NAME: C.M. Rosens
CREATIVE FIELDS: Author / Podcaster
WEBSITE: You’re here – cmrosens.com – but if you’re looking for Women In Horror specifically, try women-in-horror.carrd.co
CREATOR LINKS:
Bluesky: @cmrosens.com
IG, TikTok, Threads: @cm.rosens
Facebook, Pillowfort, Tumblr: @cmrosens
CREATOR BIO:
C.M. Rosens is a genre-bending hybrid author of Gothic Horror, New Weird, and dark SFF, based in the UK. Find her travelling by rail, wandering among lonely ruins and ancient megaliths, and lost in worlds of fiction, music and folklore.
She is a monthly contributor to Divination Hollow Reviews, and an active member of the HWA and British Fantasy Society, and her work is published with Canelo Horror, Black Hare Press, and Red Cape Publishing, among other places. She is a multiple Indie Ink Awards nominee.
You can find free audio versions of her work, as well as bonus episodes and interviews with fellow authors and creatives, on the podcast Eldritch Girl.
INTERVIEW
What got you into horror to begin with – what’s your core Horror memory?
The spiders in Mirkwood. I know it’s Fantasy not Horror, but it was Horror to me. My mum read THE HOBBIT to me when I was 4 years old, in 10-20min increments, which meant that they were stuck in Mirkwood for what felt like weeks of my life. (She didn’t lie to me about how it ended, either, which was how I learned about death, and how much it hurts to get deeply emotionally invested in a character that doesn’t make it).
I think that was when I started to be afraid of spiders in general… But ever after that, I loved dark and spooky atmospheres, woods and caves, dangerous landscapes, and high stakes.
I was always most drawn to the Usborne books that had ghosts and skeletons in them from when I was very small and just learning to read, and from there it was the Addams Family, Goosebumps, and Point Horror… but I think the core memory will always be JRR Tolkein’s deep dark woods where you can’t find your way out, with its amnesiac river and gigantic spiders.
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?
The Gothic, and its messed-up child, Weird Fiction.
Bonus points for monsters, ghosts, genre-mashups – especially with Fantasy and Sci-Fi – and the third act twist into no-holds-barred screaming batshittery.
I am obsessed with class (I’m British) and power dynamics in general, so my favourite stories usually have some element of that in there.
Wuthering Heights was too brutal and abusive for me at the time when I read it as a young teen, but I did enjoy Jane Eyre and then Wide Sargasso Sea, which made me hate Rochester forever, after I played Bertha Mason aged 14 in a musical version of Jane Eyre and learned how to fall safely after throwing myself down a flight of stairs for 6 evenings and 2 matinees (we couldn’t afford for me to jump off a roof).
If that doesn’t cure you of an ill-advised book-crush on an absolute arsehole, nothing will.
That got me into the genre, and then I started reading more and spreading out from Gothic to Weird, which wasn’t much of a leap in terms of tone and themes.
I really enjoy works by Hailey Piper, Nuzo Onoh, Victor LaValle, Paula D. Ashe, Suzan Palumbo, Caitlin Starling, Vivian Valentine, Mariana Enriquez, Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, Algernon Blackwood, and Ray Bradbury.
I enjoy getting angry with Arthur Machen.
Podcasts: The HorrorBabble is my favourite for accessing classic stories, and Shadows at the Door is a new favourite for a mix of new and classic tales adapted into audiodrama format. The Magnus Archives rewired my brain chemistry. The Silt Verses is a fantastic drama in the Horror-Fantasy vein.
Films: I love Czech New Wave stuff, and Juraj Herz is probably one of my favourite directors. I also really love Irish Horror at the moment, and my favourite Irish Gothic film is The Lodgers (2017) dir. Brian O’Malley, written by David Turpin.
I also really enjoy Welsh Horror & Turkish Horror; I think Wil Aaron was an absolute pioneer, Lee Haven Jones‘s work is great, and, while I know it’s super basic but I am a basic bitch at heart… I really enjoy the D@bbe franchise, directed and written by Hasan Karacadağ.
My favourite adaptation of Shelley’s Frankenstein (which I actually have never been that into) is Yaratılan/Creature, an 8-part mini-series adapted and directed by Çağan Irmak. Guillermo Del Toro‘s version comes a close second, but Del Toro is also one of my favourite directors, and I’ll watch anything he makes.
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?
I think the Pagham-on-Sea series is the horror project of my heart. It’s a concept that gives me scope to set literally anything I want in that universe, and once I’m done with the Family books (for the time being), I can write different spin-off series within the town setting, and explore the werewolf community, or the undead community, or expand on the hardshell merfolk concept, or the Punch & Judy man, or someone trying to live in a miserable rented flat with damp and draughts and Something in the flat above them.
I never dreamed that those books would do so well; the first 2 novels in that loose series went from self-pubbed novels to being cold-pitched by a commissioning editor of a large indie UK press, Canelo Books, which has since been bought by Dorling Kindersley (DK Publishing), owned by Penguin Random House.
As an unagented author still self-publishing my stories, that’s still incredible to me, no matter how they do or what happens next.
I’ve always wanted to try scriptwriting, though, and my next thing I want to try is writing an audiodrama. I’m starting off with adapting my novelette, The Reluctant Husband, which I’ll play about with for practice, and then maybe I’ll try an original audiodrama script.
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!)
1. We Are Here To Hurt Each Other – Paula D. Ashe. I love the prose in this collection so much. I find new favourites each time I dip into it.
2. Skin Thief – Suzan Palumbo. This one is packed with Canadian and Trinidadian folklore, and each time I read this anthology I find something else that hits me.
3. Our Share of Night – Mariana Enriquez. I really enjoyed the scope of this book, and I still think about the concepts and characters.
4. The Inhabitant of the Lake and Other Unwelcome Tenants – Ramsey Campbell. This collection was my introduction to Campbell’s work, which I came pretty late to. I really enjoyed it, and it helped a few things click into place for me regarding Pagham-on-Sea as a setting.
5. Dracula – Bram Stoker. This book kicked off my vampire obsession as a teenager, but also came at a time when I was deeply obsessed with Alan Rickman as the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, so the two images collided in my head and sparked off a 4-book epic fantasy series I was writing various iterations of from the ages of 15-28; the first book had over 1M views on Wattpad back in the day. (They aren’t up there anymore!)
[Fun fact: my current pen name comes from my 2 old Wattpad usernames, CelticRose and CelticMedusa, where I also had the first draft of THE CROWS for a long time, before it became a totally different novel.]
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?
Since all my work ends up dark no matter what genre I’m writing in, and there’s usually some sort of body horror, family dysfunction and cycles of generational abuse, often framed as families who consume one another metaphorically or literally (or both), and contending with mortality, I’d go with the painting “Saturn Devouring His Son” by Francisco Goya. That painting lives rent-free in my mind, I think because it resonates with me so hard.
But I also write deeply British stuff grounded in very real (fictionalised) places, filled with working class, upper working class, and various levels of middle class characters, with a degree of dark humour.
So I’m also going to throw in the comedy-drama BRASSIC, The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy for the family drama and class aspirations/themes, low-budget seaside slasher PUNCH dir. Andy Edwards for the rundown seaside town vibes, and Ramsey Campbell’s Brichester setting for his weird fiction.
Throw all those together with the Goya painting and my work is what comes out.
Introduce us to something you’ve created, and pitch it to the audience!
I’ve spoken a lot about the Pagham-on-Sea series, which I’d describe as low fantasy horror, or modern Gothic with tentacles. I actually created a website for the town – VisitPaghamOnSea.co.uk.
This is a bit of fun where I post some town council updates as the mood takes me, but also it’s a place where fans of the books can comment on the pages pretending to leave reviews of the town’s amenities and food/drink establishments.
It links to the books and podcast where I read my fiction unabridged, chapter by chapter, as a freely accessible audio version of the novels. As you can see by reading the comments on the pages, Visit Pagham-on-Sea has become a fun, collaborative flash fiction sandbox, and anyone can leave a comment and play along.
If you like that, or anything I do on this site (cmrosens.com) you can also support me on Ko-Fi (https://ko-fi.com/cmrosens) by giving me a one-off tip, or becoming a monthly member and unlocking loads of benefits, from a monthly piece of short fiction to free downloads of all my eBooks in my Ko-Fi shop.