What do vampire bedbugs, desert parasites, and zombie deer have in common? They’ve all had starring roles in my horror fiction!

Though I rarely lack for dark inspiration, for years I’ve struggled to define the specific subgenre of horror in which I write. For a while I was calling it “microbial horror,” as a lot of my work focuses on viruses and bacteria, though not all.

For instance, the novel I’m currently pitching, Alpha Syndrome, has to do with deer ticks, but I’m sure as hell not calling my stuff “tick-lit.” And then I wrote “Handgina,” and while some tried to label it “body horror,” to me that brings up images of guts and gore, which I tend to shy away from (in my writing, my reading, and life in general).

Over time, I pondered my (world’s largest?) collection of “nature-based horror” books: dark, clever, and often absurd tomes about killer sea birds, deadly snails, and murderous bodies of standing water. But while many of my stories do take place in or involve nature, that didn’t quite feel right either.

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