Welcome back to Scare Me! a weekly horror newsletter. Today, we’re speaking with Venus, the prolific creator behind one of my favorite horror channels and a very cool Fable book club. We’ll get to meet her canine familiar, too!

I haunt a lot of online horror spaces, and after a while, I start to see the same recs resurface.

The extreme horror crowd (love u guys) perpetually has one or several conversations about Playground and/or Cows and/or Gone to See the River Man. General fiction readers mingle with horror fans, curious to see what the Marcus Kliewer buzz is all about. Then there’s the broad swath of general horror readers like me, who try to keep up with new releases in between half-hearted arguments about whether Stephen King is actually that good.

But there’s another kind of creator—a rarer and more intriguing kind—who has unique taste, a distinct point of view, and a knack for curation. This kind of creator fluently keeps up with the latest bookish happenings, while also injecting fresh recommendations and perspective into the discourse. It’s precisely how I’d describe today’s featured guest.

Venus first caught my eye on TikTok when I was tagged in a trend she started. I instantly followed her and soon I was seeing new-to-me book recs with all kinds of bizarre and interesting premises.

Venus is active on the holy trinity of book platforms—BookTok, Bookstagram, and BookTube—and her presence on all three is designed to center weird, literary Black fiction. Her posts lead readers back to her Fable book club, WSL Black Girls, where she hosts monthly discussions of books that focus on “black main characters who are weird, strange, really sad, or misunderstood.”

Last year, author Yah Yah Scholfield proposed that Black women are uniquely poised to explore profound weirdness in literature, in a post called “Who Gets to Be a Weird Girl?” It’s a question Venus is actively exploring as well, and she’s a true curator of the strange.

We caught up over email recently, and I got to learn all about how she began her Fable book club, what “weird” means to her, and how she found her beautiful dog, Cupid. I highly recommend following along on her journey—and I guarantee you’ll find some fantastic books along the way!

This conversation has been lightly edited for formatting. All links and errors are my fault!

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Venus! Thank you so much for chatting with me. Could you introduce yourself to the newsletter?

I’m Venus (she/her), a 26-year-old Midwesterner. I started making videos on TikTok (@venusandcupid) when I realized that my taste in books was pretty different from that of my friends.

My friend group played a big role in getting me back into reading, but after I recommended that we buddy-read a Mona Awad book and received some…differing opinions on what was entertaining in a book, I thought, okay, I’ve got to find other people to talk about my books with.

What was your introduction to weird, strange, literary Black fiction?

My introduction to Weird Girl fiction was, like many people, through the works of Mona Awad, Ottessa Moshfegh, Eliza Clark and other non-Black contemporaries.

For better or worse, subgenres—with sometimes extremely ambiguous qualifiers—have become essential marketing tools for publishers and readers alike. I have mixed feelings about these sub- and sub-subgenres, sometimes feeling that they’re reductive or that publishers are TOO aware of these little categories that readers have carved out but, alas, it’s in our nature to classify and I fall victim to it as well (obviously lol).

It didn’t take long, looking at those trendy Weird or Sad Girl Fiction recommendation posts, to realize that they almost never included books written by Black authors or featuring main characters who were Black. If there was, it was ALWAYS one of the same few books (cough cough Luster by Raven Leilani).

I found myself at an all too familiar place: Feeling othered in the very space that, to me, was about demystifying the strange. I didn't like how I could find such deep kinship within these stories and at the same time feel as though I was still several degrees removed from them.

I say a familiar feeling because this didn't just appear within the books I read. For example, the ethos of punk music is non-conformity, so why do I often find myself surrounded by mostly white bodies at hardcore shows?

There are so many ways that Weird Girl fiction can even be defined. Books that, themselves, are absurd and play with reality; books that are set in reality but the main character is strange, off-kilter or misunderstood; books that may not feature a woman but that a self-described weird girl might like. I often say that there is a weird-sad axis when it comes to this subgenre.

Do you remember the first book from within the subgenre that really captivated you?

The first book that really captured me, when I discovered this subgenre, was Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter. I learned from this book that, unlike the books that defined my first adolescent reading phase, non-stop action is not a necessity. I learned what it meant to seep into the black hole that is someone else’s narrative.

Months later, Luster by Raven Leilani provided a similar feeling to me, with a Black lead, and I decided that I had to find more.

What intrigues or attracts you to weird girl fiction? There are so many different niches within the space!

It feels wild to say—knowing the actions of some of the characters in these books—but I find immense kinship within the pages of a story about an unruly woman.

For the entirety of my childhood I felt odd. Well—I felt normal, but those around me treated it as odd. From the music I listened to, the people I had crushes on, the way I liked to do my hair…truly, for reasons that were not strange at all.

I am far away enough from that indoctrination to now know that this is not true, but I grew up feeling evil. I think it can be hard for someone who has never been this brand of religious to truly understand the Fear of God™. To believe that simple facets of your personality and way of being would condemn you to hell. So when I read books with a protagonist that is messy, obsessive, destructive, a little bit evil—it’s like a relief.

I'm curious to know what's catnip for you—what are the elements of a very specifically Venus-coded book?

A Venus-coded book is one where the main character feels out of step with the rest of the world, socially inept, in tail spin. I love exploring the interior of a misunderstood, hyper-aware mind.

Could you tell me more about your decision to launch a Fable book club? How did you get started, and what have you enjoyed about the process so far? Have you had any surprises, unexpected connections, or discoveries?

I started on a personal journey to identify where the hell the weird Black girls were. Were there no “weird fiction” books about Black women? Did they exist, but just didn't get the same buzz as others? Were they just not categorized the same?

I started by scouring Goodreads, YouTube, TikTok, blogs—ANYTHING that claimed to have the ultimate list of weird girl books. Still, only a handful of books centered Black women. Then, I would spend hours reading synopses of Black books tagged with literary fiction, horror, magical realism, or anything that I recognized to have overlap.

The problem is that it’s pretty hard to tell just how weird a book or its character might be until you read it. So I decided I just needed to start reading books that I had a hunch about and see after if I thought it fit into the canon. From there, I would post on TikTok about the experience.

I developed a set of criteria that I thought could help me classify if a book fit into the “weird girl canon” or not. There was a positive response and a couple of people were interested in reading the books I was “testing.” Eventually, the idea of a formal online book club came together.

It could be selection bias, seeing as our data set is still so small, but so far Nigerian authors seem to take the cake when it comes to unique explorations of sad/strange/complex characters and I’m loving it!

Who are some of the weird lit authors you're most drawn to? What books do you find yourself recommending again and again?

When I decided to create the WSL Book Club there was one problem that I didn't anticipate: I often find myself putting off reading books that are potential candidates because I want to read it with the club! If this had remained a solo journey I could have doubled the amount of books I’ve read thus far.

But now I’ve limited myself to one book a month so we can read together. The group is still within its first year and we’ve read six books together so far. I’m very excited to read more from Helen Oyeyemi and there are SEVERALLL 2026 releases that have caught my eye.

The way I see it, 2026 is the year of the Weird Black Girl.

I love your social media presence—but I have to admit that I love it extra when Cupid makes appearances. Could you tell me more about her story? How did you meet? Are there any stories her true fans should know?

My relationship with Cupid is the embodiment of that meme: “Gets a dog to help with anxiety. Dog has more anxiety than me.”

Cupid is a rescue dog who, along with her entire litter, was saved from a hoarding situation. While the rest of her litter were adopted out shortly after the rescue, Cupid (the runt) stayed four months after the other dogs were off living their new lives.

When I went to meet Cupid at the house she was being fostered at to see if we’d be a good fit, she quietly cuddled up to me on the couch. They told me that, of all the people who had come to visit her, this was the first time they had ever seen her give that affection to anyone. I have since learned that this is so true of her skittish nature. She genuinely is the sweetest dog ever, but she is afraid of everything. The wind, men, a falling leaf from a tree.

At the same time she is fiercely loyal. She would immediately set aside any anxiety of hers, if it meant protecting me. When I was at my lowest Cupid’s love kept me afloat and her love is truly infectious.

Our first bonus newsletter is coming out this weekend! Thank you SO much to everyone who’s submitted—your projects are so cool and I’m psyched to share them. Fair warning: I google you guys when you subscribe, so I might give your projects a shoutout if I’ve managed to sleuth. We are in a parasocial relationship, after all!!!

After that: We’ll be back to our regular Thursday newsletters with a wild card. I want to have a little horror ramble in between the interviews and am still deciding what about. It will be a surprise to all of us!

P.S. I reviewed Molka by Monika Kim and Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker over on Macabre Daily! Both are supremely weird and I loved them!

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.