Night Time Logic is the part of a story that is felt but not consciously processed. It is also the name of this interview series here at Cemetery Dance online and over on my YouTube channel where we explore the night time part of stories, the strange and uncanny in horror, dark fiction, and more.
My latest book, Phantom Constellations: Strange Tales and Ghost Stories, out now from Cemetery Dance Publications, is full of these kind of subtle, strange, and intentionally ambiguous tales the operate with Night Time Logic.
In March 2025 I had the opportunity to meet Drew Huff at the Scares that Cares Authorcon Convention in Williamsburg Virginia and had an advance look at some of their work. I recently had the opportunity to converse with them again to talk about their new releases. We begin our conversation here with a discussion of some of their influences and favorite authors.
DANIEL BRAUM: Please tell readers a bit about yourself and your background. When and why did you start writing? What do you want first time readers to know about your work. Who are some of your influences and favorite authors or inspiring works of art and fiction?
DREW HUFF: Ah! I was born and raised in a semi-rural part of eastern Washington, which is largely agricultural. Compared to the western side of Washington State, it’s arid, insular, and very politically conservative.
I started making up stories as a young child. One of my first real attempts at creative writing involved a tale about mermaid aliens on one of Jupiter’s moons, which I wrote when I was twelve. When I turned seventeen, I attempted my first novel manuscript, Fire and Glass, which featured a cosmic-horror version of the Devil, brutal vampires, and a pyromaniac protagonist who would later become Lorraine Worner, the villain of Free Burn. Alas, I gave up at around the midway mark (40,000 words in), when I realized my book had no plot and that I didn’t know what a plot was.
Finally, after years of fear and failure, I did NaNoWriMo in November 2020, writing a The Stand-esque 110,000k epic about intelligent zombies wanting to infect everyone, a cannibalistic incel cult, and the grim de-facto leader of said cannibalistic cult having to come to grips with his role in creating the apocalypse. Crazy book. I’ll end up rewriting it some day. I had no skills back then, and I knew it, but this time, I understood why my writing was not good, and what I needed to do to improve.
When I completed that manuscript, I fumbled around for a while before starting on Free Burn in February 2021. After six months, I had 100,000 words of a solidly plotted story, which I ended up rewriting 80% of. But the bones were there, and it was good. In January 2023, Dark Matter INK expressed interest in seeing Free Burn. In March 2023, they took it on. The rest is history.
As an author, my main influences are the noir writers and literature of the 1940s-1970s, with my favorite authors being Raymond Chandler, Raymond Carver, James M. Cain, and John D. MacDonald.
Americans are fascinated with serial killers and true-crime books and shows, which are wildly popular. What are some of the elements that draw readers to these topics?
As human beings, we’re empathetic. As evolved predators, we’re hardwired to notice threats and investigate them. In my opinion, true-crime scratches both of those itches. You’ve got the human need to understand how and why another human being would kill (and not in self-defense), and also the animalistic need to find threats in our environments and destroy them before they harm us. From an evolutionary standpoint, the sociopath/serial killer is an aberration, a blight, a threat to the safety of the community. It would make less sense if we weren’t obsessed with true crime.
And how did you approach these elements in your novel Free Burn?
I genuinely got so sick and tired of the “cool girl” serial killer trope in horror fiction that I set out to write a realistic sociopath and serial killer. Lorraine Worner, the villain of Free Burn, is an accurate representation of a sociopath. She’s brutal, grotesque, and cannot think beyond her own impulsive desires. She rapes, kills, and tortures indiscriminately. Why? Because she wants to. There is nobody and nothing that she holds dear, and nothing she holds sacred.
Near the end of Free Burn, when describing Lorraine in a scene, I included a paraphrased quote from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. It was there for a reason. Lorraine is nihilism in human form, under a thin and glittery veneer of Texan woman.
I once heard horror “explained” as different boundaries being crossed and violated. And as such, body horror was defined as being a violation of the boundary of skin, violation of the physical self. Maybe it was so long ago I am mangling (no pun intended) the quote or just making it up.
In your biography you cite body horror as one of the kinds of stories you like to explore. What does body horror mean for you and how does it come into play in your work?
To be human is to experience body horror: the unwilling changes that take place as we age, hit puberty, hit menopause, lose hair, and wither into death. Body horror is simply the loss of our autonomy over our bodies.
I like to explore the body as a metaphor for change and transformation as well. In The Divine Flesh, I explored the concept of Godhood in flesh, of worship as the sacrifice of our body autonomy…of willingly handing over control of our forms to a God/dess, out of love, trust, or reverence. In Landlocked in Foreign Skin, I delved into the mindset of an ever-changing fleshy aquatic alien’s POV, and the idea that to a creature like The Fisherman, being trapped in a human form is body horror. In My Name Isn’t Paul, I really dove into the body horror of bodily changes that impact your mental state, and the idea that hiding what you truly are ends up causing more suffering than acceptance.
The main character of Free Burn has pincers for hands.
How are our bodies and the physical world, the external world for a character, a medium to express and manifest internal trauma and conflicts in fiction?
Initially, I came up with the idea of our main character’s paralysis ability, and he had normal hands. But the more I researched hand deformities and old “freakshow” circus acts, the more I realized that the concept of him having a variant of ectrodactyly would fit, thematically. Triple-Six cannot hide his differences, and constantly feels the pressure of living in a world not built for him.
What does body horror mean and come into play for Triple-Six?
In Free Burn, Triple-Six finds out that he’s undergoing a kind of hellish second puberty, turning from a normal scrawny dude in his twenties, into a muscle-bound demonic monster. His body is literally not his body, and begins altering itself to better fulfill his designated role in Hell’s society. At one point, when he’s being chased in an unlit field, he idly thinks about how frustrating it is to not be able to see…and his body promptly forces him to claw out his own eyes, right then and there, so that it can grow “better” eyes that can see in the darkness. He is literally a prisoner of his own body. As a metaphor for the horrors of puberty, it’s a little on-the-nose.
You’ve released a cosmic horror novella called My Name Isn’t Paul. Do you have a definition, or working definition, of cosmic horror? How does the novella fit in to this sub-genre of horror?
Cosmic horror, in my opinion, is any kind of horror that challenges our current understanding of reality and the way the world works. What differentiates it from standard horror monsters/creatures, is that in order for something to be “cosmic” horror, it must fundamentally alter or destroy our conception of how reality works (at least in the world of the book). In My Name Isn’t Paul, the creatures are shapeshifting mimics composed of empathic filaments from an alternate dimension. They aren’t aliens from a different section of our own Universe; they’re straight-up from another Universe in which their creator-god committed suicide.
This cosmic horror raises the real question: How many creator-gods are there? How many universes are there?
Gender, gender-fluidity, and gender identity has a long history with genre fiction as shown in some of the classic works from speculative fiction masters such as Ursula K Leguin and Tanith Lee to name a couple.
How does gender come into play in My Name Isn’t Paul? How does it drive the conflict and serve the story?
Paul Cattaneo, our protagonist, is actually not Paul, nor is “he” a man. “Paul” is actually a hermaphroditic, floating mass of silver filaments, and “Paul’s” real name is Uxon. It’s interesting, because the Mirror People are, by default, sexual hermaphrodites (similar to snails) in that they have all of the parts needed for procreation with one another and are not differentiated by sex. But because of the way that Mirror People are raised/assimilated, many of them do have gender identities like the humans they mimic. As larvae, the Mirror People also pick up the morality and social messaging of their human hosts…and a lot of those human hosts have conservative leanings on subjects like sex, gender, and morality.
“Paul” really struggles with the nature of themselves as a creature without human sex/gender, but also as someone that’s really attached to the idea of being a normal heterosexual human man. “Paul” has sexual urges to be with Mirror People that are in male skinsuits/identities, as well as female skinsuits/identities, which again, is simply part of how Mirror People are wired. They do not have sex differentiation in their natural forms. Any two Mirror People can have sex and produce eggs. Unlike mammals, Mirror People do not have a rush of post-coital hormones that encourage emotional bonding. In fact, it’s actually the opposite: Mirror People create stronger, more genetically-diverse offspring by having many sexual partners during a heat.
Long story short: “Paul” is genderless and also kind of gay/bi for his friend “John” (who is also a Mirror Person) and really, really represses it. There are hints of it in the early chapters, with how emotional “Paul” gets about “John”.
Is there a trope or sub-genre of horror that you would like to write about but have not yet done so?
Yes! I’m working on a folk horror novel right now, set in rural eastern Washington.
Where can readers connect with you and your work?
I’m on Instagram as @druhuf, and also have a Behance portfolio! When not working on a book, I do freelance illustration and graphic design, specializing in book covers.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
DREW HUFF’s fiction is pure action, filled with unique concepts, worlds, and characters. They’re the author of several horror and sci-fi books, including LGBTQ sci-fi novella Landlocked In Foreign Skin (January 2025), cosmic horror novel The Divine Flesh (Dark Matter INK, March 2025), forthcoming cosmic horror novella My Name Isn’t Paul (November 2025) and forthcoming horror novel, The Exodontists (Nefarious Bat, Fall 2026). Drew’s short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies. By day, they’re a freelance illustrator and graphic designer.
DANIEL BRAUM is the author of Phantom Constellations: Strange Tales and Ghost Stories out now from Cemetery Dance Publications.
One can sign up for his mailing list at his website Blood and Stardust.
