Stephen King is inescapable when you’re writing horror set in New England, and I grew up on him, and I still love him. What are some haunted New England books or texts that you’ve drawn inspiration from?įor me, it’s got to be IT and Moby-Dick. There’s nowhere more haunted in the world, and every single picturesque little downtown area and whitewashed clapboard church is dripping with it.
It’s where we poured onto this continent and commenced ruining the next four centuries of human history. As far as I’m concerned, New England is Mordor. That visual palette, dead leaves and moss and fiddleheads and lady slippers, that was very influential to me, and when I learned as a little kid that we had taken all that land from the Abenaki and the Pennacook, that had a profound impact on how I saw it. I’d take my dog and hunt for snakes and newts, or climb trees, or go stare into little ponds and see what was going on in there. No supermarket, no businesses to speak of, just 600 or so people spread out through the forest. As a kid I ran pretty much wild in the woods we lived way, way outside of anything you could call a real town. Gretchen Felker-Martin: Yeah, absolutely.
Is this something you’ve thought about or influenced your practice? More specifically, I’m interested in how you follow in the tradition of great New England Horror Writers (girl Stephen King, hello.) New England is a spooky place, steeped in ghostly history. I spoke with her about her practice, influences, and artistic desires.Īnnie Rose Malamet: Before we dish about your upcoming novel, I want to talk about your origin story.
Gretchen has risen to the challenge with demented aplomb. Bathed in splatterpunk and a cinematic sensibility, the novel is an arresting exploration of the question “what if men would just go away?” It puts Y: The Last Man to shame (while inspiring renewed interest in its superior predecessor, The Screwfly Solution.) Trans women are the current epicenter of a poisonous moral panic, and trans women artists are uniquely positioned to tackle the failed essentialist fantasies of second-wave feminism. Gretchen’s new novel Manhunt, which debuts tomorrow, follows a clutch of trans characters trying to survive amidst a devastating virus while outrunning murderous TERFs in an apocalyptic New England. As one of the leading provocateurs of the queer horror fiction scene, Gretchen Felker-Martin is no stranger to abject controversy.
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