Emma E. Murray: On Exploring the Tender Horror of Motherhood, Darkness in Female Sexuality, and Her Short Story Collection ‘The Drowning Machine and Other Obsessions’
The Drowning Machine and Other Obsessions (Undertaker Books, 2025), the first short story collection from author Emma E. Murray, entranced me. Awake in the middle of the night, I opened the book and started reading. Even when I finally grew tired enough to sleep, I didn’t want to put it down. Murray’s writing gripped me, each story taking me further into her mind, her fears, her obsessions.
Balancing dark moments of horror and gore with tender love and desire, The Drowning Machine follows the phases of life, looking into the deeper psychology of motherhood, women’s sexual desires, and grief. The stories leave afterimages in a reader’s mind, offering a space to explore our own darknesses and how desire and grief, how love and death, might entangle. She writes about mothers unable to let go of the children they lost, women who pursue vicious and violent sexual experiences, and individuals navigating the depths of mental illness.
The human experience is the heart of Murray’s short story collection; she reminds us just how far we might go to finally have peace.
Sydney Bollinger: What was the process of putting together The Drowning Machine and Other Obsessions?
Emma E. Murray: I have loved writing short fiction my whole life but I hadn’t actually thought about putting together a collection until TJ Price, who ended up being my editor, said “I love your short fiction and I want you to put together a collection. It’ll be great.” We worked with Undertaker Books, which was amazing. But, it was really hard to go through all my stories and figure out which ones should make the cut because it wasn’t just [choosing] which stories I love. I left out some of the ones I love. I had to think about which ones work well together. I really thought through what the themes were going to be and how it follows the flow of a lifetime.
I started with stories where there are infants and motherhood, at the very beginning of life. Then it moves into themes of childhood and innocence lost. The third section has more adult themes. There are stories that deal with lust and grief.
SB: In all of the stories, I felt a deep empathy for a lot of the characters, even if they were doing horrific things. “Exquisite Hunger” fascinated me. The narrator experiences intense sexual pleasure at the thought of intimate acts with cuts of meat from her neighbor Carly’s body. What inspired this story?
EM: I heard this true crime story about a man who lured someone into his apartment and killed them. He had an obsession with them, but not nearly as intense as “Exquisite Hunger.” I love getting into the psychology of killers. I wanted to get into what would cause this storyline to happen, and then I had an idea for a cannibalistic sapphic obsession. So many serial killers are sexually motivated. Female serial killers, or [female] killers in general, are not always sexually motivated. But some of them are, and they’re not explored as deeply because we, as a society, don’t look at female sexuality the same way. So what would that look like? It’s a really different process, I think, than male sexuality. How would a female character build to the point where she would actually act this out?
SB: I was surprised when I realized the narrator was a woman. In the beginning of the story I thought, “Oh, this is a creepy guy,” and then I was like, “No! It’s a woman.” Her thoughts sound like what we typically expect of men, or what we see when we’re discussing male serial killers and the sexual fantasies of killers.
What do you think this story says about female desire and our expectations of it?
EM: I think it’s really important for a lot of people, especially men, to realize that women do have lust and sexual thoughts that we wouldn’t necessarily think women are having. I like that this story doesn’t center on men, because it is this fully female sexuality and shows that women can have strange fetishes and can act in really violent ways. Often when we look at killers, we put them into categories and don’t allow them to be similar in other ways. Female killers tend to either kill their children or are angels of mercy.
It’s so weird for people to imagine that a woman could have this very horrible festish, but that is possible. There’s no reason why women couldn’t. It was super fun to get into that headspace because it is very different from mine. I don’t have that fetish at all, so I thought, how did she discover that? How did she finally act on it? And it was so much easier for the narrator to gain Carly’s trust because the narrator is a woman. So she’s not seen as a threat in the same way.
You would think [readers] would be happy she didn’t get anything out of it, but it left space for empathy because that’s something we’re all craving. I think it says something deeper about us to empathize with her. Things are never quite as good as we expect them to be and what we build them up to be. It’s getting at this human experience of [feeling] let down even when we get everything you wanted. It’s bittersweet. She did get what she wanted and it wasn’t what she really wanted.
SB: We’re talking about women characters, but there’s also more and more women writers finding their place in horror, which I love to see. What initially drew you to writing horror?
EM: I didn’t realize I was a horror writer for a while. I was writing what I thought was literary fiction, but I kept getting feedback that my writing was “too genre” and people said “this is horror.” I had this specific idea of what horror was before I really started writing it and started reading all these amazing indie horror writers. What you see a lot of the time in mainstream horror fits a very specific niche. It’s very Stephen King heavy. I had read some of that, and felt like that’s not what I do. And then I started reading other horror authors and I realized I do write horror. I just didn’t know that’s what it was.
I wanted to delve into these really dark places of human psychology and the human condition. I wanted to get into grief and disappointment. That fits perfectly in horror, because horror isn’t just slashers or creature features or something that feels like Stephen King. I found that women in horror tend to write very different kinds of horror and there’s work that fit more mainstream themes in the genre, but a lot of women writers get into a really different place. I wish they got more recognition.
There is a wave of female horror that’s happening and I love that. I think it is going to get bigger and stronger, but it still feels like there’s pushback. I often see female stories being told by male authors, and those are the stories getting a lot of praise. I’m not saying those are bad, because I’ve definitely read some that were incredible, but I see women who are writing these same stories and they’re not getting any recognition. It’s crazy to me, because you have no idea the talent that’s out there that nobody’s reading.
SB: Your stories have such visceral body horror, but they’re also so tender. The first two stories in the collection, “The Angel of God” and “If I Carry You” brought home this idea. They both follow mothers contending with the death of a child. What is it about motherhood that evokes this particular kind of tenderness in horror?
EM: I became a mother almost five years ago. I had written some stories that dealt with motherhood, but it wasn’t until I became a mother that I realized just how much there is to dig into with horror. I have OCD and a lot of my intrusive thoughts have to do with my daughter and terrible things happening to her, which inspire a lot of my horror stories. It is very cathartic because just going through that thought process of “what if that happened” and letting myself sit with it actually helps me process some of those terrible fears in a healthier way.
There’s going to be tenderness with those stories because I am a mother. I can’t help but have that tenderness for all my characters, especially the mother characters. I have so much sympathy because I can imagine what it would be like. Even when [the mothers] are bad people in my stories, sometimes I still feel for them and what kind of choices they make and what they think. I put myself in their shoes.
SB: So many of your characters struggle to heal and continue on after losing a loved one. They’re consumed by their grief. In the titular story, “The Drowning Machine,” the unnamed narrator struggles to live, blaming herself for her sister’s death, because as a teenager, she wished for and witnessed her sister’s death. It was just a wish a kid might make in their head on a whim and now, well into adulthood, she’s losing her will to live. What inspired this story?
EM: I lost my mother when I was only fifteen. When she was in hospital, I wondered what it would be like if she died. And then she ended up dying. It was very sudden, not a long illness or anything. I really believed in the magical thinking of it and it was something I had to deal with in therapy for a long time. That story is super close to my heart because it let me explore that again, in a fictional way, and the narrator reacts very differently than how I dealt with it.
Even if you don’t have mental health disorders, we often have this magical thinking that we know isn’t true, but it haunts us. If you think something bad and it happens, it will haunt you even though there’s no logical way to think that you caused that. A lot of people can relate to that. When I tell people about my experience with my mom and how guilty I felt, people tell me they've [experienced] similar things. Maybe they didn’t like a girl at school and wish something bad would happen to “teach her a lesson” and then something terrible happens, and they have to deal with feeling like they brought it on.
The guilt that follows magical thinking is so intense.
SB: I felt that violence in sexuality was a theme throughout some of the stories, especially in part three, which featured “Mother of Machines” about a girl and her sexual desire for a lathe. We also already discussed “Exquisite Hunger.”
How does desire shape horror? And is there something about desire that is inherently horrific?
EM: I love the idea of how we have our sex drive and our death drive, and how they can get confused for some people. This is something that happens more often than people think because there’s a lot of people who have really strange fetishes and fantasies that they can’t explain, but if you really delve into why, it all comes down to this weird confusion of those drives. Both “Exquisite Hunger” and the story about the industrial lathe are stories that deal with what happens when something triggers wrong in your brain during your development to make you associate these things that shouldn’t be together.
From the perspective of the characters, those stories wouldn’t be horror stories. The girl in “Mother of Machines” wants to be consumed by the lathe. In “Exquisite Hunger” the narrator wants to eat Carly, even though it doesn’t work out for her. I’m sure they could see that objectively this is horrific, but they don’t see their stories as horror stories.
SB: The middle of the book has a lot to do with children. I read that you were previously an elementary school teacher. How does that play into your writing?
EM: I taught first grade for many years and I tend to have six-year-old characters because I know that age so well and I’ve had to deal with horrible things happening to them. No one is immune to suffering, which is terrible. I think it’s one of my biggest fears, the fact that these things can happen to children, even though they’re innocent, sweet little things.
We had lockdown drills all the time and we did have a couple of real lockdowns, which, thankfully, were not gun incidents. One time there was a dog that got into the school, but they didn’t tell us why we were having a lockdown, so I had to gather all twenty-something of my kids in the corner. Some of them are crying and some of them are laughing and farting and stuff because they think it’s funny. I’m trying to keep them calm while also keeping it serious. You don’t want to freak them out, but we have to be quiet because for all I know we’re all about to die. Having to deal with that inspired me to write “The Profound Pain of Letting Go.”
I know people are obviously aware of gun violence in schools, but if you haven’t been in a classroom during a lockdown I don’t think you know how… I have PTSD from being in these lockdowns because I was like, what am I going to do? We had windows that didn’t open, so I ended up buying a glass breaker because if I have to, I’m going to get these kids out of here. I had all these things I had to think through that I don’t think my teachers had to think about when I was a kid. But as a teacher, I did.
“Profound Pain” is one of my most tender stories, I think, because I couldn’t bring myself to show the violence in that story, even though I don’t usually shy away from violence. It was genuinely too painful. I was a teacher when Sandy Hook happened. I lived in Texas when Uvalde happened. It’s way too close.
It’s almost not a horror story, compared to the others. I wrote that story to give this kid a nice ending that wasn’t just going to heaven. I wanted to process this horrible fear I have. I send my daughter to preschool and she has these light-up shoes. All I can ever think is, should I even let her wear these shoes? Is it going to give her away? It’s something I think about so much. I delved into some of my deepest fears and those experiences to write this story.
That story got rejected from so many places and I didn’t know if it was ever going to get published… I did get some feedback that it was too heavy, and they didn’t want to do [stories about] school shootings.
But I had to deal with that fear every day. Teachers are in the thick of it. I think this is an important thing to have to think about and have that brain exercise of what it is like for these kids and these teachers, and to give them some peace in my story.
SB: What are you working on now?
EM: I’m writing a novel. It’s slowgoing, but I’m really happy with what’s happening. Some novels fly out and some are like pulling teeth, but they’re worth it. It’s not something I want to give up on because it is actually coming along, but for some reason this story is not wanting to come out quickly.
I have two books on submission, so hopefully those get picked up. My novel Shoot Me in the Face on a Beautiful Day comes out in August, so I’m really excited about that.
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Emma E. Murray (she/her) explores the dark side of humanity in her fiction. Her stories have appeared in Vastarien and Cosmic Horror Monthly among other places. Her works include When the Devil, Crushing Snails, and The Drowning Machine and Other Obsessions. Her second novel, Shoot Me in the Face on a Beautiful Day, will be out August 26, 2025 from Apocalypse Party Press. When she isn’t writing, she is usually found playing make-believe with her daughter
