Donyae Coles for Women in Horror Month
1. Introduce yourself. What do you want people to know about you and your work?
Hi! I’m Donyae Coles, the author of Midnight Rooms. I’ve also done a bunch of short stories, people seem to dig them. I’m an artist, I like to paint. I suppose if I was going to want people to know something about my work, outside of the fact that it exists and can be experienced is that I write about the horror and joy of being a Black femme and that probably doesn’t mean what you think it does but you should read my work anyhow, because it’s good.
2. Who or what were your earliest horror influences?
All the big names really. You know, Stephen King, Clive Barker, Dean R. Koontz, Edgar Allen Poe. Movies like Nightmare on Elm Street, whatever was playing late at night on USA. MTV. I’m a child of the 90s.
I think R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike actually taught me a lot about the craft of writing horror. I don’t think people mention them enough because by the time I’m reading and laying the groundwork for who I’m going to become, people like King and Barker, you know they’ve been in the game for a minute. They’ve got really developed styles and King especially was out here writing fifty million asides in his work (this is not a complaint, it’s just an observation. His earlier work was more streamlined. But I didn’t read these until much later. I read 90s king in the 90s.)
But Stine and Pike, they were putting out a book a month and they really do show a lot of how to write a horror story and all the strange directions that one can take. I read a lot of midlist 70s-80s-90s horror novels but I read almost the entire catalogue for those two at the time and I don’t think I would have explored the genre as much if I they hadn’t been there to fill in the cracks.
3. Your novel Midnight Rooms is special in that it tells the story of a Black woman in Victorian England—the kind of story that doesn’t often get told. What inspired you to place your protagonist Orabella in 1840s England? Why is it important to you to tell a story like Orabella’s, and what role does horror play in her experience as a Black woman?
I really wanted to write a story about a Black girl in a big dress. I wanted that motif of a woman running through dark halls holding a candlestick and her skirts to feature a Black girl. Create the representation that you want to see in the world.
But as I was working on the book it became really clear it was more than just physical, this lack of representation. That there was a lack of softness in a lot of Black femmes in particular and femmes in general. So it became really wanting to write a story that focused that kind girl and that we survive too.
I think the horror that intersects with her Blackness is less about her being Black specifically (meaning, this is happening because you’re Black) and more about her being vulnerable because she’s Black. And what I mean by that is, this family doesn’t prey on her BECAUSE she’s Black. They’re going to prey on anyone they can but that she’s in a position to be preyed on because she’s Black. That she’s left to the wolves (or foxes as it were) by the “good people”.
And I think that’s the subtle horror of the situation. That even when people are not being awful, if they’re not confronting their own biases and racism, they’re still part of this system that destroys people of color.
4. Take us through a day-in-the-life of Donyae Coles.
Wake up at noon, scream at god until the sun fades. Write until the words blur on the screen.
No, I wish. I have three children so much of my daylight hours are committed to making sure they’re like, not dying and making it through life ok. I get up in the later morning, make some coffee and round up the youngest for schoolwork. Get him through that, make a few meals. Direct my older kids around. In the evening, we do some outside the house activities.
Since I’ve moved my art practice has suffered but a couple times a week I try to get some lines and colors down. I’m getting a studio to help with that.
I write at night, starting around dinnertime, for five-six hours. Then to bed and it’s back at it again in the morning.
5. Imagine you're standing in front of a crowd of every horror creative—authors, filmmakers, podcasters, journalists, etc. What would you want them to know about your experience as a Black woman in the genre, both in general and in the year 2025?
This is really a difficult question because I really think I’ve been very fortunate in a lot of ways. I have a really good agent, I am with a really solid publisher. But one thing I will say is, I wish that other creatives wouldn’t only look for us in times of unrest. A lot of times when we’re given a chance, a platform, it’s in response to some form of white violence, both large and small transgressions.
So often it’s like, here’s this horrible thing that has happened and now we’re looking for Black women to feature, to work with, to shout out. When that should already be happening. So I would like to see people in the field do a better job of reaching out, working with us, shouting us out outside of when there’s been a tragedy.
Donyae Coles is a multidisciplinary artist and the writer of Midnight Rooms, out from HarperCollins.