Horror writer Neena Viel, who last year published Listen to Your Sister, lives in a cabin in the Washingtonian woods with her husband and the best dog on the planet. LJ talks with her about her new novel, I’ll Watch Your Baby (St. Martin’s Griffin), reclaiming stereotypes, and her personal connection with the horror genre.

You write unique and compelling horror novels in which it’s clear that you have found your voice. How do you find your story ideas?

I write the stuff I want to read but can’t quite find. I love putting my own spin on horror tropes, and I especially love dropping unconventional characters into terrifying circumstances. I adore a sassy, morally gray antihero who always does the absolute worst thing but also maybe has a point on some issues. This archetype has long been popular in fiction, but I struggled to find stories that placed Black women in that role, so I wrote I’ll Watch Your Baby. I think of this book as a modern version of Candyman, but a lady!

Let’s dive deeper into I’ll Watch Your Baby, beginning with your reclaiming of the harmful “welfare queen” stereotype. You write honestly and beautifully about your feelings and personal experience with welfare in the book’s afterword. Can you share a bit about the real woman behind the stereotype, named Linda Taylor, and how you drew on what you learned about her for your novel?

[The real-life] Linda Taylor may have been a victim in some respects, but she was also someone who created victims. Most people would agree that murder or kidnapping are far worse crimes than welfare fraud. And yet, the extent of Linda Taylor’s misdeeds went unexplored in favor of a mad fervor only on the fraud bit. It’s bananas. It’s both fascinating and demoralizing how political interests built this woman into a blatantly self-serving myth that still stands today while rug-sweeping anything inconvenient to that narrative. She was made into a template for a stereotype, but there’s absolutely nothing stereotypical about her. She wasn’t a regular person. Regular people don’t create 80 aliases or claim to be a gambling kingpin’s only child to scam an inheritance. Regular people can’t equally pass as a 20-year-old and a 50-year-old. The story I wanted to tell centers this juxtaposition. I wanted to create a scenario where fixating on the caricature of the welfare queen amid all the elements at play would be bananas.

In this novel, readers follow Lottie, known as “the Welfare Queen,” in 1974 and a troubled young woman named Bless in 1994, as their timelines overlap and a supernatural force intervenes. How did you go about bringing these dynamic and fascinating characters to life?

There was something so cathartic about penning such badly behaved women! One believes in herself to an almost violent degree, and one is riddled with insecurities. One wears fur, and one wears flannel. One is in charge, and one follows the group. But they both have a warped relationship with love. They both claw for what they want, and they don’t necessarily mind harming others to achieve their goals. They’re not going to follow the typical horror-heroine playbook, which I think makes their journeys compelling. And because I’m a clown, I take any chance I get to find the humor. If we’re laughing with a character, we’re connecting.

What is it about the horror genre that attracted you to it as a way to tell stories? Where did your personal connection with the genre begin?

When I was in the sixth grade, my neighbor gave me a tattered copy of Dean Koontz’s Phantoms. Until that moment, I didn’t know fear was a feeling a book could give. I couldn’t read it if I was alone in the house. I hid it under pillows because just seeing it out of the corner of my eye unsettled me. My family was like, “Dude, no one is making you read this.” But I had to keep reading! It felt like my nemesis. If I quit, then Dean Koontz would win! He would think I was a coward! I finished the book (and had a few nightmares) and was very proud of myself. I was thrilled to discover there was a movie, but then the horror in the movie didn’t come close to my imagination. All my anxiety just dissipated, and it made me think there was something especially about the page. Horror is such a playground. It can be funny and shocking, subversive and heartfelt. Horror can be resistance. 

Tell us some of the books and authors that most excite you right now.

Allison Mick’s Humboldt Cut, RJ Joseph’s collection Hell Hath No Sorrow Like a Woman Haunted, Alex Grecian’s Red Rabbit, and Delilah S. Dawson’s Guillotine (or anything she writes, because COME ON). I love Daniel Price’s The Flight of the Silvers. I’m literally counting down the days until Lindy Ryan’s Dollface.