Christa Carmen is a modern purveyor of Gothic in all its facets. As co-host of the Murder Coaster Podcast with fellow crime fiction lover and writer Matthew V. Brockmeyer she revels in local tales of the macabre.
Who is Christa Carmen?
Carmen hails from Rhode Island and lives with her husband, daughter, and bloodhound-golden retriever mix dog. She is the author of The Daughters of Block Island, a Bram Stoker Award winner, and a Shirley Jackson Award finalist.
She also won the Indie Horror Book Award for her short story collection Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked and grabbed a Bram Stoker Award nomination for "Through the Looking Glass and Straight into Hell" from Orphans of Bliss: Tales of Addiction Horror. She has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA from Boston College, and an MFA from the University of Southern Maine.
Carmen was a voracious reader growing up and that has continued into adulthood. Some of her favorite fiction authors (in and out of the horror genre) include Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link, Stephen King, Sarah Waters, Jack Ketchum, Ania Ahlborn, Shirley Jackson, Caroline Kepnes, Ruth Ware, R.L. Stine, Dean Koontz, Jessica McHugh, Stephanie M. Wytovich, Roxane Gay, Peter Straub, Agatha Christie, Dan Simmons, and Edgar Allan Poe.
We spoke to Carmen at the release of her new Gothic thriller Beneath the Poet’s House about her writing career thus far and how her past experiences with drug addiction influenced her horror writing.
These five Christa Carmen books will keep you turning pages for hours.
Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked (2018)
Carmen’s first completed project was a Gothic horror novel set in the Hundred Mile Wilderness in Monson, Maine, but she quickly turned to short fiction for years before again turning back to the novel form with the award-winning novel The Daughters of Block Island.
Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked
Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked in 2018 was her first short story collection and won the Indie Horror Book Award for Debut Collection. The Rhode Island author looks back on it fondly, even if she sees where things could have been improved. “I've gone to a lot of events, cons, and stuff [since that time], and I always cringe when somebody picks up the book and turns it over because they want to see what it's about. And there's not a good synopsis on the back. There's a bunch of blood,” she laughs. “I know more about the industry now, so I would've done things about the presentation and editing of it a little bit differently.”
The deliciously gruesome horror stories touch on grief, substance abuse, and mental health disorders with her unique lens. Carmen’s love for Evil Dead shows up in the Deadite story "The Girl Who Loved Bruce Campbell" and she wrestles with memory
Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked is a stunning first short story collection of the supernatural and horror of the mind and body, but it also touches on the personal.
The title flash fiction piece tips a hat towards Carmen’s wedding at the Stanley Hotel with her husband but without the ghosts.
Orphans of Bliss (2022)
Orphans of Bliss: Tales of Addiction Horror
Why do we crave that which is stealing our souls after each dopamine hit? This is the central question that anchors the horror stories in Orphans of Bliss: Tales of Addiction Horror. Edited by Mark Matthews, Carmen was joined by other brilliant contemporary writers such as S.A. Cosby, Cassandra Khaw, Josh Malerman, Kathe Koja, Kealan Patrick Burke, Samantha Kolesnik, John F.D. Taff, Mark Matthews, & Gabino Iglesias in the table of contents.
Christa Carmen struggled with drugs in the past and her short story “Through the Looking-Glass and Straight Into Hell” is equal parts touching and horrific.
“I'm still so grateful and honored that the story was nominated for a Stoker Award just because it's definitely the short piece that I'm most proud of,” Carmen said. “It was something that was in my head for a very long time. I used to be in and out of different treatment centers, and even back then before I even really was a writer, I would have these sorts of ideas of narrative. How does this event in my life fit into the narrative of my life?”
When “Through the Looking-Glass and Straight Into Hell” came out in 2022 Carmen had been sober for over nine years, but the story touches on the shaky foundations of recovering from an addiction and her experiences working at a methadone clinic.
“I'm very much for methadone treatment, but I am more for Vivitrol and Suboxone treatment when it's appropriate for the patient because when you are taking a synthetic opiate to fill the opiate receptors in your brain and fix your cravings,” Carmen remembers.
“I was counseling these patients and somebody who was on methadone for 10 years had 10 years of recovery, but it was built on this incredibly shaky, not real foundation.”
That facade of recovery is at the heart of her story. The author once wrote that “the disease of alcoholism and drug addiction is a progressive one; even in sobriety, it courses along beneath the surface, like a viscous, black river, ready to surge up and pull you back under.”
Carmen asks an open-ended question with her story: “What do you do if all of the things you thought were helping you move forward were not really there?”
We Are Providence (2022)
We Are Providence: Tales of Horror From the Ocean State
The summary for We Are Providence says it all: “Welcome to Rhode Island, home of the weird, the hometown horror, the haunted, the hunted. Home of the Gothic and of horror with history. We promise there’s something here for everyone, whether visiting or already one with the region’s countless legends. Rhode Island is the smallest state but the biggest house of horrors…”
Carmen’s story in We Are Providence fits in well with the theme. She penned a tearful tale about a mother-daughter relationship and the first story in the collection to center on the 1800s vampire epidemic centering on Mercy Brown.
Carmen loves the juxtapositions of Rhode Island or as the locals call it the “Mills versus the Mansions.”
“In rural Exeter [you see] Mercy Brown's grave or the abandoned Ladd School,” Carmen notes. “It looks like something out of a horror movie. It’s like an old abandoned asylum, only it was a school.”
The Ladd School or “Rhode Island School for the Feeble-Minded” was certainly a terrifying real place that was equal parts hospital, school, detention center, and boarding school.
With plenty of hometown inspiration, Carmen edited these Tales of Horror from the Ocean State with L.E. Daniels, who is part of her writing group that originally started as the Rhode Island chapter of the HWA (Horror Writers Association).
“I was the coordinator of the group and then just more chapters were springing up and the HWA once there were a lot more chapters, there were a lot more rules and you needed to have meeting minutes posted and elections held,” she said. “I've got a 4-year-old daughter and a full-time writing career, so I was like, I just don't have time to manage that. “
The group’s new name changed to We Are Providence and since that time they have also released another short story collection this year called Monsters in the Mills.
“Every story has a connection,” Carmen said. “Some are very strong and some more loose to Rhode Island, and then for Monsters in the Mills we wanted to play with all of the abandoned mill legends and all these great settings.”
The Daughters of Block Island (2023)
The Daughters of Block Island
“Blake knows she’s in a gothic horror novel the moment she steps off the rain-slicked ferry.”
The opening line to The Daughters of Block Island cracked up the whole book for Christa Carmen. She was already a fan of meta-fiction like the Scream series, so reading through her twisted tale about the generations of trauma in Whitehall will remind readers of that horror movie franchise’s playful games it played with the slasher genre.
Over the past few years, Carmen and other modern horror and thriller authors have given the gothic novel a shot in the arm.
Carmen’s novel started as a short story in her MFA program that she was just playing with. “It was a crappy epistolary story and it was all in email form,” share remembers. “It was very experimental and not very good.”
After she graduated from the University of Southern Maine, she finished the novel she was working on within the program and she wanted to start a new novel.
“I kind of dusted that off and I liked too many of the elements of it to trunk it. I liked the setting, I liked the characters,” Carmen said. “So I found Whitehall in internet searches and looking for a suitably gothic place on the island.” She was still struggling to make the story interesting, though.
Instead of scrapping the whole book, Carmen leaned harder into the Gothic concept and just allowed her character Blake to be a fan of the classics in that genre and it made the writing process more freeing overall. Carmen also fell in love with Whitehall like the setting of one of her favorite movies, Crimson Peak.
“I know some people don’t like it, but personally love it,” she said of the Guillermo del Toro film. “The fact that snow falls through the roof and clay rises from the floor is great.”
Carmen’s Whitehall and all of its characters are like a crestfallen building whose foundation has shifted over decades. The prose carries the weight of the genre and the location quite well.
Beneath the Poet's House (2024)
Beneath the Poet's House
Whereas The Daughters of Block Island and Carmen’s next project are more complicated with their narrative structures, Beneath the Poet’s House is her romantically charged thriller with tinges of the Gothic by way of Edgar Allen Poe and his mysterious lover.
Carmen still spent a lot of time fine-tuning the last fourth of the book.
“ I just kept going back over [that section] and trying to tighten it as much as possible and make it really just sort of hum with all of the adrenaline and suspense that I'd already put into the stuff leading up to that,” she recalls.
The result is a well-paced novel that centers on a grieving writer Saoirse White who is suffering from writer’s block after her husband’s death.
She moves to Providence, and into the historic home of Sarah Helen Whitman, the nineteenth-century poet and spiritualist once courted by Edgar Allan Poe. Her blossoming romance with a Pulitzer Prize-winner author spins the story into motion as White begins to chip away at her writer’s block.
White has past trauma to deal with throughout the story, but her romance with fellow writer Emmit Powell is Carmen’s alternate universe version of the Poe and Whitman story.
One of Carmen’s favorite stories of these two romantically entangled writers served as a jumping-off point for the book.
“Poe purportedly first saw [Whitman] tending her rose garden under a midnight moon,” Carmen said. “I kind of don't know that tons of readers maybe know that that's how he initially spotted her and then later they began corresponding and I just thought that was so interesting.”
