The Weight of the Ghosts We Inherit

This is not your average horror podcast interview.

In this raw, unfiltered conversation, Corey and Kendall sit down with author and illustrator Drew Huff, whose work isn’t just inspired by trauma, it is shaped by it. Drew speaks openly about the lasting effects of growing up with an alcoholic father, and the surreal, devastating responsibility of handling his estate after his sudden overdose. At 22, she was the next of kin, and the only one left to clean up the mess.

We trace the emotional terrain between that loss and her debut horror novel Free Burn, a splatterpunk epic soaked in unresolved rage, haunted inheritance, and the desire to break generational cycles. We also dive into the dark underbelly of creative industries, as Drew recounts her experience being emotionally manipulated and professionally exploited by a predatory freelance editor.

We talk about how The Shining saved her. How Doctor Sleep helped her forgive. And how Pet Sematary revealed the quiet truth of grief: that we sometimes choose destruction over despair, because destruction hurts less.

This is a conversation about being queer in a community that doesn’t always feel like yours. About leaving behind the security of a paycheck for the hope of a future. About the monstrous parts of ourselves we write not to hide, but to understand.

The Weight of the Ghosts We Inherit

🖊️ About Drew Huff

Drew Huff (she/her) is a queer horror and speculative fiction author and illustrator based in Washington State. Her debut novel, Free Burn, was released by Dark Matter INK in 2024, and her next cosmic horror release, The Divine Flesh, arrived March 2025. Her work explores themes of grief, addiction, emotional inheritance, and queer rage—with stories that don’t flinch from life’s ugliest truths.

She is currently preparing to relocate from a conservative hometown to Seattle in pursuit of creative community and healing. Drew is living proof that horror can be both a weapon and a mirror—and that survival doesn’t have to be silent.

📖 Books Mentioned:

• Free Burn (2024) – Rage-fueled, grief-scarred splatterpunk debut
• Landlocked in Foreign Skin (2025) – Queer sci-fi novella about isolation, identity, and transformation
• The Divine Flesh – Cosmic horror meets spiritual collapse
• Sweetthing (WIP) – Sapphic vampire tale and religious satire
• Exodus (2026) – Halloween-themed horror with a monster family at its core
• Run to Beat the Devil (WIP) – A character’s slow realization she’s become the very monster she feared

🧠 Topics Covered:

• The emotional violence of losing an abusive parent without resolution
• The actual cost of grief (financial, psychological, existential)
• Processing trauma through horror—why King gets it
• Mental health hierarchies: why people shut down at “the hard stuff”
• Writing characters who are harder to love than the monsters
• Queer loneliness in rural America—and finding strength outside the mainstream
• Rebuilding your life from scratch at 26—when it feels like the wo

Thank you for listening to Horror Heals. 

Share the show with someone who loves horror and someone who needs a little healing.

If you want to support our guests, check the show notes for links to their work, conventions, and fundraising pages.

You can also listen to our sister podcast Family Twist, a show about DNA surprises, identity, and the families we find along the way.

Horror Heals is produced by How the Cow Ate the Cabbage LLC.

Is horror good for mental wellness? Of corpse it is.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Hello boils and goals. It's your old pal, John Cashir, the voice of the crickkeeper. And I want to welcome my good fiends of the Horror Heels Podcast. Is horror good for mental wellness? But of course it is! I delight in the delicious deaths of pitiful people on the silver screen. So get ready for a hell of a good time with my new themes, Corey and Kendall, on the Horror Heels Podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:00

There are episodes of the show that feel less like interviews and more like bearing witness. This is one of those. Today on Horror Heels, Kendall and I are joined by writer and artist Drew Huff. Someone who doesn't just write horror, she bleeds through it. Drew opens up about what it's like to grow up with an unstable, alcoholic father, and how reading The Shining at nine years old wasn't just formative, it was survival. This isn't a tidy trauma story. This is about what happens when the person who hurt you dies suddenly, and you're left with their house, their debt, their ghosts. We talk about how Drew poured that pain into her debut novel Freeburn. And we really dig deep into horror, the only genre honest enough to hold on to the mess. Stephen King, grief, queerness, betrayal, rage, all of it. Well, Drew, welcome to the Horror Heels Podcast. We're excited to have you. Kennel and I uh adore fiction and we love authors, and so when we have the opportunity to have one on, it's very, very cool. How did you decide that horror and science fiction were gonna be your genres?

SPEAKER_03 2:21

I never actively made a choice to stick certain specific genres. I just knew uh from a young age when I was first exposed to horror that I wanted to write books that were as raw and real and in my opinion, truthful as the ones I was reading. The first book I ever read when I was a kid that I really finally felt like I was seen and with characters that I could wait to, as horrifying as it sounds, uh, was The Shining. I was a very, very intelligent, like hyper-lexile child, and I, you know, I found books. And so I read The Shining when I was nine. And at the time I was dealing with a very unstable alcoholic father. And so when I read The Shining, I wasn't in Jack Torrance's shoes, I was in Danny's. I was a weird, precocious kid, I didn't fit in. And for me, it was the first time I had ever read a book that actually like talked about what it's like being public. And I felt, and it was honestly a relief, even through the horror, even through you know, the crazy haunted hotel, it was a relief to finally see that it wasn't just me. It wasn't just, I wasn't just a sad kid. Like there was an actual reason for what I was going through and the struggles I was dealing with as a child in that environment. And I remember just saying that when I wrote, when I made stories, I wanted to make stories that did express that truthfulness, that honesty, that rawness to life, so that other people could read them and know that they weren't alone.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

I went back and reread The Shining a couple of years ago, and it's I love the movie because there's just I mean it's just so beautiful. But the Jack Torrance character is very, very different in the movie and in the book. So has your opinion about that character changed from that first time reading it at nine and to today?

SPEAKER_03 4:32

Yes, yes. Um it's easier to relate to Jack now as an adult when you have bills, when you're stressed, when you're trying to get things working, and everything in life seems to be against you, and it makes you angry and it makes you bitter and full. And I mean, I don't I don't drink because I have I've lost too many family members into an issue. Um, I was actually really excited when the sequel to The Shining came out, Dr. Sleep, in 2012, because that Doctor Sleep is one of my favorite like top five books of all time, because it really goes into, you know, you try not to turn into your crappy parent. You try really hard, but you end up, whether you want to or not, mimicking their patterns, mimicking their behaviors, and getting sucked into that. And it is incredibly hard to not, no matter how much you hate your crappy, abusive parent, it's so hard to not turn into them. And I that rawness in Doctor Sleep was just so cathartic to me to read and to see the movie's amazing.

SPEAKER_01 5:43

I'm sure like a lot of people just like, oh, a sequel to The Shining, which is like one of the greatest books ever. You know, and it's like, but I'm thinking, like, well, it's Uncle Stevie. He's not gonna, he wouldn't do this idea. Yeah. And I I adore both the book and the movie. I was actually kind of disappointed that they, in the movie, they decided to kill the daddy character. He survived the book. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 6:07

No. Like, it was so integral to the book and the book's happy ending that he survives and he's like an uncle figure to Abra. And I also was disappointed that they didn't have the family twist that was in the book. So, minor spoilers for Dr. Sleep for Listeners, the twist in the book is that Dan is actually related to Abra in the book, The Psychic Kid. That's part of why they both have such strong shining. And as he kind of goes into Danny's past, Dan's past and Jack Torrance's past and how Dan is trying to get redemption for the wrongs of his father in the present day and his past wrongs, he realizes that Jack Torrens had an affair with one of his students years and years in Do, and that they had uh Abra's mother, basically. So he is actually related to Abra Stone. And so the ending of the book Doctor Sleep is they overcome, you know, Rose the Hat, the Ghost of the Shining, the Ghost of the Hotel, Come and Help. And Danny lives, he survives, and he's like an uncle to Abra. And Abra's growing up, yada yada, but it's a happy ending. And it's very fulfilling, it's full circle. He's finally broken the cycles of the past. And in the movie, they just basically have it as I mean, they try to kind of have the saying with him confronting the bump CGI Jack Forrest. But but it's not quite the same. He's deadass, like, we're all cool.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

It's like at some point they're gonna remake it for like a like a streaming series or something like that, so they can put in the more details, I'm sure. You know, it's it's that's gonna be coming in the future, I would imagine. Uh not that we're gonna talk about shining for the entire interview, but I did just I just thought of this. I love that. I just love like bonding with friends and stuff over different movies, and so there's a couple that I like with my dear dear friend, our dear, dear friend Rachel, that we kind of like I would I would give her gifts based around like the shared movies. So the two that we really have together are The Shining and Silence of the Land for one birthday. I got her an autographed photo of the twins um for another one I really went overboard. So like I photoshopped it's a it's an image of Danny and the Scadman Cruthers character sitting there in the kitchen when they're first meeting, and you can see in the background the actual kitchen, so I photoshopped myself in the kitchen like I'm working, like I'm working the grill, and then I got Danny to Danny Lloyd to autograph the photo, and I handmade a frame with the shining uh carpet in it.

SPEAKER_03 8:50

So oh my god. That's like oh, what's that just a side photo?

SPEAKER_01 8:54

That's a collage, elaborate art project. When you've got the time to do it, it's very fun. I've always I mean like give being a good gift giver is like one of those things I'm kind of prideful of nice. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 9:06

Aw. I wish I had that. I grew up so a thing. Like we weren't really into holidays, we didn't do the gifts, my mom's stance was always and still is. We don't need a special day to commemorate who we are and that we love each other. It's like a gift. Like, come on, man. Um, and so my friend Ashley is like you, she is a gift giver, loves gifts, is so good at giving gifts, and my buddy Ashley is just like, bro, bro, you're telling me you guys don't I don't we're not really like we're not riches, that's just not how things were. Uh so I have to like gifts and how to like be that.

SPEAKER_01 9:45

Well, you've already kind of hinted at it, but it's a work in progress. What are your feelings about the theme of the show and horror being good for mental wellness? And I already talked about the fact you're the your situation growing up and reading The Shining at age nine, so I imagine there's some trauma there.

SPEAKER_03 10:04

Oh yeah. Oh, I I haven't even gotten into what was going through my brain when I was writing Freeburn. That was I don't know if you've read um so I knew for a long time, but backtracking your question, I knew for a long time that I wanted to write a book and that it was probably going to be horror. The first book, first manuscript I ever tried writing when I finally put my fears aside and I said, I'm gonna do it, was actually the COVID. I was uh so I was lucky enough to have a very well-paying union job where they just paid us to sit at home and wait for us to come back uh for a long time. I mean, we were being paid well. I was incredibly lucky to have that. So I was cooped up at home and I was finally just like, you know, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna write a book. This was late 2020, and I had just turned a book. I'm gonna do National Novel Writing Month, I'm gonna write a book, and if I decide that I hate it, at least I'll know that I wrote a book and I don't have to do it again. I gotta just get this out of my system, this idea that I'm gonna write books. And so I wrote, I got hit 50k right at the end of November, but my book like halfway complete, only halfway complete. So I decided I was gonna continue. I finished up this 110,000-word inverse epic um in uh I'd say 21. And it was very, it was horrible. All first drafts and all first manuscripts are horrible, but I had so much fun writing it. And when I wrote it at the time, I was like, what if zombies were quote unquote not dead? And what if they were just intelligent? What if you're dealing with something that's not just an infectious virus, but something with intelligent uh vectors of that virus that know how to spread things, that still have their memories? And I ended up realizing that it was actually a really good cosmic horror epic, but I didn't so anyway, sorry to get us off track, but so that was me kind of going through that feeling of powerlessness with COVID and everything happening, the infectious nature of COVID and just the societal madness, because I also wrote about like right-wingers in this like Raider Kings in this post-apocalyptic landscape, and I'll come back to that someday. So after that, I started writing Freeburn in March of 2021. And I at the time I just said, all right, I'm gonna write like I'm gonna just write something that's gonna get published by the big five. I'm gonna just write, like, I don't know, we're gonna just keep it basic. Why not? And so I ended up having so many ideas and just kind of throwing them together because as I wrote Free Burn, I started getting more and more ideas. And I was like, I'm just gonna write this easy story about like this guy who summons a serial killer from hell. He's like a government experiment, and now he has to like run from this female serial killer from hell, and like he's got a buddy. But that rapidly turned and bloomed into the dynamic between the buddy, which turned into his girlfriend, and the daughter of this serial killer. And that intense toxic relationship, the alcoholism, the um, you know, so it was still an interesting exploration of those themes, but it didn't really hit what Freeburn is all about and the intensity and the anger and the emotion until I went through something horrible in the once or twice in another podcast. But in October of 2021, my father died of a drug overdose. No, he wasn't married to anyone, I don't have any siblings, so I was next of kin. He didn't have a will, so everything fell on me, and I was 22. And it was just a lot of these things. Um I mean, and I loved him. I didn't know that it had gotten his addiction had gotten that bad. It was just accidental. I mean, he just basically was feeling sick. I saw his last text, I was like going through his phone trying to figure out what had happened. He laid down and he just died. He used so that he could go back to work the same way he always did. He was in a instant heart attack. And he just died at home in bed, and it literally was like one day, I'm, you know, like I was 22, I was actually getting ready to go on this little trip. I felt like I'd finally kind of hit a decent socioeconomic status to where I was like, you know, I've got a little money, I'm gonna go on this trip, I'm gonna do some things, and I start getting these calls, and I just kind of have this really bad feeling in my gut, and I feel like I'm gonna puke. And I know something really bad has penned, or I'm about to go on this trip, and she like literally I'm at the airport, and she's like, Druid, don't go on the Druid, like you just need to stay there. Something, some we need to tell you when it's there, like something bad has happened, and we need to like tell you in person. And I'm like, dude, I've been planning this trip forever. I'm not, I don't care. What what what is this? But I kind of know that something's really wrong, so I kind of just stay there. I had a lot of time before my flight. I'd shown up early, and she shows up with my grandparents, you know, my maternal grandparents on my mother's side, and they kind of get me in the car, and they talk to the flight, and then they were kind of talking to the people at the flight desk, and again, they kind of knew that something was right, and so they kind of bundled me into the car, and they're in their and my mom just is like, Drew, your dad, he's dead. Like he died. He they found him in bed, his bed today. He didn't show up to work, he is dead. And it was my first reaction was to laugh because I literally didn't like I didn't believe what she was saying. I was just like, What? I hadn't really talked to my father or been around him that much in the last few years up to his death because he was starting to get really bad with his like he would drive when he was really intoxicated, he would drive with me in the car, he would start like arguments with people at stores, he was really into Trump, MAGA, right wing stuff. He got his like kicked out of a store at one point because they wanted him to wear a mask, and he literally started cussing them out. And it was like like that was like, and he threw a fit in the parking lot and like threw things, and like that was the kind of person my dad was. I hate to say. So anyway, I the probate attorney was like$7,500, everything else, the fees, the cremation, everything like it wiped out my savings. And it was just very I couldn't afford the apartment, my apartment, and the mortgage on the house, and it was just a lot. It was like I lost everything I had ever built in my life, in addition to all of this dad. Um, and I think what was hard for me was the fact that I felt like I was fine because I could kind of function, but I really wasn't fine. So he had um a Wednesday, Wednesday, Wednesday night was when I found out. And so, you know, I called my job, I told them I couldn't come to work on Thursday, and they again they knew like they believed me. Um, and then I literally just went back to work on Monday. I was like, I feel fine. I handled some funeral things, I feel fine. Um I for like a solid few weeks, my brain felt like it was concrete, like I couldn't think, I couldn't imagine, which I've never had happened in my life. No matter how bad things have gotten, I've never lost the ability. But it was like somebody had filled my brain with concrete. I could focus on what was right in front of me, and then that was it. I had to deal with his family, there was drama there, drama with his brother, drama with his girlfriend who got really weird and stalker, very like not mentally stable, that was not fun, and it was like everyone just it was just kind of rough. And so I didn't come back to Freeburn for months and months and well, not months and months, it was like a month or two, and then I came back to it in late 2021, December 2021, and I realized I was gonna have to rewrite it entirely basically from scratch because the story was different than I thought it was. But I did. I ended up rewriting it, and I um but I've also made some of the like most solid, loyal friends that are years that I know not the writing. And it's been very it's just been great to have that. I think writers and other creatives do need other creative friends that know what it's like to try and be in this industry because I mean I love my family, but they don't they don't like get it. Like I'm like venting about like, oh, the agent system and the quiz is rigged, and they like straight up don't get it. They don't they try, but they don't uh I can't spill the T the way I'm gonna be able to do it.

SPEAKER_01 19:14

No, it's just I mean, same with us with this particular podcast. Like people that aren't into horror or don't really know the horror community, they have a hard time wrapping their heads around like what this podcast is, what its purpose is.

SPEAKER_03 19:25

I think horror is so cathartic. It's a way to transform mental anguish into good story material. And I'll say Chuck Polinick has mentioned this in his writing book, one of the best writing books, he, or I I can't remember the title of it exactly, but Chuck Polinik in his craft writing book says every time you write a book, you're kind of mentally, it's like therapy. You're mentally working through a major issue or a theme that you're going through at the time. And he points out in Lullaby when he was writing that, he had a neighbor that would not stop making sounds over and over, and he literally felt like he was going crazy from the noise next door. So he wrote Lullaby, which is about this ancient African song that kills whatever it's sung to. And it's hidden in like this nursery rhyme book. And so it felt a little bit better, like the issue hadn't gone away, but I felt like I was more mentally equipped to handle it, process it, and deal with it. And I have found that to be true, especially for my rhyme. I finish a book or I like something or a novella, I end up working through some issue I'm dealing with at the time with Freeburn. So when I rewrote Freeburn, I poured in everything I was going through at the time with dad's death, and it really turned into this epic about abuse. And I was writing about the experience of literally having your dead kind of abusive parent come back from the dead and haunt you, and feeling so angry that you have to deal with this shit all over again. And so I really poured that in, and like growing up and growing out of that grief, and uh with Divine Flesh, I was writing about I was having a lot of existential questions about the nature of God, the nature of love, what is the role of a creator God, and I really poured all of those existential and also like mental illness, addiction, flesh in 2022, when I was going through every create those crazy things, feeling like you're mentally a wreck and not really knowing how you overcome that. So I dealt with that in Divine Flesh. I kind of wrote about like the social collapse and like feeling how do you deal with hopelessness and like the role of being an individual within a community or a society, like within a family, like the loss of sense of self in the Exodontist, which is a was supposed to come out October 2024. And the Exodontist is this fun, whimsical, like nightmare before Christmas-esque story about a cute monster family that lives and runs a free dental clinic from an abandoned warehouse. Well, a Halloween store comes and takes over the warehouse, you know, and so now they have to deal with that and figure out what they're going to do. A lot of events happen, and long story short, they have to end up go, they have to go through this hellish Halloween-themed gauntlet to rescue some of their family members. I'm probably gonna end up self-publishing that in fall 2026. The thing with Exodonis is that it kind of has to be published in the fall because it's around Halloween. I have like a bunch of others, but I'm not gonna talk about the issue. Well, Run to Beat the Devil, which is like the sequel prequel to Freeburn, also goes into issues of becoming your parent, basically. And the gut punch for Mallory at the end is the character in Run to Beat the Devil is realizing that she has tried as hard as she could to not become her parent, but that she ended up becoming her serial killer mother. And so it was actually really hard for me to realize that that was the ending because for so long I was very attached to this character and I wanted to give her a happy ending. And it was the realization that that's not how she is. She doesn't want to do the work, she's just in this codependent.

SPEAKER_01 23:22

I like the way your mind works. And I know it's I know it's like, you know, you're dealing with it's like your therapy, you know, the writing has become your therapy. Let me ask you this is it's something that I was a little bit surprised about. You know, this is years ago, but just like I was a little bit hesitant of like you going to horror conventions and stuff and being an out queer person, like, you know, how how will I be accepted? And should have never worried about it because the horror community is like so accepting of everybody. It's so queer. I love what kind of support you've gotten through the queer community, you know, as a as a writer.

SPEAKER_03 23:58

And I'm gonna be real. I live in rural eastern Washington, and I don't know if you guys know this, but rural eastern Washington is like Idaho. It is extremely conservative, it is like MAGA country, and I've born and raised here my whole life, and I'm getting to the point to where I am going to move to Seattle in the next few months and uproot my whole life because I can't take it anymore. It is hard and frustrating to constantly have that low-level fear and anxiety. There is very much a hierarchy when it comes to mental health, and I'm not trying to dismiss the impact that some things have on people, but when you go through something like, oh yeah, dad died of a drug overdose. Oh yeah, I had this and this and this happened. Oh yeah, I realized he was doing fentanyl, lol, oh, well. And it's like people don't really know how to react or respond. Like there's mental health, there's depression, there's anxiety, and I'm not saying those things aren't real, but there's that, and then there's I saw the peace stain from when dad's from dad's death from his body laying on the mattress. Like people don't once you get to a certain point of trauma, people really don't know how to respond, how to react. I even get that reaction from therapists when I've tried finding other therapists. Yeah, they're just like, yeah, once you get past a certain level of socially acceptable trauma, people just kind of treat you like you're a leper.

SPEAKER_01 25:24

It's like, oh, but I think it's important to still have these conversations and still put that stuff out there because you know, I feel like they have to be silenced because their thing might be like extreme, you know, their situation. Uh that's going to be more damaging, you know, to keep it all inside. So it's important to get that stuff out.

SPEAKER_03 25:45

That's why I go so hard in Divine Flesh with Jennifer, who is like a drug mule, a drug trafficker, and someone who is just a horrible person mental health-wise. Like I wrote Jennifer as someone with a cluster B personality disorder. She has an awareness, she has no and people, and the one comment I get from people who have read The Divine Flesh every single time is can't stand Jennifer. I hate Jennifer. Fuck Jennifer. I wish, and that was part of what I was trying to do was make a main character that was more hateable than the cosmic horror that's trying to assimilate everything and everyone. And I succeeded, I think, pretty well. But Jennifer has seen some things, and Jennifer is unlikable because she has been through again, she's an addict, she likes a real addict, not like a Hallmark channel addict. She has been through so many things that she can't even conceptually. And once you get past that level of, again, like once you have mental trauma, you you lose the ability to hope, which I think is so damaging. And you get into this mentality of I'm a piece of shit, and everyone else thinks I'm just a piece of shit, so why should I even try? People treat me like I'm a freak, and I'll always be messed up. Why should I try to be anything besides what I am? Everyone thinks I'm crazy and dramatic, so why should I try being anything else? There's no point in trying to change. And that's one of the most damaging, insidious things. And when we only have perception, we when we only have tame, mild depictions of mental health the way that we do in most mainstream books and most mainstream things, it doesn't help people that are really going through it. It only makes them feel more alienated because it's like, oh, here's this depiction of someone with depression, and everyone's saying this person's messed up. How would people feel if they knew that I was not only this messed up, I was like 10 times more messed up?

SPEAKER_01 27:48

Oh, it does. And you know, that's one of the reasons you know why we do this, because there are people in rural areas like yours all over the country who you know, and I'm just thinking back to the whole it gets better movement, you know, and it's like we need that like we need that more now than ever because you know, we're as as you know, I mean we're we're we're all scared you know, right now. But you know, we yeah, we want to let people know that it's okay to talk about these things. And even if you don't want to do it in a public forum like that, we're so open here that if anybody wants to reach out to us, we answer every email, every Instagram direct message, all of that. Some people might not be ready to tell their story like you are, Drew, but they do want to let people know that, hey, I'm out here and this is what I'm going through. That's one of the missions of this podcast.

SPEAKER_03 28:35

Thank you. I really appreciate it. And that's that's why I wanted to be on it so bad. I love the conversations that we have with horror and mental health in the genre, and I feel like we don't have these conversations as much with mental health and other genres. I mean, Haley Piper said it best, horror is the most honest genre. It's one of the few that I have seen that is willing to actually look into real emotional issues and like how far people go when they're broken. Another book that I think was such a good example of grief horror is Pet Cemetery. A lot of horror books now, when you read them, you know, you can't understand why they're doing the stupid thing, why they're waking up the monster, why they're making the deal with the devil. But Stephen King wrote Pet Cemetery so fucking well that you read it and you know Lewis Louis Cree knows what's gonna happen when he buries his deceased child in that pet cemetery. You know it's not going to end well, and so does he, but he is so desperate and so broken at that point that he would do anything. And you buy it and you feel horrible for him, but it is depict his grief and his anger and his rawness so well that it's it's believable, it's understandable. And because of that, we're forced to look at ourselves and think when have I been? So broken that I was willing to do something I knew would end horribly, something that would be self-destructive because I was so broken I couldn't see any other alternative. When has that been true for me? I think horror is again a genre that's willing to have those conversations and willing to ask people and confront the reader or the viewer about their own morality and their own justification for the things they do.

SPEAKER_01 30:27

And we just want to let you know that not everybody has the opportunity to do what you're doing, moving to Seattle at a very progressive place. But we know that you're going to find your people, you're going to find your community. And maybe that's going to change the way you write, but that's okay.

SPEAKER_03 30:43

It'll be good. I definitely, that's what everyone and my friends who have moved from the Tri-Cities to Seattle, they've been telling me they've just been very like true. We've been trying to nudge you out here for wilting in the Tri-Cities. Like this place is just not your place. I have people, I'll be fine, but it's just a lot. I am restarting my entire life at the age of 26. I don't have kids, I don't have anyone that depends on me. And I've never lived anywhere besides the Tri-Cities. I was born here, I was raised here.

SPEAKER_01 31:14

I mean, we did it, it's definitely doable. We've done it twice now. We went from St. Louis to San Francisco in a just a matter of a couple of months. And what I was 33 and Kendall was 38, so it's, you know, it it age is just a number. And then we did it again seven years ago when we moved from San Francisco to New England when we found Kendall's birth family. So it's, you know, yes, it's it's a lot. There's gonna be hurdles and challenges in the times when you want to cry, but just know that you can do it, and we'd be happy to be part of your support system because we we've done it twice now. And it's yeah, but yeah, I I I think your path is leading you outside of the Tri-Cities.

SPEAKER_03 31:53

I'm excited. No, I'm definitely excited.

SPEAKER_01 31:55

There are gonna be times when it's gonna be overwhelming and scary. I get it. When we moved to California the years prior, I was a newspaper and magazine editor until the bottom fell out of that industry. I went back into retail, something I swore I would never do. But then within a year, I was doing marketing for that company. Good things will happen for you. So, as a listener to the podcast, I'm sure you know that the last question that we always ask our guests is who is your favorite final person in a horror movie? I know it's always hard.

SPEAKER_03 32:32

I would say needy in Jennifer's Body. I love Jennifer's Body is such a good, queer movie, and I didn't get enough love when it came out, but it is very much a I will always be of the opinion that Jennifer wanted needy, and that was why she was so heartlessly killing these men, trying to find in compulsive heterosexuality what she's looking for, but not really being able to ever satisfy her hunger because she doesn't actually want these men. And that really resonated with me growing up being very gay, just feeling that constant where it's like, oh, maybe if I try dating another man, I'll finally like feel some sort of like thing for him at all. And just over and over, just having that like, oh, I don't really emotionally care, and I'm not obviously attracted to this person.

SPEAKER_01 33:29

That's a good that's a good one. Yeah. We haven't heard that one. No, we have not. Well, you're definitely gonna have to stay in touch with us and let us know when you land in Seattle and start to get settled and stuff, and you know, keep on making art. We need it more now than ever. We so appreciate your honesty and your candor.

SPEAKER_03 33:49

I appreciate it. Thank you for having me on. It was really fun.

SPEAKER_01 33:52

There's really no way to wrap up a conversation like that with a bow. Drew Huff brought her whole self to this conversation. Grief, fire, love, and the hard-earned wisdom that only comes from being broken open and writing your way out. She reminded us, and we hope reminded you, that horror isn't about fear. Not really, it's about truth. It's about confronting the parts of ourselves and our pasts that polite stories leave behind. Drew, we thank you for your honesty, your brilliance, and for surviving. For creating art from places most people don't come back from. To those listening, if you've felt unseen, unsupported, or like your pain is too big for polite company, you belong here, and you are not alone. And remember, if someone asks, is horror good for mental wellness, you tell them of corpse it is. The Horror Heels Podcast is produced and presented by How the Cow Ate the Cabbage.