Emma Cleary: On the Terror and Awe of Motherhood
In this interview, author Emma Cleary discusses the films that helped inspire her to write her new queer horror novel, Afterbirth.
Emma Cleary is a writer and editor from Liverpool, now living in Vancouver. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Best British Short Stories, James Baldwin Review, and Canadian Literature, among other publications. She holds a PhD in literature, and an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. She is editor-in-chief of Geist magazine. Follow her on Instagram.
In this interview, Emma discusses the films that helped inspire her to write her new queer horror novel, Afterbirth, her hope for readers, and more.
Name: Emma Cleary
Literary agent: Evan Brown and Amanda Orozco @ Transatlantic Agency
Book title: Afterbirth
Publisher: HarperCollins
Release date: March 24, 2026
Genre/category: Queer literary horror
Elevator pitch: After an ill-omened romance with a horror cinephile, Brooke arrives in Vancouver to help her sister Izzy recover from reproductive surgery. Confined inside Izzy’s decaying apartment building—its hallways stalked by an ominous figure known only as Medusa—Brooke’s heartbreak takes on a cinematic life of its own, until the horror begins to bleed from the screen into their lives.
What prompted you to write this book?
I wanted to read a book where the question of motherhood was treated with the terror and awe it deserves. I’ve always had a fascination with the feminine grotesque and became especially interested in depictions of the maternal body in horror—from classics like Carrie and Rosemary’s Baby to more recent films like The Descent and The Babadook. The universes of those films feel so alive to me that I wondered what would happen if they took root in reality.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
The kernel of the novel was contained in a short story I wrote seven and a half years ago—all the major characters and preoccupations were there—and it germinated in a little dark room while I worked on other projects for my MFA at UBC. I started drafting Afterbirth in earnest during the pandemic, when I had the fortune to work with Alix Ohlin as a mentor. Alix encouraged me to go weirder and darker with the story. It transformed a couple times over once I started to revise for publication—it was an intense process, since the timeline overlapped with my pregnancy and the birth of my daughter. As I reimagined the shape of the novel, I was also spending a lot of time in a little dark room, with a tiny and beautiful infant attached to my body.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
One thing that surprised me was how the story continued to evolve right up until the final moment: I even wrote an entirely new scene after I got my copy edits back. Making those later edits was quite nerve-wracking because I had the feeling that I could whip out a loose thread and lose half a jumper along with it. I had to learn when to stop refining sentences and let the story be what it wanted to be.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
As the book kept growing, sometimes I was unsure where the narrative would go next. I just knew there was something else, another possibility pulsing beneath the text. I always found the answers were already in the writing somewhere, like a string of clues I’d left for myself. I just needed to go deeper, or keep the characters together for longer in a scene than felt comfortable, to get to the good stuff.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
When I was writing Afterbirth, I was taken with the idea of pain, which is a very lonely experience, passing between people and speaking through the body in a kind of supernatural exchange. What if we could feel someone else’s pain, their longing, underneath our own skin? But in many ways, this is a book about the courage it takes to reclaim our own desires, our bodies and our future, despite outside attempts to deny our autonomy. I hope that speaks to readers.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
The advice I return to myself is the famous quotation from Agnes de Mille’s biography of the dancer Martha Graham, in which she shares a conversation they had about creative expression. Graham is talking about creativity as a kind of life-force or quickening that is translated through the dancer—or the artist or the writer—into action. How it’s not the artist’s job to measure whether the work is any good, but to stay open to the urges that drive them. To keep the channel open.
