‘I’ve been asked in other interviews and by other writers and readers about advice for new authors, and I guess my simplest suggestion is this: Write! Do not stop.’
Congratulations, Christa, on your latest book, Beneath the Poet’s House. Before you discuss that, how about a brief intro to folks who may not have read your outstanding work yet?
Thank you so much! I am a writer of horror and psychological suspense, and my novels include The Daughters of Block Island, Beneath the Poet’s House, and the forthcoming How to Fake a Haunting. My short story collection, Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked was published in 2018 by Unnerving, and additional short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in places like Nightmare, Vastarien, Wicked Run Press, Fireside Magazine, Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, and the Bram Stoker-nominated books Not All Monsters: A Strangehouse Anthology by Women of Horror and The Streaming of Hill House: Essays on the Haunting Netflix Adaption, to name a few.
I live in Westerly, Rhode Island with my husband (we were married on Halloween at the historic-and-purportedly-haunted Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado), our four-year-old daughter, and a bloodhound/golden retriever mix. I have a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania in English and psychology, a master’s degree from Boston College in counseling psychology, and a Master of Fine Arts from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine.
When did you first begin writing?
In May of 2014, I was on a train back from Baltimore to my hometown in Rhode Island after a family gathering, and I ended up downloading Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft to read on my Kindle. I had read the book before, but I’d recently overcome a fair amount of upheaval in my life and was reconnecting with things that brought me joy. As I read, I remembered, almost like a woman awakening from a bad dream, that not only did I love reading, but I loved writing, and there was nothing stopping me from doing just that. I’d written a lot in the past—mostly journaling and some weak attempts at novels and a memoir—but never with the express intent of trying to get published. By the time the train arrived in Westerly, I was outfitted with a plan and no small amount of inspiration, maybe even preoccupation bordering on obsession. By the next day, I was trying my hand at short stories, and by the end of that summer, I’d finished a draft of my first novel.
Was horror you preferred genre from the start?
I’ve enjoyed horror for as long as I can remember. Counted among my favorite books as a child were Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, the Goosebumps and Fear Street Series, the vampire novels of Christopher Pike, the harrowing mysteries and narrow escapes of Caroline Keene’s Nancy Drew, and James Howe’s Bunnicula, The Celery Stalks at Midnight, and Howliday Inn. The love of the unknown, of things that go bump in the night, only increased as I got older.
I remember lying in bed following my first ever horror film, John Carpenter’s Halloween, certain that Michael Myers was in my backyard, making his way up the trellis to my bedroom window. That there was no trellis alongside my house didn’t matter; beguiling, paralyzing fear wound through me all the same. I can also recall darting across my room to retrieve a crucifix from my jewelry box after reading the scene in ‘Salem’s Lot in which Danny Glick floats outside of Mark Petrie’s window, tap-tap-tapping, hoping to be invited in, and I refused to venture into my bathroom at night for weeks after reading the ‘Inside 217’ chapter of The Shining, certain that Jack Torrance’s vision of the hideous dead woman would become my own.
Today, the horror that interests me most is a different kind than the vampires or ghosts that inducted me into the genre. That’s not to say I don’t still enjoy these types of stories; I love a great creature-feature or supernatural-horror novel, short story, or film as much as the next fan. But horror, in my opinion, is the best genre for reflecting the hideous and appalling parts of life—addiction, mental illness, the death of a loved one, difficult marriage, dangerous childbirth, the future, dead-end jobs, not being good enough, being forgotten—back at us through a carnivalesque filter that makes the suffering more bearable.
And what is the appeal of horror. For me, it has always been what my favorite writer, Stephen King, described when he wrote: “Monsters are real, and ghosts are real, too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
I absolutely agree with that King quote; he’s always—not surprisingly—so eloquent when it comes to describing the appeal of horror. Personally, I subscribe to the Jungian idea that we each have a shadow side to our personality, and I find writing horror the most satisfying way to explore mine, and the most organic way to work through what truly terrifies me. I’m actually a little suspect of people who don’t enjoy horror, or, at the very least, don’t acknowledge the essential nature of the horror genre within film and literature. That there’s darkness everywhere seems much easier to swallow when you’re used to facing that reality in your entertainment.
OK, let’s dig into your work. Your first book was a collection: Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked. An overview, please.
The most literal way to read Something Borrowed is as a series of straightforward horror stories. There are ghosts, apocalypse-inciting rains, witches, serial killers, more ghosts, nefarious shadow creatures, zombies, haunted houses, long-preserved corpses, newly-opened mausoleums, sinister trains, and out-of-place staircases.
But these tropes are stand-ins for deeper themes I was interested in exploring. The babysitter in “Souls, Dark and Deep” uses her unorthodox powers not for evil but to level the playing field against evil and injustice. The serial killers in “Red Room” function less to scare à la Michael Myers, and more to warn of the perils men can face when they disbelieve the women in their lives for whom they’re meant to be allies, like their partners and other loved ones. The ghost in the eponymous flash fiction piece is a hardcore, Gloria Steinem-quoting, take-no-nonsense-and-even-less-prisoners feminist. And the shadow wolf in “Flowers from Amaryllis” represents many things: the fear of eventually losing a companion animal, the fear of losing a parent, the fear of being alone, the fear of going mad, the fear of not being able to be true to who you are.
In putting together this collection, I really strove to include stories that showcased my range, not just as a writer, but as a horror lover, and all the different types of horror stories I had penned to date. Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked includes post-apocalyptic, extreme, slasher, paranormal, supernatural, psychological, zombie, Gothic, magical realism, weird, and creature horror, so I truly hope the phrase, ‘there’s something for everyone,’ will apply.
Then came The Daughters of Block Island, which won the coveted the Bram Stoker Award and was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist. Tell us about it please.
The Daughters of Block Island is my take on the gothic, the culmination of years of reading books like The Castle of Otranto and Rebecca and wanting to throw my hat in the ring of decaying castles and damsels in distress. Like many popular subgenres, the gothic has been done to death, so I had to ensure I was bringing something new to readers, ultimately deciding to “make gothic meta,” with my poor tragic heroine, Blake Bronson, believing herself to be in the quintessential gothic novel.
The book is also inspired, in part, by the Twa Sisters murder ballad (in which a young woman is drowned by her older sister after they are two-timed by a suitor… no spoilers, but you can certainly find nods to my story within this ballad’s description), as well as the Scream film franchise, so there is a little something for everyone within its rain(-and-blood!)-soaked pages.
And finally in the books category, the just-published Beneath the Poet’s House. Again, sketch it out for us.
Beneath the Poet’s House is my second novel with Thomas & Mercer and is based in part on the real-life romance between Sarah Helen Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe and set in the actual house at which Poe first spotted Whitman tending her rose garden under a midnight moon in 1845. The novel sees protagonist Saoirse White navigate both a personal haunting and the lingering ghosts of much-revered public figures, as well as the ramifications of men who treat women as stepping-stones on their way to artistic greatness.
Sarah Helen Whitman was an accomplished poet, but she was also an essayist and literary critic known throughout Providence—and wider literary circles—for her keen intellect and, eventually, her thoughtfully penned defenses of Edgar Allan Poe after his death in 1849. Her passion for science, mesmerism, and the occult as described in Beneath the Poet’s House are unfabricated, and while she typically dressed in black, wore a coffin-shaped pendant around her neck, and held séances in her home, her belief in the afterlife was careful and measured. Whitman scorned the obvious charlatans and professed the belief that occult sciences, while “dimly discerned and obscured by superstition,” still concerned themselves with “great truths.”
Whitman attended the first ever recorded séance in Providence in September of 1850. And she cultivated her unique interests during a time where most of the population was enamored with industrialization and the accumulation of wealth. In other words, she was a fascinating, multifaceted, and purposeful individual, a woman who knew her own mind and surrounded herself with similarly idea-driven friends . . . and romantic interests.
Whitman and Poe met at 88 Benefit Street in September of 1848, after which they began corresponding with one another, culminating in plans for what was to be an “immediate marriage” on Christmas of that same year. Whitman’s one prerequisite for their union was that Poe remain sober, so when she discovered he’d been drinking two days before Christmas, she broke off the engagement, an event that, despite the betrayal she felt at Poe’s relapse, distressed Whitman to the point where she could only flee the Athenæum for home, where she collapsed on a settee with an ether-soaked handkerchief held to her face.
So, why a book inspired by Sarah Helen Whitman? Because, in my humble opinion, she of the coffin pendant and midnight-black dresses, of nighttime gardening sessions and regular attempts to understand where the dead go, respected herself enough to hold one of America’s greatest literary successes to her own personal standards. Because she was as hauntingly intriguing as the lines of her delicate, decadent poetry. Because the house she once inhabited infuses mystery from every Federal-style window molding—bone white against the striking shade of red—as it sits, sentry-like, above Saint John’s Cathedral and the silent, shadowy cemetery. And because, though no one can discount the macabre genius of Edgar Allan Poe, the woman who commanded his attention with her sharp wit—and sharper discernment—is just as deserving of contemplation, admiration, and indulgently eerie spin-off stories.
Where do you find inspiration for your novels and shorts? We read on your website that “most of [your] work comes from gazing upon the ghosts of the past or else into the dark corners of nature.”
I love making connections to historical places and figures and find that these connections often to lead to passions, obsessions, and story ideas. My interest in the “last New England Vampire” led me to writing a (currently unpublished) novel about Mercy Brown. My interest in the 100-mile wilderness in Maine led me to writing a (never-to-be-published!) gothic addiction horror novel—my first novel ever—in 2014. My interest in murder ballads and, eventually, in White Hall, led me to writing The Daughters of Block Island. And my interest in a Sarah Helen Whitman’s former residence, and in Whitman herself, led me to penning Beneath the Poet’s House. I find that writing novels with some sort of connection to the past or to an actual place fulfills me in a way that writing more free-floating stories ever could.
These days, 95% of what I write takes place somewhere in Rhode Island. I think my consistent use of Rhode Island as setting can be attributed to a combination of two factors. First, there is absolutely something haunted and horrific about the smallest state in America. Especially in the beach communities at the southern part of the state, there’s such a sense of isolation in the winter, of things lurking in the cold and waiting to awaken. Additionally, while I don’t necessarily subscribe to the oft-repeated “write what you know” adage, I find that setting a work of fiction in a place with which you are intimately familiar makes for fiction that can be more dynamic to read, and more enjoyable to write.
And give us a bit about your writing process. Do you outline first? Edit as you go? And so forth…
I write when I have an ongoing project I need/want to work on, or if the idea for a new project or short story strikes me. Once I’m working on a project, especially a big one, I’ll get into a routine of hitting a daily page or word count, but I have to take advantage of the time during which I can write whenever it presents itself. That might be for twenty minutes after my daughter falls asleep before I’m overtaken with exhaustion myself or four hours straight on a weekend when my husband is at work and my daughter is with her grandparents or cousins. In a way, it’s a more productive schedule than the one I had prior to my daughter being born four and a half years ago; I can’t waste time picking out ambient coffee shop sounds on YouTube or reheating endless cups of tea or screwing around on the internet. With a child and a full-time job, when a free hour presents itself in which to write, I HAVE TO WRITE.
As for “pantsing” versus “plotting,” or, writing without an outline versus with one, I don’t outline in the traditional sense, but I do leave myself what I call literary breadcrumbs as I go. For example, when I’m halfway through a novel, I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about it, daydreaming, etc., so if I’m out, say, walking my dog, mentally working through plot points, I’ll text myself little epiphanies or narrative beats that I want to hit or at least work towards. And occasionally, if I’m struggling with where to go next or trying to plan how to pace things for maximum suspense, I’ll draw a big, colorful, chaotic graph and see where different chapters land in terms of high vs. low emotion, then use that to envision where I want to go from there.
On your website, you write that you use “a Ouija board to ghost-hug her dear, departed beagle.” Tell us about that, please.
For readers familiar with the concept of a heart dog, my beagle, Maya, was that for me. She was my constant companion for thirteen years, my rock during substance abuse treatment as well as in early—and then longer-term—recovery, as well as a huge source of joy across all aspects of my life. She was my copilot for so many of my young adult years, steadfast and sweet, and I was absolutely gutted when I had to make the decision to end her suffering due to an extremely fast-growing mast cell tumor six days before her thirteenth birthday.
The line in my bio about ‘ghost-hugging’ her via a Ouija board simply means that I go out of my way to remain connected to her in small but concrete ways: lighting a candle in her memory, placing a new gemstone next to her picture on an altar in my home office each year on her birthday, placing photos of her in beautiful, well-lit areas of my house, surrounded by greenery and tiny talismans (wax from the candle I lit in hopes of her recovery, a puppy tooth, a silver coin engraved with an angel, a shark’s tooth that matched the pattern of the fur on her back), etc.
What advice do you have for young or emerging writers in any genre?
Advice is a tricky thing, because what might work for some might be neutral—or even harmful—for others. I’ve been asked in other interviews and by other writers and readers about advice for new authors, and I guess my simplest suggestion is this: Write! Do not stop. Turn all your anger and disappointment and dissatisfaction (and, since I believe we each have a shadow side and a lighter side to our personality, all of your joy, success, and happiness, too!) into stories. Those stories make the world the magical place it is. It’s a real gift to harbor a talent and passion for writing. Embrace it, and share it with others, if you’re so inclined.
I do also think it helps to have a goal. Any goal, no matter how small, helps keep you on track. Maybe start with something that gets your butt in the chair as consistently as you’re aiming for and work your way up. My writing goals are simple these days: meet deadlines—regardless of what that looks like for word count or days in a row spent writing—and respond to the Muse when she comes knocking.
What’s next for Christa Carmen?
My third novel with Thomas & Mercer will be out in the fall of 2025 and is called How to Fake a Haunting. It’s a bit darker than the first two novels, and I suppose that’s saying something, since there are some pretty dark themes in both The Daughters of Block Island and Beneath the Poet’s House. In How to Fake a Haunting, a woman pushed to the brink by her alcoholic husband decides with her best friend to stage a haunting in their home to convince him to leave her and their daughter, only to experience very real, very terrifying events that may prove too powerful for any of them to survive. I’m excited for readers to experience this novel because I also feel like it’s my first that’s not firmly rooted in the traditional Gothic (there are definitely still some fun gothic elements), so I’m interested to see how fans of the first two books feel this one measures up.
Thank you so much!
