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The Writers’ Room: When Horror Inhabits Our World

Children dressed in their Halloween costumes in Monterey Park, California.
Children dressed in their Halloween costumes in Monterey Park, California.

Fear can be uncomfortable for some, but for others, it’s something they crave. Horror stories can be a great place to turn for some hair-raising adrenaline.

Some writers, however, use the genre not to escape the real world, but to inhabit it in different ways.

In his new novel, “My Heart Is A Chainsaw,” writer Stephen Graham Jones uses slasher films to think about justice and revenge for marginalized groups.

In an interview with GQ, Jones describes slasher films as a justice fantasy:

“The slasher dreams of a world where wrong is punished….For the past four or five years we’ve been seeing people escape so many bad things. From the news to the political arena, people just kind of want comeuppance in lots of ways.”

We’re sitting down with Jones, writer Carmen Maria Machado, and horror scholar Kinitra Brooks to talk about horror writing and more.

Copyright 2021 WAMU 88.5

Haili Blassingame