I write pink horror. Not just horror with women at the center, though that is frequently true. My stories are, at the same time, also about patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism and how our understanding of ourselves, of other beings, and of the body is impacted by them. These systems are foundational cosmic horrors that permeate human reality as cultural hegemony. There is, therefore, ample richness to uncover in the joy and rage in all that persists in spite of those systems.

Pink horror is a complex articulation. It expresses the pain of living under patriarchy, but also how that pain transmutes into rage and creativity. When we write it pink, the act of writing refutes our pain as inevitable, as an intrinsic part of being born into these allegedly unchanging structures. Pink horror is therefore not just pain, but an encounter with power. It can be soft, morbid, camp, neon, tragic, ironic, violent, emotional, funny, volatile. At the move of the pen or stroke of the key, the story is already being reclaimed through voice.

This is all to say: I write pink horror. Pink like a ribbon and pink like a wound. 

We know from literary history that the angel of the house can be made demon or madwoman simply by making her true self known. In all the old stories the feminine and femme and fem can be made monsters by desire, by refusal, by every threshold-crossing. In each of these iterations they spin around the bubbling cauldron of self-creation. In the new stories, this self-creation is cause for further consideration as the writer is also made complicit, is also made witch.

When written as an exploration of beauty and the body, pink horror plunges into the subjugation and subversion in the breaking-free of flesh. Abjection and abstraction are cantilevers balancing the ambiguity of selfhood: that which is demanded to be beautiful can be ugly, disgusting, neutral, or simply beautiful on its own terms. Existential anguish echoes in all the best horror stories, sure, but so does some level of jubilation at moments of carnality made cathartic. Pink horror writes the body’s own pinkness: tongue and stomach together, speaking with nerve, daring to be gross, strange, and nourished. 

As the morbid symptoms of modernity continue and continue into the horrors of the late-stage capitalist present, the need to read, write, watch, and create pink horror in our art feels urgent. This is a time when the bourgeois tradwife lurks in the kitchen, beckoning for us to join her where the knives are kept. This is a time when the billionaires’ plagiarism machines promise the forgery of fruition. These expressions are grey horror: inauthentic and estranged, they are lies that uphold environmental ruin, crass consumerism, and global oppression. 

Pink horror may not be a term that resonates with writers who might be categorized as such. I embrace it because I think that it expresses exhilarating feminist possibility at a time when expressions of the feminine, femme, and fem are being co-opted and diminished under patriarchy, capitalism, and rising nationalism. As a sub-sub-genre that is about encounters with power, it is a rich terrain for art to bloom, as pink horror is both rose and thorn.

Regardless of genre specificity, this is a time when we must wield our stories, hold the complexity of creation sacred, and let rage show up in the places where we’re commanded to smile. Let it be pink, if one wants it to be, because pink horror is also the glass ceiling broken into a million mirror shards, sparkling. Each piece refracts a different eye as the gaze turns and turns and turns.