Author Interview

Brenda LaTorre on body horror, motherhood, and monstrosity in Bruja’s Nest #Spooktober

Mandy Webster

Of all the horror novels I’ve read this Spooktober, Brenda LaTorre’s Bruja’s Nest has been one of my favorites. This unsettling blend of body horror, Mexican folklore, and social commentary offers plenty of grotesque imagery, but what makes it so compelling is its deeply flawed protagonist, Yolanda, whose desperate pursuit of a better life leads her into increasingly disturbing territory. Through Yolanda’s experiences, LaTorre explores the connections between motherhood and monstrosity, the ways poverty and privilege shape our choices, and the power structures that keep women trapped even when they believe they’ve found a way out.

Brenda LaTorre Headshot
Brenda LaTorre is the author of Bruja’s Nest, which released October 6, 2026.

I spoke with LaTorre about creating an antiheroine readers can root for despite her troubling choices, using body horror to explore the physical and psychological realities of motherhood, and drawing on elements of Mexican culture to bring Bruja’s Nest to life. We also talked about what she’s working on next—and if her plans for a new short story collection are any indication, she has plenty more horrors in store for readers.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

The Whispering by L.A. Detwiler: A psychological thriller that loses sight of its inspiration

Mandy Webster

L.A. Detwiler’s The Whispering begins with the ingredients of an effective psychological thriller: an isolated manor overlooking the New England coast, a heroine whose perception of reality is open to question, and a fiancé whose promises of protection may conceal something more sinister. As Cadie McIntyre settles into Wright Manor with Oliver Wright, the doctor who once saved her life, the novel builds an atmosphere of suspicion that leaves readers questioning who poses the greatest threat. Unfortunately, although the premise has potential, the execution struggles to deliver a convincing psychological horror story.

Book cover of The Whispering by L.A. Detwiler, a psychological thriller novel featuring an isolated manor filled with dark secrets
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The opening chapters establish an appealing tension. We know little about Cadie and Oliver’s relationship, including how long they have been together, but there are enough warning signs to make their arrangement feel uncomfortable from the start. Oliver has apparently faced accusations of some kind, though he dismisses them as rumors. Furthermore, the fact that he is engaged to a former patient is a huge red flag on its own. Cadie, meanwhile, has a history of mental health struggles that raises questions about the reliability of her first-person narration. Her fiancé’s insistence that she remain indoors because the outside world is dangerous only adds to the unease. Is Oliver protecting a vulnerable woman, or using her circumstances to justify controlling her?

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

What the Forest Devours by Elaine Vilar Madruga: A brutal horror novel about motherhood and sacrifice

Mandy Webster

What the Forest Devours by Elaine Vilar Madruga, translated by Kevin Gerry Dunn, is the kind of horror novel that makes me very aware of the cultural assumptions I bring to what I’m reading. The story takes place in a Cuban rainforest where the forest itself functions as a ravenous god, demanding sacrifice from a community that has learned to survive by feeding their children to the forest. Mothers raise their children knowing what ultimately awaits them, women are expected to reproduce as a condition of survival, and the boundaries between motherhood, violence, devotion, and self-preservation become increasingly difficult to separate. It is a brutal premise, and Madruga does not soften it for the reader.

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One thing I’ve noticed while reading more horror from Central and South America, and now Cuba, is how readily some of these authors approach subjects that U.S. American writers sometimes seem reluctant to name directly. There is a bluntness to the language surrounding violence, bodily realities, motherhood, and cruelty that I appreciate. Where a U.S. American novel might reach for euphemism or carefully circle an atrocity, Madruga is willing to call the thing what it is. There is something refreshing about that refusal to make horrific realities more comfortable for the reader. Atrocities exist in the real world. People do terrible things to one another. Children are abused and sacrificed. Women are exploited. Mothers can be both victims and perpetrators. Pretending otherwise does not make those realities less horrific, and I would rather a horror novel confront them head-on.

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On Storytelling

Why ghost stories are really stories about the past #Spooktober

Mandy Webster

Why do ghosts so often haunt places rather than people? It is a simple question, especially because we tend to think of a ghost as the spirit of a dead person. If someone has died and refuses to leave the world behind, it seems logical that they would follow the people who mattered to them. Yet some of the most enduring ghost stories give us something different. The ghost is tied to a house, a hotel, a cemetery, a battlefield, a ship, a school, or some other physical location. The place itself becomes haunted, and the history of that place becomes inseparable from the haunting.

A haunted house surrounded by faded photographs, memories, and the ghostly outline of someone who came before—an illustration inspired by the idea that ghost stories are often really stories about the past.
Some ghosts aren’t haunting the house—they’re haunting the history. Today we are exploring why ghost stories are really stories about the past, and why the things we bury don’t always stay buried.
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A ghost story is rarely just about a dead person wandering around. More often, the ghost represents something that hasn’t been resolved: grief, guilt, trauma, injustice, family secrets, historical violence, or simply something someone desperately wants to forget. The supernatural element gives physical form to an idea that is otherwise difficult to see. The past does not always stay where we put it. We may move away from a place, close a door, bury a body, destroy a document, or stop talking about an event, but none of those things necessarily erase what happened. The past can continue to exert its influence long after the people who experienced it are gone.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

The Haunting of Lavender House by Natalie Kikić: A promising gothic premise that never quite comes alive

Mandy Webster

Natalie Kikić’s The Haunting of Lavender House has nearly all the ingredients I want from a gothic novel: a crumbling ancestral house surrounded by lavender fields, a family history full of secrets, a centuries-old curse, Croatian folklore, and a woman returning to a place she has never truly known. Petra arrives at Lavender House after her mother’s death expecting to discover the grandmother she has always been told is dead, only to find herself confronting a family history that reaches back more than a century. The premise is intriguing, and the Croatian setting offers an opportunity for a gothic story that feels distinct from the familiar haunted houses and old estates that populate the genre. Unfortunately, I found the execution much less compelling than the setup promised.

Book cover of The Haunting of Lavender House by Natalie Kikić, a gothic novel featuring a crumbling ancestral home surrounded by lavender fields.]
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One of my biggest problems began with Luka, who appears to be positioned almost immediately as a romantic interest for Petra. The book leans into the enemies-to-lovers setup, but this is one of those cases where the “enemies” portion made it very difficult for me to care about the eventual romance. Luka is simply rude to Petra from the moment they meet, and the explanations for his hostility never made his behavior feel justified. He has preconceived ideas about her and her relationship with her grandmother, but those assumptions don’t give him a free pass to treat her badly.

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We Are Underlings by Doretta Lau: A darkly funny take on corporate culture and death

Mandy Webster

Doretta Lau’s We Are Underlings turns the corporate workplace into a darkly comic afterlife where incompetent executives, impossible bureaucracy, and reanimated corpses are all just part of getting through another day at the office.

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Zita Chang is an Associate Marketing Manager at the Nine Circles, a theme park dedicated to death, dying, and the afterlife. The concept is certainly unusual, but the workplace itself is depressingly familiar. Projects get bogged down in bureaucracy, decisions that should take minutes take weeks, and the people with the authority to solve problems often seem to have the least idea how the actual work gets done. Meanwhile, the underlings—the employees who understand what needs to happen and are actually trying to make it happen—are left fighting their way through an endless maze of approvals, departments, policies, and institutional inertia.

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Tatratea by Alex Woodroe: A strange trip into a dystopian Transylvania wilderness

Mandy Webster

Tatratea by Alex Woodroe is one of those books that leaves you staring at the final page thinking, “What the hell did I just read?” It is an unusual blend of eco-horror, science fiction, cosmic horror, and psychological disorientation, and it took me a while to figure out what kind of story I was actually reading. Part of that confusion was probably my own fault, because the book’s setting sent my expectations in a very specific direction. When I saw that this was a horror novel set in the Romanian wilderness of Transylvania, I immediately assumed I was getting some variation on the Dracula story. Given how many books I’ve encountered this year that have played with vampires, Dracula, and the mythology surrounding Transylvania, that was where my mind went. Instead, Woodroe took me somewhere I absolutely did not expect. So no, this is absolutely NOT a Dracula story or even a vampire story of any kind for anyone who was wondering.

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The story follows Errata, a researcher working for an organization known as the Institute in a future where humanity has been almost completely wiped out. An alien presence known as the Source has taken over Earth, and only around two hundred humans are believed to remain. Errata is sent to investigate Tatratea, an isolated manor where the Institute has detected strange activity that could provide information about the entity responsible for humanity’s devastation. What initially sounds like an investigation of an abandoned estate quickly becomes something much stranger. The house and its surrounding flora have become active participants in the story, and Errata finds herself relying on the plants as she tries to understand what has happened there and why the Source seems to be affecting reality itself.

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To the East of the East by Ping Lu: Marriage, disappearance, and the stories we tell ourselves

Mandy Webster

Ping Lu’s To the East of the East, translated from Chinese by Jeremy Tiang, is an unusual novel about a woman searching for her missing husband while gradually confronting how little she may have understood the marriage she is trying so desperately to preserve. Its structure moves among Min-Hui’s search in contemporary Beijing, her increasingly complicated relationship with a man who claims to be a human rights activist, the historical novel she is writing, and the letters left behind by her husband. The individual threads don’t always fit together neatly, but their loose connections create a story that asks questions about freedom, attachment, identity, and the stories we tell ourselves about the people we love.

Book cover of To the East of the East by Ping Lu, a literary novel about a Taiwanese woman searching for her missing husband in Beijing while confronting questions of marriage, freedom, and identity.
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Min-Hui discovers that her husband has disappeared from China, although even the circumstances surrounding that disappearance are difficult to pin down. Their marriage has already become a strange kind of long-distance arrangement, with the two of them speaking on the telephone only once every couple of months. She knows remarkably little about his life, and yet when she realizes that she hasn’t heard from him for an unusually long time, she travels from Taiwan to Beijing to look for him. Once there, she settles into a hotel and tries to determine what happened to the man she calls her husband.

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Her Kind by Sophie Lefens: A meditation on motherhood, friendship, and the refuge women create together

Mandy Webster

Sophie Lefens’s Her Kind is a beautiful, meditative novel about motherhood, friendship, grief, and the strange ways we prepare ourselves for loss. It is set on an almost dreamlike lakeside farm where a group of women create a temporary refuge from the rest of the world. This quietly immersive debut feels less like a story to race through than one to settle into, allowing its atmosphere and its questions about love and mortality to seep gradually into the reader’s thoughts. As someone who is frequently impatient with slow-moving novels, I found the writing here perfectly suited to the pace. The story moves slowly, but it never felt like it was dragging. Instead, the meditative quality of Lefens’s prose made me want to linger in this beautiful, strange world she created.

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When Ada is left alone to raise her young son, Lenny, she retreats with him to her Aunt Leigh’s crumbling lakeside home. It is an extraordinary place to raise a child: surrounded by water, wildflowers, animals, and the rhythms of the natural world, with none of the constant negativity of Lenny’s father intruding on their lives. Ada has also managed to find part-time work that she enjoys and that allows her to spend a great deal of time with her son. There is an undeniable element of privilege in the life she has been able to build, particularly because so much of it depends on having an aunt like Leigh who can simply say, in effect, come live with me when everything falls apart. Not everyone has that kind of safety net.

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On Storytelling

Why horror is the perfect genre for feminist rage #Spooktober

Mandy Webster

Horror has always been good at making the invisible visible. It takes the things we are afraid to talk about, the things we have learned to tolerate, and the things society has decided are simply part of life, and gives them teeth. That makes horror an especially powerful vehicle for feminism because so many of the experiences women navigate every day are frightening precisely because they have been normalized. Horror can take those experiences and ask a deceptively simple question: What if we made the consequences impossible to ignore?

A square comic-style graphic featuring a central woman with dark hair, expressing intense rage while holding a burning torch. The dark, cinematic illustration uses a charcoal and blood-red palette, featuring text that reads "WHY HORROR IS THE PERFECT GENRE FOR FEMINIST RAGE." Four surrounding panels depict different horror tropes: a woman trapped in pearls and cleaning supplies ("Domestic Traps"), a pregnant woman enveloped in thorns ("Loss of Autonomy"), a silhouette in a shattered mirror ("Impossible Standards"), and a shadow stalking a woman at night ("The Gaze").
Horror has always been good at making the invisible visible—taking the fears women carry quietly and turning them into something impossible to ignore.
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Consider the fear of violence. Women are often taught from a young age to think about where we park, whether we should walk alone at night, what we wear, how much we drink, who we trust, and how we can avoid making ourselves vulnerable. These precautions can become so routine that we barely notice how extraordinary they are. We can internalize the idea that constantly assessing our surroundings is simply part of being a woman. Horror does not have to explain that fear, however. It can turn it into something physical: a monster waiting outside the door, a figure following the protagonist home, or an unseen presence that makes an ordinary environment suddenly dangerous. The genre can take a fear that women are expected to carry quietly and make the reader experience it as an immediate threat.

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