterical
Let’s start at the very beginning. For our readers, please introduce yourself. Beyond the author bio, tell us a little about who you are when you’re not writing, what you love doing, what fascinates you, and what fuels your creativity.
Amber Dean: When I’m not writing, I’m a mum to an incredible five-year-old boy. We spend a lot of time outdoors together, especially on beaches and in gardens, examining whatever strange little creatures we find along the way: insects, hermit crabs, sand worms. There’s something grounding and quietly inspiring about watching curiosity form in real time, especially when it brushes up against the uncanny.
My family recently relocated from New Orleans, where I worked closely with burlesque producer Trixie Minx and learned the craft from the inside out. Burlesque taught me a great deal about performance, control, spectacle, and the body as a vehicle for storytelling these ideas that have inevitably bled into my fiction. While Abu Dhabi doesn’t have the same burlesque scene, I still practice and carry that influence with me.
I balance the darker corners of my imagination with yoga, meditation, and the occasional spin class. And when the house finally goes quiet, you’ll usually find me reading or watching horror films, curled up with my cats and my husband. I’m endlessly fascinated by obsession, desire, and feral women, those are the forces that fuel my creativity and keep pulling me back to the page.
In the early stages of a new project, what tends to come to you first: a compelling character voice, a central thematic question, or a vivid image/scenario? How does that initial spark then guide you in building the rest of the story?
Amber Dean: Usually, what comes to me first is a loose sense of story rather than a single image or voice. With Hysterical, I knew I wanted to write something rooted in the New York City spaces I moved through and observed closely between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, the swinger, fetish, and Brooklyn rave scenes, places that felt thrilling, intimate, and quietly destabilizing.
At the same time, I was drawn to questions I didn’t yet have clear answers for. I was interested in how easily people, particularly men, underestimate small, “safe-looking” women, and how that assumption creates its own kind of danger. That idea stayed with me for a long time, shaping the emotional logic of the book rather than announcing itself outright.
I was also thinking a great deal about the period between 2009 and 2013, when social media, especially Instagram, was beginning to change how we saw ourselves and each other. It was the first time many of us were learning how to perform a version of our lives for public consumption. For me, that performance came at a real psychological cost. The distance between who I appeared to be online, the pressure to curate a persona in order to feel successful, and how I actually felt and behaved created a quiet, persistent anxiety I didn’t fully understand until much later. As someone who already struggled with social anxiety, that early cyber-social world often felt deeply dissociative.
That initial mix of setting, unease, and lived experience guided everything that followed. As the story developed, the characters emerged naturally from those pressures, and the narrative began to ask the same questions I had been circling for years about identity, desire, safety, and what happens when the persona you’ve built can no longer hold.
Every book has its own unique set of problems to solve. What was the most difficult ‘puzzle’ you had to crack while writing this book? Was it a plot hole, a character’s motivation, the structure, or something else entirely?
Amber Dean:The most difficult puzzle to solve while writing Hysterical was Jessie Anne herself. Specifically, how to portray her mental illness in a way that felt honest rather than inherited from genre shorthand. I knew early on that she would be a serial killer, and with that comes an expectation of “madness,” but the real question was what kind of madness, and how it should present itself to the reader.
My first instinct was to lean into a familiar model, the calculating, emotionally detached psychopath in the Patrick Bateman vein. That’s how the first draft was written. When my editor came back and said Jessie felt “too slick,” that everything came too easily for her, I knew he was right. The character felt polished, but she didn’t feel human.
Around the same time, I was deep into research, countless hours of documentaries, interviews, and recorded interrogations with real-life serial killers, and something kept nagging at me. Ididn’t fully agree with the cultural narrative that frames serial killers as emotionally void, unfeeling monsters driven purely by violence. What I kept seeing instead were people who
were deeply emotional, just catastrophically ill-equipped to understand or regulate those emotions. Obsession, longing, jealousy, abandonment, those feelings were everywhere, even if they manifested in horrific ways.
When you really look at it, acts like Ted Bundy’s violence or Jeffrey Dahmer’s desperate attempts to keep a lover from leaving aren’t devoid of feeling at all. They’re saturated with it. The problem isn’t a lack of emotion, it’s the inability to process or express it in anything resembling a healthy or ethical way.
Once I allowed myself to lean into that, Jessie finally came into focus. I rooted her violence in emotions many people experience in their twenties, rejection, loss of identity, desire, and then distorted and exaggerated them through her particular psychology. That shift made her more unstable, more frightening, but also more recognizable. Solving that puzzle didn’t just strengthen the character; it reshaped the entire book.
The journey from a finished manuscript to a book in a reader’s hands can be a surprising one. What was the most significant way your book evolved during the editing and publishing process, something you didn’t anticipate when you typed ‘The End’?
Amber Dean: Without giving anything away, the biggest surprise for me was how extreme the ending ultimately became. Even now, after multiple rounds of edits and rereads, it still unsettles me. I didn’t fully realize how far I was willing to let the story go when I first typed The End.
What changed during the editing process was my resistance. I stopped questioning whether I’d gone too far and started asking whether I’d gone far enough. Once I trusted the logic of the character and the world I’d built, the ending sharpened into something deliberately brutal, deeply uncomfortable, and incredibly satisfying. It isn’t gratuitous, but it is uncompromising.
The unease it leaves behind is intentional, and for me, that lingering discomfort is where the book finally earns its last word.
Once a book is published, it no longer entirely belongs to the author; it belongs to the readers and their interpretations. Has a reader’s reaction or analysis ever revealed something about your own work that surprised you?
This has been one of the most unexpectedly satisfying parts of releasing thebook. What’s surprised me most isn’t just what readers are saying, but how the book seems to affect them while they’re reading it.
Several readers have described feeling unsteady, unsure what was real and what wasn’t, as if the narrative was slowly destabilizing their sense of reality alongside Jessie Anne’s. One reader even wondered whether the story was slipping into Fight Club territory, questioning whether Tinsel, the MFC’s best friend and obsession, exists at all, or whether she functions more as a psychological projection. I never set out to create a puzzle in that sense, but I’m fascinated by the fact that the book invites that kind of doubt.
That reader response feels very aligned with the horror I was trying to explore. The unease isn’t confined to the plot rather, it leaks outward, making the reader question their own interpretations, their trust in the narrator, and even their emotional complicity.
One reaction that stayed with me was seeing Jessie described as “unapologetically queer.” Her desire was written without apology or explanation, and I wasn’t sure how that would be received. Seeing readers not only recognize it but embrace it suggested that the book wasn’t just telling a story, it was also transmitting a way of seeing desire, identity, and obsession that refuses to settle neatly.
When readers begin to feel destabilized, implicated, or uncertain, that’s when I know the horror has done what it’s meant to do.
Writing is a demanding, often solitary pursuit. Beyond the apparent goal of ‘telling a story,’ what is the specific, personal fuel that keeps you going through the difficult stretches? Is it the joy of discovery, the need to understand something yourself, the connection with a future reader, or something else?
Amber Dean: I’ve had almost every job imaginable: handing out promotional vape pens in bars, DJing warehouse parties, art modeling, selling real estate, teaching children’s yoga, managing Broadway events, working as a marketing director. Each of them was engaging in its own way, but none of them held my attention for long. Writing is the first pursuit that has sustained me beyond the initial excitement of starting something new.
What keeps me going through the difficult stretches is the act of creation itself. I love building people, worlds, and the chain of actions and reactions that make them feel alive. Writing givesform to something that’s been with me for years in the form of all those late-night, anxiety- fuelled conversations that replay endlessly in my mind, some rooted in real experience, others entirely hypothetical.
On the page, those thoughts finally have somewhere to exist. Writing isn’t just about telling a story; it’s about containment and release. It’s about giving shape to internal noise and letting it live outside of me. That sense of discovery, of watching something cohere that once felt scattered, is what keeps me returning to the work, even when it’s difficult or isolating.
We often hear about authors being influenced by other books. What are some non-literary influences on your work, such as a specific piece of music, a historical event, a scientific theory, or even a landscape, that have profoundly shaped your storytelling?
Without question, the most profound non-literary influence on my work is New York City itself, especially when viewed through a horror lens. It’s a place where roughly thirty million people exist in an impossibly condensed space, spanning the full spectrum from extreme poverty and homelessness to unimaginable wealth. That kind of proximity creates a constant, low-grade tension. It’s chaos, but organized chaos, contained within a rigid grid of skyscrapers and routines.
In New York, simply leaving your apartment feels like inviting the world in. You never quite know who you’ll encounter or what you’ll witness. Anything can happen, and often does. There’s something deeply unsettling about that unpredictability, paired with the city’s insistence that you carry on regardless. You can have a night that feels genuinely transcendent, or grotesque, and still be expected to show up at a 8 a.m. meeting like nothing happened.
You might see something that alters you, or do something you’ll never quite metabolize, and yet the city keeps moving, demanding productivity and composure. That dissonance, the coexistence of the sublime, the disgusting, and the mundane, has shaped how I think about horror. In New York, terror doesn’t announce itself. It blends seamlessly into daily life.
Is there an author, living or dead, whom you consider a ‘silent mentor’? Not necessarily someone you try to imitate, but whose approach to the craft made you feel permission to write in your own way?
I know this is a cliché, but J.D. Salinger has always felt like a silent mentor tome. The Catcher in the Rye is a book that’s stayed lodged in my mind for years. Holden Caulfield’s relationship with institutional education mirrored my own experiences in a way that felt almost uncomfortably precise, especially when I entered college with genuine hope about what it would offer, only to find that promise largely undelivered.
What struck me most was the way Salinger allowed Holden to exist in such open defiance of expectation. There’s a raw, unapologetic I don’t give a fuck quality to his voice, written during a period when conformity was not just encouraged, but idealized. The permission to let a narrator be difficult, alienated, and resistant without softening them for the reader was hugely formative for me.
Salinger’s later withdrawal from public life only deepened that influence. After reaching the height of success, he chose silence and privacy over visibility, which I find quietly radical. The work stood on its own, without explanation or performance. That idea, that the writing can speak loudly enough without the author constantly present, gave me permission to trust my own instincts and write on my own terms.
Who was the first person to see your early drafts, and why did you trust them with your unpolished work? What is the most valuable piece of feedback they gave you?
My husband was the first person to see the book in its earliest, messiest form. He read almost every line as it was written, watched me revise and unravel and rewrite, and acted as a constant sounding board for every doubt, detour, and structural shift along the way. What made me trust him with such unpolished work was his steadiness. He wasn’t trying to shape the book or impose his own vision on it he was simply present, attentive, and honest.
The most valuable feedback he gave me wasn’t a technical note at all, but an unwavering belief that the book would be finished, and that it would be good. That confidence mattered more than any line edit. His faith in the project carried it through moments when I might have abandoned it entirely. Without that support, Hysterical could easily have ended up as another half-finished file buried somewhere on my desktop.
Horror is often most potent when it’s internal. Beyond external monsters, how do you explore the slow unravelling of a character’s sanity or the horror of their own mind?
Oh…this is where my interest in horror really lives. The main character in Hysterical is, quite literally, hysterical, and that’s where the horror begins, breeds, and ultimately ends. There’s no clear line between her internal world and the violence that unfolds; one feeds directly into the other.
Her need to be wanted, to keep someone close, sits alongside deep fears of rejection, abandonment, being used, or discarded. Those emotions aren’t background texture—they’re the engine. They drive her perceptions, distort her reasoning, and slowly transform desire into something predatory. The monster isn’t an external force acting upon her; it’s the natural outcome of those internal pressures left unchecked.
I take the reader entirely inside her mind, every reaction, every justification, every emotional spike or collapse. The horror comes from proximity. You watch her thoughts loop, fixate, and intensify until they no longer remain abstract. At a certain point, the thoughts don’t become actions so much as reveal that they always were heading there. For me, that slow, intimate collapse, where sanity erodes not in a single break but through repetition, obsession, and emotional logic, is far more terrifying than anything supernatural. The reader isn’t just witnessing the unravelling; they’re trapped inside it.
Setting in horror is often described as a character in its own right. How do you approach transforming a location, whether a house, a town, or a landscape, into a source of active dread?
Amber Dean: I’ve already spoken about New York from a macro perspective, but what makesit especially effective for Hysterical is how easily horror can disappear into it. The city is crowded, chaotic, and overstimulating. Things go unnoticed, overlooked, or deliberately ignored all the time.
New York also functions as a vast ecosystem of both predators and potential victims. People move through it anonymously, constantly intersecting with strangers, carrying private hungers and private vulnerabilities. That ambiguity is where the dread lives. The city doesn’t announce danger; it absorbs it. So, what I’m interested in is that lingering question the setting leavesbehind – when you step into a place like that, you’re always being asked something quietly and repeatedly: which one will you be?
Writing a terrifying buildup is one skill; delivering a satisfying payoff is another. How do you decide when to finally show the monster or reveal the source of the horror?
I tend to reveal the monster early. It may be a symptom of my ADHD, but I’m not especially interested in withholding the central conflict or turning the story into a prolonged guessing game. I’m not drawn to whodunits or slow-burn mysteries.
For me, the real tension comes from recognition rather than concealment. I like the reader to know who, or what, the monster is, to understand the problem clearly, and then be forced to sit with the question of what happens next. The suspense isn’t about discovery; it’s about inevitability.
Once the monster is visible, the story becomes a study in consequence. The horror lies in watching how far things will go, how badly they’ll unravel, and whether anything resembling resolution is even possible. That forward momentum, knowing the danger and being unable to look away, is what delivers the payoff for me.
The horror genre is rich with established tropes and archetypes. How do you engage with these familiar elements, the haunted house, the ancient curse, the final girl, in a way that feels fresh and surprising? Do you consciously seek to subvert a trope, or do you focus on executing it with such depth and authenticity that it becomes new again?
I’m very aware of horror’s tropes, especially the way women have historically been positioned within them. The “final girl,” in particular, has always fascinated me, not because I want to dismantle her outright, but because she represents a very narrow form of survival that’s often tied to moral correctness, restraint, or endurance.
What interests me more is the girl who doesn’t survive, or the girl who was never meant to. The one who, in a traditional horror structure, would be killed off early: too emotional, too sexual, too volatile, too much. I’m drawn to what happens when that girl doesn’t disappear, but instead reclaims the narrative by becoming the monster.
In that sense, I’m not trying to subvert tropes for the sake of novelty. I’m more interested in shifting the point of identification. When the character who would normally be punished orerased is allowed to drive the story, the rules change. Survival stops being the moral reward, and horror becomes something more confrontational and unstable.
For me, that leads to the idea that there are no final girls – only outcomes. When you centre the monster’s interior life, the genre stops asking who gets to live and starts asking what we’re willing to excuse, fear, or even root for. That’s where familiar tropes begin to feel dangerous again.
How do you approach writing scenes of intense terror or violence to make them feel physically impactful without tipping into gratuitousness?
Amber Dean:I’m very conscious of why a violent or terrifying moment exists before I write it. I’m not interested in violence as spectacle; I’m interested in what it reveals. If a scene doesn’t deepen our understanding of the character’s interior state or push the psychological trajectory forward, I tend to strip it back or remove it entirely.
When I do write violence, I focus less on excess detail and more on physical immediacy. How the body reacts, what the character fixates on in the moment, where their attention goes under stress. Terror becomes more impactful when it’s filtered through sensation, emotion, and distorted perception rather than sheer description.
Gratuitousness, for me, happens when violence exists independently of consequence. In Hysterical, every moment of brutality is tied to desire, fear, or control, and it leaves a residue, psychological or emotional, that carries forward. The goal isn’t to shock and move on, but to make the reader feel complicit, unsettled, and unable to fully disengage from what they’ve witnessed.
That lingering discomfort is where the real impact lives.
Do you have a favourite line or passage from your work, and would you like to share it with us?
“And the sick part is: I like it better this way. Not for money. Not for safety. Just to be chosen. I’ve learned not to ask questions that turn gods into men.” – Hysterical, Amber Dean
What is the specific, core truth you are trying to expose or explore through your horror?
At its core, my horror is about what happens when desire is treated as something dangerous or unspeakable, especially in women. When need, obsession, anger, or longing are denied expression, they don’t disappear; they turn inward and begin to distort perception and behavior.
I’m interested in how identity fractures when it’s built on performance rather than truth, and how fragile the boundary really is between control and collapse. The horror isn’t rooted in an external threat so much as in recognition. The slow realization that the monster isn’t alien or exceptional, but constructed through fear, repression, and emotional denial.
For me, horror becomes most potent when it forces the reader into proximity with that process. When the story doesn’t allow for easy moral distance, and instead asks how much of the monster we’re willing to understand, excuse, or even recognize in ourselves.
You have precisely two minutes in a crowded bookstore to hook a reader who is sceptical of the entire horror genre. They look at your book’s cover and ask, ‘Convince me. Why should I read this? I don’t even like being scared.’
Amber Dean: This isn’t a book about jump scares or things hiding in the dark. It’s about what happens when wanting to be loved, chosen, or seen starts to override your sense of self. The horror in Hysterical isn’t loud, it’s intimate. You’re inside the mind of a woman whose thoughts feel reasonable to her, even as they become more dangerous. If you’ve ever ignored a red flag, stayed too long, or performed a version of yourself just to keep someone close, you already understand the fear this book is working with.
People who don’t usually like horror often tell me this book unsettled them not because it terrified them, but because it lingered. It’s less about being scared in the moment and more about recognizing something you wish you hadn’t. If you don’t like horror because it feelscheap or extreme, this is something different. It’s psychological, character-driven, and quietly uncomfortable. It stays with you after you close the book.
Amber Dean is a horror writer whose work explores obsession, desire, and the instability of
identity. Her debut novel, Hysterical, is a psychological horror set against New York City’s
underground nightlife and fetish scenes, examining what happens when longing curdles into
violence. She previously lived in New Orleans and now resides in Abu Dhabi with her husband,
son, and an unreasonable number of animals.
Purchase the book links:
Canada: https://a.co/d/aPzYNGn
Australia: https://amzn.asia/d/fXJ3LfD
Author Website: www.AmberDeanAuthor.com
Hysterical: A Novel by Amber Dean
She’s not the final girl. She’s the reason there isn’t one.In the chaotic allure of 2013 New York City, Jessie Anne appears to have it all together: sharp wit, quiet intensity, and a wild nightlife filled with underground raves and unconventional gigs. But beneath her composed exterior lies a fractured psyche consumed by unrequited love for her best friend, Tinsel, and a dangerous fascination with death.
As her infatuation with Tinsel deepens, Jessie’s double life begins to blur. The lines between love, envy, and obsession vanish, pulling her further into fantasies she can no longer control. People in her life become pawns—tools to process her frustration and rejection, leaving a bloody trail in their wake.
Hysterical is a visceral journey into the twisted psyche of a woman navigating love, obsession, and her most disturbing cravings. Amber Dean’s chilling debut blends biting humor with unnerving suspense, exploring the raw underbelly of city life where pleasure and peril collide.
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