Rebecca Cuthbert: On Writing Unapologetic Women, How Horror Explores What We Fear Most, and Her New Collection, ‘Self-Made Monsters’

Rebecca Cuthbert is like every horror writer’s best friend. She knows which anthologies are looking for the story you wrote in a workshop you both attended, when you need someone to tell you to sit down and write, and what to do to take your draft in the right direction. 

She’s the person a horror writer looks to when they need advice—and for good reason. With her exacting prose and melodic poetry, she creates haunted atmospheres and confronts readers with the reality of horror in the everyday. In her poems and stories, she effectively blurs the line between what we consider literary and what we consider genre. 

Her latest book, Self-Made Monsters (Alien Buddha Press, 2024), is a collection of feminist horror fiction and dark poetry where women fight back, face their fears, and, on some occasions, are unapologetically bad. Her poems remind us of a woman’s innate power, and the stories contend not only with what it means to be a woman, but also what it means to be human, to love, and to kill. 

Sydney Bollinger: Self-Made Monsters is split into two parts: “Part One: the Dead, the Damned, the Dreaming,” and “Part Two: the Vexed, the Vicious, the Vengeful.” What inspired you to create these two parts and how did you decide where pieces in the collection belonged? 

Rebecca Cuthbert: I ended up splitting my poetry collection [In Memory of Exoskeletons] into three parts because it just made sense to do that. Self-Made Monsters is kind of a follow-up to that collection. 

I chose to [split the book into] parts because the feminine grotesque involves, in a really broad sense, women misbehaving [and] women not adhering to their role. There are different ways we can misbehave. In one sense, we can be unwilling victims. Even when bad things are being done to us, we don’t have to go quietly, and we can fight back even if we eventually lose. We don’t just have to surrender. So, “the Dead, the Damned, the Dreaming” is women fighting the things done to them. The other half—“the Vexed, the Vicious, the Vengeful”—is women as the monsters, or becoming monsters because of what happened. Some of them are just bad and it was really fun to write. 

The poem that I think is the most fun is the last one in the collection: “Mistress Meg O’Malley.” She has no origin story. It doesn’t matter how she became a vampire. She loves it [and] she has a great time with it. I don’t want to say she poses as a sex worker, because she is one, but after each encounter, she kills the guy, and there’s something funny about that to me.

There’s a song from the '70s by a group called Looking Glass, and the song is “Brandy.” It’s a narrative song about this woman who works at the docks. She’s a waitress and she’s in love with a guy who comes into port and pays attention to her for a minute and then he’s gone again. I was like, what if she didn’t give a shit who came and went? What if she wasn’t sitting there pining away for one dude? What if Brandy were a vampire? What if Brandy were a vampire sex worker two hundred years ago? It was fun to create her as a figure. 

There are other women in the collection who are just unapologetic, and that’s what I was going for with a lot of these. Women who weren’t sorry. 

SB: There's quite a few things in the collection that are inspired by other famous pieces of literature. The sonnet, “No rest nor relief for you with me dead,” comes to mind as one that was really striking.

What was it like to take these classic stories and poems and rework them into your feminist horror?

RC: Gosh, I just think it’s so fun. This is all fun to me. I think if you aren’t having fun, you shouldn’t write, by the way. If it’s not fun, don't do it. It means you’re spending your time unwisely. 

I wrote the sonnet because I saw a call for an anthology called Shakespeare Unleashed. I didn't have enough time to write a whole story. All submissions had to be based on Shakespeare’s work, and I knew that I didn’t want to do one of his most famous sonnets because I'd have a lot of competition. I knew I had to pick one that's kind of obscure, or at least not as well-known. 

[My sonnet] is based on “Sonnet 71.” The original is a guy [telling his wife], “Don’t be sad. I’m still with you.” And I thought, what if it is a woman and she got murdered, and she is plotting her revenge right now? What if she were dead, speaking beyond the grave?  

There’s a line in the original that goes “no longer mourn for me when I am dead,” and that’s when I wondered, what if the dead person is speaking? It’s not some guy leaving his love, it’s a woman who’s been murdered. So, then, it was fun to figure out how to set a new poem on the framework of the existing one, because that [poem] is close, even in structure. I actually wrote it as a sonnet.

SB: I want to talk more about Part One. I noticed that several of the characters meet their demise at what I would call the casual cruelty of people meant to care about them. 

I’m thinking specifically about “Dare You,” which is the story where the girl is dared to enter the haunted house, and “With Her,” where a teen girl tells her younger sister to accept a ride from a stranger on Halloween night. To me, these stories show the horror of the everyday. This is the threat of the ones you love leaving you for dead, and not necessarily out of a lack of care, but of not understanding what the consequences of their actions might be. 

What were you thinking about when crafting stories about these types of events?

RC: For “Dare You,” I wanted to write a modern Gothic and I wanted to write something focused on kids, but not the usual “kids in a haunted house” story. They’re not teenagers breaking in to drink. They’re littler kids, and I think there’s something more disturbing about it because they’re younger, in sixth or seventh grade, and it’s plausible. I can absolutely imagine [the events of the story] happening and could absolutely imagine the other kids, not out of malice, taking off [because they don’t want to get in trouble]. 

Yes, it’s the wrong thing to do, but they’re also kids. Adults don’t always make the right choices, but they do know better. These were little kids and they were scared and they made a bad choice. 

SB: I thought about that when reading “With Her” when the older sister, Cailtin, tells her younger sister, “Just get in the car with this woman.” The annoyance I felt as a teenager having to cart my brother around creeped up—I don’t know if I would have done that, but I understand why the older sister did, and to me, that was the twist of the knife in that story. 

RC:  She’s older. She’s a teenager. She knows better. But she is still pretty young, and her chief concern is partying with her friends and meeting up with the boy she likes. I remember those being my chief concerns. Like you, I hope I would not have just let my little brother get into the car with some creep, but there is something about Caitlin that, again, is disturbingly believable. People can do this. People do this all the time. 

SB: Reading these stories also makes me think about how horror helps us contend with the possibility of these events becoming a reality in our own lives. Or does it help us?

RC: What I take as the psychology behind horror and why we find it helpful is that it is a way to feel fear in a safe environment. Even if we’re feeling very genuinely, [and] we’re emoting for these characters, we still know it’s a book. We can always put it down. Same thing with a movie; you can press pause or you can shut it off. 

I hope someone reads “With Her” and the next time they’re thinking about ditching their little sister, they don’t. And that’s not to say they’re all morality tales, because some of the women [in Self-Made Monsters] are just being bad and women can be bad and they are bad, that’s just the truth. But I do hope someone will reconsider leaving their friend at a party—even though it’s natural and a bunch of us have done it, maybe don’t. 

These stories turn on one moment of decision or indecision, one moment of hesitation, one moment of distraction, and it’s horrifying that that’s all it takes. 

SB: In “I Won’t Call it a Monster” and “The Cliffs at Battery Pointe,” I loved how the narrators address a character directly. The stories read as verbal transcriptions of what the narrators are saying, and that had me thinking about horror’s roots in oral tradition, like folklore and ghost stories. 

What led you to this narration style for those stories? 

RC: I love what I think of as a “direct address,” where you have one speaker directly addressing the listener. I love second person narration, too, but this isn’t quite that, because there is a figure listening. 

I think I started that [in a story called “Hey Stranger”] that will be in a collection I have coming out in January. There’s a story I wrote in there so long ago. I meant it to be second person, but then I realized the waitress character was talking to a customer, and the customer was part of the story, so it became a one-sided conversation. It’s similar to “I Won’t Call it a Monster,” so it’s not the first time I’ve done that style. I really like it. 

With “The Cliffs at Battery Pointe,” I just thought of an old woman warning her grandson and [her] tone would be stern, but it’s out of fear and it’s out of love. 

SB: I think those stories, especially “The Cliffs at Battery Pointe,” put the reader in the conversation. I am, obviously, not the narrator’s grandson, but when I read the story, it’s like my grandma is telling me this. It’s such a different way to experience a story. 

How do you think oral tradition and storytelling has shaped horror as a genre? 

RC: I think that we have been telling horror stories since we, as humans, first invented language. So, just imagine the first two humans ever—and I know this is a ridiculous premise—but take two humans. They’ve just invented language. They’re hanging out. They’re domestic partners because they’ve been surviving together. And one of them comes home and they’ve been chased by a lion or some prehistoric whatever. 

That person telling that story? That’s a horror story. That might have been the first story ever told: “Something big and scary chased me, and I don’t know what it is, but it could have killed me.” 

SB: I love that, and I like the idea of thinking about story and the role of story in determining what we fear most. There’s so much about storytelling and horror that can shape how we feel about the things that are out there. 

RC: We know through studies [and research] that one of the scariest things is the thing we can’t define. The whole subgenre of cosmic horror is based on a horror that cannot be understood and cannot be conceptualized. I think that’s why a lot of horror is less neatly tied up. Stopping right before the thing happens is worse than seeing what happens. It’s what we can’t see, what we can’t define, and what we don’t know is coming. That’s the scariest thing, and I think horror has been built on that since the beginning. 

SB: What initially drew you to writing horror? 

RC: In college, I fell in love with writing because of some very famous female writers, like Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter. These women write darker stuff, and it’s got a speculative edge to it. That type of writing interested me. Even when I was writing more literary fiction, it was always literary fiction with a dark ambience. 

Then I went to grad school, and the speculative stuff was not so welcome there. If I turned in something with a ghost, people didn’t know what to do with it, and I just didn’t really get great feedback. 

I got away from writing for several years and then, during the pandemic, I got back into it. When we were on lockdown, some friends from grad school and I did an online workshop together once a month. I realized I really wanted to write. Being stuck at home, a lot of the excuses were peeled away. So I dusted off a couple stories from grad school. I started to get more and more into horror and some of the literary stuff fell away. I still pay attention to prose, and I hope people like the way my work sounds, but I did get more into the genre stuff and I leaned into ghosts. 

I write a lot of different types of things, but I don’t think I’ve strayed that far from where I’ve started. I’ve just leaned away from the word “literary” and leaned into the word “horror.”

SB: What do you think you can express in horror you can’t necessarily express in other genres? 

RC: This genre lets people be ugly. You get to have main characters who are not good people and who have no good side, and we just get to hang out with them in stories. We’re not always going to get that in other genres. 

SB: In addition to Self-Made Monsters, you’ve been quite busy with several other projects. You have some upcoming fiction releases and children’s books on the horizon. 

Your writing career has been so prolific, and continues to be. What keeps you writing and pursuing new opportunities? 

RC: I will say that it seems like I’m doing a ton right now, but the truth is, I am just finding breaks right now. I have been scribbling away at my desk in a really focused way since 2020, and so much of what’s coming out now was produced initially in workshops like Moaner Lawrence’s Fright Club and Lindsay Merbaum’s Study Coven. I really put a lot of time into them and I’ve been working hard for four years now. 
Right now, I’m actually not writing as much as I want to, because I started a small press [Undertaker Books] with two partners and we’re doing a lot of editing and a lot of work for that. I need to find ways to squeeze my own writing in, but for a long, long time I had a ton of stock, and now it’s getting published, or it’s in line to be published. 

One of my publishers, Joshua Lloyd Fox, says overnight success takes five to ten years. 

SB: Can you pinpoint the moment where you felt things were starting to change and you started to gain momentum? What do you attribute this breakthrough to? 

RC: There are no shortcuts. It’s really hard work. Some people who are not writers think writing is easy—but no, [writers] have so much to deal with. If your writing is not good, it’s not gonna get picked up, no matter how long you spend sending it out, and so I think that a lot of my energy was put into getting better. For a couple of years, I spent more time getting better than I did getting published. 

[Eventually] my writing was of a higher quality, and my name started getting out there, and I could be proud of what I put out. My first book [In Memory of Exoskeletons] is pretty tiny. It’s eighteen poems—some of those poems are ten years old and some are brand new. I was just so happy to put that book out. I thought it might be the only book I ever put out. No other book is guaranteed, so I made sure I was really proud of it. It ended up making the Horror Writers Association’s Recommended Reading List, and it won an Imadjinn Award from Imaginarium. That might have given it a little boost, but I think I just work really hard and I bother to meet people. I go to events. I introduce myself and try to make genuine friends. 

Making friends in the community really does help because we help each other and workshop each other’s writing, and now I can ask them for blurbs for my books. The success I’ve found is very community-based, like people in the Study Coven and mentors like Moaner [Lawrence] and Lindsay [Merbaum]. 

But I don’t think I would have gotten those [publications] without my stuff being good. 

SB: I think that’s a good reminder. Sometimes what you need to do is put in the work and then see it pay off later. 

RC: That’s very much what happened. A lot of writing is just you, by yourself. 

That’s why I joined all these workshops. It’s to improve my skills, but it’s also because writing can be lonely, so it’s fun to meet other writers and encourage each other. But you have to be willing to just sit your butt in a chair, at your desk or wherever, and put in hours and hours and hours knowing that it might not go anywhere. 

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Rebecca Cuthbert is a dark fiction and poetry writer living in Western New York. She loves ghost stories, folklore, witchy women, and anything that involves nature getting revenge. Her debut poetry collection, In Memory of Exoskeletons (Alien Buddha Press, 2023) won a 2024 Imadjinn Award for Best Poetry Collection; the poems “Still Love” and “Bloodthirsty” were nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and “Still Love” was also nominated for a Best of the Net Award. CREEP THIS WAY: How to Become a Horror Writer With 24 Steps to Get You Ghouling (Seamus & Nunzio Productions, 2024) was nominated for a Golden Scoop Award. Her hybrid fiction and poetry collection of feminist horrors, Self-Made Monsters, was published by Alien Buddha Press (Oct. 2024), and her first children’s book, Down in the Dark Deep Where the Puddlers Dwell, will be out Nov. 12th, 2024 with Malediction and AEA Press.