Welcome back to Scare Me! a weekly horror newsletter. Today, we’re speaking with Emily C. Hughes, the award-winning author of Horror for Weenies and co-founder of new horror site Darker Times!

Sometimes I can’t tell if I’m nostalgic for the old internet, or the magic insanity of being 22.

I graduated from college in 2015. I’m amused by Gen Z longing for the 2010s. Those days? When Twitter could yap about a dumb thinkpiece for 48 hours straight? When people thought WeWork was going to revolutionize work somehow? When feminism was a Hilary Clinton cameo on Broad City?

I joke, but in truth, I’m nostalgic for those heady, confusing days, too. I miss the way my outrage was inseparable from my optimism, and the naivete I can never quite recapture.

But most of all, I miss the websites.

Many of you remember the old internet—its treasure trove of WordPress blogs, its abundance of niche publications with quirky names like The Hairpin, The Awl, and Jezebel. These sites were small, independent, and very accessible for young writers sending their first pitches into space. When I wrote a piece about feminist street art for The Toast, I felt like I could do anything.

Over the past decade, these sites have shuttered one by one. Some were absorbed by larger brands. Others ceased operations after failing to achieve financial stability. And so many more have been handed over to soulless capitalist thugs who’ve driven great writers out of the journalism business entirely.

It’s hard to not feel discouraged. But then, every once in a while, a new site will come along that brings back a flicker of that hope and optimism I felt when I was younger, that I worry might be lost forever.

Darker Times is one of those sites.

Launched the same week as StokerCon, Darker Times has already brought a new energy into a healthy horror publishing landscape. It’s built to be a sustainable, worker-owned business led by a quartet of cofounders—Jessica Woodbury, Emily C. Hughes, Anna Dupre, and Aigner Loren Wilson—who pen critical essays and invite spirited debates about horror. Darker Times is a glimpse of the kind of writing I didn’t realize I was missing, that I thought I’d never find again.

To learn more about the vision behind Darker Times, I recently hopped on a call with co-founder Emily C. Hughes. It ended up being well-timed! Darker Times is currently in the midst of a summer subscriber drive, with a goal of landing 500 paid subscribers by mid-August.

I happily handed over the $70 annual fee and have loved receiving subscribers-only essays by Rachel Harrison, Clay McCleod Chapman, and other exciting voices in horror over the past few weeks. If you’re interested in subscribing, you can find all the info here!

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Michelle Delgado: It was so exciting to hear about Darker Times just before StokerCon in June! How as the response been so far?

Emily C. Hughes: People were so, so nice about it and really enthusiastic. I felt like every time we mentioned it to someone, they just kind of lit up, which was wonderful.

At the same time, I [was] scurrying back to my room like, “Okay, we have to put a newsletter together.” So the work part never fully goes away, even when you're basking in people's excitement about it.

I have so many questions for you! But first, could you tell me a little bit about the subscriber drive that just started?

We are hoping to hit 500 paying subscribers by August 14th! So we're running the drive for four weeks. It coincides with the launch of a full publishing schedule—previous to this, we had been in our soft launch period, publishing a couple of times a week. We are working up to publishing every weekday.

We are entirely independent, worker-owned, [and] subscriber-funded. In order to keep doing this, we live off of these subscriptions. They allow us to pay for web hosting; they allow us to pay for our little graphic design tools; they allow us to hopefully pay freelance writers.

That's one of our big pushes for this subscriber drive—to bank enough to give ourselves the budget to pay outside contributors professional rates, and also to pay ourselves for our work. As of right now, before we started the subscriber drive, we had gotten to a point of being able to pay back all of our launch costs. But we work really hard on this, and we would like to make a tiny bit of money from it!

I know that it's a tricky time to be asking people to give you money. The economy is not great, despite what people on Blue Sky with economics degrees want to tell you. Everything is expensive. Going to the movies can be a pocket-emptying experience.

But for people who value culture writing, and for people who value criticism—who read a book or see a movie [and] want to go online to see what other people are saying about it, in a format that's more robust than Threads posts—we are hoping that those people will find us.

I’ve been really enjoying the subscribers-only newsletters and articles so far. Could you share any other sneak peeks of what’s ahead of subscribers?

Right now, paying subscribers are the only people who can comment on the site. You have access to our book club, which we are launching August 1st. The first book we're reading is The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins.

That’s been on my TBR for the longest time! Great pick.

One of my favs! Plus, he has a new novel coming out in a couple months, so we thought it was a good moment for it.

We are launching a subscriber-only Discord. And then, if we get to that 500 paying subscriber mark, we are going to offer a movie club and to pay for one freelance contributor post [per] month. There are so many writers I have worked with and read, who have said, “Hey, I would love to write for you!” And I’m like, “I really want to be able to pay you first.”

It’s music to my ears. I started freelancing in 2015, and the landscape was so profoundly different back then. I used to follow so many culture writers and look forward to their takes—like when Jia Tolentino would go to a Taylor Swift concert and report back. To me, Darker Times recaptures a time when publications were very voicey and full of personality, and it feels like sinking into what I used to love about the internet.

I know that you’ve been a journalist for many years as well, and that you’ve contributed to many publications. Where do you place Darker Times in the tapestry of online media, both the legacy of it and where we’re at right now?

Like you, I started writing for online publications in a very, very different world and a very different media ecosystem. I started working in publishing in 2010, and by 2014, I was working for Penguin Random House, running their consumer-facing sci-fi / fantasy site.

I loved that job. I loved running that site. I ran it for five years. That was the era of The Toast, Gawker, The Hairpin—all of those sites that we all remember fondly. And they just kind of don't exist anymore.

In addition to the consolidation of digital publishing, there's also been this flattening. For a while, it was “pivot to video,” right? And then everything has to be listicles. We have to chase SEO keywords. It was just so counter to creativity, in my experience.

It was why I started a newsletter in 2019, just so I could talk about horror books in a way that I wanted, without having to pitch someone and write to a certain publication's standards or KPIs. I ran two websites in my publishing career, both for big corporate publishers, and both of those sites are now gone. They're just not online anymore, and that was really a hard lesson to learn in terms of owning your own creative endeavors.

And so, when my co-founder Jessica Woodbury came to me this past winter and said, "Hey, I've seen this little flurry of worker-owned sites pop up over the last few years. Defector is a big one, but there's Aftermath, there's Ravenous, there's 404 Media. Why couldn't we do that?” And I was like, "I can't think of a single reason why not.”

I feel so much grief, knowing that your sites disappeared. That is so devastating, and I’m so sorry that happened.

I really relate to owning your own content and writing stories instead of pitches. In a way, that’s really what I’m trying to do with this newsletter! But Darker Times is distinct in that you are also building in the editor-writer relationship, which we lose in self-publishing. Editors are so crucially important in the publishing process—both for the rigor they bring, and for the way they’re able to help protect writers through the revision process. I worry that younger writers might not know what they’re missing out on, now that the online writing ecosystem has changed so much.

I love being edited, and I love editing. My book, Horror for Weenies, was edited by the wonderful Jess Zimmerman, who I had written for when she was the editorial director of Electric Literature. I already knew that she was a very talented, very strong editor who could come into my draft and take three words I had written around something that I didn't know how to express and be like, "Here's what I think you might be trying to say.” And I'd be like, "Oh shit. You're right!” That's just a magical relationship when it works.

I saw the edges of some discourse earlier this week about [how] being edited is an emotionally punishing experience, or that editors will make you feel like shit. And I was like, boy, that shouldn't be the case. Either there's a mismatch of expectations, or someone's not acting in the way they should.

My editor said to me once, “Editing is not something I do to you. It's something I do for you.” I think [that] is such a such a perfect encapsulation of what that relationship should be. It's a very tricky balance, because it requires technical knowledge, institutional knowledge, and interpersonal skills. But ideally, for me, the editing relationship is: I help you tell the best version of the thing that you're trying to say.

At Darker Times, we have this sort of wonderful co-editing relationship with each other. We're all writing for the site, but none of us is writing into the void. We always have someone else to be a second pair of eyes, to say “hey you can do XYZ and this will be one hundred percent better.” It's really, really heartening to have that again.

You kind of mentioned the origin story already—but when did the site crystallize from idea to reality? Was there a moment when it really felt real?

Jessica suggested the idea, and my brain just kind of lit up. If there's one thing I know how to do, it's run a website. So we got on a video call to talk about the broadest possible ideas, and it became rapidly apparent that we were really on the same page: Smart but not pretentious, voicey but not cheesy, something that feels like the old internet.

We started working on it. We started talking about exactly what it would take. We started talking about names. Logistics— where we wanted to host it, who we wanted to bring on as the co-founding team. We pretty quickly added Anna Dupre and Aigner Loren Wilson, both of whom I had worked with in various capacities and knew to be smart, perceptive readers and writers.

I would say, probably when we bought the domain name—that was the “Oh, okay, this feels real.” Brainstorming is so tedious and difficult until finally you hit the right name, and you all kind of go, “Yeah, that’s it.” We were so thrilled to find that the domain name but also the social handles were somehow available.

It was meant to be! You mentioned that you’ve been in a soft launch since June—are there any pieces you’ve published so far that really embody what you hope to build with the site?

I really love Rachel Harrison's essay that kicked off our subscriber drive—[it’s] about horror and living with anxiety. She does such a good job of expressing the myriad tiny ways that anxiety will kind of kick you in the head out of nowhere, and how horror can be a way to process that or do a little bit of exposure therapy.

I thought Anna's essay on StokerCon was really lovely and meaningful, and a great examination of how writing can be a very solitary pursuit. It's so important to find your community in that world.

Aigner did this wonderful deep dive into the evolution of how the queer community relates to Sleepaway Camp, and Jessica just published this great piece about the social contract in horror films—specifically about hosting or being a guest—the way that women in particular are expected to act in those situations, and how tiny tweaks can produce really horrifying results.

I noticed you mentioned all your co-founders—but you’ve been writing, too, right?

I have! In June, I got very sucked into the editing and the setup. But I do have something on Stranger Things, which is a show I hate. We're doing a series called Hatchet Job, which is people writing intelligently and thoughtfully about art that they really didn't like, in a way that's not just “I hated this and I'm going to get off some jokes about why I hated it,” but actually digging into the artistic choices and the specific reasons why.

And then we have an ongoing series called Let Them Fight, where two of us or more talk about something that one of us liked and one of us didn't. Jessica and I had a fun conversation about Disclosure Day, which I liked and she really didn't. I'm currently rereading Incidents Around the House because next week Anna and I are going to publish a conversation about that. She loved it and I couldn't stand it!

When you imagine a utopian world five years from now, where money isn’t a limitation and everything is going great politically, what is your ideal vision for the site?

I would love to be a fully fledged [outlet], publishing multiple times every weekday. We're making enough money that we can all quit whatever day jobs or projects we want to quit and just work on this full time. And we offer healthcare.

We're nowhere near that right now, of course. But I think, if you don't shoot for something big, you're gonna fall flat, right?

Jessica has talked a lot about a future vision where this site gets really big and successful, and wouldn't it be great to be able to expand into other genre spaces? Romance, sci-fi, fantasy, thrillers, literary fiction, anything. That would be so nice. That feels almost impossible to me right now, but I still think it's a good thing to shoot for.

Is there anything else readers should know about Darker Times?

There are other horror culture writing publications out there who are doing good work, and I think of us as additive to that. We're not a substitute for any other site you know, like Fangoria, Bloody Disgusting, Rue Morgue. I've really been enjoying Mo Moshati's website, NightTide. There are plenty of good horror outlets out there, and I think the distinguishing factor is really just the individual point of view. I think there's there's certainly space for all these different publications.

I hope that if I can help even one person subscribe to Darker Times, I’ll have done my job right. I genuinely feel like you made this site specifically for me.

It is always so nice to hear that someone's interested and wants to know more. You hear authors say this, too—if one person comes up to you and says, "Your book really meant something to me,” that makes everything else worth it, right? It's the same with the website.

Long live blogs!

Have I mentioned before that I grew up in Virginia? I spent much of my indie sleaze / dirtbag period drinking beer in Richmond, which happens to be the hometown of author Clay McLeod Chapman. We hopped on a call last night to chat about our shared roots, what it takes to sustain a career as an author, and the incomparable magic of reading a really, really great book. I’m looking forward to sharing our interview in next week’s letter!

P.S. On Monday, I had so much fun helping to break the news that Shortwave has entered a partnership with Rapture Publishing! You can read my story here—and for more on Rapture, I had such a fun conversation with founder Mitch Hull earlier this year.

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.