On posting our latest story, we spoke to horror writer Corinne Engber. You can read Rufus here. There may be minor spoilers for the tale ahead.

Q1. I’ve never read a story with an antagonist quite like our Rufus – where did the idea spawn from and why does he creep me out so very much?

This is going to sound a little weird, but my wife and I are both horror writers and sometimes when we’re in bed at night, we like to talk about scary things before we go to sleep. Like, top five scariest environments to wake up in, top five scariest types of guy to be in the apartment right now, that sort of thing. Rufus arose from one of these conversations: I had recently read about the filmGood Boy, where a character appears to live as a dog, and its failures to maintain tension or push the envelope with the concept, and the thought spiralled out from there.

The horror of Rufus is that his motivations are unknowable. Aria (and by extension, the reader) can infer what he wants—companionship, love, sex—but we never really know for sure. This, coupled with suburban isolation and the shackles of Midwestern social niceties, means that Aria is trapped in an unwilling relationship with someone who does not care if she is uncomfortable as long as he gets his. BDSM is so ripe for horror, but so much BDSM-adjacent horror is focused on whips and chains and sadistic dominants, which I don’t find all that scary. What I do find scary, both in fiction and in real life, is malice masquerading as willful ignorance or ineptitude. Rufus is the worst of the worst of entitled subculture creeps, and I write a lot of entitled subculture creeps.

Q2. I love the mix of emotions you have going on in this story. We are obviously frightened by Rufus, but we very much feel for the main character who is not in the best of places. I really felt all of the emotions from fright, anxiety, through to passion and love. Did you spend a lot of time trying to hit these notes or did it all come through as a natural part of the story?  

This is an excellent question. I really find that horror lives and dies by the emotions of its characters. It doesn’t matter how gruesome the events: if the characters aren’t scared, I’m not scared, and when I write horror, the person I’m trying to scare most is myself.

Writing clear emotion actually doesn’t come naturally to me at all; I experience moderate alexithymia or emotional blindness, which makes it difficult for me to identify and portray emotions in a way that doesn’t seem overblocked and hammy. However, because my experience of emotion is so nebulous, it opens the door for physical representations of emotion beyond the typical stable of happy, sad, scared, etc. For example, when Aria sees Rufus walk for the first time, I wanted to evoke the feeling of being so powerless and angry at the ridiculousness of a situation that you just have to cry. So too with Aria’s relationship with Dylan; their chemistry needs to be believable, and Dylan’s kindness very clear in contrast to Rufus’ self-interest. All of this is deliberate and at the forefront of my mind when I’m writing.

Q3. Another thing I love about this story is that it doesn’t ‘look away’ and all of Aria’s reactions come from a very human, very honest place that writers sometimes shy away from. How do you feel about the role of honesty in your fiction?  

Oh, I don’t think I could be dishonest in my writing if I tried. I’m a painfully earnest person in real life, so representing any sort of detachment in my work is somewhat laborious. I also find that real reactions create real discomfort; isn’t it awful when you’re reading something and the characters don’t speak or behave like real people? This sort of irony or profound genre awareness can work, but more often than not, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. That being said, I also dislike insistence that characters should only ever behave reasonably and rationally, especially in horror. Sometimes people are irrational, or make choices based on incomplete information. Sometimes you realize the dog man is only doing the dog thing to you and it freaks you out. I think that’s reasonable! Honestly, I think everything Aria does is reasonable.

Q4. How much of your time do you spend writing short stories versus other projects?

Though I’ve always loved reading short stories, I actually only started writing short fiction seriously around 2021-2022. Before that, it was all poetry and novels, all the time, but now that I’ve started writing short fiction, I’ve really developed an affection for it. Like short films, short stories are incredible vehicles for horror: they’re tight and self-contained, but with plenty of room to play. I usually have a short story going on in the background while I’m working on my longer projects, but sometimes an idea will grab me and I’ll write it all the way through in a couple of weeks, put it to my workshop group and then write it again from the top, but good this time. At this point, I’d say I spend about a third of my writing time on short fiction, two-thirds on my novel. It’s nice not to be locked in on only one project!

Q5. What other works do you have on the go? Anything you’d like to promote?

Aside from my novel-in-progress Space Trash, which is a sci-fi lesbian road trip through Body Horror World, I’ve got another short story in rewrites called “Dead Wife” which is about the successful resurrection of a marriage and also a lovely corpse. I’ve also been submitting a story called “Dollbaby,” about yet another subculture creep who meets an odd couple way, way weirder than he is.

In the publication pipeline, I have a sci-fi food service horror piece forthcoming with Penumbric Speculative Fiction, and recently, my Gothic timeloop story “The Sound of a Gong” was published by Tales to Terrify! It’s beautifully narrated by Krystal Hammond and Andrew Gibson and I could not be happier to share it.

My other work can be found all over; there’s a pinned post on my Tumblr @synonymsfordismember with links if you’d like to check it out.