I am pleased to share with you my (short) interview with Katrina Leno. I quite like this author because she explores various genres and themes in her stories: mental illness, horror, mystery, romance, friendship, family relationships and more. I recently read her novel Horrid and had some burning questions whose answers I was curious to know.
What is the worst nightmare you’ve ever had?
The night before I graduated high school, I had a dream that I was at a big house party with everyone from my school. The house was on a lake, and I walked around the backyard and ended up standing on the edge of the lake. I was wearing these new blue tennis sneakers that I actually owned in real life, and I realized I was just a bit too close to the muddy water and they were getting dirty. I tried to take a step backward but the mud was too sticky and thick, and after a minute it started sucking me down. I remember standing on the very bottom of the lake, looking up at the surface of the water as I drowned. I woke up to a terrifying stretch of sleep paralysis and even though this dream happened 18 years ago, I still think about it all the time. It was very terrifying!
Have you ever seen a ghost or had experience with them before?
I haven’t! I am open to the possibility of lingering spirits but I think they might have better things to do than disrupt the living 🙂 But it’s always fun to be a little creeped out by a spooky house and a creaky door, right??
What do you want your readers to remember the most about your novel Horrid?
One of the things I love most about writing is that once you put a book out into the world, it stops being solely yours and it starts being a collaboration between you and the reader. Often a person will reach out to me with a response to my book that I never even thought of and it’s the greatest thing in the world! I guess for Horrid I hope people come away with the idea that the scariest things in this world are sometimes not external forces, but very internal ones – but I won’t say anymore, so I don’t spoil anything 🙂
Is there anything you wanted to include in Horrid that you weren’t able to or were warned against?
I was really blessed with great editors for Horrid and I don’t think there was anything I was told I shouldn’t or couldn’t do – if anything, my editor was trying to get me to include MORE creepiness and more scares! We definitely worked a lot on the backstory together because we wanted that to be as solid as possible, so I think that was the biggest piece we tweaked and tweaked, to make sure it was as powerful as possible.
One of my favorite horror books and a huge influence on Horrid is The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson!
More Katrina Leno books.
I had not done an author interview in over a year. I’m glad my first one since the pandemic started was with Katrina Leno, because she was very open with regards to my questions and happy to be interviewed. Those are really the best kinds of interviewees.
Did you enjoy the interview?
Are you planning on reading Horrid or another Katrina Leno book?
Let me know what you think in the comments.
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