Welcome back to Scare Me! a weekly horror newsletter. Today, we’re speaking with Annie Neugebauer, the inventive author behind You Have to Let Them Bleed and the Outsiders Sequence.

Earlier this year, I read a short story collection so incandescently perfect that I felt they were somehow written exactly for me.

You Have to Let Them Bleed came to me by chance, on an email thread with a publicist who was helping me arrange a different interview. By the time I finished reading the second story, I was completely entranced.

Since then, I’ve tracked down author Annie Neugebauer’s recently published novella, The Extra, and its soon-to-be-published sequel, The Other. Both are just as incredible.

Anne Rice (!) agreed with my assessment. “Everything depends on the quality of what you write,” she once commented, “And I like Annie Neugebauer’s very much. Very high quality.”

I was delighted when Annie agreed to hop on an early morning interview a few weeks ago. She very kindly answered my many questions—about her early horror inspiration, her keen powers of observation, and the themes of identity and queerness that suffuse her work—and didn’t flinch despite my oversharing. (I really need to curb my oversharing!)

Annie has several major announcements currently under wraps, and while I am keeping secrets for some of my past interviewees, I was unsuccessful in weaseling out any details this time. (Surely this is for the best!) But I definitely recommend following her on Instagram for when the news drops.

I will read absolutely everything Annie publishes, forever and ever, amen.

Thanks for reading Scare Me! Our monthly Subscriber Spotlight is coming up fast. If you’ve got a project to share with our community, now’s the perfect time to send it my way.

Michelle Delgado: I’m catching you at a busy time! Your short story collection, You Have to Let Them Bleed, just came out on March 17. Your novella, The Extra, just came out on September 9—and its sequel, The Other, will be out on June 9. How does it feel to have so many books coming out all at once?

Annie Neugebauer: It feels satisfying, because it's been a very long time in the making. It's definitely not like I just started and lucked into it—I have had so many irons in the fire for such a long time.

And now, it feels like the ball is rolling the way that I've been trying to get it rolling for many years—almost two decades of working in the industry. So it feels really exciting, really fulfilling, and to speak candidly, it also feels a little bit like finally! Like the work we've been doing is finally showing some results.

As good as I hoped it would feel, [that’s how] it feels. I do think that's one benefit of it having taken so long—I really do appreciate every little bit of it. I’m just soaking it in as much as I can.

You’re also an award-winning poet—the whole time you've been writing these stories, you've also been earning accolades for a different-yet-related art form. That must be a strange feeling, too, to be bursting onto the horror scene in a new way, while also being known for your poetry.

It's interesting how [different forms of] creativity all end up feeding each other. Every lesson that I learned writing poetry is at least a little bit applicable to the other stuff—the prose, the novellas, the novels, the stories, all of it. Every lesson can apply in all of the fields, even if it's a completely different form.

Nothing is wasted.

Nothing is wasted. That's a really good way of saying it. Even the life stuff—the hard times and the good times and the complicated things. All of it all feeds all of it.

I had a craft question for you, and I’m curious to know if your background in poetry influenced this.

Something I notice while reading certain authors is that even when I'm reading from one of their character’s perspectives, I see the author’s voice peek through. That’s not a knock, of course—I return to these authors because I love their voices and their work!

But something that really struck me in You Have to Let Them Bleed and The Extra is that every character you write feels so distinct. Not just in the language—if you put different characters in the same room, they would each notice something completely different. I was so enchanted by that.

Thank you so much for seeing that. That's such a nuanced thing to notice as a reader, that's really cool.

Absolutely—that's something that I do intentionally for a lot of different reasons, not the least of which is that [it’s] more interesting for me. I don't want to write the exact same character over and over again. It's a new challenge with each character, because I'm creating them and getting to know them, but also trying to figure out the most effective way to show that internal life on the page.

It's also an exercise in human empathy and sympathy—of trying to understand other experiences. So it's an exploration, for me, of different types of people, their lived experiences, and the things that shape the way they look at the world.

For a point of view protagonist, it's inextricable from whatever message or theme I'm exploring. There are certain people who can illustrate whatever I'm getting at, what I'm exploring, or what I'm trying to say.

And some of it is so specific! That was another thing that hooked me. For example, one of the characters in “What Throat” plucks out all of his eyelashes—I totally did that when I was in the fifth grade and experiencing extreme anxiety.

There’s another story, “The Filling,” that features a character having a horrific experience at the dentist. I’ve had a lot of dental work done recently, and I’ve never seen someone articulate what it’s like to astral project out of your body, while also wanting to get an A+ at being the best dental patient.

It was just this shock of recognition—like, “Wow. Someone gets it.” You’re such a keen observer. How do you do that?

Well, thank you. I do think a lot of it is just natural—that's how I was made. I am such a people watcher. I am definitely one of those people who will come back from a social event and debrief with my husband. I'll explain, like, “Well, this person was…” and I'll give some very specific detail, and be like, “…so that made me think that he was uncomfortable. But then I noticed he was looking at this person and…” And my husband's like, “What? I didn't notice any of that!”

People are fascinating. I like the challenge of interpreting people—it is so interesting to me, the dichotomy between what any one person is experiencing internally and what they're showing externally. Because it's never perfectly aligned. If nothing else, there’s always thoughts happening that color everything.

It's interesting, too, because I noticed that mimicry is a horror that seems to recur in your work. I was so interested in that slippage—how mimicry is never quite perfect. Is that something that gets under your skin?

Yes, it gets under my skin for sure. I tend to write the stuff that creeps me out, because that's the easiest thing for me to follow—if I'm just staying true to what disturbs me.

The mimicry, I think, is really closely tied to identity in general. Identity is a huge theme that I return to over and over again. [It’s] related to people watching and that dichotomy between the internal and external versions of a person.

There's something there, too, about being able to know somebody else—because we can't ever slip inside somebody else's brain. Even the people that we're closest to—our spouses, best friends, family members—there's still a gap there. An unclosable gap.

I guess I'm kind of obsessed with identity, and the different ways that identity breaks down and is ultimately not quite knowable—all the way through to the mimicry, where it's somebody trying to copy an identity. But again, there's always going to be the little gap. That's just a very fascinating spot to me, the fact that we could never really, truly know anybody else, and possibly even ourselves.

I had this crazy chain of thoughts when I was listening to your Talking Scared interview—you brought up queer identity, and suddenly I remembered experiences I had when I wasn't out as bisexual. Dating often felt like an uncomfortable disconnect, and in a way, a kind of mimicry. All my straight friends didn't seem to have the same problem, and I wasn’t sure what the gap was for me.

Then I met my husband, and I just loved being around him. When I eventually did come out, he was like, “Well, yeah, obviously!” It was a completely different experience and so validating.

I was curious if mimicry has a similar resonance with queerness for you.

[Regarding] the whole umbrella of queerness, I think that—at least for me—there was the gap between what I felt was true internally, and what was being perceived as true externally. And yeah, that does set up a feeling of mimicry. You either have to play act what you know you're being perceived as, or at some point, you have to intentionally separate yourself from it, which is what we call coming out. You have to say, “No, actually, I'm being misperceived. Here is how I would be more correctly perceived.” And sort of set the record straight—or, less straight.

I think there's a really interesting tie into mimicry there. I'm married to a man. I didn't have to come out. But the more I became aware of that gap between what people assumed about me and what I knew to be true about myself, the more painful that became. It began to feel intentionally deceptive, in a way that made me feel dishonest.

That was ultimately the deciding factor for me. It began to feel like I wasn't being true to myself by not clarifying, even though the relevance to most people is zero. It doesn't "matter," but it mattered to my sense of self and accuracy. There is this jarring experience of being bisexual and feeling like members of the queer community are talking around you instead of with you, about an experience that you also share.

There’s a real joy and relief in getting to be yourself fully, even if it matters to no one else. I think about that when I’m in environments with people who may not come into contact with many other queer people, too.

It's relatively normalized now, [but] I think we're backsliding on that. Even if you, as a person, feel relatively safe coming out, there are other repercussions, too. There's social stuff; a lot of people's families are not super accepting.

It's not always a concrete thing that you can point to, like “this person has started treating me differently.” But there's still tangible change. At least there has been tangible change for me. Stigma is a very powerful thing.

"That Which Never Comes" is my story exploring what it would be like to live an entire lifetime of never closing that gap—of never getting closer to authenticity, instead of, I suppose, mimicry.

I immediately clocked that character as queer.

The monster does come out of the closet.

Ha, yes! Plus, the details about the character being wonderful with kids and his family, but returning to a quiet life that's quite isolated. As a queer kid growing up in a conservative area, I kind of pictured those as the two options—being alone, or burying parts of myself.

And then you're living with self-deception, which is super painful. That's another layer of the whole ”How well can you know yourself?” conversation. How well can you know yourself if you're actively deceiving yourself, too?

I have a good friend who’s also bisexual, and she has a concept of bisexuality as a very liminal space. It got me thinking about vampires—are they dead or alive? Or a werewolf—are they beast or human? They’re kind of both. Liminal.

I think people get really uncomfortable when something is two things at once, or in between. We seem to want to have this conversation that says, “You're bisexual because you're on the way to being a lesbian,” or “You're straight, but you want to seem interesting.”

I always notice bisexual characters in books, because they seem uniquely poised to accept both the mundane world and the paranormal, the weird, or the cosmic. It feels under-discussed to me, and I was curious if that’s something that resonates with you.

Yeah, it sure does. For the record, when I say bisexual, I also mean pansexual—I’m just an Old, and bi was the word we used when I was self-assessing. At least for me, pan also applies to the concept of being able to see beauty and attraction to a wide range of people. [That] definitely feels connected, to me, to open mindedness in general.

There's maybe two separate issues here, in my mind—as far as “monsters” like vampires, werewolves, and more complicated spooky things in horror, I do think there's an othering that maybe speaks to the othering of bisexual people and queer people in general.

Society is uncomfortable with the other in all its variations—whether it be monsters, queer people, or other factors—because maybe it's more comfortable to think that you can easily put constraints on somebody's identity. It's easier to feel like you can understand somebody if they have a simpler set of rules, perhaps.

Maybe it's just because this is what we've been talking about, but it takes me back to how well you can know somebody, and the potential for that gap between what you're able to understand and who they are being scary to you. If it's something you're uncomfortable with, the gap between what you feel is the limit of your knowledge and the sense that there's more to a person could probably be very unnerving.

You push that gap to an extreme, and you get serial killers who are leading secret lives. The gap between perception and knowledge of somebody else is potentially a very scary place. It's also a place that can be weaponized by way of fear-mongering and prejudice, or embraced, as we've seen the queer community do with monsters, good, bad, and in between.

Yes! And it's a gap that is very exploited in our current moment. There are people who are actively trying to fill that gap with every horrible, scary, inhuman thing. It just occurred to me right now, although it’s a very obvious thought, that it’s what propaganda is doing.

If that gap is secretive, then you can imply all kinds of things are in there, right?

That, plus your earlier point about self-deception, is so interesting to me. It’s great territory for horror, and literature and conversations in general.

It's interesting. I'm thinking about the positive and negative of that perceived gap. Maybe this just speaks to me as a person, but in real life, I feel like more often than not, that gap is filled with positive things—even if they're kept secret.

In real life, when you begin to close that gap with somebody, you begin to know their internal self more than just the easily perceived external [self]. Usually, that is likely to bring people closer together. It draws connection. It makes us feel seen and understood and builds relationships and all that good stuff.

I suppose I explore that in fiction as well. But because I lean so hard towards horror in my stories, I'm more often interested in exploring when closing that gap is a negative thing, a scary thing, a disturbing thing, and/or that gap is unclosable.

I think that's very frightening—to never be able to close that gap, whether it’s because you want to be perceived or because somebody else doesn't want to be perceived. That's emotionally scary to me.

To change tracks to a lighter topic: Your range is so interesting and so much fun. In one story, for example, you write about a cosmic junk drawer that felt so House of Leaves and exciting to me—and in others, there are more mundane, smaller horrors.

When you're thinking about scale and how cosmic or subtle you're going to go, what’s it like to think about that bigness or smallness?

That's a really good question. I don't know that that's a conscious part of my decision making for most short stories.

It certainly has to be a pretty active part of planning longer novellas and novels. With those, you really need to know your ultimate scope so that you can get such long pacing to match.

But with short fiction, there's such a freedom. There's an ability to just start going and see what happens. That scale isn't usually my focus. Usually, I have some idea that I'm interested in, and some themes or issues that I'm wrestling with or exploring.

The scope sort of naturally shakes out for me. When you put those two things together, it's creatively pretty intuitive how big or small it'll end up being. And I do really enjoy every scale. I love zooming way in to the point of, like, cellular level. There's some cool power to really intense, detailed observation. But I also love huge, grand, epic concepts as well.

I’ve seen other bookish people reference John Carpenter’s The Thing alongside the Outsiders Sequence, and for good reason.

But I was curious about your earliest brushes with the horror genre. Did you come to horror through books, movies, or something else? Are there any milestone pieces of horror media that made you want to create in the genre yourself?

I would say books first. Edgar Allan Poe was one of my earliest and biggest influences in horror fiction and poetry, and to this day, I still think he truly is one of the most masterful horror authors we've ever had. I definitely pulled a book of Poe down from the high shelf too young, got into it, and was changed.

I remember being scarred by some Stephen King novels—The Shining in particular. I was probably a young teenager when I read The Shining and ‘Salem's Lot. Both of those definitely got to a core level fear for me—an active experience of being afraid that probably, in ways I can't fully articulate, set me on the path of wanting to explore fear and wanting to be able to scare other people. For whatever reason, even though it was horrifying, it was also such a powerful experience. I wouldn't necessarily call it a positive experience, but it was certainly powerful. I can still vividly relive reading some of those passages that moved me, decades later.

My dad was a huge horror fan, and my mom was a huge reader, so I came at it from both ways. I definitely snuck books off both of their bookshelves and traumatized and fascinated myself. I remember a collection called Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories That Scared Even Me. He made an anthology of scary stories, and some of those stories—I couldn't tell you what they're called or who wrote them, because I don't have the book anymore, unfortunately. But I could tell you about the story. It still lives up here in my brain.

Those experiences of scaring myself, by myself, [while] reading are definitely pivotal for me.

As far as watching things, I'm an easy mark. I get scared so easily by screen. I really do! I'm the person who watches movies through my fingers. I scream. I'm ridiculous to be with when I see horror films. I'm legitimately just so easy to scare.

Every scary movie, even the moderate quality ones of my teenage years, worked. They did the job, they affected me. I guess there is sort of a transition from the nature of being scared while I was reading into the more fun type of being scared, seeing a movie in a theater with your friends [and] you're all laughing. It's more of a social experience. I remember when The Ring came out, and us all going to see each new horror movie around that time. [It was] scary, but in such a fun, thrilling way.

In a way, it almost seems like that intense, embodied feeling of fear you can get from reading a book closes the gap between you and the author. I mean, there are other strong feelings like love that can make the gap feel almost invisible. But knowing that someone who’s been dead for many years, like Edgar Allan Poe, can ignite your nervous system in that way—that's a magical, powerful thing.

Absolutely. That's such a great way of looking at it.

Would you say that “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a favorite? There’s a story in conversation with it in You Have to Let Them Bleed. Or do you have a favorite favorite?

It's definitely one of my favorites. If I had to choose a single one, it would be “The Tell-Tale Heart,” but it's really more like I have a cluster of favorites: “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Masque of the Red Death.” I have a story in conversation with that one coming out later this fall.

There's a cluster of his more scary stories, in tone, that are my favorites. I appreciate his detective stories, but those are my core Poe [stories].

I do think it's crazy to read “The Cask of Amontillado” in like, the sixth grade. I was not prepared for how dark that story was, and I read it as a very young teen, in class. Why were we doing that?

I read “The Raven” in seventh grade, and we read “The Cask of Amontillado” and “Black Cat.” The way that our school system was set up, we studied it as eighth graders, and then we studied it again in senior year honors English or whatever.

It's interesting how young they start that—and it's also interesting how much it changes when you come back at different ages and study it in different settings and with different teachers. I guess when you read it in sixth grade, it's really just for the trauma. Like, let's get some scuffs on that brain!

They just throw the morbid kids one bone.

We need this.

I went to University of Virginia, which is the school that Edgar Allan Poe famously dropped out of, and they keep his dorm room behind a plexiglass window. It’s supposedly set up the way that he had it. But it seems too tidy! I always wondered if it was true to life.

[He was] very meticulous. Unfortunately, horror authors are usually pretty disappointing. I'm also super tidy. [There’s] generally a contrast between the subject matter and the actual author.

There's another gap. This is just the theme, huh?

weird black girls bookclub (@venusandcupid) is one of the first BookTok accounts I really fell in love with. Venus, who runs the account, offers a never-ending series of phenomenal book recommendations and hosts a Fable book club that puts a well-earned spotlight on Black writers who craft utterly weird literary fiction.

We recently chatted over email—about reading, getting hooked on weirdness, and about Cupid, the adorable shy darling Venus rescued from a hoarder situation. I’m looking forward to sharing the conversation next week!

Scare Me! is a free weekly horror newsletter published every Thursday morning. It’s written by Michelle Delgado, featuring original illustrations by Sam Pugh. You can find the archive of past issues here. If you were sent this by a friend, subscribe to receive more spooky interviews, essays—and maybe even a ghost story or two.