C. C. Rayne and the Dark Fairy Tale
Image Credit: “Ancient Tower with a Water Mill” by Jean-Jacques de Boissieu, 1759.
To get us started, would you be willing to describe your relationship with the horror genre? How did you become acquainted with the genre as a reader and a writer? What does horror mean to you personally?
For me, horror is the shape that’s formed from shadows. It’s the genre that lets us highlight all the terrible and wonderful facets of our world. So much depends on what you cast as the monster—and whose story you’re trying to tell. Horror is a flashlight, and a mirror, and a prism. You can angle it a million different ways to create wildly different rainbows of dark and light.
I didn’t always consider myself a horror fan, but now it’s one of my favorite genres. I started in speculative fiction, sci-fi, and fantasy—but I also grew up on plays, and I had a deep love for Shakespearean tragedy. So my preference towards darker stories bled into these other genres as I got older. (My love for revenge tragedies is definitely present in “Estranged”.)
I credit The Haunting of Hill House for my discovery that horror is deeply engaging and fun. Once I learned that, I knew I had to delve further into the genre. These days, I’m pretty academic in how I teach myself about horror. I have a long checklist of media to watch and read.
“Estranged” is such a dark and beautiful tale. It seems to engage with many fairy tale tropes: the forsaken noble, the tower in the forest, the main character’s transformation through a garment. What made you lean into fairy tale elements for this story?
I wanted to conjure the darkness of classic fairy tales, which tend to come with a bloody sense of humor and a grim unfairness about the rules of the world. Terrible things happen to good people. Life doesn’t play out kindly, even for those who deserve it. I knew I was writing a story where these tonal understandings would form the core of the plot. So transforming it into a fairy tale was the natural heightening of the already-present themes.
Fairy tales also have this sense of overarching inevitability. From the Brothers Grimm to Angela Carter to D20’s Neverafter, they’re more aware of their narrative framing than other genres. When you engage with their elements, you’re in conversation with the idea of a narrative, and a happily ever after. So in “Estranged,” the reader gets to wonder: Is this a story of choice, or a story of fate? Is this a subverted fairy tale, or a fairy tale played straight?
Plus, I dearly love the trope of transformation through a garment. In the ballet La Sylphide, there’s a terrifying moment where a magic shawl burns a nymph’s wings from her back. That’s a flavor of fairy tale horror that’s always stuck with me, and I wanted to reverse that type of beat. I liked the thought of a mask changing someone’s outward appearance to reflect their inner truth. It’s a fun twist—the exact opposite of what we associate masks with!
The conceit you use to tell the story is also intriguing: the entire story is written in first-person as a letter left on a mantelpiece. How did you decide on this style of narration?
Initially, I was playing with the idea of an inverted confessional. I wanted to establish that the main character was exposing their revenge with pride, not shame—owning the act of retelling, not trying to atone. So that’s how the framing came about.
Then the letter narration became vital to the story’s plot, because it drastically shifts the balance of power. First of all, the narrator’s life is placed back in their control. They’re telling the tale; they can recount the truth how they choose. The narrator also chooses to withhold their name from Everett and the readers. They never mention it in the story, pointedly so—and though the letter starts with a greeting, it ends with no signature.
Perhaps most notably, the letter narration takes power away from Everett. The reader never gets to see his reaction, or hear from him directly. He is robbed of agency by the story he lives inside. And that’s intentional on the narrator’s part. That’s an act of revenge.
In your imagination, what does the rest of the main character’s life look like, now that they’ve exacted their revenge on the family that disowned them?
I’m glad you asked this—I think about it all the time! In some ways, this feels like just the start of the main character’s story. I imagine they go on to have a life of adventure and drama and hedonism, something very much along the lines of The Picture of Dorian Grey. They become the villain or the antihero of something bigger. There’s a whole world of magic and darkness and brutality that I think they’d unlock; one we don’t get to see.
I’ll be honest, I’ve considered writing a novel or novella of their future escapades. So no promises … but maybe someday, we’ll find out.
Is there anything else you want your reader to know about “Estranged”? What does this story mean to you personally?
I wrote this story partly to push myself. As a younger artist, I’m hungry and excited to grow. When something scares me, I want to interrogate it, and learn more about myself. In the year where I was writing “Estranged,” I was learning that I tend to self-censor and sanitize my writing, for any number of reasons. And that’s not necessarily good for me, or the stories I wish to tell.
So this work came in part from that pursuit—the challenge to write what my fear instinct wanted me to lock away. “Estranged” let me take tough elements of queerness and anger and identity to their darker places, and not pull back on the punch. When I challenged myself this way I found that I unlocked a story very rawly from the surface of my heart. And I told it true, in the style that fit it best. I didn’t understand I could do that before now! “Estranged” holds my growth as a person and an author—and my understanding of the path between the two. It means a lot to me.
Shifting gears a little, what piece of writing advice would you give to a writer who’s just starting out?
You can’t edit what you don’t have! Getting material out of your head and onto the page is 90% of the storytelling battle. A sentence of bad writing is always better than a blank page of nonexistent words. The more you write, the easier it will get.
Also, format is an incredibly valuable tool. I don’t think we talk about it enough. Worlds open up when you realize that how you tell a story is just as important as the story you tell. Expose yourself to as many storytelling mediums as possible—plays, novels, audio dramas, movies, musicals, LARPS. Each of them will teach you something new.
What are you reading right now, or what upcoming things are you excited for?
I just finished reading Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and it was phenomenal. It’s beautifully crafted and heart-stopping, and it’s going to live in my mind for a long time. I highly recommend it.
Currently, I’m reading a collection of Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories, and I’m having a great time with them. And I’m very excited for T. Kingfisher’s upcoming novella, What Feasts At Night. Its precursor (What Moves The Dead) is truly excellent, and I really want to see what’s in store for that world.
Do you have any forthcoming works readers should look for, or works in progress you want to share? Where can we find you?
I have some scary stories forthcoming with JAKE and Gone Lawn which I’m stoked to be sharing with the world—so keep an eye out for those. I’m also part of an incredible anthology called Demons & Death Drops: An Anthology of Queer Performance Horror, which just released last month from Little Ghost Books. And I’m working on a couple longer-form projects (a sci-fi horror heist novella! an eldritch found-footage novel!) that I’m hoping to make good progress on this year.
