By ADRIANA GASIEWSKI
Author Gwendolyn Kiste’s childhood home in New Philadelphia, Ohio, was filled with horrifying sounds:
The screams of frightened women witnessing Frankenstein run rampant through a village…
Dracula’s menacing laugh while besting Professor Abraham Van Helsing…
The guttural howl of the Wolf Man as he transforms under the white, bright light of a full moon…
Kiste’s parents were horror fans and constantly played the black-and-white Universal films in their home. However, when they purchased a special annotated version of Dracula by Bram Stoker, it heightened her awareness of the classic. Following the book’s arrival, Kiste would watch the vampire jump from the book’s pages to haunt the screen, but the smaller roles of other characters caught her attention. “I had always wanted more from Lucy’s perspective in Dracula ever since I first learned about Dracula when I was pretty little, like elementary school age,” she says. “That kind of lived with me for a while.”
Author Gwendolyn Kiste
The desire to tell horror stories, especially those from lesser-heard perspectives, stemmed from Kiste’s childhood, when she felt like an outsider because of her love for horror. “It’s just feeling different. Bullying – I feel like there’s always a lot of bullying of anyone different,” Kiste explains. “Just dealing with wanting to get out into the world and feeling kind of stymied…there’s not enough culture.” Horror offered the author and filmmaker an escape, which she still uses today to create a community for others.
During her childhood, Kiste was not only exposed to monster movies but also to a range of classic cinema. George Stevens 1951 drama, A Place in the Sun, which follows George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) caught in a love triangle with his co-worker Alice Tripp (Shelly Winters) and socialite Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor), offered her a glimpse into other worlds. “[I] definitely had no interest in living any of those characters’ lives, but just seeing the beauty, the glamour and just how pretty [it was],” Kiste says. “That’s not a Technicolor movie. That one’s a black-and-white movie, but even the black-and-white of that time was so beautiful; everything was so, so nice to just look at. So, I just feel like I love film, in general, for that kind of escapism.”
As she grew up, Kiste remembers always writing and having an interest in fiction and screenplays, motivating her to graduate from Case Western Reserve in 2006 with a psychology degree. Kiste’s degree would give her an edge for writing compelling characters, like instilling confidence in Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason and making Dracula’s Lucy Westenra a guarded pessimist in her 2022 novel, Reluctant Immortals. “A lot of writing is understanding characters, and if you understand characters, you need to understand people,” she states. “To me, it’s always been a very natural connection between them.”
In 2007, she started graduate school for psychological studies at Kent State University, an hour-and-fifteen-minute drive from her hometown, and moved to Stow, Ohio. The city became her temporary home as well as the filming location for parts of her feature-length horror film Edge of Midnight. After a few years of being an independent filmmaker, moving to an abandoned horse farm outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and completing graduate school, in 2012, Kiste decided to make a career change. As a filmmaker, she felt limited in the stories she could tell and revisited her first passion – short fiction. “You don’t have to worry about budget constraints, and that was something I had at the time,” says Kiste. “I’m like, ‘I’m never gonna be able to do everything that’s in my head because I can’t afford it. I don’t have a multimillion-dollar budget.’”
To make the change easier, Kiste reminded herself that she would face challenges. With this mindset, the setbacks of promoting a new book or a publication delay became easier to handle. “I’d always heard how difficult it was to be an author,” she says, “so I was prepared for a lot of rejection, and that was something I’d kind of braced myself for.”
Set in a Cleveland neighborhood, Kiste’s first novel, The Rust Maidens, which follows protagonist Phoebe Shaw and her friend Jacqueline as they witness girls’ bodies wither away, and their fingernails turn to glass, was published in 2018. Kiste’s debut (and perseverance) caught the attention of Bram Stoker Award finalist and author of the Bless Your Heart series, Lindy Ryan.
In 2022, while Ryan was editing the horror anthology Into the Forest: Tales of Baba Yaga, which includes one of Kiste’s short stories, she discovered the author’s ability to write about dark subjects in “beautiful” ways. When the two worked together again on the 2024 anthology Mother Knows Best, Kiste contributed “Your Mother’s Love Is an Apocalypse,” which Ryan describes as “heart-wrenching.” “She can just take these really dark subjects and write them so beautifully that you can’t not fall in love with her work,” Ryan says, adding, “She writes so authentically.”
Ryan grew to appreciate Kiste’s willingness to commit to projects and views her as a reliable contributor. “I think she approaches every short story as if it’s her next novel,” she explains. “She gives it that amount of care.”
In addition to making Kiste’s name known among her peers, Rust Maidens received the Horror Writers Association’s Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel in 2019. While at the awards dinner, Kiste met Sara Tantlinger, the author of To Be Devoured and Cradleland in Paradise. The two would become fast friends.
At the 2019 Bram Stoker Convention in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Sara Tantlinger and Kiste sat next to each other at the convention’s banquet. They knew each other from online interactions, but had never met in person. During the evening, the two quickly bonded over their love of cats and birds, later introducing “Cats and Horror” and “Birds and Horror” panels to Stoker Con.
Through their friendship, Tantlinger believes she and Kiste learned how to trust others, which has created a family atmosphere in the Horror Writers Association Pennsylvania chapter that Tantlinger created. “Growing up, I was always the one who was really into horror, and not everybody is necessarily into horror,” Kiste says. “So, it’s just been really nice to have a female friend who’s really into horror right alongside me.”
Although strides have been made, female authors may still lack resources and struggle to gain exposure for their books. “I feel like there are so many great female horror writers, and sometimes they don’t get the attention that I would personally like to see them get,” says Kiste.
Tantlinger also credits Kiste for giving women in horror voices by featuring roundtables on her blog during Women in Horror Month in March. “Knowing that there’s someone who is really strongly advocating for women in horror, and that you can go on each other’s blogs and talk about these things, is really important in the community,” she explains, “So, just raising awareness, getting them out there, helping promote each other and just celebrating each other for a month, It’s just really nice.”
These roundtables are not limited by age or types of prose, welcoming all. In fact, Kiste created a Google Form to gather information about what authors should be included and what topics they want to discuss. “[Gwendolyn] does a really nice job of mixing writers who are more well-known and newer writers, which is a really great way to do it, because then you kind of pull people’s attention in because they know this one writer,” Tantlinger says.
Lindy Ryan is hopeful that Kiste’s roundtables will be successful in reminding the horror community how more voices need to be heard and accounted for. “It would be amazing if we had a community that was a coven, if you will, for women in horror to just be in a safe space,” she says. Ryan also thinks the accessibility of Kiste’s writing and her depictions of the LGBTQ+ community aid in diversifying the genre, adding, “Gwendolyn’s very outspoken and very passionate about representation, identity, and honesty.”
As Kiste prepares for the release of her second fiction collection, The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own” and a horror novella, In These Gilded, Ghostly Hearts,” she is thrilled with how people’s perception of the genre is changing. “I feel like horror can be very accepting because I feel a lot of us felt like outsiders at some point. A lot of us were the weird kids that liked weird things,” says Kiste, “and I feel like horror is more mainstream now.”
