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Award-winning horror writer Catriona Ward joins us to discuss this most exciting and compelling of genres. Why are we so moved by horror? Why do we willingly throw ourselves into the twisted worlds it conjures? We don’t have to look far to find it: horror surrounds us every day and our own bloody history is full of it.
We ask Catriona whether she thinks readers have a stereotypical image of a horror writer, how she navigates her way through the ins and outs of crafting a mystery and why children can be so eerie. We discuss nineteenth-century medicine and the heavy moral cost of progress. We ask: is horror even truly a genre?
Catriona’s new book, Little Eve, is out now from Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Mentioned in this episode:
- John Connolly
- Pet Sematary by Stephen King
- It by Stephen King
- The Tom Ripley novels by Patricia Highsmith
- Agatha Christie
- The Girl With All The Gifts by M. R. Carey
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer
- Legion
- Fargo
CATRIONA WARD was born in Washington, DC and grew up in the United States, Kenya, Madagascar, Yemen, and Morocco. She read English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford and is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia.
Her debut novel, Rawblood (W&N, 2015) won Best Horror Novel at the 2016 British Fantasy Awards, was shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award and selected as a Winter 2016 Fresh Talent title by WHSmith. Her second novel, Little Eve (W&N), was published in July 2018 and is described by Joanne Harris as ‘magnificent… with shades of Shirley Jackson and the Loney.’ She lives in London and Devon.
