Lindsay King-Miller for Women in Horror Month
1. Introduce yourself. What do you want people to know about you and your work?
Hi! My name is Lindsay and I write queer horror. I'm especially fascinated by the ways horror can intersect with sex, parenting, and grief, and you'll see those themes in most of my work. I write poetry, short stories, and novels, and a lot of my shorter work experiments with diegetic or found-footage writing. I also love putting a fresh twist on old horror tropes (not the final girl, though. She could use a break).
2. Who or what were your earliest horror influences?
Like every millennial horror nerd, I devoured Goosebumps and Fear Street books at an early age. My earliest stories were Goosebumps ripoffs. Then I got into Christopher Pike, which is maybe where I acquired my unshakable conviction that scary stories should be horny. Once I finished all the Pike in the library, there was nowhere left to go but Stephen King. By that time, though, I'd mostly stopped writing fiction in favor of poetry. I've been a writer my whole life in a variety of genres, and I've always been a horror reader, but I didn't really come back around to writing scary stories until after my first child was born. All of a sudden I had a LOT of fears that I needed to work out on the page.
3. You describe yourself as a "disaster bisexual.” Wendy, the protagonist of your novel The Z Word, is a "chaotic bisexual." Why are all bisexuals hot messes? Asking for a friend.
Oh, this got personal all of a sudden! There are bisexuals who have their lives together, definitely. My friend Miranda. Probably a couple of others. They go to a different school, you haven't met them. But I feel frustrated by the expectation from certain readers that queer characters have to be aspirational, or "good representation." I'm not aspirational! When I wrote Wendy, I deliberately made her a "bad" bisexual. She embodies certain biphobic stereotypes - she's unfaithful, she's attracted to pretty much everyone - but she isn't a stereotype herself (I hope). She's a layered, deeply flawed person who happens to be bisexual.
Don't worry, though - the protagonist of my forthcoming novel (THIS IS MY BODY, Quirk Books, August 5, 2025) is a lesbian who might be even more disastrous than Wendy. I'm just very unlikely to ever write from the point of view of someone who knows what the fuck they're doing.
4. Take us through a day-in-the-life of Lindsay King-Miller.
I think this question is asking about my writing routine and I wish I had one to tell you about! In addition to writing, I'm a stay-at-home parent and the director of Girls Rock Denver (a nonprofit summer music camp for girls and gender-expansive youth. Make a tax-deductible donation today!). My schedule is subject to many outside influences and seldom looks the same from one day to the next. I write when I can, whether that's in the morning after I drop my kids off at school or in the evening while they're playing video games. Sometimes I sneak off to the library on weekends.
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 woman in the genre?
My experience has been overwhelmingly positive. I've gotten lots of support from my publisher Quirk Books, my friends and colleagues, and the community in general. I benefit from the hard work of writers who came before me and broke down barriers for women and queer people in the genre. At the same time, I know I also benefit from being white and cis. Women of color and trans women, and particularly trans women of color, have a harder time getting their work published, distributed, marketed. People talk a lot these days about horror becoming more diverse, and it is, but white writers are still the most visible. And horror deals so much with otherness, with outsider-ness, with the lines between known and unknown, that I really believe the voices we hear least are the ones bringing the most vital ideas to the genre. I'd encourage all those people to be active in looking for underrepresented women in the genre, reading and talking about their work - not out of a sense of responsibility, but with joy and delight, because those writers make horror better.
Lindsay King-Miller is the author of The Z Word. Her next novel, This Is My Body, is out from Quirk Books in August.