On this month's Special Page:
Gwendolyn Kiste has just won a Bram Stoker award at this year's Stokercon! The Horror Zine's Media Director, Trish Wilson, has captured an exclusive interview with this best-selling author.
Gwendolyn Kiste is a two-time Bram Stoker Award-winner and best-selling author of horror novels and short stories. She has just won the 2024 Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel The Haunting of Velkwood at StokerCon 2025. She also won the 2018 Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel for The Rust Maidens and the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction for Reluctant Immortals. Her fiction has appeared in Interzone, Nightmare, LampLight, Shimmer Magazine and Daily Science Fiction.
The exclusive Horror Zine interview with Gwendolyn Kiste
TRISH WILSON: It's good to talk to you, Gwendolyn! First, congratulations are in order. You won the 2024 Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel for The Haunting of Velkwood. How did you feel when you won that award?
GWENDOLYN KISTE: Thanks so much! It was surprising and exhilarating and such an incredible honor. The Haunting of Velkwood is truly one of the most personal things I've ever written, so to have it recognized at the Bram Stoker Awards is beyond a dream come true. I'm so grateful for everyone who has supported the book over the past year; it genuinely means the world to me.
TRISH WILSON: You mentioned in a Cemetery Dance interview that you are especially drawn to the "odd girls" like Wednesday Addams, Lydia Deetz, Daria, and the coven from The Craft. What is it about that type of character you find appealing?
GWENDOLYN KISTE: I’ve always found those characters to be so much fun because honestly, I’ve always related to them so much. Growing up in a small town, I absolutely never fit in. Weird girls can struggle to fit in no matter where they are, but it can often be harder in small towns where conformity is a commodity. But knowing there were characters out there in the world that looked like me or dressed like me or even just thought and talked like me made the world feel less lonely. And sometimes, there’s nothing more powerful than that.
TRISH WILSON: You also write non-fiction, specifically for The Lineup, where you write about horror films and fiction. What are advantages and disadvantages to writing non-fiction?
GWENDOLYN KISTE: I really love writing nonfiction, in particular about horror, so I definitely don’t feel like there are any disadvantages to it really. My nonfiction and fiction tend to fuel each other. I’ll often explore the same topics (e.g. ghosts or body horror or vampires) in both my nonfiction articles as well as in my short fiction and novels at the same time. I adore each form of writing, and it’s definitely a goal of mine to have a standalone nonfiction book at some point in the future. It’s absolutely a major passion for me.
TRISH WILSON: What is it about horror that appeals to you?
GWENDOLYN KISTE: Honestly, I love everything about horror. It’s so visceral and immediate. It can really get down to the marrow of what it means to be human. Horror is unflinching. It faces the difficult things in life head on. It can be so frightening but more than anything, it can be so cathartic too.
TRISH WILSON: Without giving away too much, Reluctant Immortals tells the stories of Lucy Westenra of Dracula and Bertha Mason of Jane Eyre. How did you come to write this book? Why did you choose those two characters in particular?
GWENDOLYN KISTE: I’ve always been fascinated by the more “forgotten” characters in literature. The ones that get pushed aside. I’ve loved Lucy in Dracula since I was a kid. I always felt that Sadie Frost’s depiction of Lucy in Bram Stoker’s Dracula was by far the best part of the film. She’s such an interesting character, and she so often doesn’t get her due. The same thing applies to Bertha in Jane Eyre. They’re two characters who get sidelined and ultimately killed, so that the main female protagonists—Mina and Jane—are able to have their character arcs. I very much wanted to see who these forgotten characters really were and how they would react both to each other and to a changing world that might give them the chance to finally reclaim their own destinies.
TRISH WILSON: Reluctant Immortals is written using characters in the public domain. What advice would you give writers who also want to write using public domain characters? What kinds of reactions are they likely to get?
GWENDOLYN KISTE: There are certainly people out there who are purists; they don’t want to see anything changed about the characters they consider to be theirs. Be prepared for some readers to hate your work just by virtue of the fact that you’re doing something different. But so long as you believe in what you’ve written, that’s truly all that matters. Have fun with public domain characters. Do something completely new. Explore what those characters mean to you and why. Be fearless. That’s probably good advice in general when it comes to writing: don’t be afraid to bring your own unique vision to life.
TRISH WILSON: Decay, both physically and emotionally, seems to be one characteristic of Gothic fiction. What other notable characteristics are there? How does decay play into the Gothic?
GWENDOLYN KISTE: For me, the gothic is all about an obsession with the past. An inability to let go of what came before, whether that’s peoples or places or hopes and dreams. That sense of loss is represented in gothic characters that are often trapped in traumatic cycles. It’s represented in the crumbling settings of the gothic. The decay is very often a reflection of the moral or spiritual decay of people. All of us are haunted by something. The gothic explores exactly what that something really is.
TRISH WILSON: What scares you?
GWENDOLYN KISTE: The loss of self. The loss of identity. The way the world can do its best to stop us from just being who we are. I think that’s particularly true for women and the LGBTQ+ community, but it can be the case for anyone who is “different” from the so-called norm. Sure, the slasher killers of horror are scary, but society is always scarier.
TRISH WILSON: Did you have mentors early in your career who helped you? If you did, who were they? What kind of help did they give you? I've noticed some writers have had mentors and they've maintained professional relationships and even friendships with them.
GWENDOLYN KISTE: You know, I never really had a mentor as a writer. That being said, ironically, I’ve actually been a mentor myself to several other writers. In the past, I’ve mentored through the HWA mentorship program, and I’m now an instructor and mentor in an MFA program. So it’s definitely something that can have a huge value for a writer; I just never had one myself.
TRISH WILSON: What advice would you give a writer who is just starting out?
GWENDOLYN KISTE: Write the book you want to read. More than anything else, you should be happy with the story you told. That way, even if it doesn’t get published or become a bestseller or win any awards, you’ve still written something you believe in.
Also, don’t keep waiting for the moment when everything is going to be perfect in your writing career. It will never be perfect. You can be a writer for years, but the royalty checks will still sometimes be late or you’ll sign with an editor who ends up being terrible to work with or you’ll have to deal with the usual deadlines and bad reviews and moments when the writing is more difficult. That never really changes. Just try your best to enjoy what you can out of writing.
TRISH WILSON: What advice would you give a more seasoned writer?
GWENDOLYN KISTE: Honestly, I’d give them the same advice. Personally, I don’t think the needed advice changes that much over the course of a career. What works when you’re starting out usually still works when you’re midway through your career. Writing is writing; it can be beautiful and wonderful and terrible and transcendent all at once.
TRISH WILSON: Thank you so much for the interview! Please leave your social media and web site links. Also, what projects may readers look forward to down the road?
GWENDOLYN KISTE: My second fiction collection, The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own, was just announced. It will be coming out from Raw Dog Screaming Press in spring 2026. I’ve got another book that’s currently in the contract stage, so once I have more details about that, I will of course be screaming it from the rooftops. Those two titles are among my favorite things I’ve ever written, so I’m absolutely thrilled that they’ve both found such wonderful homes.
In the meantime, you can find me online at Instagram and facebook as well as on my website gwendolynkiste.com. I’m also occasionally on Bluesky, so feel free to look me up there as well!
