Interview with Horror Author Nat Cassidy
Nat Cassidy Interview
1. Congratulations on the upcoming release of your book Mary: An Awakening of Terror! Without giving away spoilers, could you please tell us a bit about the premise?
Thank you! I'm so excited for people to get to read this weird-ass book! Let's see, a spoiler-free recap of the premise …
Mary Mudgett is about to turn 50 and she's feeling incredibly unsettled. In life, in her own skin. It's not just the hot flashes or the restless sleep or the body aches … it's the voices in her head urging her to do awful things, and the increasingly terrifying visions of decomposing corpses she sees on the street and in the mirror. Her symptoms are all dismissed as textbook menopause, but she's unconvinced there's not something really wrong. When she's fired from her job in New York City, she decides to accept a job from her abusive aunt back in her old hometown (a tiny desert town in the deserts of Arizona), thinking it'll be a good opportunity to reconnect with herself, her past, and maybe get to the root of what's happening.
But when she arrives, the visions get even worse, the voices get even louder, the urges get even stronger ... and she soon learns the horrifying history of this town and what often happened to women just like her ...
Mary's about to discover how she fits into all this. But that's when the real horror begins.
2. What was your inspiration for this book?
I go into this in depth in the Foreword/Afterword of the book, so I'll try not to repeat myself too much for those who want to read them. Basically, I first wrote a version of this book when I was 13 and its major inspiration then was that I wanted to write an homage to Stephen King's Carrie. I'm a lifelong King obsessive and Carrie is one of my very favorites. (The title of my book rhymes with Carrie quite purposefully.) I knew pretty much nothing about menopause other than the fact that it existed and was a sort of second puberty, but I loved how Carrie tied this universal, biological rite of passage to a scary story, and so I wanted to do something similar with menopause. I became intrigued by the idea of what Carrie might be like if it took place in middle-age instead of High School. What would it have been like for Carrie White to have lived so many decades feeling invisible and neglected and abused? And what if she didn't have any special powers like telekinesis? What if she was just a normal person, like, say, my mom (who would have been in her mid-40s at the time and who was nowhere near as introverted as the character of Mary, but who'd had far more than her share of unfairness thrown at her)?
There was another book that I was also really into, The Parasite by Ramsey Campbell, which is very metaphysical, all about astral projection and metempsychosis and stuff like that, and that's where I got the idea to explore reincarnation. With those elements, the premise for Mary was born.
I revisited the story a few times as an adult, and it was then that I realized there was richer thematic ground than I could've appreciated as a teenager. There was an opportunity to explore more about how society treats women of a certain age, how menopause is still treated as a weirdly taboo subject, how the bullying Carrie White experienced becomes less overt but more insidious. My original attempt at this book had all these ingredients already—the ideas of cycles (both physical and social), of serial killers and the inheritance of violent patriarchy, etc—but now I felt mature enough to see the threads and actually tie them together in ways they deserved. Hopefully I did it some justice.
Oh! And also, J-horror and gialli. Those were big influences on the actual execution of the book as it exists now. I should mention that, too, because, well, how a book is told is just as important as what a book is trying to say, isn't it?
3. You write the female voice extremely well! It’s so refreshing to have a woman protagonist, turning fifty, who is experiencing the symptoms of menopause…Honestly, when I picked up this book, I didn’t pay much attention to who the author was. I selected it because of the description and cover art. Halfway through, I remember thinking, “Wow, this woman can write!” I was surprised to discover that it was written by a man! How did you research this POV? Did you have women beta readers or critique partners help with the voice?
That means the world to me to hear. Women have been the primary influence of my life. I was raised by a single mom (who herself came from a family of three daughters, and the only children my mom's sisters had were all daughters, as well). With a few exceptions, almost all of my closest friends at every stage of my life have been female. I've just always felt much more comfortable around women than I do men, and honestly, most of the protagonists I write tend to be female or nonbinary.
But obviously, with Mary, the story is about something very specific that's outside of my lived experience as a person without a uterus, so I was incredibly lucky to work with a brilliant array of women—from my editor, Jen Gunnells, to a number of beta readers from all sorts of backgrounds and at multiple steps of the drafting process—just to make sure what I was writing sounded authentic and respectful. I also read several books and watched countless videos on the experience(s) of perimenopause. I feel like that's the least you can do if you're going to write about something that's not yours. (And, of course, Mary is narrated from one particular POV but I tried to acknowledge in the Afterword that not every woman goes through menopause and not everyone who goes through menopause is a woman. Just wanted to have that said since I'm running my mouth off about women and menopause so much here!)
4. I’ll admit it. This book legitimately scared me in the most deliciously terrorizing way! What book or movie have you seen recently that scared you?
Yessss. Writing horror is so weird—sometimes you just know when something you're writing is going to be scary, but a lot of the times, you get so desensitized during the revision process that you start to forget how certain moments will actually affect readers. It reminds me of when you're rehearsing a comedy for the stage—after a while, you're so into the mechanics of everything that you kinda forget you're doing a comedy until you finally put it up in front of an audience.
Mary was definitely like that. I was so caught up in making sure the internal logic made sense and that Mary was a complete character that it's incredibly gratifying now to be reminded that, oh yeah, scary shit happens in this book!
As for stuff I've read or seen … Because I'm part of the Nightfire family, I've been incredibly lucky to read the other books that are under the same imprint. Books like Just Like Mother, Sundial, Black Tide, Manhunt, Dead Silence (I haven't read Echo yet but I loved Hex so much that I know I'm gonna love that, too)—it's the honor of my life to be included among them. If you haven't read the other Nightfire titles yet, you're in for a treat; they're each terrifying and brilliant in their own specific ways.
Some other recent reads (or rereads in some cases) I loved include Sarah Langan's Good Neighbors, Rachel Harrison's The Return, Michael Seidlinger's Anybody Home?, Eric LaRocca's We Can Never Leave This Place, Gus Moreno's This Thing Between Us, Richard Chizmar's Chasing the Bogeyman, Jonathan Janz's The Siren and the Specter. Horror is having such a moment right now, it's almost infuriating. There's just so many good books to read.
Plus, I'm so looking forward to reading your Beyond the Creek, Nico! I've got a copy on my Kindle just itching to be cracked open!
My answer's probably getting too long to get into the stuff I've watched lately, too, but I watch a ton of horror movies and TV. If I were to randomly pick one thing that got under my skin recently, I'd say … Koji Shiraishi's Occult from 2009. I just watched that for the first time a few months ago and it's insane.
5. In addition to writing books, you’re also a screenwriter and actor. How is writing a script different than the experience of writing a novel?
Less and less different the more I write novels, actually!
I actually didn't start writing scripts until I was in my 20s, but for the past 15 years or so, that was pretty much all I wrote. Plays, screenplays, teleplays, you name it. So the bulk of my mature, professional writing career has been scriptwriting. It's how I approach breaking stories, outlining, shaping, etc. I try to make sure scenes are vivid and necessary, that information is relayed through interaction, and, more than anything, that the characters are interesting enough that someone would want to play them.
When I decided to get back into writing novels (which I'd spent my childhood doing), at first I was really excited that I'd have all these new tools to play with—access to characters' inner thoughts, an ability to really set scenes and indulge in descriptions and backstory and digressions, etc. However, I pretty quickly realized those are all traps! You still want to keep your novel lean and mean and propulsive, just as any script! Even though a novel writer has access to more tools, the principles are the same. Keep it grounded in physical action, try to have each scene contribute something new, and try to create a sense of escalation with as little redundancy or wheel spinning as possible.
The biggest difference between script writing and novel writing, I'd say, is that a script is a means to something final (ie, a production, a film, whatever) while a novel is the end result itself. So, with scripts, you need to leave more space for collaborators. Your focus is on the characters, the dialogue, the physical action—but, unless it affects something in those departments, you don't have to worry about, say, the costumes, the lighting, the camera movements, and so on. When you're writing a novel, you're ALL of those things. You're the director, you're the actor, you're the gaffer, you're the costumer, you're the caterer, you're in charge of stunts.
But, ultimately, the goal of any writing is the same: keep the audience wanting to move to the next sentence. The methodology and the rules are different depending on the medium, but it's like how music theory is the same no matter what instrument you're playing.
(I will say, though, there's one other big difference between script writing and novel writing that I definitely miss whenever I'm working on a book: when you write a script you can just hand a draft over to some actors and have them read it outloud in front of you over the course of an hour or two, to see if it's working. You get to make a little event out of it, with cheese and snacks and wine. With novels, you have to sit alone, in quiet, and read your own damn work over and over and over again! It's downright brutal sometimes.)
6. If Mary: An Awakening of Terror was every made into a movie, who would you want to play the lead?
I am so embarrassed I don't have an answer ready to go for this! I mean, I'm an actor and director—I should've cast this in my head down to the background actors already, right?
I will say when I made a little mood board during the drafting process, I used Nicole Kidman's character from the movie Destroyer as one of the stand-ins for Mary. There was a haunted, exhausted quality to that face that I really responded to. But the most important aspects of the character that an actor would need to play are that she's capable of both great meekness and great rage, and that even at her most withdrawn she's still got a sense of humor.
7. What is one writing tip you would give to writers trying to break into traditional publishing?
Write about werewolves. It works every time.
No. Just write. And read. Write write write. And read read read. Write write write write. And—you get it.
No one's path into traditional publishing is the same—my own was long and circuitous and strange and happened because I wrote a lot of plays which happened because I was frustrated with my career as an actor—but the only constants I know of are that you have to love writing and you have to love reading. Writing only happens when you write, and reading makes you a better writer (also, if trad publishing is your goal, reading also helps keep you up to date about the business side of things: who's publishing what, etc. It's win win!).
Also, one bonus tip: take the pressure off of yourself as far as time or age or anything like that goes. Don't get caught up in the Word Count Wars on social media. I wrote the bulk of Mary during quarantine while taking care of two elderly pets that required constant care and only allowed me 4 hours of sleep a night. I usually only got to work for a couple hours in the early morning, before the sun came up, and most of the time I was so exhausted I barely wrote anything and fell asleep at my desk. I'm not saying this as a way to be like, "Don't complain! No excuses!" Instead, I just mean that, even if you don't feel like you have the time to write (or, fuck that language, even if you straight up DON'T have the time to write), just give yourself space to write even a dozen words a day. A sentence. It'll all add up, I promise—the most important thing is to try to do it as regularly as you can and remember that no one can tell your stories but you. I complained in an answer a few thousand words earlier that writing a novel means you have to play ALL the parts … but that's really the beauty of it, too.
8. Where can readers find out more about you?
Contact your local police department and—
Wait. I have a website. Use that instead. Natcassidy.com
Or find me on Twitter if you want to see me shout about things that make me angry: @natcassidy
Or find me on Instagram, where I'm less active now that both of my pets have sadly passed away and I no longer have a reason to share photos of just how weird they were, but I'm sure we'll be getting some new critters again at some point: @catnassidy
Oh! And after several years away, I finally gave in and reactivated my Facebook profile so I could set up an author page: @NatCassidyAuthor.