Pride Month Interviews: Meet S.A. Sizemore

Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you contribute to the horror genre.

I am a playwright and author who works in themed entertainment, which means I get to ride rollercoasters as part of my day job. My ancestry is European and Native American (Cherokee and Chickahominy decent). I’m fascinated with my ancestors and enjoy hanging out with them at night in their burial grounds. Love living in my hometown of Los Angeles with my wife and our two dogs, Harry and Agatha.

My Beckett Coven book series starts this September from Rowan Prose Publishing with Whispers of the Pale Witch. The second book, Lies of the Bishop Stone, comes out in 2027. Working on the third one right now. Hopefully we can get that out to readers in 2028.

The Beckett Coven series was born from the discovery that I am a Salem Witch Trials descendant. That means my ancestors were either accused, accusers, or part of the court proceedings during the Massachusetts witch panic of 1692. Unfortunately, my family were solidly on the accuser side. I also have a couple of tenth great-grandparents who took part in the witch mark search on June 2nd, 1692. 

My MC, Kylie Beckett, is a twenty-four-year-old queer, mixed-race forensic photographer, who returns to her birthplace of Salem, Massachusetts. She wants to learn more about the disappearance of her mother decades ago. Instead she discovers that some secrets are best kept buried and no one can escape the whispers of the Pale Witch.

What drew you to the horror genre?

I mean I’ve been scaring people for years. My first one-act play was about Jack the Ripper. A few years ago, I published an updated version of it, Black Mary, that’s even more terrifying and off the rails than the first one. I guess I became creepier as I got older. 

My favorite part about that play when we put it on at my university, California Lutheran University, was watching the whole audience lean forward, completely engaged in the action of the two characters. But after Jack kills his victim, he turns around and breaks the fourth wall with the audience. We did it with a wraparound staging, which made the effect even more unnerving. As he gives his last few lines, he stalks the audience. It was fascinating watching all of them unconsciously lean back as he did this. For me as a horror playwright and author, that was gold. It let me know I did my job.

When I decided to write a novel series, of course I went straight to a horror/thriller storyline. This time the horror was revolved around witch trials and baneful witchcraft.

If you could recommend one creation of horror that everyone should consume that is queer or queer coded, whether that be a book, podcast, movie, art, etc., what would you recommend?

I love the Morbid podcast. Ash, one of the cohosts, is queer and has a trans husband, so they do lean very queer friendly and it’s spooky as hell.

Also, the Circle Is Podcast is a very queer friendly witchy podcast that I just adore. Occult author and tarotist, Mat Auryn, and the one and only Rachel True (The Craft) talking all things witchy and Tarot. What more could you want?

What positive changes have you seen happening in the horror community regarding LGBTQIA+ creators and content and what are some areas the community can still improve?

I’m new to the queer horror book scene, so I’m probably not the best person to answer this question. I was pleasantly surprised that there is a queer horror sub-genre. I’m a queer author and the Beckett Coven series has queer characters in it, but I wanted my characters to primarily be interesting people, who just happen to be queer, as opposed to them needing to be queer in order to tell the story. Although there are a few queer-specific moments in it, for the most part my books are about someone coming out as a witch as opposed to someone coming out as queer. Which I guess is a bit of a metaphor for queer folks.

When folks look back at the LGBTQIA+ movement of today’s day and age, what do you think the defining characteristic will be?

That we didn’t give up. I am old enough now to have lived through a time when it was absolutely not okay for anyone to come out. Now I’m married to a wonderful wife and we have a great life together. If you had told me when I was a teenager that’s how my life would be in my fifties, I would have said you were nuts. Tremendous progress has been made, but we are living in a time where nothing is truly permanent. Everything is on the table to be rolled back to a time when we didn’t have the rights and freedoms that we have today. Some things have already been taken away. Unfortunately, that censoring movement may continue, and if it does, we have to continue to fight against it. Being out and visible and not in the closet makes it much harder to pretend we don’t exist.

What are some areas of queer horror you think are under-explored?

I’m interested in queer characters just being everyday characters as opposed to an anomaly or a stereotype. Several of my characters just happen to be gay, but the story they are part of would still be the same story whether they were queer or not. There are a couple of subplots in the first book that are queer in nature. One character’s past causes her to be unable to act with a clear mind when she needs to. What happened to her is because she’s queer. Just like in the Salem Witch Trials, she was othered and put into a bad situation. To me there are many real-life situations that queer folks have gone through that can be turned into horror. Conversion therapy is absolutely something that can be explored further as a queer horror motif. It’s not actual “therapy”. It’s just something awful that’s inflicted on our community. I went through a light version of it when I was young. All it did was delay me coming out of the closet. It didn’t change who I am. Unfortunately, many young people are still being forced into it.

What do you find scary within the horror genre?

People scarier than monsters. That’s what I leaned into in the Beckett Coven series. My villain is just a regular human being, but how she handles her past trauma and becomes a demon herself is far more frightening to me than any kind of monster. My mother suffered from mental illness. She was nowhere near what my villain is, but how her illness affected her was also no walk in the park, either. There are definitely lived experiences that colored how I wrote and talked about mental illness in this book series. 

The Salem Witch Trials were also terrifying. What the accusers did to their neighbors was awful. We often look at the witch trials from the point of view of the girls being afflicted by the accused “witches”. In reality, it was the afflicted girls and the adults, who enabled, encouraged, and conspired with them, either consciously or unconsciously, were the monstrous and evil ones not the people they accused. They were the true devils in Salem. 

There’s a psychological concept called violent innocence in which a person or group of people use righteous reasons to do something terrible for the good of the community. That’s exactly what went on in Salem. One can argue that we haven’t come that far from three hundred years ago. The truly terrifying thing for me was to discover that my ancestors were one of two families who did most of the accusing during the first four months of the witch trials. Their complaints resulted in a couple dozen deaths and almost a hundred more victims losing their minds and going into debt because of being thrown into prison for months on end. In the case of my Ingersoll family, they were considered by their neighbors to be moderate and respectable people. Even “good” people can be monsters.

Who are some queer content creators in horror you think more people should discover?

I hope these are people folks already know about. Rob Costello is a Lamda Award winning author and editor of We Mostly Come Out At Night. I love anthologies. They’re a great quick read, especially something spooky right before bed, when I don’t have a lot of time at the end of the day. (Yes, I know I’m weird that way.) Jessica Drake-Thomas wrote Hollow Girls. People disappearing into the woods with a magical element. I’m all over that.

What advice would you give to the next generation of queer horror content creators coming into the horror genre?

Keep writing no matter what. Writing is a compulsion for me. I’ve been doing it since I was six (if you believe my mother). You get better at it over time. Sometimes you ebb and flow from it, but I’ve always come back to a story when it was ripe to write. People love to be scared. Either on roller coasters, in a movie theater, or while reading a book. There will always be room for scary stories to haunt our minds. Find what scares you the most and have the guts to write about it.

Where can folks find you these days?

My website is beckettcoven.com. I have a hunt you can go on and find the spooky locations in Whispers of the Pale Witch, along with a character page and event notifications. You can also find me on Insta, Threads, TikTok, Bluesky, X, Substack, and YouTube @beckettcoven. On Facebook, I started a Beckett Coven Readers group where I’m hoping we can have lively discussions after the first book comes out this September. Good Reads and BookBub are also places you can catch me and my book series.

Shall we begin?

Bio:
Drawn to theater from an early age, S.A. Sizemore began writing professionally while studying
theater arts in college. After producing several plays regionally in Southern California, Sizemore pivoted to the themed entertainment industry. Whispers of the Pale Witch is the first installment of the Beckett Coven series and inspired by Sizemore’s ancestral connection to the Salem Witch Trials. She is a full member of the Dramatists Guild of America, a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community, and resides in California with her wife and two dogs, Agatha and Harry.
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www.beckettcoven.com
@beckettcoven (socials)Whispers of the Pale Witch pre-order link: https://books2read.com/u/4EvXVY
Goodreads: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1432502558353371/