Guest Post: The Bone Houses Author Emily Lloyd-Jones on Grief Inspiring Horror

Here’s a confession: I’ve never sat through a horror film.
I’ve started a few, but inevitably I will end up scuttling from the room like my cat does every time I bring out the vacuum cleaner. So when I look back on my last few novels and realize I somehow found myself working within the boundaries of horror, I have to laugh. How did I even get here? I always wonder.
Here’s another confession: I plotted a zombie novel while I traveled cross-country for my grandmother’s funeral.
I can say this because I know she wouldn’t have minded. My grandmother was always tickled by the fact I wrote stories, and sometimes she asked if she would ever show up as a character. She was an incredible woman—the eldest of many children, and when her parents passed away prematurely, she was put in charge of raising her younger siblings. She was tough, determined, and her wit never dulled. It was only after I’d finished writing The Bone Houses that I realized I’d given this background and those personality traits to my heroine.
I spent time with my family after the service. My aunts had carefully boxed up a lot of family history: pictures, papers, and news clippings. We sifted through the lives of people I was distantly related to, but whose stories I would never know in their entirety. I saw my grandfather—whose family came from northern Wales—with my grandmother in faded old photographs. I kept a few pictures, because I wanted something to hold onto.
Zombies have been a metaphor for many things since they became popular: capitalism, disease, the collapse of civilization, the fear that humanity is one catastrophe away from turning on itself. They’re easy villains; I have slain countless in video games. But as I sat with my family, surrounded by old photographs and papers, I wondered if I could turn zombies into a story about family loss. After all, the idea of the risen dead is terrifying—but what if it’s someone you loved? Would you rather they walked the earth in some form? Would you cling to this echo of their old life? Or not?
It probably sounds a little strange to say I put a lot of myself into a novel about zombies and magical curses. But if you look closely, you’ll find my grandmother’s prickly wit in the heroine’s dialogue, my grandfather’s Welsh heritage in the world-building, and my own experiences with chronic pain in the hero’s experiences. I wanted to explore how losing a loved one affects us all. And how we move on from that.
Life is, in many ways, defined by loss. We lose possessions, we lose jobs, we lose homes, and we lose people. And those empty spaces left behind—those empty gaps can be terrifying. For my characters, these losses transformed into physical monsters that had to be fought.
But that was the point. Those monsters could be fought.
There is an old Welsh myth, and I included it in my book, about a magical champion that could not be defeated by physical means. He was too strong, too powerful. The only way to bring him down was to name him, thus breaking his power.
I think this is what fiction—and specifically horror—is all about. It is giving names to nameless fears. Because once a thing has been named, it isn’t quite so terrifying.
Why do I write about scary things? Because I want to know I can survive them.
But I’m probably still too much of a wuss for horror films.
The Bone Houses is on shelves now. For more Emily Lloyd-Jones, check out her story in the recently released Poe-retellings anthology His Hideous Heart, where you can find her hacker-girl take on “The Purloined Letter.”