Lily Luchesi Q & A

1) Why write horror?
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I don’t think I made it a conscious decision. I fell in love with the macabre when I was a toddler, watching old Scooby Doo episodes on Cartoon Network. I recall the Chicago suburb I lived in had a ton of bats that we’d often see at sunset, and a coven of “vampires” (I wrote them into my novel Stake-Out, as a matter of fact).
I fell in love with all things creepy and dark, and always have been, from music to TV and especially books. My mother bought me a collection of Poe’s work when I was 8, and it got me started down the horror rabbit hole.
With horror, it can be combined with many genres (I like to combine it with high and urban fantasy). It’s not a one trick pony genre. It can even be added to romance (my pen name’s The Vampire Mistress, for example). Fear is a visceral emotion, and from birth, we have the capability to feel it.
Sure, doesn’t a newborn baby immediately feel the fear of the unknown the moment it’s ejected from the warm, familiar comfort of the womb?
Fear is universal, it is beautiful, it is eternal.
 
2) Tell us about your writing style - is it gore, psychological etc?

I like a little bit of all of it, and I like to combine them. Gore is fun. You can often find me gleefully grinning as I peel the flesh from a hapless victim or gut someone and describe the way their intestines squirm and dance once free from their prison of flesh and bone. Gore is gross, it is violent, and it has a place and time.
Psychological is more difficult, and I delved into mixing it with gore in my novel Never Again. The MC, Sean, suffers PTSD from being captured during WWII and held prisoner and, yes, tortured.
I suffer from multiple psychological disorders: generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety, chronic depression, insomnia, night terrors, PTSD, and am on the spectrum. When one’s body is betrayed by their brain, it can be alarming in an indescribable way. I try to describe that feeling, and make my readers feel it, too.
 
3) Who is your favorite woman in horror author?

Of course Anne Rice and Shirley Jackson are up there, as is Anne Bronte. But I think Mary Shelley would have to take the top spot for her sci-fi twists and deeply psychological plot.
Honorable mentions (because I read them when they still identified as female) are Z Brewer and Poppy Z Brite.
 
4) Who is your favorite scream queen?

Unpopular opinion, but as a modern scream queen, I find Chloe Grace Moretz fantastic.
I prefer the 60s horror mavens, such as Caroline Munro and Veronica Carlson. I adore black and white horror, as well as the 70s Hammer films (Christopher Lee was the man). They had beauty and grace few can emulate.
 
5) What's next for you?

On March 20th I release a boxed set I compiled called Just A Little Wicked, which will feature my YA historical fantasy novella Morgana’s Revenge, featuring some impalings, stabbings, a memorable electrocution, and the encroaching fear of being hunted for no reason other than the fact that you exist.
Over the summer I will enter a new genre: cozy mysteries, with the launch of the Paige Papillon Paranormal Mysteries Series, and have a YA horror novella called Dead Memories included in the boxed set Summer Bites.
Dead Memories follows my Paranormal Detectives MC Angelica Cross when she’s sixteen years old, as she attends paranormal summer camp to socialize with the children of other supernatural dignitaries from around the world. While there, camp counselors and campers alike are brutalized by a mysterious creature, and she must figure out who or what it is and stop it.
Finally, on Halloween, I will release Make Me Bad, a psychological, sci-fi horror novel about a half vampire and the insane mortal sect that seeks to use him as a test dummy for disease, torture, and much more.