In My Own Words: Elspeth Hollow

The house where I grew up was alive. I don't mean that metaphorically.

It was a Victorian on a street where the elms had grown so thick overhead that the light inside was always green and shifting, like being underwater. Floors that creaked in sequence, as if something were pacing. Rooms that seemed smaller in the evening than they had been at noon. A cellar door that would not stay closed no matter how many times my father latched it. I was ten before I understood that other children's houses didn't behave this way.

That house made me a horror writer. Not because it frightened me — though it did, often, at hours I shouldn't have been awake — but because it taught me that the most terrifying thing in the world is a space that knows you're inside it. Every building I've written since is a descendant of that house. Walls that breathe. Hallways that lengthen when you're not looking. Rooms that grow smaller as the guilt grows larger.

I keep a journal of nightmares. I call it research. It sits on my nightstand in a leather cover that is wearing badly at the spine, and I write in it before the dream has fully dissolved, while the images are still wet. Most mornings the entries don't make sense. Some mornings they make too much sense, and those are worse.

I write horror because I believe it is the most empathetic genre. You cannot be truly scared unless you care, and you cannot truly care unless you understand. My narrators are unreliable — increasingly so, as the story progresses, until the reader can no longer be certain what happened and what was imagined. That uncertainty is the point. I never explain the supernatural, because explanation is the death of dread. The moment you understand the monster, it stops being a monster and becomes a problem. I don't write problems. I write hauntings.

Shirley Jackson taught me that the most haunted house is the one you grew up in. Mark Z. Danielewski taught me that architecture is narrative. Henry James taught me that ambiguity is not a failure of storytelling — it is the highest form of it. In my stories, the temperature is always wrong. Too hot, too cold, never comfortable. Because comfort is the one thing I refuse to give the reader.

Horror is empathy's shadow. You cannot have one without the other. I write about guilt as haunting, about domestic spaces as traps, about the things we inherit from the dead and the things the dead refuse to let us give back. I write to make you feel unsafe in your own house, in your own memories, in your own certainty about what's real.

The house remembers what you buried. I'm here to help you dig it up.