I was always the kid in the corner with the wrong taste in things, the kid who liked dead things. I was made that way by undiagnosed ASD and a household where my parents taught me that safety is silence. Horror made sense to me. Horror told the truth. Fantasy often failed to represent the world I was living in: a world that looked and sounded like cis, straight white men. ASD makes me a good observer of subtext and erasure—I see the holes in stories. I write strange characters and neurodivergent characters and real, broken, human characters. I apply horror’s intimate focus to the epic canvas of fantasy, and I center the stories that don’t get centered. I write for the outsiders—because no one wrote me.
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