Ivy Grimes' "Comic Fabulist Southern Gothic"
Women in Horror Month 2025, #1
In March, I will be running a series of interviews with women writers to celebrate Women in Horror Month. This is #1, with the wonderful Ivy Grimes. Please also check at the end for some of my updates (I have a new newsletter, for example!).
Thank you for doing the interview, Ivy, and congratulations on your upcoming debut novel The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion from Cemetery Gates Media. I greatly enjoyed reading this book as well as your earlier collection Glass Stories from Grimscribe Press.
“The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion is somehow as disturbing as it is delightful. An American Bluebeard on shrooms. Ivy Grimes writes with the wry humor of Brautigan and the dream-like disconnectedness of Murakami and always brings something new to the table. You will get sucked right into this strangely familiar or familiarly strange culty community, where two sisters confront and untangle a poisonous local history. It’s a surreal Southern Gothic with one part tender character work and two parts uh oh what the hell was that, and you’re not going to read anything else quite like it.”
—Thomas Ha
The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion releases April 21. Paperbacks will be available, but for now the Amazon ebook is up for preorders. People are going to be wondering if they ought to pick up this book–or hopefully, preorder it–so what would you like them to know about it?
The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion is a strange book, one I’m calling a comic fabulist Southern gothic. The main characters are Ruby and Opal, two sisters who grew up isolated from society, living with their mother in a tiny cabin in the woods, until their mother becomes too sick for them to care for alone. Their only friend is a weird kid who calls himself Didymus (Ruby gives him the nickname Phew), and even as a young kid, he goes around telling everyone he’s a preacher/prophet. He’s the one who tells Ruby about the strange mansion at the edge of the woods, owned by the Blaubart family. When Ruby goes there for a job, she finds that they’re essentially hiring for the position of “wife,” and she beats out many other applicants for the job. Her sister Opal has always tagged along as the younger sibling, and she sets out to rescue Ruby from her wifedom. That’s where we find ourselves at the beginning of the action.
Two main fairy tales that inspired this story are “Bluebeard” and “Snow-White and Rose-Red.”
I wanted to say, too, that I admire your novel Beulah so much, and I was honored to publish my book with the same press, Cemetery Gates. Thanks for the opportunity to answer these questions!
Aw, thank you so much! I am curious, what other authors and works do you find comparable to this one?
My three main artistic inspirations at this point in my life are David Lynch, Haruki Murakami, and Barbara Comyns. I think you find bits of each of them in this novel…eeriness and sadness and philosophizing along with absurdity and fun. I’ve also taken a lot of inspiration from writers like Kurt Vonnegut and Shirley Jackson and Barbara Pym and Kelly Link and Richard Brautigan. These writers made me feel free to skip the vegetables and go straight for dessert. That is, to write what I enjoy and not worry so much about what a writer is supposed to do.
I watched many seasons of King of the Hill while I was writing this book, and I also made reference to shows like The Golden Girls and Designing Women along the way. I love how Twin Peaks plays with the soap opera, and in that spirit, I enjoyed adding a few sitcom elements to the novel. Even though King of the Hill is set in Texas (which seems like its own country and is far from where I grew up), it helped me delve into the cadence and humor of the South. This was important since I wrote the book while living in Northern Virginia, which isn’t really the South.
I remember a lot of emotions when my first novel came out. How does it feel to have your debut novel coming up? Or what sorts of things are you thinking about as you prepare for the release?
If I remember correctly, your mother read the finished version of your novel Beulah but passed before the book’s release date. You said she always encouraged you to write. I felt emotional about your story, too!
For me, I don’t know. I’ve been sort of obsessed with writing fiction for the past decade. In the first few years, I wrote three novels that I have since dutifully murdered. They just weren’t right somehow. This one, The Ghosts of Blaubart Mansion, was so much fun to write, and it felt right. I truly love some of the characters in this book, maybe Phew most of all.
But I don’t feel a lot of emotion around publication itself. I want to share this world with other people, and I want to give them an experience. Publication doesn’t ensure that I do that, though, and I might never even know if I truly succeeded (in sharing what I wanted to share). I have to be content with my own pleasant experience while writing the book, and I am. And anyway, that’s in the past now.
What was your process for writing and preparing this novel for publication?
The fairy tales I mentioned, “Bluebeard” and “Snow-White and Rose-Red” were swimming around in my head before I started, along with one called “The Boy Who Could Not Shiver.” “Snow-White and Rose-Red” is about two innocent sisters who live with their innocent little mother in the woods until they befriend a bear…and I won’t spoil the rest. That led me to the initial setting and characters. And I knew I wanted to explore the Bluebeard story alongside my experience with living in the South. I feel like a lot of Southern prejudices and traditions are carried on, much like the Blaubart legacy in the book, because people get used to them. They don’t know how to change even when they want to. And I wanted to have some fun with that idea.
That was the concept. My process was simply to write chapter after chapter, pressing on even when I got lost a couple of times in the woods. That is, I stopped writing for a bit and felt sad. At one point I erased 10,000 words or so and went back to a turning point, because I felt I’d gone the wrong way. When I was done, I set the novel aside for a while, and then I returned to it to revise it. And I was happy to find that it still made me laugh, and I enjoyed returning to that world.
I send things out before they’re finished, because nothing ever feels finished. And I’ve enjoyed working with Joe Sullivan at Cemetery Gates!
What advice would you give to other writers as they work on a first novel?
Don’t listen too much to anyone else. Write it for yourself.
There’s that Tolstoy quote – “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.” It’s hard to play the submissions game if you don’t have patience. Waiting for people to read your work can take longer than the writing process. You might write a beautiful novel, send it out to everyone in the world, and get nothing but rejections. If you love the work, though, and you persist in writing new things and submitting, you’ll enjoy yourself, find your niche, and meet other likeminded people.
I don’t know how to make money or be popular, though! I don’t have any advice for that, nor do I want to receive any.
I thought of you for Women in Horror Month because you have works published in horror markets, and because you are involved in the horror community, but I know you are interested in other genres and in experimentation. What thoughts would you like to share on these topics in general, and as regards your debut novel?
Many women in horror craft stories that are absolutely hardcore, as brutal as anything you’ve read, and I think some hardcore male fans avoid their work because they’re expecting something gentle, shot in soft focus. Nothing could be further from the truth!
On the other hand, ha, my stuff is relatively gentle. I think it can be shocking in its own way, but not through pure terror. It isn’t really horror in the classic sense. It’s on the fringes of the genre, along with some of the writers I’ve mentioned as inspirations. I’m very drawn to fabulism, which often lends itself to an unsettled feeling. Unheimlich.
As I labeled my book, I might label myself as sort of a comic gothic fabulist. I add the “comic” so that people aren’t disappointed when I joke around. Fans of Southern gothic might already figure that the tradition of Faulkner and O’Connor is infused with horror and humor in equal measure.
You might not like my book, but I hope you’ll read some of the authors I mentioned. Knowing where writers came from, their web of influence, enriches the experience of reading them in my opinion. I used to say that genre labels didn’t matter except for marketing purposes, but now I believe it helps us understand the soil a writer is planted in, and from there, to discover more writers to read. I’m always on the hunt for more books that change my energy, change my life.
What is a question you wish I had asked. Ask and answer (please).
What’s your favorite prophecy the child prophet Phew makes in this book?
“Be a good sport, because life is gonna throw you some curveballs. That’s what the Lord says.”
Thank you so much, and best wishes on your new release!
Ivy Grimes is originally from Birmingham, Alabama, and she currently lives in Virginia. She has an MFA from the University of Alabama. Her stories have appeared in The Baffler, Vastarien, hex, Maudlin House, Cosmic Horror Monthly, Seize the Press, ergot., Potomac Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Grime Time is available from Tales From Between. Her collection Glass Stories is out now with Grimscribe Press.
Find ivy at :
And as always in Noglesque, I will end with some of my own stuff:
As I am also a woman in horror, please do check out my work this month:
I started a new newsletter focused on Creativity & Inspiration, and the first issue “How Can Publishing Affect Your Motivation” is here: https://christi-nogle.kit.com/posts/how-can-publishing-affect-motivation-creativity-inspiration-1
My newest updates are always at https://linktr.ee/christinogle
I have a newly updated website at https://christinogle.com/
I am active on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/christinogle.bsky.social
and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/christinogle/
My novel Beulah is available at Amazon, and my other books should be available at any online seller:
