(typewriter dings) - [Ryan] Hi, I'm Ryan La Sala, and this is "Beholder."

(mysterious music) It is this dark, glittering trap of a novel about a kid trying to unveil a mystery in the art world of Manhattan and engaging with a hereditary curse in order to do so.

- [Jeremy] What draws you to writing horror, specifically?

- Humans have been telling stories about what scares them since the dawn of the species.

It's sort of the, like, primordial form of storytelling is what's beyond our campfire, what's hiding in the dark?

And I think it's this effort to basically draw monsters out into the light where they can be conquered.

And when you write horror, you get to make up monsters and you get to assign things to those monsters and what they represent.

So for me, when I'm writing horror, I'm taking something that frightens me and something that's amorphous and sort of undefined, and I'm putting it in a physical form where I can handle it, where I can look at it directly and do something about it through one of my characters.

(mysterious music continues) - Why do you choose to so often write about the queer community facing the supernatural?

- As a queer person, I have always been in dialogue with monstrosity, right?

Because for a long time as a child, I was the monster in the room.

I was the thing that people were scared that their child was gonna befriend or invite to a sleepover.

And I didn't even know what that meant.

I didn't even know what it meant to be gay.

But I sort of learned about it through people avoiding me, and bullying me, and things like that.

And so growing up, my best adaptation was to learn what people considered monstrous and how to outsmart that, how to figure out those things about myself so that I could adapt and blend in.

And then eventually, when that was no longer a choice, 'cause as you can see I'm a very flamboyant person, I had to learn how to be bold enough to kind of outshine whatever that monstrosity was that people saw within me.

And now I think that queer characters in horror is sort of the exact right people to put into a situation where they're fighting for their lives because we're experts at adaptation.

And oftentimes I think the best horror looks at what we consider monstrous and asks us to reconsider that in order to outsmart it or survive it.

- Ryan, thank you so much for being here.

- Thank you for having me.

- And thank you for watching "A Word on Words."

I'm Jeremy Finley.

Remember, keep reading.

(typewriter dings) You're a young writer.

- One day you will be- - Thank you so much.

- [Jeremy] But one day you will be an older writer.

- Yeah, tomorrow (laughing).

- You know?