By BILL REICK
Anybody who has already connected with Wendy N. Wagner’s writing can attest to her powers to deeply unsettle. Her 2021 novel, The Deer Kings, is an occult story rooted in the traditions of folk horror. Specifically, Wagner described it as a “kids-on-bikes” tale.
Now, with 2025’s GIRL IN THE CREEK, Wagner digs deeper into the soil and the moss, weaving a frightening story of trauma, nature and the unexplainable. Without spoiling too many details about this chilling and compelling novel, Wagner answered all my questions about her influences, her past and her horror philosophy. Rather than being left feeling like a magician revealed her secrets to me, I instead was all the more intrigued to delve into whatever mysteries she conjures next. GIRL IN THE CREEK is an outstanding book, proving that Wagner is a horror writer at the top of her game, with a refined, assured voice deftly executing exactly what she aims to do.
GIRL IN THE CREEK is super evocative and chilling in its imagery. Was there a particular image or idea that inspired the story?
The story started on a drive up the Clackamas River on a rare sunny spring day. We stopped at a picnic area where a couple of people were fishing from the bank. All the trees were these intense shades of green, and the sunshine made the river gleam with an incredible aquamarine shade as it moved between a pair of boulders the size of moving vans. Just as we were about to leave, a small brown bird landed across from us on a rock and dipped its beak into the water two times before flying away. When we got home, I wrote a little scene about a woman standing there in all that green and watching that dipper, and the moment stuck in my mind for nearly a year before I figured out the book that went around it.
Did any true crime cases, local legends or personal experiences influence the narrative?
A big inspiration was the Bennington Triangle, an area in Vermont that became known for missing people in the 1940s and ’50s. I wanted to tap into that weird, creepy “cursed location” atmosphere, while drawing on real Pacific Northwest history. I grew up in the 1980s, at a time when serial killers and serial sexual assaulters were very active in Washington and Oregon. For example, when I was a preschooler, my family lived near Spokane, Washington, where a serial rapist had attacked over 40 women over the course of several years. My oldest sister actually lived in the city at one point, and my parents were really anxious for her safety. Later, the Santiam Killer was active about 50 miles north of where we lived in Oregon, and of course, the Green River Killer was national news. Our quiet green corner of the world seemed like a paradise for that kind of evil.
How did you approach building dread in GIRL IN THE CREEK?
I think the first draft of this story was pretty much dread-free! I’m very good at writing atmosphere when it comes to writing about nature or about capturing sad moments, but I tend to get very caught up in the moment during exciting scenes. In some ways, it’s more like I’m taking notes while watching a movie than writing a novel, so the first draft was filled with scenes that read like a screenplay: “The thing ran toward her. She juked left. Her toe caught on a branch, and she fell.” I had to really sit with those scenes and rework them, searching for the details that would make the moment come to life for the reader.
Do you see horror as a way to explore trauma or healing, or is it more about the catharsis of fear for you?
Both. Horror is a safe place to practice being scared. It’s also a fantastic place to practice being angry or strong or cruel; it’s a great place to sit with depression or anxiety. Horror is a genre where it’s okay to admit that the human experience has dark sides. We need that, I think. Society has a way of squishing those feelings down into small, safe boxes, and we’re discouraged from feeling those things. And when those feelings get too big for the box, they have a way of being explosive. Reading and watching horror can give us tools to better understand our dark sides and to process the hard things in life. Horror also provides a place where those of us who have been injured by the world can feel seen and connect with others who have been through similar experiences.
That said, there is nothing so relaxing as the aftermath of a good jump scare.
Author Wendy N. Wagner
Was there a scene or moment in the book that truly unnerved you while writing it?
There’s a scene early on in the book where the group of friends discovers a poacher’s hunting shack. Writing the scene wasn’t unnerving, but reading the article that inspired it certainly did. The poachers were inspired by a real poaching ring that was active in Washington’s Gifford Pinchot National Forest, and thinking about the way these people savaged and mutilated other creatures was pretty awful.
How did writing GIRL IN THE CREEK challenge you creatively or emotionally?
The novel has two main POV characters. One is human; one is the Strangeness, a fungal hive mind. You meet the Strangeness in the very first chapter, where a coyote who’s part of the Strangeness discovers a body in an old mine. I wanted to capture the coyote’s natural animal mind but also show how it was integrated into the Strangeness and under its control, and that was a challenge. To practice writing that scene, I actually wrote an entire short story from the perspective of a dog. (That story, “An Infestation of Blue,” got picked up by Analog Magazine and was nominated for a Sturgeon Award. So I’m glad I wrote it!)
One of my favorite details is how perfectly you captured the feeling of smoking pot and wandering into the woods at night. What’s your secret to articulating these harder-to-nail-down feelings?
I think the trick is to focus on sensory details and personality. I’m always asking myself, “If I were this character, what would I be drawn to? What would interest me?” It’s hard to push aside my own interests and opinions and put on someone else’s, but that’s the key. Like, I’m the most nervous of nellies, and the times that I’ve been out in the woods alone at night, I was extremely honed in on threats. But that scene wasn’t about me; it was about Erin, and she was suddenly absorbed into this wonderful group of new friends in a beautiful place, and all of her defenses were down. I really focused on the lovely stuff in that moment.
Also, here in Portland, the selection of marijuana edibles, even vegan ones, is pretty phenomenal.
I feel like there’s a lot of push/pull in the story. You’ve done a wonderful job at conveying beauty and repulsion in nature, and I was just wondering whether that was a focus from the start, or if that developed along the way. Or, is this something I’ve completely made up and I missed the mark entirely?
There’s nothing I love more than being out in nature, hiking, trail running, backpacking, bird watching, gardening, all that stuff. I identified as a “tree hugger” by the time I was 10. But I’ve always been keenly aware of the fact that nature runs on blood and guts and decay. Living in very rural areas without a lot of money meant my family doctored our livestock and pets as much as possible. I watched my dad delivering a breeched lamb, his arm buried inside the ewe while she screamed and bled. I helped my parents butcher a deer my dad shot, and helped clean fish he caught. I saw the bloody chunky spot on the road where our dog’s head got crushed by a pickup. And when I would go for walks, I would scrape the roadkilled animals off the pavement and bury them on the side of the road.
All of that can be purely repulsive, if you let it, or it can be normal or even lovely. I think that’s one of the reasons why I’ve always enjoyed David Lynch’s work so much. He saw the beauty in everything, even the rot. Some of his photos of dead things are exquisite. It’s important to remember that we live in a phenomenal, beautiful world, and death is the backbone of that.
I’d love to learn about your horror origin story. What was some scary media you were drawn to as a kid, and how has your taste developed since then?
My parents didn’t have any restrictions when it came to movies or books. Some of the first movies I can remember seeing were The Amityville Horror and The Day After (that last one gave me a crippling fear of nuclear war that stuck with me until the Berlin Wall came down). But the first horror story I read was Stephen King’s “The Raft” from his collection Skeleton Crew. I was about 7 years old, and my oldest sister had checked out the book from the library. I heard her telling my mom and my other sister that it was the scariest story she’d ever read, so we all wound up passing it around. I thought it was so amazing!
After that, I read a lot of horror. My best friend had recently died in an accident, and my family was going through some hard times, so horror books felt like a wonderful place to hide inside. When I read them, I could feel like I was braver than I was in real life. I adored Dean R. Koontz. (This was the era when he still used his middle initial- and tore through all his early stuff.) Our bookmobile connected me to Charles L. Grant, Tanith Lee, John Coyne, Anne Rice – the full pantheon of late ’80s, early ’90s horror writers. It was great.
I don’t know if I’d say my taste has developed so much as it’s dug in its roots and made connections. I still really enjoy most of the writers and the works I enjoyed as a kid, but now I’ve seen more about what inspired and influenced them. I’m starting to read more work from writers outside the United States. And of course, my love for other genres has affected me, too. I used to say my favorite flavor of horror was SF-horror. Now it’s a toss-up between horror-inflected thrillers and Weird horror. There’s a place in my heart for all shades of horror, from the pulpy and fun to the old-fashioned to the classy award-winning stuff that doesn’t always get labeled as horror (I’m looking at you, Beloved.)
What’s your writing process like when you take on a work of dark fiction like this? Is there any special music you throw on? Do you change your environment? Must you be cloaked in moss and bark, hiding away in some wooded nook?
I tend to use music as a trigger- I turn on a certain playlist, and that’s my cue to get to work. I develop a different playlist for every major writing project, and I just listen to it over and over again while I’m working on the story. When I’m developing the playlist, I think about movies and games that have a similar atmosphere to what I want to write and draw from their soundtracks. Sometimes I’ll also have a playlist of music that comes from the same decade the story is set in, or I’ll listen to the kind of music the characters like. In Girl in the Creek, there’s a character who really liked scene music, so some days I got to listen to a lot of Millionaires, 3OH!3, and Hollywood Undead. For my novel The Deer Kings, there were days I just listened to Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged for hours. I couldn’t listen to that album for about a year after I finished that one.
Otherwise, I try to just make sure I sit down at my computer and work without being too fussy about the conditions. Being cloaked in moss and bark out in the woods is for my day off!
Wendy N. Wagner’s GIRL IN THE CREEK is available now from Macmillan Publishers.
