Beyond the Extreme: Four Women Authors Defining a New Wave in Horror

Elle Nash: I don’t think there’s a need to feel silly, but I understand the sentiment—I think a lot of people feel this way. I believe that what is considered “transgressive” is constantly changing because the borders of our shared culture and our experiences are always in flux (and also because literature crosses so many borders and cultures and languages, what is transgressive in one country or city may be banal in another!).

In its most basic definition, I’d say that it’s work that explores the complex and nuanced ways of how the boundaries of our social expectations and morals are violated.

I don’t know if I’d always call my work transgressive but my characters tend to live on the peripheries of things and I find myself always wanting to explore the edges of those boundaries, and I’m always curious about what sorts of things I write will elicit empathy or more intense emotional responses from others, though this is usually after my work is written.

Generally, when I am writing, the only audience I have in mind is myself.

I’m sure there is a relationship between the two and likely these titles exist as genres for marketing/audience finding purposes. I can’t say aesthetically what separates them because even a single genre can be multifaceted and have its high and low points.

To me, some work no matter the genre just has more heart than others. Baseless violence is no longer challenging in the world at large. This kind of violence already exists pervasively in real life, and so violence for the sake of violence, in my experience, is not transgressive.

I am more interested in looking at how and why violence is expressed, i.e. how it starts in the human heart and becomes something that moves outward towards harm, as well as how it affects communities and us as a species, how it affects or inhibits how we, as social animals, connect with each other and express ourselves.  

Charlene Elsby: I’ve been called “transgressive” or “extreme” or “philosophical horror” or “literary horror” or “literary splatterpunk” or just “literary fiction.”

Ultimately, I will write whatever I feel like, and let other people put labels on it. The labels are definitely helpful to people who are trying to decide if they will like the book or not.

Whenever I hear that something is “extreme,” I just take it as a warning that the book is out of a lot of people’s comfort zones. And for something like Violent Faculties, that is true, so I’ll take it.

But my favorite label for that book is “vantablack academia,” which someone put on Goodreads. 

Compared to “transgressive,” I think “extreme” is pretty normal. Like there’s a defined genre for extreme, and people who seek out and enjoy that kind of thing. But “transgressive” is more fluid, because it’s possible to transgress in so many ways.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what “transgressive” means since I talked about it with Elle and Lindsay Lerman in the Femgore workshop. It’s definitely the pushing up against a boundary of some sort, but the ambiguity comes when we realize that each person’s boundaries are individual and depend on a multitude of factors.

Now when I think of “transgressive,” I think of it as a little shock that pushes us out of the natural attitude—this is the name the philosophers give to the mode of existence where we’re just going about our daily business and not questioning our fundamental existence

 Getting out of that way of being is important. A little shock to the system opens us up to new ideas or the empathic experience of other people. A lot of people find that little shock unpleasant, but there are also those who seek it out.

We tend to form little habits of thought that become engrained, and ultimately that’s bad for us, because the world progresses. If our thoughts don’t keep up, we just become more wrong over time.

Emma E. Murray: To me, transgressive fiction is any work that pushes into taboos to examine them deeper, even if that makes the reader uncomfortable and makes parts of the work hard to digest.

Personally, I do consider a lot of my work to be “transgressive,” but not all of it. I also think that the definition of transgressive changes from person to person, so it’s not something easy to nail down. I love your idea of this emerging subgenre really being a “new wave of something beyond extreme,” and I am going to embrace that when answering questions like this in the future.

There is something about my colleagues’ works (and my own) that I think eludes the typical ideas of transgressive and extreme, something deeper, darker, and uniquely feminine in my opinion.

I’ve had many readers and reviewers label my work “extreme,” but personally, I’m not sure it fits that label. When I hear “extreme horror,” I think of the kind of the kind of exceptionally gory and gruesome works that try to go past any societal taboos in an attempt to shock or titillate.

My work is never written with that kind of intent. Indeed, I do press into traditionally taboo topics, and there are often gory and uncomfortable scenes, but they are there to make you think and assess your own judgments of other people, to consider whether there are shades of grey to the morals you’ve always held onto to perhaps without thinking about why.

I do think there is a relationship between the transgressive and the extreme, and they often intersect, but in the end, I think there is always a bit of escapism in what many people consider extreme horror, which transgressive horror doesn’t necessarily have.

Sara Tantlinger: To me, transgressive or abject horror is meant to push boundaries and twist up societal or cultural norms and expectations.

There are varied definitions and interpretations I’ve seen, and then arguments by those who see transgressive horror as one thing and one thing only, which is frustrating. I absolutely think the term is relevant because it’s more than a definition.

Transgression evokes certain feelings and challenges; we’re constantly changing and evolving as a society of people, and it makes sense for the definition of what is transgressive to change, too. Horror will always hold up a mirror to society and reflect different shades of darkness back; transgressive horror leans toward a particular grit and visceral underbelly with its darkness.

I love pushing boundaries (at least my own) through writing. My novella, To Be Devoured, is probably my clearest work of transgressive horror—I hadn’t set out to write something that toes the line of extreme, but in the end, it felt like it made sense for the story.

I think authors like Joe Koch and B.R. Yeager, in addition to Charlene, Elle, and Emma here, are such incredible examples of transgressive horror, and I raise my glass to all of them!

Wrath James White and Brian Keene have given some great explanations over the years on extreme vs. splatterpunk and the origin of the splatterpunk term, so I highly recommend looking into their discussions and blog posts for anyone interested in the nuances and differences.

The history is really great to know if you want to write in these categories and understand the roots.

Splatterpunk has ideas in common with transgressive horror because they’re both meant to push back against societal norms, especially when those norms are suppressive. I think what all these terms have in common is that they represent the fringes of horror.

This is the edge of the underground. There might be a cult following, but it can still be difficult to find representation for these books or get them into major retailers.

EN: Thank you for this. I don’t feel an emotional distance from my work, at least while drafting. I feel very much subsumed in a project when I am working, like I am living in the soup of it.

I guess I see writing a book a lot like a puzzle. I’m spending time trying to work out what it is I am trying to explore, which ends up resulting in a draft, and then I go back in as I keep trying to work it out. I usually have a main thrust, an idea of plot, or at least I know the ending, but I don’t always know why I am so obsessed with a particular ending or image or scene.

So, I know there’s a story there. And in writing I’m working it out, perhaps trying to explore more of the why by uncovering more and more of the story until it seems as complete as I can get it.

I often find that depending on what I’m working on it’s easiest for me to have like a whole day to sit in it so I can transition from one state of mind to the other. When the book is done and out into the world, I have noticed that I don’t tend to come back to the core seed that I was trying to break open anymore.

Though at the same time I suppose themes do keep coming up, but probably because that’s just how life works… like a spiraling process of untying all the same knots in our minds, over and over again.

Just when you think you have put something behind you, it comes back again, but not in the exact same way. 

CE: I feel like gruesome and grim conditions are normal for a lot of people, so when I write them, I feel like my goals are to either (one) convince other people that these conditions are real and do exist and maybe gain some sort of understanding that way or (two) just to get it out of my own consciousness. 

The difficulty I always run into is perceptions—making someone feel the action instead of just thinking it. When I’m writing something really violent, I tend to be focused on the action and how it is conceived, what motivates it, and what truths can be extracted.

Then I hired Elle to edit Violent Faculties, and one of her constant comments was “make this more visceral,” i.e., make it affect the reader on a perceptual level—what does it feel like, smell like, etc.

Now I have her voice in my head whenever I’m writing one of those scenes. I think it’s magic that I can write something that gives someone a physical reaction in another place, at another time. 

EM: I’ve often told people that just as there are method actors, I consider myself to be something of a method writer.

I have to fully immerse myself in my characters before I can even think of writing their stories, obviously not by committing acts of violence or things like that, but by figuring everything out about my character’s background, morality, way of thinking, and more before diving in, and then when I begin a writing session, I take a couple minutes to really settle myself into their mind before I begin.

So for me, there is not much emotional distance, to the point where I have cried writing scenes, and then cried when rereading different scenes when revisiting a work during edits, shocked at how visceral some scenes are when I don’t remember them being so intense because I was deeply entrenched in that character’s mindset.

My favorite feedback I’ve received is how real my characters feel and how they can elicit empathy from readers even when they wholly disagree with them, and I think this way of method writing that I employ is the reason why.

 ST: Exploring the senses is an absolute must in horror. I love imagery and it is very easy to get lost in the beautiful and horrifying visual description of something, but adding in gooey textures or rotten meat smells or the sound of a woodchipper can take the reader to where you want them to be so much quicker.

Having a background in poetry has helped me a lot. If you’re someone who has written poetry or flash fiction, then you know the pressure of having to say a lot in a short space.

It’s a fabulous challenge in reducing wordiness, yet still evoking the senses and creating an immersive story. I’m so interested in what everyone else has to say about the emotional distance. You all have some truly twisted and beautiful work!

A little distance can always be helpful when writing fiction because while we lose ourselves in the worlds and characters we create, we also have to be able to move on.

Readers will interpret stories in their own ways and share their opinions. Writers can’t constantly dwell on a negative review or a wild interpretation. At some point, we let the work go and move onto the next story.

I have a poetry collection titled The Devil’s Dreamland, which centers on serial killer H.H. Holmes. It’s not a particularly extreme work of horror, but it does focus intensely on the psychological.

I just kind of disappeared for two months and spent my time reading Holmes’ diary pages from the Library of Congress. It hadn’t been my intention, but a little extra isolation certainly helped me create the work.

Even with more extreme stories, we can harvest from our own experiences and emotions, and then really blow it up on the page. For example, I know how it feels to be angry or hurt. I know how it feels to carve a pumpkin and pull out its stringy, damp guts.

Maybe I can combine those two things in an unexpected, gross, goopy way. The textures, the smells, the sounds—we can take the familiar and twist it into something new, like a character who taps into their hurt from a betrayal and deals with it by carving up someone’s leg rather than pumpkin innards.

EN: I honestly don’t always know what I am interested in exploring, because I am interested in what feels like everything, all at once. I’m interested in people and work and the struggle to survive, and how desire both hurts and frees us, and how alienation happens in society, and why, I suppose, or at least, these themes are always coming up for me.

I think limits are very personal. For myself, I think it is important to challenge myself on my limits, in part to ask why I think they are there, who decided they were there, what purpose they serve, whether challenging them will teach me more about myself or not. 

CE: The real horrors can and do occur on the regular. The part of reality I find confusing is how as a species or as a civilization, we sweep that under the rug.

Maybe that’s a comment on who tends to be featured in works of literature—people to whom the gruesome and grim do not regularly occur.

Maybe the reason for that is that normal people read books for fun and don’t want to confront the horrors of existence all the time. That’s understandable.

I don’t have a purpose when I set about writing, but at the same time I know from experience that what I will write will push up against some limits.

It was a surprise to me when I was submitting Hexis, that some of the responses said it was beyond what people were willing to publish. I thought it was pretty normal.

Limits set by moralizers who aim to censor reality—these are some limits that shouldn’t exist. I don’t want to have to worry that writing about my experiences is going to offend people.

Other limits, limits that aim to prevent actual harm to an identifiable group of individuals—those are good limits. I believe in freedom up to the point where people try to use their own freedom to take away someone else’s freedom.

Those people are actually against freedom. They are acting in bad faith and can fuck off.

EM: My biggest interest is exploring the dark side of humanity and our worst parts of ourselves.

My first two novels deal with topics that I have personal connections to, especially the domestic violence in my upcoming novel Shoot Me in the Face on a Beautiful Day, being a survivor myself, but there are many fascinating, dark topics I’m eager to explore in future works. 

Nothing is more interesting to me than the way nature, nurture, and our society combine to shape the many kinds of people that exist, especially those who make unthinkable decisions and lash out at others.

Ever since I was a preteen who discovered my therapist father’s DSM, I’ve wanted to know everything about how our minds work and why different people raised in similar situations or with similar backgrounds can turn out so different, and that has drawn me to the deep character studies my work often becomes.

For me, there are limits to what I will personally explore in my writing, but I don’t believe in censorship except in cases of hate speech and nonconsensual/consent-is-impossible types of pornography.

Besides those, I don’t think writers should put a limit on what they want to explore except for their own comfort and mental health.

ST: I am currently working on a manuscript that feels like my love letter to the idea of glitter and gore.

Will it be transgressive? I think in some ways, yes. It’s going to be a bleak look into human connection and manipulation, plus quite a bit of body horror

 I’m still finishing it up, but I’ve enjoyed exploring the duality of my characters. Body horror shows up a lot in my work because bodies are so innately weird, wonderful, magical, and terrifying. It’s a category of horror that walks hand-in-hand with transgression. 

We can use our bodies to rebel, but our bodies can also rebel against us.

As for limits, I don’t set many boundaries for myself, but there are things I probably won’t write about, or write about again. For example, my novella To Be Devoured has some gruesome animal violence, and while I used those scenes to show a point of no return for a character, and the scenes fit the narrative in my opinion, I’m not interested in writing something with that level of animal cruelty again.

Emotionally, it was not fun. Plus, if there is anything in my writing I refuse to do, it’s to rely on the same trick again and again. That’s boring. I want to keep discovering my on limits in new ways and continue to push myself.

As for the question of “should there be any limits?” which is a great question that has spawned many heated internet arguments…I’d recommend attending lectures or panels on extreme horror because it often gets covered at conferences, and it’s fascinating how varied the conversation truly is.

I don’t have an answer because for me, it’s just my own limits of what I will probably never write. Who am I to set those limits for other writers?

We all have different boundaries, and it’s more important to me how someone acts in their everyday life than whatever weirdness they’re putting into a fictional world.

CE: I think people enjoy the unfiltered thought process, the weird and graphic sex and violence, and how I tend to relate things that are happening back to abstract philosophical principles. And sometimes I’m hilarious.

I think horror is a place where we can write down the kind of thoughts that we don’t necessarily believe but can still entertain. When Red Flags went up on Amazon, I saw it was ranking in “Absurdist Humor,” and I was like yeah, that’s because we are absurd and hilarious. (Red Flags is a collection of stories about what people are thinking as they die.)

For what is misunderstood, maybe just what I am trying to do. If someone goes into one of my books expecting a standard form and narrative, they may think that I’ve failed.

But I know what standard forms and narratives look like, so if I’ve deviated from that, I’ve done it on purpose. The trick is just making sure that people know what they’re getting into (changing expectations). 

 EM: I hope that readers enjoy the prose and the way I carefully paint my scenes, but as far as the content, the intent isn’t really “enjoyment” in the typical sense.

I rarely write a story intending it to be “enjoyable” or escapism in any usual way. Instead, I want to make my readers uncomfortable, not because of the gore, but because of the reality and moral dilemmas behind it. Topics like domestic violence, child abuse, complicated mental health disorders, intense grief, and emotional turmoil are all realities that many people are living with right now.

By delving into them via fiction, it allows a reader to dig into their own beliefs and morals without participating in exploitation of real victims, and also allows a deeper, more personal look at how someone may handle these unbearable situations.

I always do a ton of research on any sensitive topic I’ll be covering in a work, and often write about things that are either close to me personally or things I’ve already been fascinated with regarding abnormal psychology (which I have a background in and still read scholarly articles about frequently).

I try to balance the art of storytelling with the horrible realities of the topics I’m writing about, so I hope my readers pick up on the heart and compassion behind the words.

The thing I think is most often misunderstood about my work, especially my novel Crushing Snails, is that it isn’t supposed to be just a fun, gory read.

I’ve had several people tell me they were shocked at how dark and serious the book is, and I think that comes from the saturation of the more extreme side of horror with “fun” extreme reads that work to describe the most disgusting and shocking possible situations instead of digging beneath that to the truth of the characters behind it.

Instead of focusing on shocking my readers, my work is always deeply character-driven. I try my best to make these characters feel real and fleshed out; that there is no easy to identify “villain” because all of us has hidden, or not-so-hidden, dark parts inside us.

I want to make you uncomfortable because you can see how these things can happen and because you see yourself in these characters after spending so much time with them.

ST: I think (and hope) readers enjoy the thought I put into my work because I am not a fast writer. I overthink and then overthink some more. I don’t want to churn things out quickly and then realize all my works sound the same or feel sloppy. I want to have fun writing, and hope my love for the craft emits through the stories I create.

As for what might be misunderstood, this is more general than specific to my work, but I hate when authors of extreme horror suffer verbal and online abuse. It happens every now and then where someone shares this brainless idea of, “oh they must be a terrible person to write about such terrible things.”

What a senseless, unimaginative response to works that push boundaries or defy how someone thinks a horror book should be written. Even if your taste level isn’t on par with extreme or transgressive work, it doesn’t mean the whole subgenre is tasteless. Fiction is fiction.

Luckily, there are endless books to choose from out there. I read an article the other day that used the term “splatter-feminism” and I LOVE THAT. I love it so much.

I want more extreme horror from women, from queer writers, from trans writers, from nonbinary writers—if anyone has the collective rage to write transgression, to write against the expectations of a society that would happily take away (and has been taking away) freedom of choice, of decisions about our own bodies, and so on, it’s all of us.

This is the time. Write those challenging works, please.

CE: I’m thinking of the connection between the transgressive and the real and how when there’s a limit, sometimes it needs to be destroyed.

Sara and Elle both have scenes about tampons that wouldn’t be as shocking were bleeding not so demonized in North America. I just finished reading Emma’s book about a woman whose character flaws led to her son’s death.

People live with that sort of thing. It’s the rest of humanity that hasn’t found a way to fit that into our concept of what reality is. I’ve been asked about the restaurant scenes in The Devil Thinks I’m Pretty.

I wrote those, because that’s where that character spends most of her time. I don’t know, it just seems like whenever I find myself pushing up against a limit, it’s somebody else’s limit.

When I’m pushing up against my own limits, it’s more likely the case that I’m writing something that I don’t want to think about, regardless of how true it is. (That’s what makes me uncomfortable.) 

EM: If you’re a writer, write the stories you want to tell. Don’t worry about whether they fit into a particular subgenre or if they’re too extreme or too weird. There will be readers for your fiction if you pour your heart into it.

And if you’re a reader, please seek out lesser-known authors. I have found so many gems when I look beyond the big names, and that’s where you’ll find unique stories that don’t necessarily fit the mold of what is “horror” according to the biggest markets and publishers.

ST: Thank you so much for having me! I’m honored to be included with these fabulous writers whose bold works are constantly inspiring me.

Elle Nash is the author of Deliver Me (The Unnamed Press), Animals Eat Each Other (Dzanc Books), which was featured in O Magazine and hailed by Publishers Weekly as a “complex, impressive exploration of obsession and desire.” Upon publication of her novel in the UK, she appeared at the Edinburgh International Book Festival to present the work of under-represented voices with Amnesty International, and to speak about sex, death, and feminism in literature. Her work appears in Guernica, Adroit, The Creative Independent, Hazlitt, Literary Hub, Cosmopolitan, New York Tyrant, and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine and currently lives in Glasgow, Scotland.

Charlene Elsby is a philosophy doctor and former professor whose books include Hexis, The Devil Thinks I'm Pretty, Violent Faculties, and Red Flags. Her essays and interviews have appeared in Bustle Books, The Chicago Review of Books, The Millions, and the LA Review of Books.

Emma E. Murray explores the dark side of humanity in her fiction. Her work has appeared in Vastarien and Cosmic Horror Monthly, she has a sapphic southern gothic novelette out from Shortwave Publishing titled When the Devil, and her debut novel, Crushing Snails, came out earlier this year from Apocalypse Party Press. Her collection, The Drowning Machine and Other Obsessions, will be out February 2025 (Undertaker Books), and her second novel, Shoot Me in the Face on a Beautiful Day, will be out summer of 2025 (Apocalypse Party). When she isn’t writing, she is usually found playing make-believe with her daughter. 

Sara Tantlinger is the author of the Bram Stoker Award-winning The Devil’s Dreamland: Poetry Inspired by H.H. Holmes, and the Stoker-nominated works To Be Devoured and Cradleland of Parasites. She has also edited Not All Monsters and Chromophobia. She is an active HWA member and participates in the HWA Pittsburgh Chapter. She embraces all things macabre and can be found lurking in graveyards or at saratantlinger.com and on Instagram @inkychaotics.

Featured photo: Metzae / DeviantArt