Tag: Empress of Suffering

Beautiful Monsters

November 25, 2025 / samanthahund / 0 Comments

As the holidays rear their ugly head, I’ve been wrestling with the idea of posting. It seems everyone is a giant fan of doing the ‘End of Year Wrap-up’ post: tallying accomplishments, reflecting on the worth of their year. And while I think it’s always a good idea to take stock of yourself and your life for personal reasons, I feel slightly ick about doing it publicly, so I won’t.

Instead, I’ll talk about something I find endlessly more entertaining; our obsession with Monsters.

I have to admit this comes on the heels of thoroughly enjoying Guillermo del Toro’s rendition of Frankenstein (which I’ve already seen twice, and has achieved ‘comfort film’ status alongside Interview with the Vampire, Hannibal (the series), The Craft, Crimson Peak, The Witch, Heathers, Natural Born Killers, the list goes on…)

And, fair warning to stop reading here if you haven’t seen the film, as there are small spoilers ahead. You were warned.

I feel the need to call attention to one of the most underrated scenes in the film:

In an early scene, Victor’s father motions for the servant to bring him his wife’s plate. She’s left the gristle and juices from her dinner, and so, he deftly sops up the waste with a piece of bread and tells her to eat it. He watches until she does.

This moment unsettled me at my core more than gratuitous violence or gore ever could. In fact, I was smiling during the insanely jaunty creature assembly scene, as Victor enthusiastically works more diligently than any butcher to the rather twee backing track.

By contrast, the subtle nuance in the dinner scene established Victor’s father as something truly monstrous in one elegant, simple interaction.

This is the sort of character building that intrigues me. Then again, it’s a huge part of my own work.

But what really brings this to the forefront for me is—yes—I’ve started writing something new. Entirely new. I’m in full creative freedom mode, pantsing all the way—something I rarely allow myself. This story is terrible. The characters are worse. But it’s given me the freedom to explore a space that fascinates so many of us drawn to horror;

What makes a Monster?

I know this is nothing new if you’ve read my work, but I think this a theme I could return to endlessly, and still surprise myself. If The Last Dawn asks the reader; what if we empathize with the villain? Then my new story asks; can a Monster achieve redemption?

It also allows me to explore the terrors of casual cruelty in a way I haven’t truly touched before. I find the nuance fascinating. When apathy comes so naturally, that it hardly warrants a second thought. It becomes instinct. Is this more evil for its callousness? Or less because we can write it off as a thing’s nature?

I’m no philosopher, but this concept has haunted me for a while now, and I think I’ve finally found the right story, and the right characters to explore it. Though I do wonder if I’ll find readers brave enough to take the ride.

As always I can’t help but try to find a way, much like del Toro, to make the ugly beautiful in its own way. I’ve always admired this about certain art directors and cinematographers, even costume designers contribute significantly. Though I’ve always preferred novels to films, I very much respect the power of infusing story with aesthetic to reinforce emotional themes. I’ve heard the arguments that this style of filmmaking values ‘style over substance’ (every artist’s greatest fear!) and usually espoused by those who understand neither. I’ve always favored the romantics, the surrealists, and come out on the side that art is meant to elevate, to curate, to show beauty in all its forms.

I simply chose to do so, to the best of my ability, with prose. In the right light, the right context, blood can glisten as beautifully as any cut ruby. A scream can be as multifaceted as any soprano’s aria.

It’s all a matter of perspective, darlings.

That’s enough philosophy from me, I think. I’ll be crawling back into my crypt now to await the New Year and see what tidings it brings. Enjoy yourselves, have a cup of tea, and know that somewhere out there this humble author is stitching together her own beautiful monsters.

Decadently –SMH

CURRENTLY READING

The Black Carnival by Harlequin Grim

This was our book club’s pick, and I’m ecstatic to be reading it. Since my book club is comprised entirely of former and current circus artists, this one hits close to home. I can smell the rosin and tape.

Empire of the Dawn by Jay Kristoff

I admit I haven’t started reading this one yet, but it is sitting there on my parlor table waiting for me. I am saving it for the proper moment where I can enjoy it for maximum impact, I expect to be quite heartbroken by it.

Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle

This one has been haunting my bookshelf for a hot minute so I’m pleased to be finally getting into it. Chuck’s writing is so tight, and always a treat.

In the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft

I’ve been on a bit of a Lovecraft tear lately (see also: my entire post about monsters) and this one is next up on the list. Eldritch horror gives me the wonderful heebie jeebies and well, this re-read of his work doesn’t disappoint. So little scares me these days, but somehow the unknowable horror still gets me. Also – tentacles will never not be creepy as shit.

Bury Me in Pearls; or a Coffin Drifting out to Sea

July 30, 2025 / samanthahund / 0 Comments

I am fixated on the last images of Lèvres de sang – a French film from 1975. A desolate windswept beach, dawn approaching. Two immortal lovers climb into a shared coffin, close the lid, and drift out to sea.

These are the kinds of stories I love. I find more romance in fantastique films and 19^th century poetry than most other places right now.

I was born in the wrong century.

I realize that. My idea of coping mechanisms are; unironically wearing a robe, drinking excellent absinthe (it’s Pernod or nothing) and reading the 1818 edition of Frankenstein.

I am the anachronistic poster girl for 19^th century artistic suffering and while I realize how ridiculous that sounds—I struggle to conceive of how it could be worse than what everyone around me does.

Phones. Netflix. Lawn-care. Crossfit. Microbrews.

We all pick something, don’t we? I just choose the most insufferable crutches, and I’m well aware of it. I own too many vintage robes, and listen to French jazz. I watch old poetic vampire films for the pure joy of aesthetic. I live paycheck to paycheck but insist on being buried in Prada lipstick and pearls.

You can’t take anything too seriously. That’s what I’ve learned. Life is a roulette wheel of misfortunes with the occasional, fleeting, elusive bright spot of joy.

We all lose in the end so we might as well enjoy the ride.

The real beauty of it all, is that we get to pick our poison. So no, I may not know who won the football game. But I did ache when I read Baudelaire’s love and hatred for his muse. I did tear up during J’accuse when the poet lost his soul. When Joan of Arc chose the flame.

My poison happens to be pretentious as hell. But it somehow feels more honest.

I am here. I feel. I am alive.

I am aware that society is unfathomable and insane. That we are the only species on this planet that enforce misery on ourselves over something so imaginary as the concept of ‘hustle.’ Let me have my drama, my poetry, my ache.

We’re all dying, and we only get this dream once. Is it so wrong to want it to be beautiful?

All melodrama aside, as summer winds down and I start hearing the whispers of autumn approach, I’ve got a few writing updates:

I’ve (finally) finished revisions on the third draft of The Last Dawn and am preparing myself to head back into the query trenches. I swear I’m not anxious about it at all.

However, I have to shout out Blake Curran (nouncertaintomes.com) for all of his help. Working with him has been an absolute necessity for me during this process. Thanks to his insightful, and meticulous critique, I completely reconstructed my novel. It is now deeper, bloodier, and more brutal – and at last, cuts just right.

Blake is a wonderful human (see also: possible Australian demon) and he’s been incredibly supportive throughout my many spirals. I really couldn’t have pushed myself so hard without his steadfast encouragement. Hats off to the editors, because without them we writers would simply be melodramatic nonsense puddles that use too many commas.

Also, my horror story; This is My Body is going to be published in September, but I’ll do a full post on that later. It’s an uncomfortable little story but if you like that sort of thing, I can’t wait to share.

I’ve also recently joined the Horror Writers Association, and it’s been exciting to become a part of that community. Also maybe a little overwhelming, but I am navigating.

In less serious news I’ve begun working on a meta-comedy novella, which may never see the light of day, but it has really been helping me laugh at myself. I will not further embarrass myself with the logline here, because I have been told repeatedly, I am not actually funny.

Back to the trenches I go—SMH

Currently reading:

Don’t Let the Forest In by CG Drews

Beautiful and visceral in all the right ways. Truly haunting, and the interwoven fairytale prose cut straight to my heart.

Frankenstein: The 1818 Text by Mary Shelley

Reading this makes me weep. For obvious reasons.

Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Indulgent, gothic, atmospheric, sapphic, classic. What’s not to love?

The Devils by Joe Abercrombie

Absolute powerhouse. This man. How dare he be this good. How dare he just reappear and drop this blood-soaked joyride? How. Dare. He.

Also there is a crazy beautiful UK edtion of this that makes me angry to be American.

Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite

Not my first time reading, will not be my last. This novel holds a very special place on my shelf as perhaps the most disturbing book I own. Not for the faint of heart or stomach, painfully indulgent and hyper-sexual, but still legendary in its audacity.

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

Again, an old favorite. This book… fundamentally changed me. And explains a lot about my writing. Highly disturbing, but what I find iconic is the narrative style and voicing. So chunky, stuttered, and painful to read. I love it.

Letters to Milena by Franz Kafka

I cannot describe how this book makes me ache. This is romance, I will accept nothing less.

Don’t Half-Ass Two Things

June 19, 2025 / samanthahund / 1 Comment

Contrary to all of the advice I received in my formative years:

You can’t do that.
It’s too dark.
You’re too much.
Tone it down.
You’re too messy.
Too honest.

I have finally come to an important realization. The only time any of my art or writing seems to touch anyone, is when I am embracing those exact things I was told to fear.

It’s been a theme my entire life. Restraint. Filter. Polish.

I was once crowned the reincarnation of Emily Post by my respective friend group. At 27.

Look, this isn’t completely self-imposed de-clawing. I’ve worked in creative fields professionally for over a decade. Palatable has always been the name of the game. Clients don’t want too funny, too self-aware, too bright, too true. Safety nets, everyone.

Unlearning that conditioning though, is a superhuman feat. Writing a book while fighting that voice in the back of my head, that little nagging one that whines in a wheedling tone:

You can’t write that! Someone might read it!

But, as I enter into draft 3 of The Last Dawn, I’ve come to a kind of peace with it. I’ve spent a year developing these characters, this world, and exploring the awful consequences of their actions.

I don’t want to write the story that makes that palatable. It simply doesn’t interest me. There are writers out there who will do that far better than I ever could. Because they are actually passionate about it. The endcap at your local bookstore has plenty to choose from where the dark will never go too dark. No one will really break.

I’m not here to knock genre fiction. I love a good beach read as much as anyone. But I realized that I don’t have any interest in writing it.

Which made my revision plan fairly straightforward honestly. I’d done something weird where I wrote a Frankenstein of a novel; three parts romantasy, one part dark fantasy. I didn’t really mean to, but that internal filtering system I had going on just pulled my punches when it should have let me double down.

I was battling ‘this is going to be unpublishable’ with ‘maybe this will have crossover appeal’ with a dusting of ‘let’s go full commercial candy’ and ended up with a novel that wasn’t really living up to my original awful vision.

I wanted to write something smart. Something toothy. Something that subverted expectations but still made you want more, like a slow-motion car wreck.

Instead of half-assing two genres, I decided to whole-ass one. Right now, as long as I remain brave enough, The Last Dawn is going to live up to my vision—and to hell with marketability. Filing off my claws wasn’t doing me any favors. If you want a happy ending, if you want redeemable anti-heroes, I’m going to recommend you move along for your own sanity.

I’m telling a messy, tragic, tale of what happens when we reach for power instead of connection. When we tell ourselves it was a necessary evil. When there is no magic kiss to break the spell. Villains are made one baby step at a time, and each of those steps feels justified.

It won’t be neat. It won’t fit into witty little hashtags, and you’ll see no Canva book graphics about this one.

Wish me luck. Or better yet, guts.—SMH

My Byronic Horror Weekend

May 26, 2025 / samanthahund / 0 Comments

Patience has never been one of my virtues.

Sometimes, I liken my brain to that of a shark. I can’t stop swimming or I’ll die. It makes me insufferable. So, I find myself with a holiday weekend, completely frozen creatively as I wait for feedback from my editor.

This isn’t something I can stand. I find myself itching for the pen, and writing anyway. Writing deep, dark lore for my series that should never see the light of day. This helps ease my twitchy fingers, but only slightly. I need more purpose.

It’s been almost a year since I’ve written any short fiction, and I’m tempted to push myself. There’s something so inherently attainable about writing short fiction. Anyone can write six-thousand words. I’ve spent a year struggling to bear the creative weight of an ambitious trilogy narrative— and as soon as I conceive of the idea, I’m enchanted. Oh the exquisite freedom of unbound words.

Of course, you need an idea if you’re to write, and all of my ideas feel gobbled up by my current novel. Good thing I’ve spent the past two years learning how to reliably conjure them.

For me, there’s a bit of a sacred ritual to it all, the summoning of these tidbits. I file details away in my brain, which may take years to resurface, but when they inevitably do, it often feels like kismet.

I allow myself creative meditation. I pluck words, images, and concepts from those sleeping recesses of my imagination. Then, like my surrealist muses, I blindly combine them, rolling them around in my head until they take on a shape of their own.

I love this process. This is where I feel closest to writing. It’s no different from the way musicians pluck out a tentative new melody that jangles in their mind. Or the way a painter holds the pencil loosely, allowing expressive motion to guide the first lines of a sketch.

There is no commitment at this stage. I conceive of many ideas, but some sink to the bottom, while others float, worthy of my attention. And that’s where I found one.

Short fiction is the perfect place for me to challenge myself, to fail, to try a voice I don’t understand. It feels like a breath of fresh air when I’ve been languishing in four-hundred pages of structure for the last year.

That’s how my Byronic Horror weekend began at least. I conjured the demons on Thursday, began drafting on Friday, and completed the draft by Sunday morning. While all over America, families ready their yards for Memorial Day Weekend barbecues and beers, I sank myself deep into a haze of grotesque religious horror.

It’s equal parts arrogance and amusement to imagine myself as a modern-day Mary Shelley, quietly obsessing over the darkest story my mind could conjure. In fact, it must have been catching because my wary husband also caught the feverish bug. We agreed to both write a short horror fiction, with a religious theme over the weekend, keeping the details secret from each other, until we could swap stories at the end.

So I wrote like I always do, half-mad, forgetting basic human requirements outside of caffeine intake, and dreaming of scripture I don’t understand. Even now, as I sit smugly, my finished manuscript printed and waiting to be read, I can hear my husband clacking away at the keys, occasionally catching him standing in the kitchen rubbing his face in frustration.

This is the kind of creative madness I adore. In so many ways, this is what keeps me writing. I feel renewed by the ritual of completing something, even when it remains unread. I feel the possibility. I feel the terrifying fear that I wrote something I do not understand.

Because if what I’m writing doesn’t scare me, I don’t know that I’ve been digging deep enough.

Fretfully—SMH

P.S. For those unbearably curious (and I applaud you for it) I will tease this about the aforementioned story:

“This Is My Body”

A visceral religious horror story set in rural Pennsylvania, 1962. It follows Father Francis Callahan, a devout and repressed Catholic priest whose obsession with ritual purity and divine suffering spirals into self-mutilation.

Exploring themes of martyrdom, spiritual longing, and bodily violation, This Is My Body is both a meditation on Catholic devotion and a grotesque fable of faith gone too far.

Perhaps you’ll get to read it one day.

The Horrors Persist

May 14, 2025 / samanthahund / 0 Comments

Hello. Welcome to my dark corner of the internet. It smells like deadjournal in here. If you don’t understand that reference maybe find somewhere else to haunt. I’m still writing, and there is so much happening around me I’ve struggled to keep up.

It’s unseasonably hot at the moment, but I’m not sure if it’s just summer getting started or the dumpster fire in my head that’s keeping me warm. I’ll get to that in a moment; first— updates.

Post NYC Midnight (Summer 2024)

I started reworking my short story The Crossing, from the first round of the contest into an entirely different animal. It’s not that I didn’t love what I wrote, it’s just that I’ve always loved villains more— and that’s where The Last Dawn began.

Submitting Short stories and Poetry for small publications (Fall 2024)

I also decided to share some of my short stories; Something Like Love, and The Farm with some small publishers to see if I could get a bite. Spoiler Alert: a year later I’m a published poet in Crowstep Journal, so let’s check that off my starving artist bingo card.

Drafting The Last Dawn (Spring 2024-Spring 2025)

Looking back now, I have to say this all feels like it happened in a bit of a fugue state. I drafted half the novel lightning fast (to about 40k) before starting over and getting the color coded post-it notes out. I have pictures. It was pure madness. Then I was halfway through the next draft before I finally got two weeks to myself to finish it.

It was a lovely, insane two weeks in South Carolina, with no humans to bother me, only a small dog and plenty of girl dinner. Eat, sleep, write, repeat. A tornado happened, but I hardly noticed. Also I discovered how to write 5k a day consistently, and I honestly can’t recommend Rachel Aaron’s 2,000 to 10,000 enough for those struggling to boost their writing speed.

When I returned home to frigid NY once more, I had a finished first draft in hand, and I was absolutely delighted with myself. I thought maybe I’d earned a moment to take a break, and bask in the glory.

Then I remembered that I’m a monster, and dove straight into my brutal revisions. Let it be known— I do not have any qualms about strangling my darlings. I was almost horrified to discover that my ‘cuts’ folder was growing exponentially as I revised. At one point there were over 40k words in the cut folder, and the manuscript was barely more than 70k long.

But I stuck to my plan, make this story sharp as heck. So I committed. I rewrote so much. I tore out the spine of the main plot because I realized it was comically complicated. I thought my revisions would take two to three months. Imagine my shock when I realized— two weeks later, it was ready for betas. I had done it.

Now, hold on. I know what you might be thinking; you could not of possibly revised properly that quickly. That’s a fair assessment. But remember, I did not hesitate to rip my beloved child of a manuscript wide open with a box cutter. I prodded at it, poked at it, watched it squirm, and got back to work. I’m just unreasonable like that.

So- by March of 2025 I had the first beta-edition of The Last Dawn ready. I had already made up my mind to start querying agents in June if all went well. Then everything went… fast. I was querying by late March, and seeing interest by May.

Trust me, this makes it all sound simpler than it is. I’m intentionally leaving out my multiple imposter syndrome spirals, feral meltdowns, fear of handing other humans my trauma-ridden manuscript and—gasp!— letting them read it.

I’m also saving you the obsessive play-by-play of my querying journey so far; suffice to say, I’ve gotten too many “almosts” for my liking— and I’m still in the trenches.

The horrors persist, but so do I.

I should also add, I’ve been feeding my brain as many books as it can handle. I’m currently reading:

The Last Argument of Kings – Joe Abercrombie

I may name my next cats Glokta and Jezal. Really.

Mexican Gothic – Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Sinking into this like a well worn sweater in the autumn.

To Be Devoured – Sara Tantlinger

The reviews were promising. I love a book that horrifies people, but my standards are high.

Les Fleurs du Mal – Baudelaire

I am both reading this and listening to a man with a lovely voice read it in French. I highly recommend both. And a bubble bath.

Farewell for now, theres a manuscript that needs gutted—SMH