Welcome back to Scare Me! a weekly horror newsletter. Today, we’re speaking with Yah Yah Scholfield, whose much buzzed-about debut novel offers Southern Gothic atmosphere, erotic thrills, and exquisitely crafted gore.

Yah Yah Scholfield’s debut novel, On Sundays She Picked Flowers, begins with a shocking act of domestic violence.

Judith Rice is forty-one years old, but her age doesn’t stop her elderly mother from viciously beating her. A blow to the head finally pushes Jude to the limit of what she can tolerate, setting off a chain of events that take her on a life-changing flight deep into Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp.

Free for the first time in her life, Jude rehabilitates a hainted house abandoned in the swamp. As she soothes restless spirits and transforms the house into her home, she begins to heal her own deep wounds. Her solitude doesn’t feel lonely—until a beautiful woman named Nemoira arrives on her doorstep, dredging Jude's long-buried desires right to the surface.

Scholfield’s novel is a genre-bending tapestry that weaves Southern Gothic elements with steamy sapphic romance, all against a sweeping historical backdrop that spans Reconstruction through the Civil Rights Era. Their writing revels in pairing unlikely elements, flitting from scenes of sticky gore to sublime strolls through the swamp. The novel is hard to characterize, because it explores so many ideas—yet somehow, everything hangs in just the right delicate balance.

I recently hopped on a video call with Yah Yah to find out how they managed to write a book specifically designed to get under my skin—plus a hint of what their next projects may explore.

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Michelle Delgado: It's been almost a month since your book came out! I imagine the past three weeks have been a total whirlwind. What has that been like?

Yah Yah Scholfield: It feels so weird, because I've been in the BookTok and Bookstagram spaces. I take copious notes whenever I read books. So when I'm seeing other people make playlists, [or] all these complex spreads and annotating my book, I'm like, “Oh, this is very, very real.” People are reading my words and going, “We like your words.” Thank you!

I think maybe in like another month or so, I'll start being like, “Okay, how are you feeling for real?” But right now, I just feel like a very nervous, scared chihuahua. But happy.

There's a shift that happens with a book, where it goes from your creative work to something that's marketed and put out to people. Something that really struck me about your book is the genre-bending that you do. I was so delighted by it.

Were you playing with genre throughout the writing, or was that something that Simon & Schuster was like “Okay, this is your genre, you’re writing horror.”

When I was writing On Sundays, I knew I wanted to be a horror writer, because I love horror obviously. But I'm very much influenced by a lot of literary fiction.

Literary fiction gives you lots of room to be introspective—I feel like with literary, you have space to just be like, “Okay, let's have this one emotion, and let's focus and dig on that emotion.” It'll impact the plot, of course, but it's like, let's take two seconds to just sit here and think. How would it feel? What is it like? What am I doing? I love that.

But also, I don't really think about genre anymore. I know there's supernatural elements, but I never would think of it as a fantasy. It's so odd. I just don't think about genre anymore. I'm just like, that's where I will let everyone else figure it out.

For me, I just want to write, and I want it to be terrifying, and I want it to make people's stomachs hurt. Derogatory…but also, positive.

A lot of parts made my stomach hurt. But there's something about that scene where a set of empty clothes is walking down the hallway that was a different kind of stomachache. A cold kind. I loved it.

That was my favorite scene, and it was one of the last ones I added in one of the last drafts. I really was thinking, how absolutely disturbing would it be to just see clothes walking?

I want to talk about how you write gore specifically. There’s this porousness that happens—the line between what’s happening inside and outside their bodies is constantly getting blurred.

Obviously, sexual violence is a major theme in the book. But I also feel like you wrote that specifically to get under my skin, because it hit on every single raw nerve for me.

Thank you! When I read good writing that really is evocative and hits me, I'm like, oh, you wrote that to hurt me. You came into my head and said, “What will make Yah Yah cry?”

Is that something that bothers you—that idea of, “I'm getting stabbed, and my blood is on the kitchen floor, and also I’m puking, and also I’m pissing myself.” I have OCD and emetophobia, so the idea of my insides getting out there…

What's up? Are we the same person?

I knew you got it.

I hope other people with OCD will read the book and be like, “Oh, not only does this character have OCD, but I can tell Yah Yah Scholfield is the most neurodivergent person ever put on this earth.” Terrifying. You get it.

I've had conversations with other artists who are emetophobic and explore it in their art, and there is some kind of catharsis or relief of seeing it on the page.

I'm more of a pure OCD kind of person. My brain is just constantly like, “Let's get her, guys! Let's jump her!” But when I put it on the page, it's out. I can look at it and deal with it, and I can go, okay, these are just thoughts. These are just words. I am not that person. Even though I may feel an insane amount of rage and confusion and spiraling, this is just one small component of me.

It feels very meditative to put it on a page, and also to have other people read that page and be like, “Oh, okay, I thought was the only one who was in the spiral.” But we're all in the spiral.

I’m definitely on OCD TikTok, and it’s so interesting to see how universal some things are. I just thought I was a little freak.

Okay, cool, I don't have to go to a monastery.

I was really thinking about that with Jude, because she doesn't have the internet. She's so isolated—which is very Gothic, but also, oh my god, life would be so difficult.

I mean, it’s already isolating to be neurodivergent and live with these thoughts in your brain. There's so much relief in connecting with other people.

I just want to tell her it's okay. I know she's just like, “I'm the worst person who’s ever lived.” Girl, you're okay. You're absolutely fine.

Something else I've been dying to ask—I was really keyed into Jude’s name. Sometimes she's Judith, sometimes she's Judy, sometimes she's Jude. She eventually gravitates most toward Jude, which is also the most androgynous name. It felt so significant.

Michelle, I adore you. I liked her being having all these names, right? Because there are different facets of herself.

When she's with her mother, when she's with her family, she's Judith—she's this proper, contained, little woman who’s afraid and does what she's told. [She’s] so broken and doesn't really know herself.

With Nemoira, she's Judy. And Judy is this wild creature of a woman. She's more—not more in tune with her body, but more free. Like, whatever, we're out here.

But Jude is just her, at her basic level. When I was writing it, I was like, of course it has to be Jude, because I like how all final girls have kind of an androgynous name. I love that. And she is the final woman.

I like having all these facets of oneself and being a different version of yourself, or a different person to different people. [It’s] the same with Ernestine, her mother. She's Ernestine: Ernest's daughter, the usher at church, the proper little church woman. But then she's also Nessie [to her sisters], and she's also Ma'am [to Jude]. I love when there's layers.

Thankfully, my family situation is not as bad as Jude's—but my family is all kinds of fucked up. I really, really loved the idea that Ernestine is both the abused and the abuser. You see those cycles of violence, and that felt so real to me.

Absolutely. We all have the ability to be harmed. And it's a conscious choice to harm, but sometimes it's out of our hands.

I love that part of Jude’s journey is discovering compassion for this person who hurt her. That was so powerful—there are so many books that don't go there, or go for a pure revenge story. But Jude holds both at once.

I guess that made my stomach hurt, too, because it’s what we all have to live with.

It's hard to hold both. I did a little talk at Charis Books—I was talking about my great grandma, and how I love my Nana. She was—oh my God, just the most amazing woman. I get all my personality, and the way I hold myself, and just so much of me is her.

But also, my grandma will tell stories about how cruel she could be, and abusive. Her mom never loved her. There’s this family story that we like, tee-hee haha about, but we shouldn't be haha—she hit my grandma in the head with a stiletto, and blood spurted. She was out for a while, until my Nana shook her awake and said, “Okay, go get some Chinese food.” I love my grandma, but then my mom would tell me stories like, “If I had a single shoe out, she would incinerate it.”

And it's like, all that bloodiness and violence and cruelty exist—but also, my Nana had the softest hands. Couldn't sing for the life of her, but she always sang in church. My grandma was cruel and cold to my mother, but she also calls me sweetie and I'm her little bunny. She loved me in such a special, deep way. You have to hold both, right?

As a survivor and whatnot, it's hard sometimes to be like, “This is true, but this is also true.” I think life is just about having that balance. But also—shout out to other victims and survivors who are like, “Fuck that shit!” Good for you as well. It's just constantly going back and forth between “fuck you” and like, “but I am you.”

Yeah—I was adopted, and my biological mom died a couple years ago. It was crazy, the amount of information I learned after her death, stuff that made me be like, “What the fuck? I didn't know you were like that.” But we had this really special relationship, and we looked identical. It was just so confusing. She always, always wanted her dad’s approval, and then he didn't even come to her funeral.

Family's so complicated, and people are so interesting, and it feels so arbitrary sometimes, how you end up with these people that you're tied to.

It's just like, oh, by random chance I was put with these people, and we just have to figure it out. What the hell? Crazy business.

I also wanted to ask about Candle, the hainted house where Jude makes a home for herself.

When I interviewed Lucy Rose, I asked her about being a filmmaker. The house she created in The Lamb feels so real, and she told me that she designed it like a movie set in her mind. She knew every corner of it.

Did you mock up Candle in any way? Is there like, a Sims build of Candle somewhere?

There's not! It exists only in my mind. I've tried to build it in The Sims, and it's like—you can't build the kind of house it is. It shouldn't exist. It's very much like Hill House, where you can describe it and it's like, “Okay, there's floors, there's walls, there's this, there's that, there's rooms. [And] there's also just like a place that is nowhere.”

I feel like people use the word “liminal space” too much, but it is very much just a strange nothing-and-everything kind of place, mostly because it's so untouched. And just Jude is in there, and then Nemoira.

I can put it into words, but I can't put it into space.

I really love The Woman in Black by Susan Hill. It’s much more sober, because the character is a lawyer, but when night falls in the story’s haunted house, and the mist rolls over the causeway, it’s like the land has this instability.

I felt similarly about your swamp. You feel like it’s doing something behind your back and rearranging itself.

I love the swamp, and I was thinking of a swamp as my own little version of the wild and windy moors. Have you read Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark? There's this one short story in there, it's about this bog that people are afraid and terrified of. You go in it, and it kind of sucks and tears at you. I just remember the end being like, the man comes out and he's missing a hand.

I don't know if that was, like, an exact inspiration for me—but thinking about it is like, okay, yeah, I can see there's some familiar connection. There's some family tree here.

I'm not quite sure the right way to say this, but I feel like books set during the Civil Rights Era, especially books by white writers, feature this double sided trope where the Black character is put through some horrible trauma to show that we’re in the Civil Rights Era. And then there’s always a white savior who’s like, “I’m naturally immune to white supremacy and prove not all white people are bad.”

I loved that in your book, white people are just on the margins and never taking center stage.

I get what you mean—I’m very much of the Tony Morrison mindset of like, I'm so sorry, but I don't write about white people. In the same way Jane Austen was, like, “I don't write about men because I don't know about men,” I feel like it would be dishonest to focus on something that I have no clue about. I don't know what y'all doing over there in white America!

I'm gonna write not only what I know, but I'm gonna write what feels real to me and what I'd like to see reflected.

But also, going back to thinking about how white writers write about the Civil Rights Era—it’s kind of like, you have to show the trauma, but also you have to do the Freedom Rider thing where there's this one white lady being like, “Guys, racism is bad!” Like, yes, thank you, amazing.

I do enjoy that movie with Hilary Swank sometimes, but there's no room for white people in Jude's story. First of all, she doesn't really know many, or any. And then it's like—there's monsters in the woods. She has to worry about getting eaten. There's only so much the girl can handle! We can't just random conversations with white people, you know what I mean?

It made me question why those tropes seem so inevitable, because you get across the terror of that era so vividly without them. When Jude escapes from Ma’am, she passes through sundown towns where she isn’t able to stop or rest. All of that was so heartbreaking and gripping and terrifying, and I think also really demonstrates the drive for survival that is so core to who Jude is.

A lot of [Jude’s] choices are just like, how do I spend as little time as possible in this nasty behind town? I need to go there to make my money, but—

This is gonna sound insane, but I live in Atlanta, right? And Atlanta is one of the most Black cities ever in the United States. Beautiful, beautiful place. I love it. But whenever me and my family go to, say, Helen, Georgia, and Athens, Georgia, I'm scared!

I remember the last time we went to Athens, there were Trump Vance signs everywhere. A state fair—there's MAGA signs everywhere. Confederate flags. And the one thing I'm thinking is, okay, I want to have fun. I want to have a good time. I'm here to survive, but I'm also, I'm not gonna die at a state fair. Nothing's gonna happen to me.

I have come this far, and I've been [through] a lot. The only reason I'm alive is because other people have survived. So I'm going to use the same survival skills, at a much smaller scale, to make it past the Confederate flags at the state fair.

What's up next? Are there creative projects you're dying to move on to? Or are you needing to just like, lay down for a month and process?

I already had WAY too much rest time (#chronicallyill), so now I'm working on Book 2, which I'm tentatively titling Right to Comfort—I wanna have my Flowers in the Attic moment, while also getting into discussions of eugenics and white supremacy, white passing Black people living alongside their oppressors and whatnot.

And while I am excited for Book 2, what I'm like, chomping at the bit to write is what I'm calling THE VILE FILES, which'll be a epistolary book chronicling the life of an infamous performance artist/adult film star, Viola Vile...

That sounds absolutely amazing. Okay, last question: This is so random, but is there is a story behind your handle, @fluoresensitive?

Okay, so—I am on Tumblr. No one look for me! But I've been here on Tumblr since 2011.

Here's the timeline: I get on Tumblr in 2011, 2012, I start doing role play stuff. Indie role play, role play groups. In 2014 or 2015, I make my own inspiration board for other Black people in role play.

After getting out of homelessness in 2018, I changed to @fluoresensitive, because I was tired of feeling dark and gloomy. I wanted to go into this new era of lightness, and even while dealing with terror and trauma, of being like joy and like brilliance and like illumination. But basically, it's just like a mix of “fluorescent” and “sensitive.” Shiny, but also sensitive as hell.

And now it's everywhere, and it's just me. I'm @flouresensitive. I love that. I'm just a cutie patootie, man.

I’ve been wanting to make a little horror collection tour video for TikTok for a while now, so I’m going to use next week’s newsletter to spur me into action! From It Follows fan art to a prop used in Saw III, I’ve had fun picking up oddities and knick knacks over the past few years. In next week’s newsletter, I’ll share a few treasured items in my horror collection.

After that, we’ll catch up with LaTanya McQueen, whose haunting novel When the Reckoning Comes navigates the tricky reality of interracial friendships, the weight of historic traumas, and how genuinely fucked up plantation wedding venues are.

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.