C. M. Rosens

white text on plain black background that reads "Women in Horror"

Ann Fraistat

cmrosens
5–7 minutes
white text on plain black background that reads "Women in Horror"
A headshot of Ann Fraistat, a smiling white woman in her thirties with long brown hair, standing in front of scraggly branches and greenery.

NAME: Ann Fraistat
CREATIVE FIELD: Author
WEBSITE: annfraistat.com

AUTHOR LINKS:
Instagram: @annfrai
Book Links: getunderlined.com/authors/2244956/ann-fraistat

AUTHOR BIO:

Ann Fraistat is the USA Today bestselling author of A Place For Vanishing and What We Harvest, both Bram Stoker Award finalists. Her co-author credits include plays such as Romeo & Juliet: Choose Your Own Ending, and alternate reality games sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

Ann lives in Maryland with her husband and daughter, cats, and an alarmingly large stash of tea. Find her at annfraistat.com or on Instagram @annfrai.

INTERVIEW

What got you into horror to begin with – what’s your core Horror memory?

Long before I would dive into Shirley Jackson and Grady Hendrix and Carmen Maria Machado and Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Stephen Graham Jones, I was a Goosebumps girl.

For a formative childhood stretch, Goosebumps were the only books I would read, to the point that one of my teachers intervened, begging me to try at least one book from another author. I did. But I also kept devouring Goosebumps.

Some early favorites were Stay Out of the Basement, The Haunted Mask, and The Beast From the East.

Other treasured early horror memories come from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and its outrageously-haunting illustrations.

I especially remember “The Window,” where a girl sees strange lights roaming outside her bedroom window, drawing closer and closer until a creature presses gleaming eyes up against the glass, breaks through, and crawls inside.

One last core childhood memory has to go to the movie Poltergeist, especially the storm scene with the kid counting down the time between lightning and thunder strikes, “One-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thous—” and what comes for him next.

Do you have a favourite horror subgenre (or more than one) and if so, what is it? What/Who are your favourite books/films/podcasts/artists/creatives working in that subgenre?

My all-time favorite horror trope is possession, but I’ve got soft-spots for anything supernatural, monster-focused, or that blends horror with comedy.

Some creators, books, and films along those lines that are stand-outs for me: Shirley Jackson,

Grady Hendrix,

Silvia Moreno-Garcia,

Carmen Maria Machado,

Jordan Peele,

Guillermo del Toro,

Ari Aster,

Midnight Mass,

It Follows,

The VVitch,

Train to Busan,

The Last of Us,

The Thing (1982),

The Exorcist (duh),

Sinners,

A Guest in the House by Emily Carroll,

The Spirit Bares Its Teeth by Andrew Joseph White,

and The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson.

What is the horror project of your heart – perhaps something you’ve already got out there, something you’re working on now, or something you’d like to do?

The cover of A Place For Vanishing by Ann Fraistat: The artwork features a ripped wallpaper background, patterned with leaves and insects, with thorny blue roses bursting through it. Dark liquid drips from the rips in the paper. A white butterfly is perched on the biggest bloom, and iridescent beetles sit on several leaves. The scene is ominously uplit in glaring pink, fading toward a shadowy purple at the top of the image. The title reads, “A Place For Vanishing” in large white serif letters, with the tagline “Sometimes, we all want to disappear.” near the top and the author’s name, “Ann Fraistat” at the bottom.
A Place for Vanishing by Ann Friestat

My second novel, A Place For Vanishing, is my heart on a plate. It’s about a 16 year old girl, Libby, who, after her bipolar III diagnosis and the mental health tragedy that preceded it, is ready for a fresh start in her mother’s childhood home—until she realizes the house’s strange beauty may be hiding a past more sinister than her own.

This book is my first to feature a main character with a brain like my own. I have bipolar III, aka cyclothymia, like Libby, and that’s something I never got to see represented when I was coming up—not anywhere, and especially not in horror, which has such a thorny track record with mental health representation.

Thankfully, that’s changing so beautifully now, and it was important to me to contribute to that effort. To make sure Libby was fully human, and that her diagnoses are part of her but not all of her.

Accordingly, I also wanted to twist the expectations for gothic horror. Instead of a haunted house that drives the heroine mad, I wanted to create one that, for all its intense horrors, is strangely exactly what she needed. Essentially, A Place For Vanishing is a mental health recovery story set inside a haunted house. It is, by far, the most vulnerable book I’ve ever written, and also ultimately, the one I’m proudest of.

Which 5 horror books can you not stop thinking about, or have influenced you most in some way? (If not books, you can pick 5 films, 5 pieces of art, 5 songs… or mix & match!)

As a YA horror author, I’ve gotta share some YA horror love.

Five of many that have lingered with me:

What the Woods Took by Courtney Gould;

My Lips, Her Voice by LL Madrid;

She is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran;

Agnes at the End of the World by Kelly McWilliams,

and The Invocations by Krystal Sutherland.

If you had to describe the tones and themes of your own work in terms of movies, books, songs, or art, what would you choose and why?

For What We Harvest, I’d choose Annihilation (beautiful mysterious eco-horror + freaky bears) and The Last of Us (emotional intimacy + zombies).

For A Place For Vanishing, I’d choose The Babadook (“LET ME IN” + you can’t face the monsters if you can’t face yourself) and The Haunting of Hill House (ghostly gothic horror + the scariest monsters creep from the cracks inside of us).

And overall, I have to give a shout-out to Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand, which reminded me what a powerful vehicle horror can be for delivering hope, and made me want to write YA horror in the first place.

After all, a candle burns brightest in the dark. One thing that’s so beautiful about horror is that it—above all other genres—makes us appreciate what we have, and it helps us understand what we need.

Introduce us to something you’ve created, and pitch it to the audience!

The cover of What We Harvest by Ann Fraistat: The artwork shows eerie, iridescent flowers with curling tendrils, mottled with dark stains and dripping blood, set against a shadowy blue field of wheat. The soil beneath is cracked, with dark silver liquid puddling at the plants’ roots. The overall mood is dark, atmospheric, and slightly ominous. The title reads, “What We Harvest” in large white serif letters, with the author’s name, “Ann Fraistat” at the bottom.
What We Harvest by Ann Freistat

My debut, What We Harvest, is feminist YA folk horror about a mysterious blight devouring an idyllic American farming town—one that infects not only crops, but also animals and people.

And it’s about Wren, the sixteen-year-old girl fighting back to save her home. Nature has turned against her community, disease rampages through her neighbors and comes for her own family, and the American dream she once believed in has shattered around her.

Even against the avalanching odds, Wren strives to save her farm and family, to unearth her town’s deep-buried rot, and to rebuild a future her community can be proud of.

You can expect: page-turning action, lush and eerie rural atmosphere, zombifying blight, exes-to-lovers romance, miraculous farms with crops like iridescent wheat and glowing ghost melons, eyes watching from the woods, corrosive small-town secrets, a potentially infected protagonist, and, last but never least, a very devoted zombie-dog.