Interview - Amanda M. Blake

An accomplished author capable of working in a variety of styles and formats, Amanda M. Blake has brought a stellar series of titles to her name whether she's involved in fairy-tale/fantasy mash-ups, Gothic Horror, or extreme splatterpunk. Now, on the occasion of her latest novel, "In the Dollhouse We All Wait" being released by Crystal Lake Publishing imprint Torrid Waters, I talk with her about her early interest in writing, some of her past works, and the book itself.

Me: Hello and thank you for taking the time to do this. First off, when did you get into horror in general? What films specifically got you into watching horror movies?

Amanda M. Blake: Like a lot of kids of my generation, I was raised on the Goosebumps books as a kid, which got me into the Fear Street series and Christopher Pike’s work as a teenager. I glommed onto horror really hard from the age of six and never really let go.

I would say that Independence Day at eight years old (the alien surgery scene is textbook horror, especially for a kid) and The Mummy at ten years old (the scarab scenes in particular) introduced me to film horror. The Others and The Sixth Sense blew my mind in my teens, and seeing Silent Hill and The Descent in theaters absolutely hooked me into R-rated horror.

Me: Who were some of your favorite writers growing up? Do you try to take influences from their style with your own voice in your work?

AMB: Another big influence was an illustrated, abridged version of Dracula when I was seven. I was finally allowed to descend into the adult section of our library when I turned twelve and read the full novel, which has had me in a chokehold ever since, along with Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Eventually, I shifted into adult horror with Thomas Harris’ Silence of the Lambs and Stephen King’s Carrie, sneaked from the school library, and read in secret in high school.

Me: What was the starting point of becoming a writer? Were you always into writing growing up?

AMB: My second-grade teacher entered a piece I wrote during a writing exercise into an awards program. I don’t think she realized how such encouragement would make a monster of me, but she probably regretted it during the next writing exercise, when other people wrote a page, and I wrote, like, eight or nine. But not only did someone tell me I was good at something I hadn’t thought about being good at, but I also caught the bug for it. I was an avid reader at an early age. The thought of being able to produce stories like the kind I read really appealed to me.

I was writing about worms turning into people through witch hypnosis at seven, vampires from about ten through sixteen, and I finally sat down and wrote the first version of my nightmare novel, Nocturne, at seventeen, between graduating from high school and my first year of college, resolved to start writing seriously with an aim for publication.

Me: Is there any specific genre you prefer to write? Is there a style or format that you find easier to get into, even if you don't have a preference?

AMB: I’m drawn into the supernatural, or at the very least, suspenseful—hyperreality instead of reality. I figure I live in reality, and at least half the reason I write is to get out of it. Horror dominates my landscape and insinuates itself in almost everything I do, but you’ll also find urban/modern fantasy, fairy tale reimaginings, gothic, and even a handful of historical.

In long form, I tend to write third-person limited, occasionally omniscient. Short form gives me a lot more room to experiment with different styles. I love found media/epistolary fiction and how it pushes on the boundaries of formatting and form.

Me: Having contributed to various anthologies early in your career, what tools and skills do you acquire working on those that transferred to future projects?

AMB: Because short form allows me to push boundaries and try new things, I can sometimes end up scaling what I learned into long form, like all my short epistolary pieces leading to my writing a found-media novel. But more than anything, I think writing a lot of anything gets normal stuff out of the way, and you start looking for the weird: different ways of describing things, different ways to shock people who have gone through all the shocks. While figuring out new ways to entertain yourself, you learn how to entertain others.

Me: What is the general process for getting involved in these projects?

AMB: I’ve never been invited into an anthology before, so I mostly find them based on the submission calls they put out. If the subject matter interests me, I’ll cook up a few ideas before landing on the one that intrigues me the most. Sometimes the decision on which to go with is not so much about originality as interesting execution.

Me: How did you settle on the plots for your writing? With your work involving both standalone and the ‘Thorns’ series of novels, what type of prep-work goes into making sure everything contains enough throughlines to the past entries in the series?

AMB: With a series, you have to look so far ahead, but I also don’t plan everything to the second. I have scenes in my head that have been with me since near the beginning. Those scenes become beats. Each book is about getting from one beat to the next. I have a loose idea of what’s going to happen in the Thorns series through about book 9 (plus a few alternative universe pieces and a prequel), but I hope to do one or two more after. The most important thing about the books is the character arcs, so each book has to have the scars and scars of the previous ones. They’re pretty gnarly wounds, so they’re easy to keep track of.

When I can hold a plot in one book, it’s a relief. It’s been a joke for a while that I make everything longer than I anticipate it will be. The Thorns series was just supposed to be a long short story. Horror has been good for me in that regard. It often prefers shorter, tighter narratives—which isn’t to say I haven’t written a few beasts in that genre.

Me: What is your writing process? How do you stay focused on writing?

AMB: I’ve had different processes at different times in my life. Ultimately, I work with the time I have. I’ve written full-time for several non-cumulative years. Right now, I’m back to part-time and struggling a bit, but the trick is to grab whatever time you can. I just don’t feel right unless I do a little something almost every day. My attention span isn’t what it used to be. Sometimes I do what I call ‘in-and-outs,’ which is less dirty than it sounds. I spend about fifteen or twenty minutes on writing, then watch ten or fifteen minutes of a TV show to let my brain breathe, then go back to writing, then break, and so on until I reach my word count goal for the day. Sometimes I outline. Sometimes I wing it. Sometimes I start by winging it and then, halfway through, write a basic outline so I don’t have to hold everything in my head all the time. ‘Form follows function’ is a common mantra for me.

Me: Your most recent release, “In the Dollhouse We All Wait,” offers a taste of extreme horror with the tale of a live-in nanny meeting her match. What went into the decision to go this dark with this format?

AMB: I don’t set out to write extreme horror. I’m actually a very sensitive person, so extreme horror and splatterpunk can be exhausting, an abrasive scour on my brain. It’s just that some horror stories benefit from fading to black, and some stories benefit from approaching them unflinchingly. In the case of Dollhouse, the story didn’t want me to look away. It wanted to put one of those eye apparatuses on to show every grotesque, stomach-dropping detail. I think human horror, in particular, as opposed to supernatural horror, requires a willingness to show the worst, because sometimes the hardest thing to look at is a mirror. We shouldn’t forget what we’re capable of, even without an indulgent father and unlimited fortune.

Me: Was there anything about the characters that you were surprised by in telling their stories?

AMB: The medical torture was expected; the degree of sexual sadism was a surprise. It wasn’t planned, but once we met Annie’s dolls, it seemed an inescapable direction for the story to go. It’s rough to read, as much as it was to write, but it felt necessary, inevitable. And I wrote it all before we got much more than a hint of the Epstein files and the breadth of wealth depravity expressed within it. I certainly didn’t set out to write fiction that would be published so parallel with an equally terrible reality.

I was also surprised by the chemistry between my long-suffering protagonist, Sam, and Annie. Not chemistry as in romance, but as in the intensity of the reaction when you put them together. Annie is charged out of a certain kind of atrophy and boredom by Sam’s presence, and Sam is jolted out of her deadening, dead-end life with Annie, forced to be awake and aware just to survive—although there’s probably a healthier way to do that than torture.

Me: Once it was finally written, what was the process for having it published?

AMB: There aren’t a lot of publishing companies that take extreme horror or splatterpunk. Much of it is self-published by necessity. But I also don’t like to send it to the editors I use for self- publishing. It’s too much for them. I’m not that cruel.

I’m really fortunate that Crystal Lake has its Torrid Waters imprint, which also published my first splatterpunk novel, Question Not My Salt. So when they opened for submissions again, I happily sent Dollhouse along, knowing Ken Cain could handle it.

Me: What do you do to keep your creative energy flowing?

AMB: The more you use it, the more it wants to be used. Trying new things opens new pathways, so I try to do little adventures when I can, even though I’m a hobbit at heart and like my routines and safe spaces and creature comforts.

Me: Lastly, what else are you working on that you'd like to share with our readers?

AMB: As of this interview, I’m on the precipice of putting out A Nightmare for All Seasons, a seasonal horror poetry collection, and later in the spring, I hope to put out May Cooler Heads Prevail, a timely short novella written as the interview of a woman who can make people’s heads catch on fire. This summer, I’ll be doing the edits on Masque, a dark alt-historical novel that will be published through Quill & Crow Publishing House in 2027.

I’ve finished a Dracula reimagining that I’m trying to figure out what to do with, I have a bucket-list epic novel I want to write later this year, a duology or trilogy I want to finish… No rest for the wicked.