From “The Brood” to “Carrie,” there’s one thing that often holds true in the horror genre: Gender stereotypes.
Logan-Ashley Kisner is author of the new book “Old Wounds,” a horror novel about two trans teens who find themselves in a classic horror-story trap. But the question of gender — and who counts as a woman — is central.
Kisner said the book is haunted by figures like Leelah Alcorn, a trans girls who committed suicide in 2014; and Brandon Teena, the subject of the movie “Boys Don’t Cry,” a trans man who was murdered in 1993.
Kisner joined The Show to talk more about it.
Full conversation
LOGAN-ASHLEY KISNER: Talking about the inspiration for “Old Wounds” is kind of weird just because it came from a place of spite. Just because I've been consuming horror since I was very young, and it's been my life for like a really long time. And there's a lot of horror where it's about gender, or what it deals with is kind of inextricably linked to gender. And it's still really, really rare for these stories to like deal with gender identity that isn't inherently cis. There are still very few trans characters, very few questioning characters, nonbinary, everything like that — even in stories that are ostensibly about gender
And so with “Old Wounds,” I wanted to create this story where not only is the reader kind of forced to confront this issue, but the story itself kind of has to change around these two trans characters that it does not anticipate being there.
LAUREN GILGER: Give us the kind of brief plot outline here so that that makes sense to folks. Because you have these two characters, like you mentioned, who are on sort of this fraught road trip, but they end up in a kind of classic horror situation.
KISNER: Yes. So Aaron and Max are two trans kids from Columbus, Ohio, and they end up on this fraught road trip, going from Columbus to Berkeley, California. On the way, they end up breaking down in the northwestern part of Kentucky, where they find this very small town that also happens to have the issue of a monster in the woods. And this monster supposedly only eats female sacrifices, which throws into question which, between the two trans characters, counts as the “proper female sacrifice” in the situation.
GILGER: And you wrote that every character in the book in some way is grappling with gender, right?
KISNER: Yeah. So, obviously with Max and Aaron, they're trans, they're trying to deal with this as well. But also the antagonists are forced to reckon for the first time with, “Oh, they're men in this horror situation.” There's a lot of inherent misogyny in just the way they go about life. And so for the first time, they're also kind of grappling with, “Oh, again, who is the proper female sacrifice?” But also like, “how accurate has our ideology been from the start, not just now?”
GILGER: So you wrote about this approach to the book in Crime Raids recently, and you talked about this kind of obsession we seem to have with dead girls in horror. And actually in pop culture, I think this pops up a lot. Talk a little bit about that idea and this idea of like it's a little bit female to be dead.
KISNER: Yes. That quote comes from “Blonde,” the Marilyn Monroe fiction story. And even when I was like drafting this, the idea of the female sacrifice thing kind of came inherently, and it wasn't until I was further in the story that I'm like, “Why did this come so easily to the story? And what does it mean that it's always the women who are chosen to be sacrifices or made into these figures, even though on its face, it really shouldn't be like that?” There's nothing in either gender that marks you necessarily for victimhood over the other.
GILGER: But we see that so often. You also wrote about this idea of the difference between ghost stories and hauntings. And you say this is not a ghost story, but it is haunted by a lot of people who really affected you in your personal life. Can you tell us about them?
KISNER: Yeah. So, I don't actually believe in ghosts. I don't know if that makes me a bad horror writer or not. But I do believe in hauntings, and I do have things in my life that have stuck with me and that inform how I write and how I write about things. The book goes into a little bit of Brandon Teena and “Boys Don't Cry” and the way that Brandon Teena is still really just pop culture's only idea of trans masculinity, or like their only reference point to it. And that was — oh God, that was the ‘90s — so nearly 30 years ago.
And Leelah Alcorn as well gets mentioned. She's also from Ohio, and I wanted to write a little bit about, what does it mean when you're only relationship to transness is these tragic figures?
GILGER: You write about the media coverage of those deaths, and you said this really poignant thing about the assertions that they kind of inherently make. I'm quoting you now, “our genders are inherent unchangeable and that violence committed against us is an inevitability.” And you say that horror often kind of operates under those same assertions.
KISNER: Yeah, just horror, especially the way that these plots kind of have to happen, where you stumble into a thing, you activate a thing, you unleash some kind of evil into the world. Even just in stories like “The Brood” and like “Ginger Snaps,” were like the gender is inherently tied to the horror.
It really echoes a lot of these same ways where it's like you, by nature of who you are, you've invited this horror into your world. And it's not even like necessarily like the right or wrong, but just playing with how that shapes your idea of like the world around you and your relationship to it and what you are capable of doing and becoming.
GILGER: Yeah. So, looking at the horror genre more generally, as you say, you've been kind of steeped in for most of your life, do you think that it's starting to change when it comes to the way it thinks about and writes about and deals with gender? I mean, you're changing it, right?
KISNER: Yeah, it's changing in both good and bad ways. I've talked about this in a few other places, where it almost feels like we've kind of skipped the part where I'm trying to get us, where we are having these conversations about gender. There are a lot of stories that want to utilize trans characters and have representation, but the stories themselves aren't necessarily engaging with that text and doing what I would prefer to see the horror genre do.
And then every once in a while, you still have the bad tropes and the really outdated, just like trans-misogynistic caricatures. I do see that a lot less, and it's more just there seems to be a nervousness around censuring trans stories because you don't want to reach into that negative stereotype. But that nervousness is also, I think, holding us back from having more positive and more interesting stories. And so it's definitely changing, it's just in an awkward growth phase.
GILGER: Fair enough. So one of the things I think that's so interesting about horror — and I'm not somebody who can watch a lot of horror or read a lot of it — there is a thing that seems to happen a lot in this genre that it makes fun of itself, or it uses its own tropes in new ways in order to say something like this, right? Are you doing that here? Or is that what you're hoping to do?
KISNER: Yeah. And the story of “Old Wounds” is kind of like the classic horror plot of yuppie kids from the city going into the country, they break down, there's monsters, there's a kind of cult. And that was kind of intentional because I'm like, OK, if the story itself is this basic and bare bones, then I can really focus on the characters because it's the characters who should be driving this plot.
It shouldn't just be like a story that goes on its way and the characters have no say or sway over the situation. I wanted the characters to really stand on their own. And even the antagonists, I wanted you to have even just a two-sentence glimpse into what their perspective on the situation would be.
