{"id":59847,"date":"2025-07-12T15:05:14","date_gmt":"2025-07-12T15:05:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/59847\/"},"modified":"2025-07-12T15:05:14","modified_gmt":"2025-07-12T15:05:14","slug":"oh-the-horror-oregon-artswatch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/59847\/","title":{"rendered":"Oh, the horror! \u2022 Oregon ArtsWatch"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"WendyWendy N. Wagner, author of the new novel Girl in the Creek. Photo: John Kaczanowski<\/p>\n

\u201cThe body lay at the very limit of daylight, the last clear place on the stones before the wood framing in the ancient adit began to peel away from the walls and pile up in moldy heaps.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 Wendy N. Wagner, Girl in the Creek<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Thus begins Oregon horror author Wendy N. Wagner<\/a>\u2019s new novel, Girl in the Creek<\/a>, a true crime\/climate horror phantasmagoria that is generating a ton of buzz leading up to its July 15 release. The Library Journal has already called it a \u201ctightly written master class in horror.\u201d This is Horror.com<\/a> said, \u201cCombining true crime with gruesome eco-horror, Wagner\u2019s latest is destined to be one of the must-read horror novels of summer.\u201d And Wagner is drawing comparisons to T. Kingfisher<\/a> (What Moves the Dead) and Jeff VanderMeer<\/a> (Annihilation).<\/p>\n

\"bobby<\/p>\n

Which is all heady stuff for Wagner, though this is by no means her first rodeo. Girl in the Creek is her fifth novel, following 2021\u2019s The Deer Kings, 2018\u2019s An Oath of Dogs, and two Pathfinder tie-ins, Starspawn and Skinwalkers. The Washington Post named Wagner\u2019s novella The Secret Skin one of the Year\u2019s Best Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy books of 2021, and Locus named the novella to its Recommended Reading List. Oh, and Wagner has had sixty-plus short stories published across the spectrum of speculative fiction.<\/p>\n

So, that\u2019s a lot, right? But wait, there\u2019s more. Wagner doesn\u2019t just write like a runaway freight train; she helps other writers get to where they need to, as well. She\u2019s an editor on Lightspeed<\/a> magazine; and as editor-in-chief of Nightmare Magazine<\/a>, she has been nominated for Editor of the Year twice, including this past June. She didn\u2019t win either time, but two nominations in a three-year period indicates she must be doing something right.<\/p>\n

Then there are Wagner\u2019s essays and articles and poems published in various outlets around the country and interwebs. With nearly a hundred published works in circulation one way or another, it\u2019s not unfair to suggest that Wagner is prolific. And when you\u2019re writing that much and getting published that much, and building up the street cred she has over the past two decades, is it too much to think that Wendy Wagner might be on the verge of a breakthrough?<\/p>\n

Sponsor<\/p>\n

\"Clackamas<\/a><\/p>\n

Wagner, an Oregon native, hails from the small town of Ash Valley. \u201cSmall\u201d doesn\u2019t quite cover it: When Wagner was growing up there, the population of the entire community was sixty-two. Sixty. Two. No post office. Next to no television reception. Kids her own age were few and far between, literally. \u201cMost of the time,\u201d Wagner remembers, \u201cI was the only kid in my whole class.\u201d Her father was a logger. Her mother worked at the local resort. It was Wagner\u2019s mom who engendered her love of speculative literature. \u201cMy mom,\u201d she says, \u201cloved science fiction. She owned every book by Frank Herbert<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"TheThe cover of Girl in the Creek, which is being released July 15.<\/p>\n

As a child in a town with no television, Wagner used to wait impatiently for the bookmobile that came out to Ash Valley every two weeks. \u201cWe\u2019d get out of school to go to the bookmobile, and I would be in there for an hour picking out books. I would get anything and everything. One year, there was a really popular run of modern Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books, and they were very skinny, but I checked out a hundred and twenty-five of them and I read them all in two weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wagner discovered horror during her formative years in a way not too dissimilar from how horror fans all over the world have discovered the genre: namely, by reading or watching material that wasn\u2019t necessarily appropriate for her virgin eyes. <\/p>\n

\u201cI found Stephen King when I was seven or eight,\u201d she says. \u201cMy sister checked out the book Skeleton Crew, a short story collection, and there was a story in there called The Raft. I remember her telling my mom, \u2018This is the scariest thing I\u2019ve ever read!\u2019 And I was like, \u2018I feel like I\u2019m not supposed to read this \u2013 but I\u2019m gonna \u2014 cuz I gotta see what\u2019s so scary!\u2019 And then, of course, I\u2019m like, \u2018I love this!\u2019 That opened the doors.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not to say that there weren\u2019t any children\u2019s authors who had a significant impact on Wagner\u2019s literary development. \u201cSusan Cooper<\/a>, who had a series that took Welsh and English folklore and recasts it in modern times, was hugely influential,\u201d says Wagner. Tamora Pierce<\/a> was another writer who was very important to me. She wrote really feminist stories about a girl who was going to be a knight.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those books, The Song of the Lioness series, had a profound impact on Wagner in ways that would manifest themselves both immediately and much later in her career: \u201cThat was the first book I ever read that was in multiple POVs. I was like, \u2018Woah! What the heck? A story can be told from more than one person in one book? That\u2019s so weird.\u2019 That made me think about how books get written, and I thought, \u2018Maybe I want to be a writer when I grow up.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Two other great influences on Wagner were Octavia E. Butler<\/a> and her mother\u2019s great literary love, Frank Herbert. \u201cOctavia Butler\u2019s books started coming out in the late eighties and early nineties, right at a time when I was really looking for stuff that was a little bit deeper, and she and Frank Herbert were mind-opening stuff,\u201d Wagner says. \u201cIt was science-fiction but it was about how social stuff happens.\u00a0It was so much cooler than like, robots in space. It was, \u2018Wow! People! In the future! Yeah, this is what this should be about.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sponsor<\/p>\n

\"Theatre<\/a><\/p>\n

Decades later you can see all of these influences manifest themselves in Girl in the Creek, a book that the publisher Tor Nightfire describes as \u201ca tense, cli-fi cosmic horror novel set in a rural Oregon forest that seems to consume any who enter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Creek is some five years in the making, from inception to writing to publishing. \u201cThis one took me longer than my other books because I had the idea for this character, and I had a vision for some of the things that would happen, but I didn\u2019t have a plot for a long time. I wrote probably eighty or a hundred pages, and I thought, \u2018This is not working.\u2019 I had to throw it away.\u201d<\/p>\n

If a hundred pages sounds like a lot of work to be thrown away, Wagner agrees, but is also clear that it was necessary. \u201cWhen you have that realization,\u201d she acknowledges, \u201cit feels good to just push delete.\u201d That process took her from the fall of 2020 to first part of 2021. There was another version, this time in first person, that she also didn\u2019t like and then threw away. Finally,she spent the whole last half of 2021 writing the book in its current form.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe way [Girl in the Creek] is structured, there are two points of view,\u201d says Wagner: \u201ca woman who writes true crime, and she\u2019s writing about missing people in the Mount Hood National Forest where her brother went missing five years earlier. The other character is this fungi-ly networked hive mind character called the Strangeness. It\u2019s made up of a lot of different beings, like animals and people and plants. That was challenging. I tried to really get in the head of each character.\u201d<\/p>\n

To develop that section of the book, Wagner turned to her short fiction: \u201cWhen I\u2019m between novels a lot of what I want to do with short fiction is to do more experimental work or try an aspect of the craft I haven\u2019t tried for a long time, something that\u2019s new, or helps me work out a problem.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was writing Girl in the Creek, I wrote out all the human stuff and I knew I wanted to write the other point-of-view characters, these different creatures and people who are messed up with this weird fungus thing, but I need to practice because it\u2019s going to take a much stronger craft to write that than a fun adventure story, which the other part is.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted the opening character to be this mother coyote. So, I decided to write a story that\u2019s from the point of view of a dog that has a chip in its brain so it can understand human language and think human language thoughts but still be really a dog.\u201d <\/p>\n

Sponsor<\/p>\n

\"Theatre<\/a><\/p>\n

That idea turned into Wagner\u2019s short story Infestation of Blue, which wound up being published by Analog, nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon award, and named to Nebula\u2019s Recommended Reading list. \u201cThat story,\u201d says Wagner, \u201cwas really good practice to level up my craft.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Girl in the Creek, the true crime writer is on a research trip in the Mount Hood National Forest. \u201c[She\u2019s] out in the woods,\u201d says Wagner, \u201cand finds the body of a dead girl in a creek. The dead girl\u2019s body has mushrooms on it that not even the local mycologist can recognize. Then she goes missing from the morgue and her fingerprints are found at the scene of a crime \u2014 that happened after she died.\u201d<\/p>\n

How does the editor-in-chief at Nightmare Magazine, and editor on the staff at Lightspeed, scribe of dozens of short stories, poems, essays and articles, carve out the time to write a novel? \u201cI\u2019m the master of my schedule, which can be its own danger,\u201d says Wagner. \u201cI make a strict schedule where I do my writing work in the morning. My creative brain works best in the morning, and then in the afternoon I do the editorial work like a regular workday.\u201d<\/p>\n

That schedule has been tough to maintain in the past few weeks as Wagner has been focused on promoting Girl in the Creek and preparing for her upcoming book tour, which will take her through seven cities in ten days, from Portland all the way to Philadelphia and back again. <\/p>\n

The tour, her first, is already exciting. \u201cNot everybody gets to go on a book tour,\u201d Wagner says with a laugh. \u201cI was expecting that I would be calling up some bookstores in the Pacific Northwest. Then I get this email from Tor and they\u2019re like, \u2018Well, here are these bookstores that have reached out to us that would like you to come.\u2019 And I\u2019m like, \u2018These are not in the Pacific Northwest! Holy Moley!\u2019 It was amazing.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

That unironic use of \u2018Holy Moley!\u2019 is indicative of how Wagner comes across in person: funny, forthright, passionate about her craft, and without a trace of cynicism. \u201cI would say that ninety percent of all horror writers are like this,\u201d she laughs. \u201cYou go to a horror convention and everybody\u2019s wearing all black, but man, are they the most cheerful, cuddly people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which is not to say that her horror doesn\u2019t come from a deeply personal, intense place. It does. <\/p>\n

Sponsor<\/p>\n

\"Theatre<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI talk to a lot of people who are horror creators,\u201d she says. \u201cMany of us have these backstories of being extremely fearful as young people or having a lot of terrible things happen to us when we were younger or came from hard family situations. When I was a kid, I fit into all those columns. I was a constantly frightened little person. Horror started out as this exercise of, \u2018can I make myself braver?\u2019 Then it became a tool in my life for dealing with fear. I like to think that I can take the things that have been hurtful and scary that I\u2019ve experienced, and I can turn it into something nourishing. It can be a healthy meal for somebody else\u2019s soul.\u201d<\/p>\n

This greater purpose of horror is the engine that drives much of Wagner\u2019s work both as a writer and an editor, and in her opinion, that not enough people talk about. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe have this idea that horror is just supposed to be scary,\u201d she says. \u201cBut I think the horror genre can do so, so much more. It\u2019s this amazing place where you can really wrestle with the dark side of the human condition, whether that\u2019s depression and despair or being frightened, or coping with trauma. You can play around with being angry, violent, scared, whatever, and then you can come out of that and you\u2019re you again, but you have a new handle on the bad things in the world. That\u2019s why our motto at Nightmare is, \u2018Horror is for everyone.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The other key tenet of Wagner\u2019s work is Nature. \u201cIn all my books; even in the fantasy novels that were set in the Pathfinder world, I picked the landscape from their choices that was the most like Oregon. This one is set in the Mount Hood National Forest. Being in nature is important to me. Our relationship to our landscape is super important to me. I write about that, but through the lens of speculative fiction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, with Girl in the Creek coming out on July 15, positive vibes already flowing in from all over the speculative fiction landscape, and a book tour beckoning, it\u2019s hard not to feel that Wendy Wagner is about to take another big step. Be that as it may, she is clear about where her focus should be. \u201cI try to keep my eye on getting better at writing,\u201d she says. \u201cI want each book to be different. I want each book to be more powerful. I want to get better and better at telling these stories and impacting people.\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Girl in the Creek is set to be released on July 15 and is published by the speculative publishing house, Tor Nightfire, an imprint of Tor.com.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sponsor<\/p>\n

\"Chamber<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wendy N. Wagner, author of the new novel Girl in the Creek. Photo: John Kaczanowski \u201cThe body lay…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":59848,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[43442,1022,171,43443,43444,43445,43446,43447,36104,43448,67,132,68,43449,43450],"class_list":{"0":"post-59847","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-ash-valley-oregon","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-girl-in-the-creek","12":"tag-horror-fiction","13":"tag-lightspeed-magazine","14":"tag-mount-hood-national-forest","15":"tag-nightmare-magazine","16":"tag-oregon-authors","17":"tag-speculative-fiction","18":"tag-united-states","19":"tag-unitedstates","20":"tag-us","21":"tag-wendy-n-wagner","22":"tag-wendy-wagnr"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114840884006374523","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59847\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}