Comfort in Horror: An Interview with Suzan Palumbo, Author of Skin Thief
Suzan Palumbo’s Skin Thief is a collection that is both luscious and terrifying, full of shapeshifting women, Trinidadian ghosts, and gothic horror. Skin becomes a startling and often gruesome metaphor for identity as queer women transform into deer, snakes, and douens. They are made monstrous, but they glory in that monstrosity.
The collection draws on classic literature, folklore, and even includes a steampunk homage to Phantom of the Opera. It persistently subverts and recenters these stories to reflect the spine-tingling horror of our world. Yet it creates tenderness in unexpected places, like the romance between two mermaids in “Apolépisi: A Descaling.”
Suzan and I spoke on the phone about how delightful it would be to talk, instead, through a human skull. It would give our voices the deep resonance we hear in our own heads. Skin Thief has its own bones, so it wasn’t difficult to transition into Suzan’s book.
Allison Wyss: Our talk of skulls has a lot to do with your work, actually. What is disgusting or horrific can also be beautiful. It leads nicely to my first question: Why do you write horror?
Suzan Palumbo: I never set out to write horror, though I’ve always been a fan of gothic horror and old horror movies. I wanted to write stories that felt meaningful, authentic, and that captured the thoughts and feelings churning inside me. But I’d continually received feedback that my stories contained “horrific” scenes and imagery. This was puzzling because a lot of the stories I write, particularly the relationship dynamics of the characters, are rooted in my lived experiences. I’ve always felt like an outsider and monster, but I wasn’t aware that it came through tangibly until readers said: Girl, you are horrifying!
So I write horror stories because large parts of my life have been horrific and that’s how I process my feelings. There are a lot of things about myself I don’t like. I don’t always do the right thing. If people are honest with themselves, a lot of them might admit the same. We’re all monstrous in one way or another, and I like exploring that. Declaring myself a horror writer has been quite the gothic journey in and of itself.
AW: The way you describe it is incredibly gothic. Now that you’ve embraced it, do you find comfort in writing about terrifying things? Or do you scare yourself when you write?
SP: I do try disturbing and scaring myself when I write. I try to feel like I’ve crossed a boundary or written something transgressive. If I’ve made myself sob, I’ve hit the jackpot. I sit in the characters’ emotional space to write them as rawly as I can. If I feel safe, then I know I need to dig deeper. It’s exhausting emotionally, but I find comfort and catharsis afterwards.
Writing terrifying things has led me to spend a lot of time thinking about death, pain, loss, grief, abuse, violence, and how those things manifest. It’s made me think about how people treat each other and ask why we do the things we do. It’s also, I hope, made me more empathetic and kind. Writing horror has been a safe sandbox where I get to work issues out.
AW: I love when a story twists those slippery, and often painful, feelings into something tangible that we can examine. In “The Pull of the Herd,” a deer woman locks her pelt in a chest so she can be with her human lover, but she is torn between worlds. The pelt is restrictive “like a bra” and “winches” her back. I love how visceral that is. In “Tara’s Mother’s Skin,” a college student tries learning about a soucouyant, but the truth is more dangerous than she anticipated. Soon her own skin is slipping around grotesquely, “like an ill-fitted glove.” Is it important to you that these bodily transformations stay messy and raw?
SP: Yes. For the type of gothic/horror-themed work I write, body horror is extremely useful in portraying power struggles, internal conflict, claustrophobia, and a lack of control. Body horror presents a situation you cannot run away from: The conflict is manifesting within you. How do you escape when you find yourself repulsive? Transformations, even mental or emotional ones, are never completely smooth or clean, and they come with messy feelings. I like those messy feelings. I like to make them visual.
AW: In “Kill Jar,” the mood is intensely gothic, but it’s also a shapeshifting story. The character learns she is a snake! It makes me think of an essay you wrote about the idea of bodies taking the part of the gothic house or manor in many of your stories. It’s not only that the journey to horror is gothic, but body horror itself is gothic.
SP: The short of it for me, as a “professional horror writer,” is there is no debate between gothic and horror. They coexist and bleed into each other.
There was recent internet discourse about drawing a line between gothic and horror, but they exist in the same space. Horror has evolved from the gothic. It’s odd to think we have a debate between them—are they saying horror is low brow?
AW: Yeah, I saw that discourse and the essay that sparked it. The only purpose of drawing a line is genre snobbery.
SP: It’s kind of meta because the gothic itself is about the taboo and lines blurring. It’s about uncovering what is buried and unacceptable and horrific. If you’re drawing a line and saying, These are the horrific things, and these are the dreadful, more intellectual things, you’re going against the idea of what gothic horror is, at least as I understand it.
AW: Speaking of blurry lines, another thing I love about “Kill Jar” is the power granted to in-between spaces, imagination, and the subconscious. The character’s dreams become more real than her waking life. They’re terrifying, but they’re also true, and once she embraces that, it’s her salvation.
SP: I create spaces like that because we can’t always explain our suspicions and fears. That, or sometimes we deny or ignore truths. We have less rigid control in dreams or in imaginative spaces. Sometimes our anxieties will show up dressed as something else.
For some reason, I was compelled to write shapeshifting animal stories. I couldn’t articulate why for a long time.
AW: So why are you drawn to them?
SP: That question makes me laugh because I had a moment of realization when I said, Oh God Suzan, you keep writing about skin and women and animal transformation. Why are you obsessed with this? What a disturbed person you are!
I’m fascinated by the tensions among desire, attraction, repulsion, and disgust. What are we repulsed by and why? Who decides what is repulsive or attractive? What are the costs of not acknowledging what we find disgusting about ourselves?
When I was younger, I tried to censor my thoughts, my queerness, and my personality. My whole life, I’d been told that fitting in would make me happy. But I was deeply unhappy and clinically depressed. There was a point where I was suicidal, and I realized I couldn’t live the way I was living anymore, especially being a queer person who is very attracted to women. I’d been repulsed by that attraction my entire life. I was brought up to believe that it was unnatural and something to be denied or destroyed. I was disgusted with myself. And one day after a lot of turmoil, I let that go. I accepted a part of myself that others told me was monstrous and repulsive—animalistic, even. It was euphorically freeing.
Humans have such arbitrary ideas of what is “normal.” Wouldn’t it be wonderful to shed all our fucks and skin and be as free as a gay snake?
AW: Yes! Shapeshifting, traditionally a point of horror, becomes something else in Skin Thief—an escape from danger or a character finding their true self. How does that interact with the way you use speculative elements to examine queer themes?
SP: Using speculative elements and folklore to examine queerness is a natural fit because queer writers haven’t always had the opportunity to see themselves portrayed openly. It’s second nature to reach for the metaphorical when we haven’t been allowed to exist in the literal. We’ve survived on a lot of queer coding. We’ve been left to speculate, and so speculation and subverting dominant narratives are part of our culture and language.
Also, traditionally, when we did see portrayals of ourselves, we were often presented as “monsters.” Many queer horror writers will say things like: Vampires are gay. Werewolves are gay. Monster fucking is gay. We see these as positive statements, a reclamation of the monstrosity put upon us. Do we want to hurt anyone? No. Am I going to drain the blood out of people? Of course not! But that’s what I’ve been likened to historically. And so I’ll gladly take all of the speculative labels and metaphorical insults that have been used against people like me and turn them on their heads to suit my purposes.
AW: And yet, there are many non-magical, non-speculative queer relationships in this book. And they are loving and complex.
SP: Despite all of my tough talk, I am a hardcore hopeless romantic and a softie. I love romance and silly sweetness and kindness. I have a lot of friendships with queer people that are loving and kind and patient. So I let queer relationships be the one tiny spot of comfort, possibly because I’m an undercover sap.
AW: So we’re back to the question of comfort in horror. Skin Thief unsettles and terrifies, but those queer relationships are moments of safety, when characters are most themselves. That’s incredibly subversive, because, as you said, queer relationships needed to sneak their way in through speculative elements. These stories seem true to the tradition of queer writers using metaphor and magic to talk about love, but they also use real-world queer love as a place of refuge.
SP: You know what’s the real hope-punk? Horror! Because you read a horror story, and you’re like, Even though everyone died, I’m still here. Even though everything is horrible, and they’re all bleeding, we’re still going on. I really don’t see what’s more punk than that.
I don’t like stories that flatten the world or pretend this specific character—even a marginalized one—is a wonderful cinnamon roll and they always do the right thing. That is so one-dimensional to me. Stories like that don’t feel honest. I find horror comforting because it doesn’t feel like it’s lying to me. I just can’t get with it that we’re going to have a utopia and not one person has any jealousy or insecurity that isn’t going to play out in a human way—not even an evil way, but a human way. I can’t swallow it. I do find horror extremely comforting.
AW: There’s something chronic and underlying and horrifying to life. Everything is bad, but we don’t talk about it. Horror pulls that awfulness to the surface and lets us look at it. Which is such a relief.
SP: At least we’re acknowledging it! It’s not a monster that’s buried anymore. A lot of what I write is unburying something. People might be upset with me for bringing it up, but if I bring it up I feel better about it. Yeah, it might turn me into a monster. I might fall apart. But that’s fine.
AW: At least it’s honest. Maybe we can’t fix it, but we can face it.
SP: Are you a horror writer?
AW: I think I am. I came to it by trying to write about the real world and the truth, but it’s horrifying.
SP: That should be the tagline of everything: I tell the truth and it’s horrifying.
Suzan Palumbo (@sillysyntax) is a Trinidadian Canadian speculative fiction writer and editor, who has been nominated for the Aurora, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. She also co-founded the Ignyte Awards with L.D. Lewis in 2020. Her debut dark fantasy/horror short story collection, Skin Thief: Stories, was published by Neon Hemlock in fall 2023. Her novella, Countess, will be published by ECW Press in 2024. Her writing has been featured in The Dark Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, The Deadlands, Pseudopod, Anathema: Spec Fic from the Margins, and other venues. She is officially represented by Michael Curry of the Donald Maass literary agency. She loves everything gothic and owns several capes. When she isn’t writing, she can be found listening to new wave, gardening, or wandering her local misty forest.
Allison Wyss (@allisonwyss) is the author of the short story collection, Splendid Anatomies (Veliz Books), which was a finalist for the 2022 Shirley Jackson Awards. Her stories and essays have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, Water~Stone Review, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. Some of her ideas about the craft of fiction can be found in “Reading Like a Writer,” a monthly column she writes for the Loft Literary Center, where she also teaches classes.