These Shattered Spires author Cassidy Ellis Salter on queerness and horror
Cassidy Ellis Salter explores the deep connection between queerness and horror, and how this is shown in These Shattered Spires.
In These Shattered Spires, Cassidy Ellis Salter crafts a gothic fantasy of bones, blood, and buried longing, where queerness and horror collide inside a decaying magical world. Ruled by the Unholy Mothers, the novel follows characters struggling for autonomy, love, and survival in a society that punishes difference — a setting that echoes the author’s own experience of discovering their identity and the emotional truths that fantasy and horror can hold. To celebrate the release of These Shattered Spires, we invited Cassidy to reflect on why queer stories feel so at home in speculative fiction.
Guest post written by Cassidy Ellis Salter, author of These Shattered Spires.
A few years ago I woke up in the middle of the night and – I’m not exaggerating – sat bolt upright in bed and thought, Oh my god, I’m queer. (Midnight can be weirdly clarifying like that.) This is also when, long before I actually came out, I started to write fantasy with lots of horror in it.
Queerness and horror go together like cereal and milk, and I think it’s partly because horror allows us to give our queer pains – of wanting things we’re told we cannot have, things that are apparently monstrous – a physical form. (I’m also convinced it’s why so many brilliant fantasy body horror books are written by trans and nonbinary authors, like Hell Followed With Us, where the trans protagonist literally becomes a monster, or Hazelthorn and Don’t Let the Forest In, where plants burst through flesh with the same fervency as the protagonists’ suppressed desires.) Rather than being uniformly dark, stories like these are hopeful and helpful. Because when your queer-coded anxiety is made flesh, you can actually look it in the eye, and it’s impossible for other people, try as they might, to ignore it. As someone who spent years after that midnight revelation trying not to be gay or nonbinary, I love that.
You know how the protagonist in a horror story is often the only person who can sense something terrible is going to happen? How their unease is initially brushed off by everyone? This has always felt weirdly familiar to me. The world assured me that I couldn’t possibly be queer. You would have known since you were five, it said. Also, you’ve put a lot of hard work into looking feminine. So like a good horror protagonist, I shoved my unease down and went along with it, both ignoring the suspicion that something was wrong and being told by the world to ignore it. Still, clearly part of me knew that horror was the necessary mirror for my panic, and fantasy became the most freeing place to explore it.
Just like horror can give queerness a gnarly physical form, fantasy offers ways for living that speak to so many queer people, like transformation by potion and the magic of found family. It’s why These Shattered Spires, which is set in a horrific world of bones and blood and floating teeth, also contains the parts of fantasy that bring joy. The world itself is queer-normative, but it’s threaded with my old anxiety that expressing difference can cause destruction. Under the Desecrae, nonconformers are violently killed; showing desire for someone you can’t have equals punishment; and as a familiar, you play your role perfectly or else have your head snapped off by an undead nun, because autonomy threatens the hierarchy of the melting gothic castle. But it’s also full of hope: people working out how to love each other despite the limitations put on them, believing in the chance of freedom, and putting their suppressed anger into changing the world.
Horror and queerness have long been entwined, and fantasy makes space for them to explode into something huge and beautiful and hopeful. To that end, bring on the horror of the Unholy Mothers. If writing has taught me anything, it’s that we’re more than capable of facing them.
