Vivian Moira Valentine for Women in Horror Month
1. Introduce yourself. What do you want people to know about you and your work?
I’m Vivian Moira Valentine—horror writer, glamour ghoul, local weirdo—and I write queer horror and horror-adjacent work with a focus on trans characters. I’m fascinated by body horror in a distinctly transsexual way—the flesh rebelling against itself and taking on a form the mind finds repellant, obviously, but also finding liberation in reshaping your body into something others consider abhorrent.
Beyond that, there’s a deep thread of loneliness that winds through my work. It’s strongest in the first Amelia Temple book, but present in almost everything I write. My characters exist somewhat off to the side of whatever society they come from, working to find community with the other freaks and weirdos.
I think that’s the key thing that sets queer horror apart from the rest of the genre. So much of horror rests on the fear of the outsider—a monster or other malign force that comes from the wilderness to shatter the normal lives of good folk. Queer horror is about being seen as a monster by everyone else. You can try to escape, you can try to weather the storm, or you can embrace your own monstrosity.
2. Who or what were your earliest horror influences?
The Universal Pictures monsters were my first loves. My local library had a near-complete collection of the Crestwood House Monster books—the orange monster books, for readers of a certain age. They were slim volumes dedicated to various monster movies, mostly the Universal Pictures creature crew. Each book held to a tight formula. The first chapter would summarize the first movie in a monster’s series. The next chapter would describe the rest of the series in slightly less detail. The volume would then delve into the books and folklore that inspired the films, as well as its influence on pop culture, at least through the late Seventies. Crestwood House opened my eyes not only to the glory of these particular monsters, but the way stories could change over the years; there’s not one singular Dracula or Frankenstein story, but dozens if not hundreds … and maybe one of them could be mine.
This may seem obvious to adults, but it was eye-opening for a seven-year-old.
3. Much of your writing veers into the realm of science fiction; I’m thinking about the Amelia Temple series, as well as your story for The Book of Queer Saints: Volume II. I know you’re also a huge fan of comic books. What about science fiction and horror speaks to your experience, and what do you think society can learn from it?
The thing that fascinates me about science fiction is that it’s not what people from outside of sci-fi think it is. Folks unfamiliar with sci-fi talk about stories predicting the future; they’re not. Much like horror, sci-fi is using metaphor to talk about the present, just with a different aesthetic.
The biggest difference I see between science fiction and horror is that sci-fi generally holds to the principle that the universe can be explained (even if that explanation is basically nonsense to make the plot work). Horror thrives in the unexplainable. That makes for an interesting tension when you combine the two - the expectations of sci-fi hold that there are rules behind all of this. Horror says instead that the rules are elusive, or contradictory, or that they just don’t matter.
That feels resonant as a queer woman living in the US. There are, surely, rules to being part of society, proper ways to explain who we are and why we deserve to exist the same as anyone else. But sometimes, that just doesn’t matter. That’s a terrifying space to live in, and stories can help us make sense of that … or at least just let out a cathartic scream. I don’t think my short story “This Is Really For The Best” offers any advice for dealing with the fact that your straight parents don’t want a queer child.
4. Take us through a day-in-the-life of Vivian Moira Valentine.
Intensely boring, I’m afraid! I still have a regular job to pay the bills. While that eats up most of my typical day, I usually spend my free hours on my writing. If I don’t have a pen in hand, I’m noodling a plot or workshopping a chapter in my head. I won’t say it helps to keep me interested in my job exactly, but it does make the workday go by!
At home, I’m something of an indoor cat. I spend most of my free time with my wife and best friend, Frankie, either building a LEGO set or watching TV. At some point we’ll break off and work on our own creative pursuits - usually me writing and her drawing - although we prefer to be in the same room doing it. Our children are grown and living their own lives now, so we’re getting used to it being just us again.
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 trans woman in the genre, both in general and in the year 2025?
The glory of horror is that it’s a nasty, disreputable little genre. Not for us, the cross-culture phenomenon of a Game of Thrones or a Star Wars. We’re the weird kids at the corner table and we like it that way, scribbling out our bizarre little stories and awful little movies about monsters and curses and final girls, splashing the walls with black ink and red corn syrup. I don’t think we’re going to have many works that transcend the dirty video rental store that is our genre, and honestly I think we like it that way.
As a side effect, we worry about censorship—outright bans, parental controls, stores refusing to shelve our work. Now, though, I’m less worried about being censored because I wrote about a biomechanical horror eviscerating her abusive father than I am because I did it while trans. The content of my work no longer matters to the censor, only my gender. In the eyes of my current government, being a trans woman writing fiction automatically makes my work pornographic.
My response to this is to add actual pornography to my writing schedule this year, so keep an eye out for that.
I am not going to stop being a trans woman, in horror or anywhere else. I will not conform, assimilate or disappear. I’m going to keep writing my disreputable little books in my disreputable little genre, and if traditional publishing channels vanish or are taken down, I’ll continue to find non-traditional ones. I believe in my work, I believe in my community, and I believe in myself.
The word monster probably derives from the Latin monstrare or monere—to demonstrate or to warn. What is a monster but a divine messenger?
Vivian Moira Valentine is the author of the Amelia Temple series. Along Torturous Paths, Amelia Temple Book 3, is out March 31 and available for preorder.