Rhiannon Grist on Rage, Weird Fiction, and Home Sick
Women in Horror 2026, #4
For the fourth Women in Horror interview for 2026, Rhiannon Grist:
Rhiannon Grist is an award-winning Welsh writer of Weird, Speculative and Dark fiction. Her novella, The Queen of the High Fields (Luna Press, 2022), won the British Fantasy Award for Best Novella 2023. Her debut novel, Home Sick, is coming out with Solaris on July 14th (US) and July 16th (UK) 2026.
Thanks so much for being interviewed! I was fortunate enough to read an advance copy of your new novel Home Sick and really loved it.
Thank you so much! I’m really glad you liked it.
I was curious, how did you get the initial idea for the book, and how did it come together? Did you draw on your own experiences for anything in Home Sick? Are there other novels that influenced it?
Home Sick started as a bad joke. My writers’ group were coming up with horror stories for socially anxious people, like sudden visitors who don’t leave, or going to an event and finding you’ve worn the exact wrong thing. I had the idea of moving to a cottage in the middle of nowhere only to find it’s a semi-detached. Imagine intimately sharing your isolation with a complete stranger, who can hear everything inside your house just as you can hear everything inside theirs.
I didn’t come back to the idea until after I moved in 2021. My partner started working from home during the pandemic, so we needed to move to a bigger place. We bought a flat (a condo) in a new build, so we weren’t able to see inside until the day we moved in.
I’m not sure if it was the latent anxiety about the pandemic or the fact that we hadn’t been able to see inside, but it took two years before I started feeling at home in the new place. Every room felt too big or too small, too light or too dark. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t get comfortable. I came to believe that I’d moved there to die. I also felt deeply ashamed to be struggling, given that many people were dealing with so much worse at that time.
Eventually I tried to cope by writing down all the horrible things I was thinking and feeling. I dialled it all up to 11 and poured everything into that bad joke, and that was Home Sick.
Advance praise for Home Sick:
“It is beyond a shadow of a doubt one of the best horror books you can pick up in 2026 and beyond.” —Johanna van Veen, author of Blood On Her Tongue
“Home Sick is a liminal fever dream of a novel exploring isolation, anger, and what it means to find - and fight for - a home.” —MK Hardy, author of The Needfire
The cover is really attention-grabbing. Who’s the artist?
It is, isn’t it! The cover was designed by Katie Klim who also designed the covers for Sarah Maria Griffin’s Eat the Ones You Love and Lindy Ryan’s UK edition of Bless Your Heart. I knew I wanted a good bold font and a singular striking image, something you could recognise from across a room. So, Katie created this really creepy double sheep design in moody pink. I think it’s safe to say she knocked it out of the park.
Tamsin is such a memorable character, one who carries quite a lot of anger. It’s an emotion one often encounters in horror, but here I would say the emotion is treated a little differently than one often sees (i.e. it’s not the kind of righteous anger that makes you root for a character to take revenge or something like that). I noticed your description of The Queen of the High Fields also focuses on “Angry misfit girls,” and I wonder, what draws you to writing about anger?
I have tried to write an answer to this question so many times. I think there’s just too much to say, so I’m going to have to risk doing myself a disservice and try (and fail) to keep it brief.
When I was in my 20s, I was really angry. I was a young woman experiencing and noticing misogyny more than I ever had before in my life, but I didn’t always know how to process or have somewhere to put that anger. It just boiled away inside of me, doing nothing but eat me up. I was irritable, brittle, and felt deeply unsafe in the world—all very understandable reactions to my environment, but not really helping me thrive.
Rebecca Solnit writes about this in her article All the Rage in New Republic. She theorizes that women are getting more comfortable sharing their rage now that we’re no longer as economically dependent on men. We don’t have to keep sweet quite as much as we used to (though the pressure is most definitely still there), so we’re seeing a surge in writing on female rage. However, there’s still a lot of misunderstanding around anger.
“Anger itself is a catch-all term for a lot of overlapping but distinct phenomena,” Solnit writes. “Bodily anger, with rising blood pressure and quickened pulse, tension, and often a surge of energy […] is, in the moment, a preparation to respond to danger. It may be useful if you’re actually being attacked; when it becomes a chronic state, it turns the body against itself”.
We’re also currently seeing a lot of anger on social media. I’m not sure if it’s because social media companies have realised that people engage more if they’re angry or if it’s because there’s a lot to be angry about. It’s probably a bit of both. Either way, it feels like there’s a deep hunger to let loose our rage. I tie myself in knots sometimes wondering if the outpouring of anger is actually helping anything. Is it powering us toward justice, providing catharsis, or keeping us in that perpetual state of emergency? The answer is probably way more complicated that what I can write in this interview, and really down to each individual’s experience.
As to how this all feeds into Tamsin and Home Sick, there are some truly amazing and important books about female rage just now where the anger is righteous and vengeance is the goal. But Home Sick is not one of them.
In Home Sick the focus is not necessarily on what might make Tamsin angry, but how that anger feels in her body. The suppression, the shame, the frustration, the powerlessness. How it complicates her relationships with others and with herself. Thanks to my own experiences with anger, having a big cathartic angry moment felt dishonest. Instead, I wanted to sit with the discomfort, chew it over and see it for all its “overlapping and distinct phenomena.”
I notice that you embrace Weird fiction in your bio, and there were definitely elements of Home Sick that struck me as being of the Weird genre. At the same time, the book was quite accessible and felt like it might be attractive to a broader audience than most Weird fiction is. I thought this was fascinating and wondered if it was a conscious plan you had, or if it just worked out that way.
The earlier drafts of Home Sick were definitely darker, weirder, harder to read. It was honest about Tamsin’s headspace, but it was a difficult reading experience. So yes, I did consciously pull it back a bit to make it more digestible. I trimmed back the interiority, cut about fifty per cent of the questions, and made Tamsin a little more goal-oriented—especially at the start.
However, I did keep the Weird stronger toward the middle. Tamsin loses her grip both on what’s happening in the cottage and in her mind. She’s struggling with some big personal issues. At the same time, she’s falling into a world that’s perhaps outside of human understanding. I think Weird excels in capturing those liminal spaces, where things aren’t so black and white and there are no easy answers.
I’m also a big believer that to find your mind you have to lose it first. I love fever dream sequences or moments when the world goes topsy-turvy. Big Shakespearean Forest of Arden type stuff where in order to find what’s really important all the rules have to go out the window for a while. That can be a bit marmite to readers, but it felt important to this story.
I think no matter what I write, there’s always something other-worldly and unexplained.
While the book has elements of other genres, it is most definitely a horror novel, and we can put that down to the psychological horror for sure, but some terrifying scenes here are more physical and action-based. I was curious, how did you feel writing those scenes? Was anything in this book a departure for you?
For me, action scenes feel less like a departure and more like a return. I first started writing when I was a teenager, scribbling away at supernatural mysteries with teen protagonists long before terms like YA and romantasy existed. I was into anime at the time as well, so these early books were always very action oriented.
As an adult, my work has become way more introspective. As one commenter once put it, I’m more of the “staring moodily at a can of baked beans school of narration” these days. The first two thirds of Home Sick definitely reflect that change with lots of interiority and an almost claustrophobic first-person point of view. But the last third of Home Sick is a return to that rollercoaster ride of frenetic action from my youth, but with way more gore.
To be honest, it was probably the easiest part to write. The first two thirds had done the hard work to position Tamsin’s character, her desires, her goals, her challenges. In the last third, she has her plan of attack and the dominoes fall thick and fast. It’s a part of the book that, if I go in to check a detail or find a quote, I catch myself getting swept up in the flow and just reading.
I haven’t had the chance to read The Queen of the High Fields or your earlier work. Would you tell me a bit about it?
The Queen of the High Fields is a contemporary dark fantasy novella with elements of folk horror. It’s about two young Welsh women, Carys and Hazard, who have no interest in modern life. Y’know, job, relationship, car, blah. So, they decide to try and get to this mythical island that’s said to exist off the coast of their hometown—the High Fields.
The novella is told in two timelines. In one, we see Carys and Hazard painstakingly plan and make their way to the High Fields. In the other, we see Carys ten years after she left the island, returning to face the friend-turned-goddess she left behind.
The novella explores a lot of my usual themes of belonging, misfit women, folklore, and power. And it won the 2023 British Fantasy Award for best novella which totally took me by surprise!
Do you have recommendations for Welsh or Scottish authors that American readers ought to seek out?
I’m assuming folks stateside know Ally Wilkes and her arctic Horror books All the White Spaces and Where the Dead Wait. She grew up in Wales and is very knowledgeable of Scottish folklore, too.
Lucie McKnight Hardy writes amazing Weird fiction. Her novel Water Shall Refuse Them is a modern witchcraft story set in rural Wales during a sweltering heatwave.
Lyndsey Croal is doing great stuff with dark fiction inspired by Scottish folklore. Her latest is a novella called In This City Where it Rains about ghosts you can only see on rainy days.
Rose McDonagh has a collection of weird fiction called The Dog Husband. There’re a few stories—namely “The Mute Swan” and “The Caravan Site”—I think about regularly.
Joanna Corrance has a dark fairy tale of a novel called The Gingerbread Men about a man who follows a witchy woman to a wintery hotel where men have to entertain her with stories.
Kirsty Logan and Heather Parry are also top recommendations for dark Scottish fiction. Check out Logan’s collection Things We Say In The Dark and Parry’s latest novel Carrion Crow.
Who are some other contemporary women in horror you think more people ought to be reading?
Well, there are some amazing horror authors debuting this year! The ones resonating most with me are Megan Bontrager’s The Sea Hides its Dead (cosmic horror meets sea caves), Deena Helm’s Our Cut of Salt (Palestinian gothic horror), Sam Beckbessinger’s Femme Feral (Menopausal werewolves!), and Kennedy Cole’s There Used to be People Here (70s X-Files in Mississippi).
What’s next for you?
The wonderful folk at Solaris have been organising lots of events and appearances for Home Sick. Nothing’s live just yet, but I’ll be spamming everyone’s feeds about it all soon.
I’ve also been working on another horror novel about occult architecture and ritual magick. Think Rose/House meets The Secret History.
I’m already eager to read that! Thanks so much for being interviewed, Rhiannon!
Thank you so much for inviting me. It’s been a pleasure 😊
And thank YOU for reading! We have at least one more Women in Horror Month interview for 2026, so make sure to subscribe! Also watch for Home Sick, on Netgalley now if you are an advance reader and otherwise, preorder here.