USA Today bestselling author Saratoga Schaefer turns the Bluebeard fairy tale into a contemporary gothic horror story with their latest novel, A Thousand Monstrous Forms.
The novel centers on Poppy Reed, a young ceramic artist who moves into the isolated manor of her new wife, only to find herself surrounded by strange noises, faceless statues, bodiless whispers and a locked basement she has been strictly forbidden to enter. When a snowstorm leaves Poppy alone in the manor, the noises, whispers and forbidden basement become harder to dismiss, and her suspicions about her wife – and her own sanity – begin to take hold.
Schaefer is the USA Today bestselling and Indie Press bestselling author of horror and thriller novels including Trad Wife, The Last Time We Drowned and Serial Killer Support Group. Their work has been featured in Variety, People, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire and Glamour, while their writing has also appeared in Writer’s Digest, CrimeReads and other publications.
To celebrate today’s release of A Thousand Monstrous Forms, CinemaChords spoke to Schaefer about reworking Bluebeard as a sapphic gothic romance, creating the sinister world of Busirane, and exploring marriage, trust, isolation and desire through a contemporary horror lens, where the things we most depend upon can end up spiraling into sources of eerie ambiguity.