New York Times bestselling author Jeneva Rose is a massive horror fan. If you’ve been following for work for a while, you likely knew that, but for the uninitiated, Rose is eager to scare us silly with her latest collection of works, Sometimes I Scare Myself.

In anticipation of the novel, releasing on September 22, we chatted with Rose about what scares her most, how her own relationship with horror has changed, and literature’s unique capacity to frighten us to death.

Dread Central: What horror movies most inspired Sometimes I Scare Myself?

Jeneva Rose: Never Kill the Medium has that Evil Dead II kind of energy—friends trapped together, a séance gone horribly wrong, dark humor, and a whole lot of blood. The Nightmare House is much more atmospheric and psychological. There’s some Rosemary’s Baby in the way motherhood and anxiety make you question your own perception, mixed with the escalating dread of a classic haunted-house movie like Poltergeist.

Oddity directly inspired All Curses Are Final. There’s a small detail in the background of the oddities shop—a sign that says something along the lines of, “All items cursed. Curse lifted at point of sale.” It has nothing to do with the movie’s plot, but the second I saw it, I thought, What if that was the plot? And that became the seed for the entire story.

Dread Central: Never Kill the Medium is about a thirtieth birthday party gone awry. How has your own relationship with horror changed over the years?

Jeneva Rose: As I’ve gotten older, what scares me has changed. Real life gives you a whole new catalogue of fears. You fall in love, you become a mother, you lose people, and suddenly there’s so much more at stake. You also realize how little control we actually have over any of it. Those fears stay with me far longer than a monster under the bed ever could. I still love a great jump scare, but now I’m much more interested in horror that finds the terrifying thing hiding inside something completely ordinary.

I think Sometimes I Scare Myself reflects both sides of my relationship with horror. There’s still plenty of what I loved as a kid—the gore, the chaos, the moments designed to make you squirm—but there are fears in these stories I couldn’t have written about twenty years ago because I hadn’t lived them yet. I used to love horror because it gave me something to be afraid of. Now I love it because it gives me somewhere to put the fears I already have.

Dread Central: As a horror movie superfan, how do you endeavor to translate those classic scares into text? In other words, what makes a horror book scary?

Jeneva Rose: Movies do have a huge advantage. They control when you look, what you hear, and exactly when the thing jumps out at you. A book can’t blast a violin sting and throw a demon into the frame. But books have an advantage movies don’t. You get to put the monster directly inside the reader’s head.

To me, scary writing is less about describing the frightening thing and more about making the reader dread its arrival. The footsteps upstairs when you know you’re home alone are scarier than whatever eventually comes down the stairs. It’s about giving the reader just enough information for their imagination to take over. I can give you the shadow in the doorway, but your brain decides what’s standing in it. And chances are, what you put there is far scarier than anything I could describe in perfect detail.

You can grab your copy of Sometimes I Scare Myself here.

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