Novel Update: January 14, 2026 – How Horror Became a Subgenre

Psychological Horror, Dissociation, and the Phenomenology of the Mind

Dear Reader,

I set out to write this book ages ago, but I’ve been seriously working on it again since the summer of 2025. Now that I am deeply immersed, I cannot let go. The story I am writing will be the story that you read, and it will demand to be felt. 

I never set out to write a psychological horror novel. It started with a deep feeling in my chest. Like I had a bubble in my lungs that I needed to get out. This feeling shaped itself into an eccentric cast of characters. People who either take up the space or diminish it. 

The story is about many things. It’s about family, love, and broken promises. Yet obscuring it all is dissociation and generational trauma. Perhaps a haunting or two. Still, I never set out to write a book with a subgenre of horror. Horror arrived not as design, but as a consequence of staying inside the mind rather than stepping back from it.

It struck me today why that is. When society looks at people with mental health, particularly those that may outwardly display it, they are quick to pass judgement. With the internet and/or AI, everyone can feel like a doctor. We think we can tell what someone is going through just by a glance. 

But you do not know. Our brain is not phenomenological. We cannot enter another’s interior world and experience consciousness as it is lived. But it is my attempt to make you feel as though you are. And, as one who has suffered, one thing is clear. It can be a horror show. 

Sometimes, there is nothing more terrifying than your own dark and negative thoughts. This book exposes that horror. 

Yours,

Susannah