LGBTQ+ HORROR MONTH: AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL G WILLIAMS

Could you tell the readers a little bit about yourself?

I’m an award-winning writer, mostly of novels and novellas with a few short stories here and there. My preferred genres are wry horror - you know, the sort that remembers it can also have a sense of humor, because ultimately screams and laughter come from the same place of subverted expectations - and science fiction. And detective novels. And ghost stories. OK, let’s just say “speculative fiction” and be done with it.

My day job is in information security, and I’m a gaymer and runner and baker. I’ve contributed to tabletop RPGs and I’m both a cat person and a dog person. In my highly-detailed fantasy life, my primary residence is a fully-staffed, 300-acre refuge for animals others have abandoned or otherwise classified as “unadoptable”: you know, all the cats with three legs and parrots who only know cuss words and iguanas with bad attitudes.  

Why horror?  What is appeal of the genre to you as both a fan and as a writer?

Because I grew up afraid.

That sounds… wow. That sounds so melodramatic, but it’s true. I grew up in a very isolated place in the Appalachians. It was scary being queer there. It was scary being any kind of different there. It was a place where people believed in a hostile and active supernatural world: not in some merely reflexive, cross-yourself-at-a-mention-of-the-dead way, but in very conscious, very explicit, very weird ways. I grew up in a place where people simultaneously held the belief that demons and ghosts and witchcraft were all real, all actively malevolent, all arrayed against the ever-narrowing “us” of those who belonged and had not yet been exposed as an agent of the forces of darkness, and that thinking about those things too much made one vulnerable to their influence. And that’s just the mundane stuff. I haven’t even gotten into how my grandmother taught me to recognize the smoke from a moonshine still (in the 1970’s!) so that I could avoid getting too close to one and winding up murdered.

Now I try to describe worlds where people feel certain the supernatural exists, often because they are themselves a part of its fabric, and who also have to keep one foot in the world that no longer believes such things. I think doing so is probably a way for me to process all my dumb baggage in front of everyone.

As LBGTQ+ fan and writer of horror, how did first become immersed in the genre and found that representation that you could identify was few and far between?

I have a very distinct memory of being shocked when I ran across my first explicitly homophobic remark in a horror novel I read in high school. Prior to that, my biggest horror experience had been repeated readings of Dracula, which remains my favorite novel of all time. It contains such a daringly transgressive band of Victorian proto-hippies that I never felt particularly excluded. Sure, they’re all straights, but Mina is a 19th century woman whose compatriots value her creativity and intellect and welcome her into the fold. The men of the group are her near-invalid husband, their elderly intellectual mentor, and a trio of guys who have all sworn a blood oath to one another because they fell in love with the same woman and decided to become best friends rather than rivals. How awesome is that? These cats are the Victorian equivalent of a polyamorous Scooby-Doo gang bouncing around town solving crimes. Stoker explicitly wrote Dracula  to be progressive and especially feminist by the standards of the time, and it still contains plenty of welcome antidotes to toxic masculinity.

But yowza was I eventually in for a rude awakening across the rest of the genre. As a result, I don’t actually read much horror these days, and I’m pretty selective about what I watch. I have made it a policy to check out the moment a story seems to think it will be hilarious if the queers get  bashed/murdered/mocked, or women assaulted, or people of color targeted. Writers and other creators would do well to remember those of us who love participating in these genres often come to them from a place of being outsiders looking for an escape. Using those stories to beat up outsiders is a hell of an insult to us. They would also do well to notice that all the most inventive speculative fiction storytelling right now is by and/or about marginalized people and their experiences: Get Out, for instance, or the 2018 Halloween, which is as perfect as I can imagine of a representation of the #MeToo movement and women whose lived experiences are misogynistically discounted and disbelieved when shared.

How did you discover authors that wrote about characters that you could relate to?

I very clearly recall the moment someone in college handed me an Anne Rice novel. I wasn’t very far into Interview with the Vampire when I realized it was the gayest thing I’d ever read. I fell instantly in love.

Other than the horror genre, what else has been a major influence on your writing?

I read a ton of Nancy Drew novels as a kid - mostly the ‘50s editions with the yellow covers - and was completely carried away by her life: absentee parents, a car of her own, and a couple of friends always up for adventure? Sign my ass up! I also watched a ton of Star Trek in syndication as a child, and then ST:TNG came along and I felt like the whole world had bent to my whim. I also watched a lot of (disjointed, out of order, so kind of nonsensical but also very exciting) old Doctor Who on our local PBS station as a child. And there’s no denying that Anne Rice and Terry Pratchett entered my reading life at exactly the right time to make huge impressions on me. Those two were practically holding hands and skipping down the path when I stumbled into them around age 21.

Basically anything in which the protagonists have to go somewhere else at great risk to become who they are. That made a huge impression on me as a kid who sensed I could not be who I was in the place where I was born, and it’s shaped a lot of what I write.


The term horror, especially when applied to fiction always carries such heavy connotations.  What’s your feeling on the term “horror” and what do you think we can do to break past these assumptions?

I think a lot of people, both in and out of fandom, associate “horror” with a certain set of arbitrary requirements: it must be about a supernatural monster, or it must be about teenagers trying to survive a serial killer, or it must be about getting inside the mind of a killer. We have been blessed with a ton of good horror, so standouts like A Nightmare on Elm Street or Scream or Christine or Hannibal, the best of the best, come to define the genre - and any definition is by necessity somewhat limiting.

In terms of how to break these assumptions, on the one hand I’m not sure we should rush to throw them away. They’re useful! And they’re fun! Like I said, I think we get them from the best of horror and not from the worst, and I am tremendously grateful to that stuff for existing. I also think it’s important that we be fresh and new and interesting. For me, balancing the two means utilizing some of the tropes and trappings of the classics as a launchpad, and then trying to figure out a way to expand the message to something outside of what those classics were talking about. A lot of the genre-defining works are about really important themes, like adults never listen to the kids in trouble until it’s too late. That’s something drawn right out of their creators’ experiences, probably. So let’s draw on our own experiences of being the outsider who is declared dangerous but feels endangered, or of being the kids whose secrets draw them together, or the kids who excel at reading the subtleties of body language and tone because we spend so much time studying others in search of allies.

A lot of good horror movements have arisen as a direct result of the socio/political climate, considering the current state of the world where do you see horror going in the next few years?

Horror has deep roots in the concept of cautionary tales, and I think we could all name examples in which that reflex for warning the reader not to stray too far from the herd resulted in stories that reinscribed the dominant and oppressive paradigm. We saw that evolve in the ‘90s and early 2000’s, so that the skin-of-her-teeth “final girl” of all those slasher movies became the determined survivor (Scream) or even the centrally promoted and fully empowered protagonist (Buffy the Vampire Slayer). And these days, all the most interesting and inventive work in horror is about marginalized people and perspectives: the new Halloween, again, or the remake of Suspiria, which is just stunning and stands exquisitely on its own as a film experience. I think that trend is going to continue.

We’re in a moment in which the President is a fascist who lost the popular vote despite a massive assist from a hostile foreign power and somehow managed to wind up in office anyway, whose entire time in office has been spent stoking the fires of hate and promoting the most poisonous and explosive forms of conformity and lockstep thinking, and whose rhetoric is entirely self-aggrandizing at the explicit expense of the humanity of others. If there is any justice in the worlds of our making, we will use horror to remind people that what makes us different is what gives us strength and that we are not afraid to use that strength against the people who would use fear to control us.

I think horror has slowly evolved from “don’t be too different, kids,” to “I’m going to be me no matter what and survive anyway,” to “what makes me different gives me focus and purpose.” The next step up from that should be, “If you think what makes me different is bad, motherfucker, just wait: you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

What are the books and films that helped to define you as an author?

This isn’t a ranking, but a general list of what I consider some of the works that most make me work to become a better writer:

Dracula (Bram Stoker)
Parable of the Sower (Octavia Butler)
Death Trick (Richard Stevenson)
Small Gods (Terry Pratchett)
Interview with the Vampire (Anne Rice)
How Much for Just the Planet? (John M. Ford)
Hyperion (Dan Simmons)
Leviathan Wakes (James S.A. Correy)
The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula LeGuin)
The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
The Long Goodbye (Raymond Chandler)

Films/TV:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (both film and TV!)
The Craft
The Addams Family
Dawn of the Dead (some awesome heavy-handed metaphor)
They Live
The Thing
Silence of the Lambs
Friday the 13th
Friday the 13th: The Series (underrated and very fun episodic television!)
Return to Horror High

In recent years there has been a slow but gradual diversification within the genre, which new LBGTQ+ writers do you think we should be paying attention to?  

Currently high on my to-read list are Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi’s Ghetto Goddess series, about a young trans woman of color whose transition is linked to accessing the power of witchcraft. They sound pretty phenomenal, and I want to dig into them.

I also very much want to read some of Thommy Hutson’s nonfiction writing about the ‘80s slasher films I love so much. He’s written about both the Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street franchises and I am an absolute slut for intellectual analysis of genre fiction.

How would you describe your writing style?

I sometimes refer to it as “wry horror.” I like to tell stories about characters who find their people - who find friends in what they expected to be a lonely eternity, or who otherwise seek out those who will understand them and a place where they can be themselves - but I also like to introduce the supernatural, and to raise some uncomfortable questions at the edges of their lives, and I like to remember it all necessarily has a humorous edge to it. Humor and horror are very closely related emotional experiences, and they both have the power to educate and enlighten, to expand a reader’s perspective beyond their own experience and expectations. They’re extremely valuable and powerful when used together.

Are there any reviews of your work, positive or negative that have stayed with you?

A reviewer once called me, “Stephen King meets Stephen Colbert,” and I responded to say I cannot hope to live up to either of those, but I plan to put that on everything I publish for the rest of my life, up to and including my own tombstone.

What aspects of writing to do you find the most difficult?

Probably the middle 60,000 words of any novel?

That sounds flip, but it isn’t. The hardest thing for me, by far, is to write the plot without feeling like it is completely predictable and transparent and that any reader would be bored silly watching it unspool.

Are there any subjects that you would never write about?

I have no interest in writing a sexual assault scene or trivializing sexual assault by writing about it from an inauthentic, contrived perspective. I welcome stories from survivors, that represent their lived experience, and I don’t want to devalue the bravery it takes for a survivor to speak out by turning their trauma into some sort of callously voyeuristic intellectual exercise on my part.

Writing, is not a static process, how have you developed as a writer over the years?

I think I’ve gotten better at hearing what I’m writing as I write it. I’m not perfect, and I’m not saying my first draft is my final draft, but I think I’ve gotten better at finding and expressing my rhythm. That said, far more has not changed. I still need a ton of caffeine. I still write in the same coffee shop, many books later. I still need dance music.


What is the best piece of advice you ever received with regards to your writing?

Honestly, and again this will sound flip but it is totally sincere, the best advice I received was to ignore all advice. We each have to find what works for us. There’s no harm in trying on someone else’s advice to see if it fits, and stealing from it what’s useful, but nobody has a monopoly on the secret sauce.

Getting your worked noticed is one of the hardest things for a writer to achieve, how have you attempted to break through the barriers that are so often in place against LBGTQ+ writers?

First, I self-published and promoted it specifically as queer fiction. I featured the queerness, even though the main character of my first series is both gay and basically ace, so there is not exactly a lot in the way of steamy queer action but there are many ways in which his experience of queer life in the early 20th century color his views of the world today.

Second, I made friends with other queer writers at local conventions where I was a guest and sought their advice. That led me to a publisher who loves having queer fiction in his catalogue. He values us as creators and consumers, and as a fan in his own right he remembers that thing I was saying of how so many of us are drawn to genre by growing up feeling like outsiders. He wants to publish stories that speak to and strengthen and empower and value those of us who feel like outsiders.

Third, don’t think you’re too good for romance, or to include a romantic element of some sort in your story. My horror is almost always motivated by relationships of some sort, from familial to platonic to romantic. Queer identities are driven almost entirely by our approach to and experience of sexuality and gender. Even a whiff of a positive representation of the queer experience in some form will draw interest in your story. I’m not saying use relationships as the bait in some sort of bad-faith switcheroo, but I am saying remember that we all experience that part of the human condition in some way - in our gender identities, in our sexual orientations, in feeling alienated for being asexual or agender - and the opportunity to connect with an authentic and meaningful representation of those parts of us that make us queer can be a great on-ramp for someone who might otherwise think your story isn’t for them.

Many CIS white male authors use LGBTQ+ characters in their works, what’s the mistake that they make when trying to portray these characters?

They make us weak. They may think they’re representing the traumas we face at different points in our life, and that’s great, but they commit the error of thinking those traumas weaken us. They do hurt us, but if we survive them then more often than not, in my experience, we hone and polish them into weapons and armor.

Moving on to getting your work read by unwashed masses, what do you think is the biggest misconception about LGBTQ+ fiction?

By far I think the two biggest misconceptions are that every queer story is a coming out story - which is a powerful part of our experience, and for many of us it’s the defining moment - and that every queer story is only about sex or romance. There is plenty of room for sex and romance but I can’t think of any queer stories that are exclusively about falling in love or getting laid.

There are as number of presses dedicated to LGBTQ+ fiction, do you view these as a good thing, or do you think they help to perpetuate the ongoing exclusion from mainstream presses?


I think they’re a wonderful thing. They’re our cultural stewards. They’re our home base, our secret clubhouse, our mothership. They foster the next generation of voices and provide a place where we can be our truest selves. They don’t exclude us from the mainstream press: they are often superior to the mainstream press.

And here is the million dollar question do you agree with movements like this and things such as Women in Horror Month?  If so how would you like to see sites such as Ginger Nuts of Horror tackle diversity?


I absolutely support things like this, and Women in Horror Month, and any other sincere effort to spotlight marginalized voices working in genre fiction. Horror is about the outer edge of human experience, about what we love and will fight to protect, about what we fear makes us weak, about what we didn’t know makes us strong. People whose experiences are of exclusion, of being disbelieved, of being underestimated, of being openly reviled, have a lot to say about those things, and we need more opportunities to hear them.

The most common phrase you hear when people object to active movements to encourage all forms of diversity is “I don’t care about the sexuality, gender, color etc etc of the writer I only care about good stories” what would you like to say to these people?

It must be nice to feel that safe in society. I do not feel safe.


To many writers, the characters they write become like children, who is your favorite child, and who is your least favorite to write for and why?


My favorite is Roderick Surrett, a supporting character in The Withrow Chronicles (first book is Perishables). Roderick is a strung-out gogo boy from the 1960’s who these days is a vampire and very likely a serial killer. He became a vampire not because he wanted to preserve his then-life for eternity, but because he wanted to see what the future held, forever. He’s weird and scary and sexual and almost definitely up to no good, and even I don’t know exactly what he wants from the world, and all the ways he’s an outsider, all the things that make people wary of him, have also made him very compassionate and cautious and calculating.

What piece of your own work are you most proud of?

In terms of published work, either “Daddy Used to Drink Too Much,” a short story published as part of Wrapped in Red: 13 Tales of Vampiric Horror (Sekhmet Press) or the third novel in The Withrow Chronicles, Deal With the Devil.

A Fall in Autumn is the first novel in a series of sci-fi detective stories coming out in 2019, and out of everything I’ve ever written, published or otherwise, I’m proudest of that. Even my editor noted at one point that it was the best thing I’ve ever written. I am just exceptionally proud of it.

For those who haven’t read any of your books, which of your books do you think best represents your work and why?

Perishables, the first book in The Withrow Chronicles. Readers often tell me it doesn’t “feel” like it’s part of its own series, but I think it best represents some of what I’m trying to accomplish: that mix of humor and horror, and the way expectations are undone.

Do you have a favorite line or passage from your work, and would you like to share it with us?

“She’d waxed and waned like some consumptive moon for years, chasing normal life just like a cat after a string.” -- “Daddy Used to Drink Too Much,” Wrapped in Red: 13 Tales of Vampiric Horror

Can you tell us about your last book, and can you tell us about what you are working on next?

My most recent completed work is Nobody Gets Out Alive, which is the fifth and final(-ish) book of The Withrow Chronicles, in which all the little strings from the previous books get pulled together and tied off once and for all. I leave in that “-ish” caveat because I am very interested in writing novellas set in that world and expanding the universe a bit. There are many characters and themes and story ideas there I’d like to explore further, and I think novellas are the perfect form for that.

What was the last great book you read, and what was the last book that disappointed you?

The last book that just knocked my socks off was Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival by Sean Strub. It’s a memoir detailing his early years as a fundraiser for various queer causes, his experience watching HIV and AIDS creep into the queer communities, and his conversion to full-blown AIDS activist. There are parts of it that are very challenging, very distressing, but overall it’s one of the most uplifting and empowering books I’ve ever read. I wept when I finished it. I loved it.

The most recent horror novel to knock my socks off was definitely Lovecraft Country. It takes the whole Lovecraftian template of having a privileged old New Englander encounter the Mythos and be driven mad by the idea the universe might at best be indifferent to them and turns it inside out, giving us stories of African-Americans in the Jim Crow era encountering an indifferent or malevolent world and already knowing how to navigate it. The characters are compelling, the science fiction and horror spot-on, and the social commentary perfectly executed. I loved it. We read it for my queer book club and just couldn’t get enough of it.

I’m trying to think of a book that’s recently disappointed me and not having a ton of luck. Is it possible I’m just having really good luck with books?

What's the one question you wish you would get asked but never do?  And what would be the answer?

The question no one ever asks above a hushed tone - and someone asks me this in that hushed tone at almost every convention where I’m a guest - is, “Have you ever killed someone you know in a story?”

The answer is, nearly all of them.

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Winner of the 2012 Laine Cunningham Novel Award!

Everybody hates their Homeowner’s Association, and nobody likes a zombie apocalypse. Put the two together, and Withrow Surrett is having a truly craptastic night. 

Not to mention the fact that he’s got one big secret to keep from the idiots in his home – Withrow is a vampire. 

Perishables has been called by some “a gripping examination into suburban ennui set in a milieu of post-modern apocalyptic horror.” 

Not really. Those people would be navel-gazing idiots. Perishables is a bust-your-gut funny collection of three stories about trust, human and undead relationships, what community really means, and zombies. 

A LOT of freakin’ zombies. 

Fans of The Black Knight Chronicles, The Tome of Bill, and Fred, the Vampire Accountant will love this series. 

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