Two-time Bram Stoker Award-nominated author Annie Neugebauer joined us to talk about her work in horror fiction, why the wilderness makes such a perfect setting for dread, the books that have permanently taken up residence in her brain, and a couple of mystery announcements she’s not allowed to tell us about yet.
We covered a lot of ground here (pun intended, considering how much hiking comes up in this conversation), from the value of popcorn horror to the nightmare of losing cell service on a trail at dusk. If you care about horror fiction and the people writing it right now, this is one to dig into.
Why Horror, and Why It Matters
We started by asking Annie the question every horror creator gets asked at some point: why horror? Her answer was honest and familiar to anyone who grew up gravitating toward the dark stuff. She’s been drawn to it for as long as she can remember.
Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, and Anne Rice. The classics hit her early, and they hit hard. What stuck with her was the realization that serious, important work could happen inside the horror genre.
I was like immediately like, okay, sold. Can I have both? I want both.
She told us.
That idea of horror being capable of depth and weight is something we talk about a lot on this podcast, and Annie gets it. She brought up reading Interview with the Vampire in high school and recognizing that the stigma around horror being lesser or unserious was, in her words, “demonstrably false.” You can’t read that book and not understand that it’s doing something powerful.
Arthur connected it to The Dark Tower series, which had that same effect on him. One summer of blazing through those books, and it became clear there was something more going on than just scares.
Meaghan had a similar experience with The Vampire Chronicles. There’s a pattern here. You start with the genre stuff that’s aimed at younger readers (Goosebumps, Fear Street, Christopher Pike), and then at some point you cross into the literary side and realize the whole spectrum has value.
That’s actually where the conversation got really interesting, because Annie doesn’t see literary horror and commercial horror as being in competition with each other. She loves both. She compared it to popcorn:
Sometimes what we need is popcorn, you know? And popcorn is great. There is nothing wrong with popcorn. And it is hard to make really, really good popcorn.
She’s right. Whether it’s a packed theater losing their minds over the latest Conjuring film or someone sitting alone with an Ari Aster movie replaying in their head for weeks, both of those experiences have purpose. They serve different needs at different moments in your life.
The Power of Short Fiction
Annie’s published work includes her short story collection You Have to Let Them Bleed as well as the novella The Extra, which is the first entry in The Outsiders Sequence from Shortwave Publishing. We talked about why short fiction has been such a big part of her career, and the answer had both a practical and a creative side to it.
On the practical end, she was candid. It’s easier to get a short story picked up when nobody knows who you are. A publisher can take a chance on one story in an anthology alongside established names without the same risk that comes with backing a debut novel. So short fiction became a way for her to build a body of work and find her readers while she continued working on longer projects.
But the creative side is where her enthusiasm really came through. Short stories let you take risks. The buy-in from the reader is faster and less resistant.
You know it’s only however many pages, you know? And so you just, you’re in.
There’s a freedom to try something wild and see if it lands, and that freedom is hard to replicate in a full-length novel. She also made the point that different ideas arrive with different scopes built in. Some concepts are poems. Some are novels. Some are tweets. Being able to work across all of those lengths has been a learning experience she clearly values.
I’m always gonna be writing short fiction now. There’s too much good stuff there to not use it sometimes.
Dread, the Mundane, and the Horror That Sticks
We spent a good chunk of time talking about what makes Annie’s horror tick, particularly the way she takes mundane, everyday situations and turns them into something deeply unsettling. The Extra is a perfect example.
The concept is simple on the surface: ten people go hiking, but suddenly there are eleven, and no one can figure out who the extra person is. That’s the kind of premise that sounds almost too simple until you sit with it, and then it starts crawling under your skin.
Annie explained that grounding her stories in reality is a deliberate choice. If the reader feels like they’re in real life, the horror can get past their defenses in a way that fantasy or outright supernatural setups sometimes can’t.
Defenses are kind of what we’re up against with horror.
She said. And she’s right. If someone doesn’t want to be scared, they usually won’t be. The trick is making the world feel familiar enough that the reader lowers their guard before they realize what’s happening.
She also talked about the kind of horror that stays with you long after you’ve finished reading. The stuff that takes up residence and keeps coming back. When we asked for specific examples, she rattled off a mix of expected and unexpected picks. The Shining. Salem’s Lot. Josh Malerman’s Incidents Around the House (“oh my god,” she said, and we felt that).
Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts, which she called a masterpiece. And then a curveball: Tana French. Not a horror writer in the traditional sense, but Annie made the case that Broken Harbor leans hard into horror territory.
Meaghan described French’s work as feeling like “it’s cloudy outside” for the entire length of whatever you’re reading, and Annie agreed. That atmospheric weight, that sense of something hanging over everything, is exactly the kind of horror Annie gravitates toward as both a reader and a writer.
The Force Field Problem (and Why Cell Phones Ruined Everything)
One of the most fun threads in our conversation was about what Annie calls “the force field.” Every horror story needs some mechanism to keep the characters trapped in the situation. You can’t just have them walk away or call for help, because then the story’s over.
She got the term from Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers, which features a literal force field preventing characters from leaving a town. And then Cabin in the Woods took that same concept and turned it into a joke (a literal force field again), which Annie thought was hilarious.
The wilderness setting of The Outsiders Sequence serves as a natural force field. When you’re deep in the backcountry, far from roads and cell towers, the story can relax into itself without having to constantly explain why the characters don’t just leave or call 911.
We shared our own experience of hiking near Lake Placid in early November, setting out way too late, and watching the sun start to drop while we were still hours from the trailhead. No one around. Phone at 25%. Hearing things in the trees.
You’re the idiots who were like, let’s start the hike at noon…
Meaghan said, and yeah, that was us.
Annie related. She’s been an outdoors person for years and still finds herself in situations where dusk is falling, and she’s not entirely sure she’s on the right trail. “It’s so shockingly easy to do,” she said. And that’s the thing about wilderness horror. It doesn’t require a supernatural element to be terrifying. The real world provides plenty on its own.
We also discussed something R.L. Stine pointed out recently: that cell phones are the worst thing to happen to horror. Before cell phones, you could isolate your characters with a bad storm that knocked out the landlines. Now?
Even that doesn’t work. Phones connect through satellites for emergency calls. You basically have to set your story in an area with zero service, set it in a pre-cell phone era, or find some other reason the technology fails. Annie agreed and acknowledged it’s one of the trickiest challenges facing modern horror writers.
Surviving (or Not) Horror’s Greatest Scenarios
We played a quick game with Annie where we threw five iconic horror movie or book scenarios at her and asked whether she’d survive, die, or end up as the villain. She was a great sport about it.
The Overlook Hotel? She’d survive. Fair enough. If you’re not dealing with the same demons Jack Torrance was carrying, you can probably lock yourself in a room and wait it out (just not Room 237).
Hill House? She didn’t think she’d die, exactly, but she didn’t think she’d come out whole either.
I think that one would break my psyche. I would become one with the house.
Cabin in the Woods? She’d probably die eventually, but not early.
I don’t think I’m easy fodder though.
And then we hit her with Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Her response was immediate:
I don’t think anybody can survive that.
No arguments there.
That led to a fun tangent about reading horror in school. Annie had a curriculum that included Poe, Shirley Jackson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and more, all the way from seventh grade through senior year.
Meaghan’s closest brush was Lord of the Flies. Arthur took a Stephen King course in college, which was entirely by choice.
We all agreed that school systems varied wildly in how much horror they were willing to let students read, and Annie seemed to have lucked out.
She also confessed to being deeply traumatized by Anaconda as a kid (despite not being afraid of snakes) and sleeping with the lights on for months because of E.T. at age three or four. The puppet, the white sickness scene, the hazmat suits.
I had a room full of stuffed animals at that age.
She said. “So the idea of there being something like embedded in my line of stuffed animals also really got to me.” Honestly? That tracks.
What’s Next for Annie (and Why She Can’t Tell Us Yet)
We wrapped things up by asking Annie what she has coming down the line. The big one we know about is The Other, the second novella in The Outsiders Sequence, which publishes on June 9.
It’s set in the same world as The Extra with the same tone and atmosphere, but with new characters and a new setting. Each novella can stand alone, which is why they’re calling it a sequence rather than a series. The third entry, The Spare, arrives the following spring.
But beyond that? Annie got, in her own words, “a little cagey.” She has two major announcements coming that she couldn’t share at the time of our recording. Two different spheres, both of which she described as “dream come true level of cool.”
She wouldn’t give us any details, which was honestly a little painful. If you want to be first in line when those announcements drop, she suggested following her on Instagram, Facebook, or subscribing to her newsletter at annieneugebauer.com. Whatever she’s got cooking, it sounds like a big deal.
In the meantime, check out The Extra and You Have to Let Them Bleed if you haven’t already. And keep your eyes on the Grave Tone: Horror Podcast for everything we have coming up this month, because May is going to be packed. Stay scared and stay tuned.