Gothic Horror: A Guest Post by Andrew Joseph White
Gothic horror meets historical fiction in The Spirit Bears Its Teeth, an unflinching tale shining a light on the often overlooked experience of transgender and autistic people throughout history. Read on for an exclusive essay from Andrew Joseph White on writing The Spirit Bares Its Teeth.
Paperback $14.99
The Spirit Bares Its Teeth (B&N Exclusive Edition)
The Spirit Bares Its Teeth (B&N Exclusive Edition)
In Stock Online
Paperback $14.99
New York Times bestselling author Andrew Joseph White returns with the transgressive gothic horror of our time!
New York Times bestselling author Andrew Joseph White returns with the transgressive gothic horror of our time!
When I came up with The Spirit Bares Its Teeth, I was twenty-three years old, sitting in a dim Washington, D.C. café with a rapidly cooling hot chocolate; I may have been skipping class to be there. The occasion? My debut novel, Hell Followed With Us, wouldn’t release for another few months, but my publisher had already asked to see my next book, and—
“I’ve got nothing,” I muttered to my agent.
That was true. Most of my novels are stories I’ve sat on for years: carefully entwining them with media inspiration, my lived experience, and hot-button issues that shove their way into my life as a trans, disabled person in the United States. But at that moment, I was empty-handed and hungry. Come on, I thought as I stared down at a notebook of half-formed ideas. When you’re an up-and-comer in the publishing industry, there’s no time to wait for a story to come naturally. Look at yourself. Look at the world. Grab the first thing that sticks with you and run.
And so The Spirit Bares Its Teeth came into existence messily, forcibly dragged from the ether. I’d ended up grabbing a massive tangle of my own feelings and had no idea how to make a coherent novel out of it all. At that point in my life, I’d been on testosterone for almost two years, and my gendered experience was giving me whiplash, ricocheted between maleness and femaleness on the whims of strangers. I’d discovered my autism while writing Hell Followed With Us, but I was still figuring out what that meant, having spent twenty years without a word for why I struggled so much. I was angry, yes, but I’d already written my anger novel.
The thing is, I was scared too. And I was ready to look at my fear.
As it turns out, for a story that discusses the above trans and autistic experiences through the lens of isolation, mistreatment, and history, gothic horror provides the perfect medium. Victorian England’s rampant misogyny and ableism became remarkable mirrors for those bigotries today; gothic horror’s fixation on the wrongs of the past and the failures of the present dragged this all to the forefront, with the help of a few ghosts. Throw in some surgery so I could get my fix of blood and guts, and The Spirit Bares Its Teeth was born.
Did this book fight me every step of the way? Absolutely. Without the years I need for a book idea to simmer, I was learning the story as I wrote it, and we didn’t always get along. But when I see how far this book has come, I think, that struggle was worth it. The teens who feel seen in their frustration and hurt—and the adults who feel the same—remind me why I do this. And I truly hope this beautiful paperback edition of The Spirit Bares Its Teeth brings the story to even more people.
