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How well can we ever know the people we love? Are there limits to healthy affection? Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya makes literal in her fiction the questions we might be afraid to ask. With her debut novelette, Helen House, these questions take a sinister turn. The story’s narrator and her girlfriend, Amber, share an intense physical and emotional connection. When they travel to Amber’s parents’ home in the countryside, the specter of Amber’s dead sister, Helen, lurks everywhere, causing the narrator to discover what she really means to this person she loves. Accompanied by original illustrations, Helen House is a sexy and thrilling ghost story, confronting our most intimate forms of haunting.
Currently based in Florida, Upadhyaya is the managing editor of Autostraddle, where she writes cultural criticism and has a reputation for developing unexpected essay themes (like Diner Week). Certain scary stories are always on her mind—from Sharp Objects to Candyman—and we spoke about film, abstract hauntings, and writing queer horror.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Michael Colbert
How did Helen House come into being?
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
My girlfriend is also a writer, and for our anniversary every year we do a mini writing retreat at this cabin in North Carolina. I wrote the first draft of Helen House the year we started this tradition. I had been reading a lot of ghost stories, and I just wrote it all in this cabin that had slightly haunted vibes. Then, I was like, “Oh no, this is a really weird length, I don’t know what to do with this.” It was somewhat of a coincidence that not long after that I heard from Ryan at Burrow Press. It worked out really well in that way; I was pretty convinced there wouldn’t be a place for it unless I made significant changes to the story and scope.
Michael Colbert
You mentioned you were reading lots of ghost stories. Were there particular influences for Helen House?
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
I actually had the realization somewhat recently that the two books I read in that cabin right before I spat out Helen House were Bag of Bones by Stephen King and Luster by Raven Leilani, two seemingly very disparate books, but I think when I say that, it makes sense. Here’s this very long dense ghost story—Bag of Bones is a sprawling ghost story, also contained to a cabin on a lake. And then there’s Luster, this sexy story.
Michael Colbert
From the first page, this story weaves the narrator’s desire for sexual intimacy with death. How were you thinking about the relationship between these two as you wrote?
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
I think I’ve always closely associated fear and desire. My friends and I all joke that horror is innately queer, but it’s also something I often feel. Fear and desire are weirdly entangled things, and I think that can especially be true for queer people. Often in my fiction I will take these concepts and literalize them. For this I was asking, what is the most extreme version of associating fear and desire? Let’s have desire and death be totally wrapped up in each other; what does it mean to be haunted in this very intimate, intimate way?
Michael Colbert
Another form the haunting takes is projection. One of the fundamental questions this story asks is how we project onto the people we love, what roles we ask—and need—our partners to fill. When does that tip into the obscene, grotesque, or horrific?
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Something that took me later drafts to figure out was how the idea of dolls and dollhouses played into this. At first, I had this question of who’s haunting who, and then that developed into who is a doll, how are people manipulating people in these ways, making them behave in certain ways or projecting things onto them like one might with a doll. Dolls are inherently creepy things that people are afraid of, but I also wanted to lean away from “here’s a creepy doll” and instead literalize it and have these people treating each other like dolls.
Michael Colbert
What questions about gay relationships were you interested in examining through the lens of horror?
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Something that I like to do in my fiction is take these stereotypes or assumptions made about queer couples that are rooted in some semblance of reality too. People talk about lesbian U-Hauling and lesbian urge to merge, and yes, these are assumptions and cliches, but also there is a kernel of truth to them. When queer people are telling those narratives, that’s so different than the dominant discourse assigning that to us. For example, I have another short story in which I take this idea of the lesbian urge to merge and literalize it to this couple where one of them is a mind reader and the other one really wants her mind read. There ends up being a literal merging of the two people. It’s something I do a lot: let me take this thing or this idea of codependency in queer relationships or queer people often needing their partners to also be family members if they don’t have familial support.
Michael Colbert
Do you have any hopes more broadly for queer work in horror?
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Lately I’ve been reading a lot of really great queer horror. This summer, I’ve read Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield. It inverts the monster narrative [and is] very romantic and very queer. I’m always interested in monster horror. I love this idea of queer and trans people being told they’re monsters for so long—and that still happens—and taking that narrative and turning it into something that’s actually for us. That can be really powerful. I also read Patricia Wants to Cuddle by Samantha Allen. It’s more of a horror comedy—a Bachelor parody that also features a sasquatch. It’s very queer, very funny and good, and also does this unexpected, subverted monster narrative. There’s been really good stuff coming out, and I want to see more of that, in film and TV too. I want it to really feel like queer horror and not just that we threw some gay characters into this horror movie. That’s kind of how I felt the new Scream movie was. I don’t just want gay characters—I love that, I’ll always love that—but I want the horror itself to feel queer in concept and storytelling.
Michael Colbert
You’re also an editor at Autostraddle. How does editing fit into your creative work?
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
I really, really get a lot out of having an intense editor-writer relationship. I’m doing incredibly hands-on editing of all kinds of things: movie reviews, music reviews, funny lists, but my favorite work falls under the realm of creative nonfiction—personal essays, experimental stuff, speculative nonfiction. At Autostraddle, I have over a dozen writers I work with regularly. I have a very individualized approach to editing; I meet the writer where they are and figure out what exactly it is they need or want from me. I feel like it can only benefit my own writing too to be so immersed in the brains and language of other writers who are inherently different from me.
Michael Colbert
What questions do you like to ask of a work as an editor, or viewer, or writer?
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
I’m really drawn to ambivalence. I really like not knowing exactly what’s happening, when there are a lot of questions being asked by the work itself, and when those questions are not exactly answerable. When I’m watching a ghost story—The Haunting of Hill House is one of my favorite shows too—I love to think about what is the haunting. There are elements of that show when the haunting is very literal, and there are elements where it’s a little more abstract. I also love the show Yellowjackets. That’s a show where there’s a lot of ambivalence as to what’s really happening. Is there a supernatural element to it? Is the supernatural a metaphor for the trauma that the girls experienced? What is going on? “What is going on” I think is the question I love to approach things, and I like when it’s kind of difficult to answer it, or maybe two people would answer it completely differently.
Michael Colbert
I love Yellowjackets. We don’t always know what’s going on; the question replicates reality. There’s not always a neat answer.
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
With Helen House, that was something I was thinking about a lot. Without giving away too much, there’s this element of shared nightmares. My sister and I used to have the same dreams, but also, did we? That was this narrative that I had created at some point: my sister and I are really close, and we used to have the same dreams. But sometimes within families there are these false memories that everyone creates together. Were we actually having the same dreams, or did she say something, and it made me feel like I had that dream? I was thinking about that a little bit with Helen House. There’s some ambiguity there too. How much of this was real? How much of what Amber has experienced was real? How much did her parents impress upon her, again going back to that idea of dolls? Being sisters, being really close, it would make sense we were having similar dreams, but were we actually having the same dreams? I kind of doubt it. But it’s easy to create those narratives, especially within a family.
FICTION
Helen House
By Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya
Burrow Press
October 18, 2022
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