Writing Speculative Fiction and Horror

I don’t write horror because I like to be scared.

I write it because I already know what fear feels like, and I’d rather not look away.

Speculative fiction and horror are the only genres honest enough to tell the truth.

Strip away the jump scares, the dystopian window-dressing, the surrealist flourishes, and what you’re left with is this: what we fear most reveals what we are most desperate to protect.

When I write, I’m not inventing monsters. I’m naming the ones we already live beside.

The systems that turn our bodies into statistics.

The lovers who vanish without explanation.

The quiet domestic rituals that curdle into cages.

Speculative fiction lets me move the walls just far enough that readers see the shape of their own prisons.

Horror lets me turn grief into something wild.

People ask why I don’t write something lighter. Something more commercial.

The answer is simple: light has no meaning if you refuse to look into the dark.

And the dark is rich.

It’s where memory lives.

It’s where the voices of women who were silenced still hum.

It’s where the body remembers what it wasn’t supposed to survive.

Good horror isn’t about gore.

It’s about recognition.

That sudden chill when you realise:

I’ve been here. I know this. This isn’t fantasy, it’s a mirror.

Good speculative fiction doesn’t whisk you away from the world.

It roots you deeper in it, asking:

What if the future isn’t brighter? What if it’s sharper? What if it forces us to become something truer than survival?

So yes, I write horror. I write speculative fiction.

I write because silence is the real monster, and mine expired a long time ago.

These genres don’t just entertain.

They unmask.

They peel back what we’ve been trained not to name.

And once you’ve looked into that kind of darkness, once you’ve called it what it is, you can never be the same again.

That’s the point.

And speculative fiction isn’t about inventing futuristic gadgets or reshaping the laws of physics. The true heart of the genre is consequence.

Ask: If one rule changes, what happens to the human soul?

It’s not the invention that matters: it’s what it reveals about love, fear, power, and survival.

Worldbuilding is political. Every choice: language, architecture, laws, even clothing says something about who is in power and who is erased. Writers who pretend their dystopias are “neutral” miss the point.

Anchor the unreal in the deeply real. If your characters don’t breathe, bleed, and ache in ways the reader recognises, then your futuristic city, your collapsed climate, your AI overlords mean nothing. The reader must see themselves in the terror, or it’s just decoration.

Speculative fiction thrives when the world feels close enough to touch... and terrifyingly plausible.

Horror is often misunderstood as spectacle. Blood, monsters, the grotesque. But the deepest horror doesn’t come from what you see; it comes from what you know but cannot un-know.

As a writer:

Don’t chase shock. Chase recognition.

Ask: Where does the fear really live? Not in the knife, but in the silence before it drops. Not in the monster, but in the people who pretend it isn’t there.

The true challenge of horror is restraint. It is easy to spill blood on the page. It is harder to write a silence that curdles, a locked door that feels alive, or a woman whose grief is so raw the reader almost flinches to look at her.

Writing feminist speculative fiction is not a subgenre. It is a refusal.

A refusal to write women only as wives, mothers, corpses, or sidekicks.

A refusal to let patriarchy dictate what futures are worth imagining.

A refusal to let grief and rage remain “unmarketable.”

But here’s the challenge: feminist fiction still faces suspicion. Too angry, too political, too niche. Writers are told to soften, to sand down the edges, to make their heroines “more likeable.”

The work, then, is to write them anyway.

To write women who burn instead of smoulder.

To write about motherhood without sentimentality, about love without subservience, about rage without apology.

To write the bodies that carry history, trauma, and desire, not as metaphors alone, but as battlegrounds where power plays out.

This is not easy work. It means you will be told you are “too much.” It means editors may hesitate. It means you will be asked why you can’t just write something “fun.”

But if speculative fiction is about consequence, and horror is about recognition, then feminist speculative horror is about naming the violence that women were told to make invisible.

It is about saying: this happened, this happens, this will keep happening unless we imagine otherwise.

If you want to write speculative fiction or horror (especially feminist fiction) here’s what to remember:

Start with the wound. Every dystopia begins in a body. What hurt does your world magnify?

Refuse easy villains. And keep it human... The technology, the laws, the rituals of your invented world mean nothing if your characters don’t ache with human contradictions.

Embrace discomfort. If you are afraid of writing it, it probably matters. If you flinch, write closer.

Speculative fiction and horror are not genres of escape. They are genres of confrontation. They demand more of the writer and, if done well, more of the reader.

For me, writing in these genres isn’t about inventing new worlds at all. It’s about unmasking the old one. About looking into the dark and naming what lives there. About refusing to lie, even if the truth is unbearable.

That’s why I write speculative fiction. That’s why I write horror. Because sometimes the only way to imagine a better future is to admit, without flinching, how terrifyingly broken the present already is.

I’m writing this not only as a reflection, but as a declaration. Because right now, I am deep inside my own speculative feminist novel.

It’s a story about control. About grief. About love that refuses to die, even when everything else has been stripped away.

The novel is fierce, unsettling, and deeply personal: part dystopia, part body horror, part lament. And like all the best speculative fiction, it isn’t really about the future at all. It’s about the present, sharpened to the point where we can no longer pretend not to see it.

And I’ve written about “small men”, too, in my story. 

They are the bureaucrats who hide behind clipboards, the partners who vanish when it costs too much to stay, the ones who weaponise silence instead of fists.

They don’t need to be monsters: they dismantle lives with cowardice and absence.

Small men are easy to find. They walk our streets. They sit at our dinner tables. They promise love and deliver disrespect. 

But the novel also insists on another kind of man.

The rare one who doesn’t flinch at a woman’s voice.

The one who stays when staying is dangerous.

Because speculative feminist fiction isn’t only about exposing the violence. 

And so, yes, the “small men” in my novel may be forgettable.

But the man who remembers, the man who remains... he becomes myth.