Savvy readers know better than to get hung up on apparent connections between an author’s biography and her published work. But then there’s the case of Kristi DeMeester, the horror novelist celebrated for her urgent stories of mothers and daughters caught up in snake-handling cults, purity culture blood rituals, literal witch hunts, and the persistent, generation-crossing terror of surviving as a woman in America.
Born in 1984 in Kennesaw, Ga., DeMeester—whose third novel, Dark Sisters, arrives in December from St. Martin’s—spent her formative years in a Georgia Pentecostal church that forbade jeans and secular music and convinced her that literal demons prowled the Earth. Later, her teenage rebellion involved the kind of unapologetic horror novels that provoke, scandalize, and awaken the mind and flesh to new possibilities. This started after her parents’ divorce shocked the community and landed DeMeester, who’d just turned 11, in a new world: public school. That meant new freedoms, but not a full reprieve from society’s zeal to police what girls know.
First, there was the librarian who refused to let DeMeester, who was in fifth grade at the time, check out Interview with the Vampire. “She said that a young lady shouldn’t read books like this—so, I stuck it under my shirt, and I walked my happy butt out,” DeMeester says over Zoom from her home in tiny Dallas, Ga., the town where she grew up, married a local boy, became a mother, taught English for 13 years, and reassured local parents she was not a bad influence despite landing short stories in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year anthologies and a host of other collections and magazines.
DeMeester’s first novel, Beneath, and a collection of stories, Everything That’s Underneath, were both published by small indie presses and hit shelves in 2017, while 2022’s Such a Pretty Smile was issued by St. Martin’s. All of which allowed her to become that rarest of things: a full-time author, a dream she never really expected to come true, says she doesn’t expect to be permanent, and credits to the luck and privilege of having a robust family support system.
But back to raising hell. In eighth grade, DeMeester again had an Anne Rice problem. “I got in trouble for reading out loud the section of Memnoch the Devil where Lestat gets blood from another source, from a woman,” she says. “That’s the most delicate way I can put it. Not from her artery or vein but, you know, another way. I got called into the principal’s office.”
Dark Sisters is very much a novel of young ladies facing the limits of what is expected of them—and of older women so inhibited in their own precarious positions that they struggle to guide, warn, and protect those young ladies. It even includes a sneaky little tribute to that Memnoch the Devil scene, but DeMeester’s horror is sensual in a different way, intensely attuned to what Caroline, teen protagonist of Such a Pretty Smile, thinks of as “the inherent trepidation that came as a result of being wrapped in girl flesh.” Powering that novel about a mother and daughter who can’t quite open up to each other regarding the horrors they face is a shared “sensation of a deep, inherent wrong” (Caroline’s words).
The girls and women of Dark Sisters likewise sense the danger of simply existing in their world. DeMeester shares with Joyce Carol Oates, another of her favorite authors, the ability to immerse readers in minds unraveling into mania, in selves straining to hold it together despite their intimate understanding that their world is vicious.
In Dark Sisters, DeMeester conjures three different eras of a Georgia town ruled by a wealthy local sect and haunted by a curse. In the 17th century, healer Anne Bolton spirits her daughter away from Hawthorne Springs and the pious patriarchs who burn women as witches. In the 1950s, good Christian wife Mary Shephard discovers new freedom in a forbidden romance with a Hawthorne Springs shopkeeper named Sharon. And in 2007, preacher’s daughter Camilla Burson faces a very American—and pointedly bougie—dystopia, where disobedient girls and wives get sent to “The Retreat” for reeducation and daughters pledge, in a secretive ceremony at a Purity Ball, to preserve their virginity until marriage.
Haunting these tightly bound, briskly paced narratives are the Dark Sisters, witchy, white-eyed spirits joined by a shared braid and appearing, according to Hawthorne Springs’ hellfire preacher, to young ladies who “make allowances for sin.” DeMeester also weaves in a mystery illness, creepy rituals, terror of temptation and conformity, and a gnarled old tree that has seen its share of death. Readers will see their share, too—Dark Sisters pulses with blood, impalings, sinister schemes, and jolting reveals.
The novel is thematically rich and intricately plotted, but DeMeester is adamant that, in terms of genre, it’s simply horror. “I’m not a fan of the term ‘literary horror,’ ” she says, “because that implies some kind of snobbery or exclusivity.”
With a boisterous laugh and a warmly outré sense of humor—she sells homemade candles though an Etsy store named Scent of Hell—DeMeester is anything but snobbish. “In my master’s program, you just didn’t write genre,” she recalls. “But now we’re seeing a lot more freedom. I like that horror is now allowed into these elevated spaces where writers who are writing literary also have the freedom to go genre.”
DeMeester also relishes new freedoms within horror itself. “I love the fact that we are getting genre-blending horror a lot more frequently, and that horror can dip into things like fabulism,” she says. “I would love to see us not automatically lump everything by women into ‘pink horror’ as a subgenre.”
She makes it clear that she respects the booming subgenre—which romance and horror author Wendy Dalrymple has said “takes back all of the real-life horrors that we who identify as femme experience just living our everyday life and shoves it back in your face”—and its authors. She just prefers “to see things with a broader scope.”
DeMeester’s publisher, St. Martin’s, seems to agree. Standing apart from the recent tide of pink-tinted horror covers, Dark Sisters and Such a Pretty Smile come sleeved in blood red.
“I love working on books like Dark Sisters, because they use horror to explain real-world fears so well,” says Alexandra Sehulster, DeMeester’s editor. Sehulster notes that, across centuries, DeMeester’s women “are all fighting the same demons, grappling with the same questions and fears,” adding, “What I also love is that Dark Sisters comes with a deep sense of hope. It’s never too late to right a wrong, to recognize an injustice, to love someone new, to redefine yourself and what you’re willing to fight for.”
DeMeester’s fight continues as she works on a new book and looks to uncover hard truths. Like her characters, she’s been raised never to let the facade of cheerful placidity crack. “That is how I have navigated my entire life,” she says. “You don’t show anything you’re feeling. It’s inappropriate to be anything but joyful or compliant or sweet, so everything that I have struggled with internally is always hidden. You put on the happy face and just keep going.”
Then, with a smile no one could doubt, she speaks the dark truth: “I’ve been screaming inside my entire life and told not to.”
