Bizarro horror laced with black humor, [Alex S. Johnson’s] Wicked Candy is shocking, perverse, and, at times, funny as hell”–Lucy Taylor, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Safety of Unknown Cities, “Queen of Erotic Horror”

I write from the slit. From the altar. From the lipstick-smeared mouth of the wound. My horror is femme, feral, and sovereign. It’s Queer in the way glitter is Queer: loud, unapologetic, and impossible to ignore. I write transfemme because I am. I write horror because it lets me scream in stilettos and bleed with intention. I write Queer because I refuse to be anything less than electric.

My protagonists are women. Slutty, sacred, contradictory, and divine. They are not victims. They are perpetrators, lovers, monsters, saints. They fuck like gods and cry like poets, often simultaneously. They are soft and they are brutal. They are tender and they are merciless. One thing they never do is ask permission to be who they are. 

I write from the place Judith Butler named: where gender is not essence but performance, not fixed but fluid, not passive but political. My horror is a stage where femininity is weaponized, eroticized, and ritualized. My women perform gender with lipstick and knives.

I write from the borderlands Gloria Anzaldúa mapped: the space between, the space beyond, the space that refuses to be named. My horror is mestiza consciousness in stilettos. It’s hybrid, haunted, and holy. It’s the scream of the in-between. My stories live in the rupture/rapture between binaries—between victim and perpetrator, between sacred and profane, between Queer and monstrous.

I’ve stood beside the torture porn boys, have even been published alongside them. I’ve read their work. I’ve seen their mobs. I’ve felt their eyes. I don’t flinch. I don’t blink. I don’t apologize.

Matt Shaw writes from the meat hook. From the gallows. From the dungeon. His books—Rotten, Sick B, The Cabin—are full of women torn apart, raped, mutilated, discarded. Pain isn’t merely a function of the violence. It’s the point. Women are the spectacle. There is no joy, no reclamation, no complexity. His protagonists are not people—they’re props. His eroticism is domination. His violence is spectacle. His tone is grim, brutal, and hollow. His purpose is provocation, not transformation.

Mine is the opposite. My protagonists are sovereign. They are slutty without shame. They love rough sex and tenderness. They revel in being women—not as objects of pity or punishment, but as architects of their own mythos. My eroticism is sacred. My violence is ritual. My tone is satirical, poetic, glamorously grotesque. My purpose is reclamation, rupture, celebration.

Matt Shaw attacked me. He joined mobs. He tried to erase me. He’s done it to others too—Hailey Hughes, a trauma therapist and BookTuber, critiqued his portrayal of women and he retaliated with a mocking book dedication, social media rants, and a swarm of followers. That’s his pattern: defensiveness, aggression, refusal to engage with critique, especially from Queer and femme voices.

But I don’t write to be palatable. I write to be unforgettable.

My horror is lipstick and knives. It’s sacred and slutty. It’s Queer and loud. It’s the kind of story that doesn’t ask if you’re ready. It kicks the door in and dances on the table.

I write in the lineage of Lucy Taylor—whose work is lush, erotic, and unafraid. Her women are complex, her sex is sacred and savage, her horror is sensual and sharp. Like her, I write bodies that bleed and bloom. I write desire that bites. I write monstrosity that seduces.

Writing transfemme means writing with every part of me that was told to stay silent. Writing horror means turning that silence into a scream that echoes through the bones. Writing Queer means kissing the monster and becoming it. I do not ask for the reader’s comfort. I offer them transformation.

Matt Shaw can keep his meat grinder. I’ll keep my lipstick, my stilettos, and my monsters. And I’ll keep writing stories that make the genre gasp, gag, and grow.

— Kandy Fontaine