Spooky season is upon us! And here we have the prolific horror writer, Cassandra Khaw, to chat with us about their upcoming novella, Nothing but Blackened Teeth, their trajectory as a writer, and the story behind the Japanese tradition of the ohaguro-bettari. Are you brave enough to enter this haunted house?
Hello, Cassandra! Congratulations on your new work, Nothing but Blackened Teeth. Could you tell our readers a little bit about yourself first?
Hello! And thank you. Let’s see. God, I’m really bad at talking about myself. I am primarily a writer. I had my start in journalism before branching out to fiction. Somewhere in between, I acquired a career in video game writing. I have two cats, who are probably going to be big enough to eat me one day. I love plants; I absolutely have a green thumb and I’m not ashamed to brag about it. I lift heavy weights and put them down. I like food. I am terrified of goldfish.
What does horror mean to you?
Horror is bump-in-the-night noises, is the creak of a door when no one else is at home; it’s ghost stories told over a campfire, and the sense that someone is watching when you’re walking home alone. It is knowing what it means when you smell frangipani in the dark and therancousness of the getai at home. It is wronged women who will not stay dead, who will not die until they eat everything that ever hurt them. It is eyes constellating a man’s arm, or worms taking over a brain. It is jump scares and parables and the things we can’t stand to talk about without an armor of myth.
Apart from your literary work, you also have extensive experience in the industry of videogames. How do you feel videogames have shaped you as a writer and vice versa?
I’m a recovering pantser (someone who just writes without really outlining anything before that), and part of the reason my tendency to just write chaotically is going into remission is because of video games. Working in the field, it’s hard not to see the importance of creating moments and beats and developing acts in which people can move coherently.
Writing books has definitely made me a huge advocate for editors in game writing. By and large, most studios don’t have in-house editors, and trust the narrative team to edit each other. And to an extent, that can work, but everyone benefits from having a trained editor who is there exclusively to, you know, edit work.
Nothing but Blackened Teeth references the tropes and recurrent elements of horror cinema quite a few times, using them almost as foreshadowing devices. What compelled you towards that medium? And why did you decide on that strategy?
I think it’s just the circles I run in, honestly. Like, last weekend, I was walking through a cemetery with a bunch of friends, and we were all trying to figure out the hierarchy of deaths. Which of us would go first and why. We argued about who would be the final girl. And… that’s just how I’ve been trained to think, I guess!
Nothing but Blackened Teeth is a haunted house story, but also a story about interpersonal relationships gone awry. What came first to you while developing the story? And which of those two storylines were more confronting for you to write?
A little of both. I knew I wanted to write about haunted houses because I was feeling haunted. The book started to take form right after my father’s death, or around — god knows, that was a weird time. And then came the thoughts about the interpersonal relationships, the way we cling onto friendships long after the time we should have put them to rest.
And definitely the throughline with the relationships was a harder one to wrestle with.
We would love to hear more about what the ohaguro-bettari means to you. Japanese folklore and horror tradition is immensely rich and many tales could serve as inspiration for horror literature, but why did you decide on basing your story on that figure specifically?
I wanted something that’d seem menacing but was, really, just kinda playful. Something that, under other circumstances, might have been able to play its little prank and then go on its way. Something that absolutely would not be able to predict what our little wedding party would do.
If you were to participate in a Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai—for our readers: an ancient game where samurais lit a hundred candles for a hundred ghost stories—what would your strategy be to win?
I absolutely would not be participating in one. I write horror. I know what happens when you tease spirits like that!
Almost every horror story has a moral, what would you like your readers to take away Nothing but Blackened Teeth?
Relationships can and should end. Friendships too. We don’t have to hold onto them when they’re not good for us anymore. It’s absolutely okay to say that we’ve outgrown a childhood friend, that we’re different people now. There’s no reason to cling to things when they’ve rotted to poison. It’s okay to let go. Honest.
To finish things up, could you recommend a couple of spooky titles for our readers to pick up this Halloween?
World War Z, Flyaway (which isn’t actually horror, but has a wonderful eerieness to it), The Safety of Unknown Cities.
Finally, what’s next for you?
A short story collection which is rolling out next year, my collaboration with Richard Kadrey, and something else that isn’t even announced yet!
