Genres Aren't Boxes, They're Planets

How contributor E.K. Sathue found her way into horror, with help from podcasts, movies, and books

Thanks to E.K. Sathue for this guest-post!

Though I have always gravitated toward dark fiction, I didn’t think of myself as a horror writer until several drafts into my latest novel. youthjuice tells the story of HEBE, a trendy beauty and wellness company named for the Greek goddess of youth, and its newest employee, Sophia, a lonely woman on the cusp of turning 30. The story had many false starts and almost-theres, but it didn’t gel until I finally accepted it for what it was—a horror satire about the beauty industry and the ways social obsession with youth drives some to extremes.

E. K. Sathue, author of youthjuice, which Publishers Weekly called “satirical, gory and delectable…a certifiable page-turner”

Throughout my young writing life, I hesitated to tie myself to a genre. I imagine it’s similar for many—we fall in love with all kinds of stories, and don’t want to hedge ourselves in with “rules.” No matter how bizarre my stories became, I deemed them all simply “fiction,” afraid to pigeonhole myself into what I felt were restrictive categories. And, sure, maybe I thought embracing genre would mean more about what my work wasn’t than what it was. I had absorbed the false idea that genre fiction is inherently not literary, not driven by language and character, but instead by tropes and three-act structure.

These things are, of course, far from mutually exclusive. In fact, I’ve found that the conventions of genre can be incredibly freeing. Take youthjuice: Even though I conceived the idea around a specific, horrifying image—a glamorous woman soaking in a clawfoot bathtub full of blood—in my head, I wasn’t writing a horror novel. This ultimately meant I didn’t really know *what* I was doing. I wanted to get at something deep within Sophia’s experience of age anxiety and fleeting youth, to say something profound about the damage from giving physical appearance disproportionate importance. Still, my early drafts lacked focus.

Around this time, I independently began a deep dive into the history of horror movies. I spent weeks listening to every episode of the Evolution of Horror podcast, especially the season “Mind & Body,” which explores key films in the psychological and body horror subgenres. Many movies I loved were represented, like the David Lynch classics Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, as well as others I’d never heard of, like Possession by Andrej Zulawski. Released in 1981, Possession follows Sam Neil and Isabelle Adjani as a married couple in the midst of divorce. It’s a moving film about the painful breakdown of a marriage, about the ways we do and don’t see the people we share our lives with. It also happens to feature a tentacle monster. 

Isabella Adjani in “Possession”

As my watchlist grew, so did my understanding of just how much you can do within the parameters of a tradition. When I finally threaded the theme of body horror into my novel, giving Sophia a brutal nail-biting habit that verges on self-cannibalization, it opened a world of possibility. Scenes loosened up while, at the same time, gaining sharper focus and becoming far more frightening. I suddenly understood why Sophia had so much anger and pain, and how she sublimated it into a bizarre and specific form of self harm while projecting a serene, put-together image. I allowed myself to revel in the contrast between Sophia’s private gory habit and the glamorous setting of my novel—New York City’s Soho neighborhood, where many real-life brands to which my fictional company owes a great debt are based. 

I turned to many books while revising. Not all of them are explicitly labeled as horror, but they play with its elements, and I took something valuable from each:  the blend of grotesquery, status obsession, and dry humor in American Psycho by Bret Eason Ellis; the madcap fever dream atmosphere in Bunny by Mona Awad; the of-the-moment social commentary in Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin; the horror of girlhood in Carrie by Stephen King, Jawbone by Monica Ojeda, and the Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enríquez; the slippery narrative of Ill Will by Dan Chaon. 

Broadening my view of what I considered horror literature further gave me an endless toolbox to play with. It showed me that genres aren’t boxes; they are planets. Sitting down to look at my manuscript and thinking “this is a horror novel” gave me permission. It said: Go there. Make it grosser, bolder, more dramatic. In other words, don’t hold back. 

As soon as I began identifying as a horror writer, my art improved, and I began to find my people. youthjuice is being released on June 4th as the first new title under a dedicated horror imprint from Soho Press: Hell’s Hundred. Some early readers have disagreed about where it falls on the horror spectrum—too gross, not gross enough. But explicitly labeling my book horror has helped it find many of the right readers. Just as important, it’s given me a lens through which I better understand my work.  

E.K. Sathue is a pseudonym for the author Erin Mayer. Her novel, YOUTHJUICE, is forthcoming on June 4, 2024 from Hell’s Hundred/Soho Press in the US and Dialogue Books in the UK. Her debut novel, FAN CLUB (as Erin Mayer) is out now.
Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Bustle, Travel + Leisure, Better Homes & Gardens, Literary Hub, CrimeReads, Business Insider, and Man Repeller. She lives in Maine with her partner, Benjamin Perry, and their beloved haunted doll, Persephone. Find her on Instagram or visit her website at eksathue.com.