Author writes best-selling horror novels from her Greece home
Rachel Harrison, a best-selling horror novelist who is now a resident of the Rochester area, sure knows how to scare a reader.
In her latest novel, “Black Sheep”, which was published Sept. 19, the narrator Vesper Wright, is a 23-year-old server in a chain restaurant. That’s scary in its own way.
“Hell was the birthday song. Hell was Shortee’s. Hell was the green polo shirt, the khakis,” Vesper tells us.
Vesper is no stranger to Hell, as she grew up in, and fled from, a Satanist compound called Hell’s Gate. It has its own rituals and rules, a primary one being to never leave.
Vesper has left, but she decides to go home — what could go wrong?
What, indeed. Once Vesper arrives back, Harrison begins to crank up the terror, zipping past 10 and even 11.
As a reader, you find yourself screaming to Vesper, “Get out of there!” But, as a reader, even a scaredy-cat reader like myself, you don’t get out of there, you just keep reading on.
Credit the fear factor. We’re too frightened to move; too curious to run. That’s the guilty pleasure of a horror novel.
Interviewed via Zoom, Harrison says she’s no stranger to fear herself.
“I am scared of everything,” says the New Jersey native. “I was a very scared kid for a long time, I thought I didn't like horror just because it made me uncomfortable.”
Then, when she was a student at Emerson College in Boston, her screenwriting club had a horror-script contest.
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“That's when I realized that if I lean into the discomfort of horror, I actually love it,” she says. “It makes me feel so much and makes me think so much. And I have such a visceral reaction to it. So that's when I unlocked my love of horror.”
“It's just a fun genre to write in,” she continued, “because the stakes are really high, often life or death. There's so much conflict. And as a writer, you can't have too much conflict. If I were to just sit down and write a book about nature versus nurture, it wouldn't be nearly as fun without the supernatural elements. So, in a way, it's an excuse for me to play with monsters.”
After college, Harrison worked in television production, in publishing, and as an executive assistant at J.P. Morgan.
She was living in Brooklyn and writing about monsters, when she and her husband, who grew up in Greece, moved to the Rochester area in 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic.
Isolated by circumstances for a quite a while, she has kept up a work routine that has led to the publication of four novels. It’s been one-a-year starting in 2020 with “The Return.” That was followed by “Cackle,” then “Such Sharp Teeth,” and now “Black Sheep.” She also has a collection of short stories, “Bad Dolls.”
“I wake up around 6 a.m.” Harrison says. “I write for a few hours, have my coffee. I'll usually go for a walk before lunch, and then in the afternoon, but I kind of treat it like a nine to five job, but just instead of office work, it's creative writing work. I work from home. And I only have one coworker, who's very loud, annoying, and that's my cat.”
It sounds pretty cozy, but don’t be fooled, Harrison, who dedicates Black Sheep “For the bad kids,” is sitting there at her computer channeling her own inner bad kid and figuring out how to scare you to death.
And there’s no stopping her.
Her next novel, “So Thirsty,” is well along.
“The quick pitch is it's like ‘Thelma and Louise’ with vampires,” she says. Yikes.
If’ you’d like to meet Harrison — and, really, don’t be scared — she’s having a talk and book signing at 7 p.m. Oct. 13, (that’s, Friday the 13th) at the Barnes & Noble in Webster, 1070 Ridge Road.
From his home in Geneseo, Livingston County, retired senior editor Jim Memmott, writes Remarkable Rochester, who we were, who we are. He can be reached at jmemmott@gannett.com or write Box 274, Geneseo, NY 14454
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Rachel Harrison writes best-selling horror novels from Greece NY home
