A Werewolf Saved My Life

What if your deepest trauma gave birth to the monster that saved you? In this revealing and powerful episode, we sink our teeth into a transformative conversation with a horror author and former teacher who quite literally wrote his way through pain—by creating werewolves.

After surviving a devastating car accident that left him with a broken back and a new reality filled with PTSD, nightmares, and cognitive setbacks, our guest found traditional therapy wasn't enough. What helped him claw his way out? Horror. Writing. Monsters. And a full moon’s worth of metaphor.

We explore how horror stories—particularly werewolves—became a vessel for healing, expression, and identity. From early literary love affairs with The Hobbit and Tales from the Crypt, to sneaking horror flicks as a kid, to launching a publishing press for authors seeking catharsis through darkness, this episode shows how horror isn’t just scary—it’s sacred.

A Werewolf Saved My Life

What We Talk About in This Episode:

• How a real-life trauma led to the creation of therapeutic monster fiction
• Why werewolves are the perfect metaphor for mental health and transformation
• The evolution from fantasy reader to horror writer
• Growing up on Poe, Price, and Friday the 13th
• The damaging effects of book banning—and why horror should be in the classroom
• Why horror helps kids process anxiety
• How creative outlets can be more effective than traditional therapy for some
• Launching a new horror anthology series, Dead Avenue, to showcase healing through fear

Links & Resources:

🐺 Visit Reader2Writer.com to explore books and the new Dead Avenue anthology

📚 Interested in writing horror as healing? Keep an eye on Reader to Writer Press for future submissions

🎧 Follow Horror Heals for more stories where the shadows offer shelter

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 0:07

No surprise there, the monster was the werewolf. You know, because it coincides so well with just mental illness, mental health, and well-being, and that struggle between, you know, what you used to be and what you are, if you have the right trigger.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Hello, boils and goals. It's your old pal, John Cusir, the voice of the Cripkeeper. 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 fiends, Cory and Kendall, on the Horror Heels Podcast.

SPEAKER_03 1:28

Tonight's full moon is rising, and we're lacing up our silver lined boots because things are about to get delightfully dark.

SPEAKER_05 1:35

You might want to chain yourself up, emotionally at least, because this episode is crawling with raw truth, literary werewolves, and some deeply therapeutic horror.

SPEAKER_03 1:45

Our guest is horror author and former English teacher Brian Hershey. Went through a real life trauma, came out the other side with titanium in his spine, and started howling at the moon. On paper, anyways.

SPEAKER_05 1:58

That's right. Brian turned PTSD into a metaphorical beast, and writing became his silver bullet. And spoiler alert, it wasn't therapy as usual that saved him. It was horror, werewolves, and a whole lot of storytelling.

SPEAKER_03 2:13

So whether you're nursing a creative itch, wrestling with your own inner monster, or just really into werewolves, we're so glad you're here. Let's dig in. Hey Brian, welcome to the Horror Heals Podcast. Well, thank you for having me. Absolutely. So, how do you relate to our theme of horror movies and horror culture and all things who are being positive for our mental wellness?

SPEAKER_00 2:39

Oh wow. I mean, that's a deep-loaded question, but also very important one. As an author and a former English and reading teacher, I just know that books and writing offered very safe spaces for people to explore things that either have happened or if it could happen, what would I do and how would I react? So I always said as a teacher that it was a dress rehearsal for real life. Anytime you read a book. And then specifically when it came to writing, not only were kids and stuff like that very excited about reading things that were spooky, but at the same point in time, having gone through a trauma in my early adult years, it allowed me to be very reflective, very introspective about what was happening emotionally because of how things were taken away from me. It was truly a situation that I experienced where I closed my eyes one day and woke up and everything was different. Completely different. And I was in a world of pain. And this was just a result from a very bad car accident where I ended up with a broken back. And it took a long time to get back up to what would be considered a normal status. I had to learn how to walk again. I had to learn how to negotiate things. I had to operate differently. And somebody who was ambitious enough that was wanting to go into the Coast Guard and do that kind of life journey at the start of my adult years, it was gone. It was taken like that. And because there was no way that I could do it having titanium rods being installed halfway up my spine. And on top of like internal bleeding and sprained ankles and knees and broken bones elsewhere that I didn't even find out were broken until a couple of days later. You know, like you go to stand up and realize, oh yeah, that's right, my toes are broken. And so there was a lot of rediscovering, talking about ground zero, and all you can do is look up. I again started to turn to writing as therapy, but just writing about what I was experiencing was not necessarily enough. I had to confront the fear. I had to identify it. I had to say, this is the metaphor for what's going on inside of me. Because there was a lot of PTSD, there was a lot of nightmares, there was a lot of anxiety, and it ultimately led to being clinically depressed. And it was just like, hey, how do I get past this? Because my brain's just not functioning anymore. I can't concentrate, I can't remember things properly because there was the swelling that was in the frontal lobe portion, and it was just it was causing all kinds of deficits. And so it was scary to realize that this could be like a permanent condition. And so I turned that fear into a monster, basically. Okay, so I put it onto a paper, and you know, so no surprise there, the monster was the werewolf, you know, because it coincides so well with just mental illness, mental health, and well-being, and that struggle between you know what you used to be and what you are, if you have the right trigger. And that right there was really the impetus for all of the werewolf stories and storylines and and everything that came out of that. So that's my connection. I was kind of a long-winded answer, but that was, you know, uh, that's my initial connection. Uh, you know, mental health and horror and how it can help you and stuff like that. So it opened up a door that like I never thought that I would ever go through. I thought I was going to be a children's book writer. Do you recall that aha moment when the werewolf popped into your head? Oh, yes. Very much so. It was almost kind of like uh it was a Saturday morning, even just drinking coffee, and I just remember thinking to myself, God, I just I feel like a werewolf. Like I just had came off of a full moon and I'm sore, I'm just anxious, what has happened, I gotta piece things together, and I was like, that could be an interesting story. That could really actually lend itself well to, you know, horror writing. And so I said, okay, I want to get into this. And it, I mean, dozens of notebooks later and photographs all over the walls of werewolves and just doing the research and how they actually connected to modern day like mental illness, but also how the folklore kind of came into being of people who were not diagnosed properly very early on, like in the Middle Ages, and they would have to live on the outskirts of town because we didn't have medicine. We didn't have these diagnoses. People were saying, well, that they're a victim of witchcraft and they're crazy, and they have to live on the outskirts. Well, if you live on the outskirts, you're gonna grow facial hair because you're not gonna be clean shaved and you're not gonna bathe properly. It's just gonna exacerbate and get worse and worse. And so somebody sees that and goes, Oh my gosh, that's like a a man wolf, a werewolf. And so, you know, it was like, okay, that makes a lot more sense now. But everything became very symbolic. Everything, the success of Forgotten Sin was I was offering explanations as to why the full moon, why silver bullets, why, you know, and a lot of that just uh goes back to how mental health unfolds, but how we treated mental health, how the authorities of the time treated mental health. The churches were brutal to people if you had mental health. I mean, they didn't know anything about the science and only uh relied on what they could read from a scripture. They had no help. They weren't helping people, they were just outcasting people, you know, and so that that's largely where a lot of people say, hey, silver comes from that line of thinking of it was a pure metal. It was, you know, you have to get rid of that evil that is inside of you.

SPEAKER_05 9:12

So we might edit this out, but I think the church is still involved. That's my bias.

SPEAKER_03 9:21

And I was gonna say, well, I mean, we've only come so far.

SPEAKER_00 9:24

Yeah, I totally agree with you on that one. I mean, there are some times we're like, wow, we just went back to the dark ages of it. Yeah, you know, and it's just did we not learn anything?

SPEAKER_02 9:35

So I know.

SPEAKER_03 9:36

Well, we tend to jump around chronologically during these just because something will pop up at the end, but I want to ask this first before I forget it. Um, were you feeling like the therapy that you were being offered for your emotional situation after your accident was not helpful? Or how did you go from, you know, here's what traditional therapy is like after an accident like this, to where you're healing yourself through writing?

SPEAKER_00 10:05

I there there's a couple of questions in there that I'll I'll unpack. The first thing is like when I was receiving the treatment, I can't say that it was bad treatment. It was what we knew at the time, and it was the supports that were in place, and I had full access to the supports. It just was not enough. And it just wasn't the right avenue for my brain. I was going into teaching, which was kind of an accelerated path now because of, you know, I was originally going to take some time and go into the Coast Guard and now I was going to go into teaching. But I realized that being a very creative, I always said, you know, I'm a hyper creative individual. And being a creative individual and not having the proper outlet for that creativity creates neurotic behavior. And there's now a lot of psychology and science behind that now that explains, yeah, if you're creative, you've got to have an outlet, otherwise it just bubbles up and you really genuinely get neurotic, you get crazy. People are like, Well, what's wrong with you? It's like, I just need to like write something or draw something or paint or you know, and but then when you've had a trauma on top of that, you have to turn it and say, Okay, I have to identify this monster. And there the therapy was just trying to say, it's okay, let's do this. Now, I mean, I had to go through like speech pathology and everything else just because I was trying to remember things and I couldn't. So there was a different type of therapy in that regard. But in terms of counseling, it was just like it's I understand your intention, I understand what you're trying to give me, but it's not helping. And I went through three different uh individuals until finally somebody actually said to me, as I was learning about, you know, horror and writing and putting it together, she was a clinical psychologist and she was brilliant. She says, I'm not gonna talk to you about feelings. Matter of fact, I'm gonna assign a lot of books that say, you know, forget the feelings, okay? Let's focus on the procedure. And she says, What are your strengths? And I told her, I said, I'm creative, I like I've gotten into the horror realm. I kind of feel like I'm a werewolf at times, and so she says, Okay, let's go with that. Let's start writing that. I want to see what you can produce, and so it just again, it the whole door opened up, and she says, But I'm not gonna tell you what you have to write. You have to do it yourself. You have to explore and say, Okay, if this monster fits you, how does it fit you? How does this, you know, and tell me a story about it, you know? Develop a story, develop an alter ego, so to speak, because if you don't like it, you can delete it. You know, and if it comes out and it's too scary, at least we've identified something, and then you know, you can uh uh uh deal with it in a different way, or we could deal with it in a different way. Well, I got to the point where I just was like, this is fantastic. I just feel wonderful when I'm writing stories, specifically if it's wow, this is a spooky story, this is really uh intense, or this has stemmed from something real that either I've experienced, or when I was the years of being a teacher, seeing like the different traumas that like children and other teachers and so on and so forth had experienced, doing home visits and seeing wow, there are some really tough scenarios out there. It just launched itself even further in. I was like, okay, this is how I need to deal with this. This is how I have to process, this is how I have to do it. And as it only took a couple of times to actually go to the clinical psychologist before I'm like, no, this is my therapy, this is how I have to do it, I can handle it from here, you know. And it's like this book right here was the one that really kind of came out after that. It was so books one and two had been written for the werewolves, but then Dark Steps was like, yeah, this is where I really kind of honed it down and was combining lots of different things. And I said, I can do this over and over again. This is a great way to help the world, to see the world, to be a part of the world, and it's a whole nother world. So that's kind of how it unfolded.

SPEAKER_02 14:30

Okay, good.

SPEAKER_03 14:32

What uh did your wife and your loved ones think about this type of therapy, utilizing the essentially the werewolf character as a form of healing?

SPEAKER_00 14:42

I think a lot of my family members are very sarcastic. So my aunt said to my father at one point in time, he used to be such a good kid, you know? It's like, what happened to him? But everyone's just like, where's the next story? Where's the next, you know, we want more. This is great, and we see you happy, and you know, all of the conventional things that you tried weren't working, you know, and you were stifled in different arenas. And now that you have this outlet and you have a way to identify different things, they were more than pleased with how it come about. And of course, my brother, he's a horror enthusiast too, so it's yes, please write more. I want more stuff. I want to, I want to hear what you have to say. But yeah, it was initially, it was you want to do what? But then it was okay, now I see the value in it. So awesome.

SPEAKER_03 15:40

Well, let's flash back to young Brian, because I imagine if you're gonna become an English teacher, you're probably a voracious reader as a young man. What did you start off with? And when did you start being introduced to horror writing?

SPEAKER_00 15:54

Horror writing came much later. I fell in love with fantasy stories as a kid. The Hobbit was one that I just was like, oh, this is amazing, this is wonderful. And that's kind of how I really got into the world of reading and things like that. My brother and I used to sneak downstairs at night. This is back when HBO would give you the little preview of, oh, we got Tales from the Crypt, and then there's Friday the 13th, and you know, so we would sneak down to the basement and turn on the old TV and we would sit there in the dark and watch them. If my parents were watching something that was spooky, we would sneak in behind the chairs and watch from around the corner of the couches. If we had a friend come over for a sleepover, we would stay up all night trying to watch the scary films, and we just love being scared. It gave us permission to be scared. And something that's whoa man, I shouldn't have seen that at that age. I mean, because that really stuck with me to this day where it's I still watch it go, whoo, you know, that that gives me the chills. But I really didn't start reading a lot of horror until I was late high school and into early college years. It's not so much that like I was afraid, it just I had read so much that was like fantasy and assigned reading that there was never really a lot of time during high school that I could sit down and read a Stephen King novel. My brother, on the other hand, he was devouring them. And so I was like, okay, well, there's something here. I mean, he's just devouring books left and right, and he's a ferocious reader. But it was when I went into college that all of a sudden I was like, this is a really cool genre, and I'm gonna have this right alongside fantasy and mystery. And I was just like, this is fun, you know. So I just want to be surrounded by books on all levels. I did read Fear Street from R. L. Stein when I was younger, but I'm old enough that goosebumps came after me. So a lot of people say, Oh, I fell in love because of goosebumps and everything else. I was I had Fear Street, so you know, being in my mid-40s now, which is yeah, there was if you were reading something terrific, it was Steve King, Ian Rice, Peter Straw, Clive Barker. I mean, it was these individuals, and parents were kind of like, nah, I don't know if you really want to read that. My brother being older, he would sneak and read and stuff like that. And so that that's kind of how that unfolded.

SPEAKER_03 18:21

It's interesting. I mean, I love that kids didn't have the opportunity, like Goosebumps was sort of that introduction into horror where I remember stuff that I was reading early on that I would consider kind of horror would be like through the looking glass and those old fairy tales. My parents didn't shy me away from like the they weren't the watered-down versions. Let's put the grim fairy tales. Yes, there was some blood and stuff happening, you know. Grandma did not fare well against and that sort of leads me to something that we've talked about several times on this show is that you know, we're big horror enthusiasts. I love going to the conventions, and I'm we're seeing more and more like young kids dressed as Chucky or you know, the Billy from Saw and that sort of thing. And it's like they're they're their parents are are allowing them to be or introducing them to these things at a young age, but it's like kids I think kids can handle it, you know. I think that the because they can, you know, especially if they're the brain is still forming it's yeah, they get it. This is you know, it's a story. Yeah, and yeah, sometimes stories are scary, sometimes they're gory.

SPEAKER_00 19:33

Yeah, absolutely. And I think uh and now that I'm now thinking back, some of my earliest exposure to horror was Edgar Allan Poe. Because again, it was like the collection was out there, it was considered classic literature, right? I mean it was gothic literature, but at the same point in time, it was readily available. And as we would take trips and we would be driving at night, my dad would slide in the cassette tape of Vincent Price reading Edgar Allan Poe's stories. And wow, I mean, talk about being immersed in into that. I mean, so it was exciting in that regard, but to your point, kids are very resilient, and being able to being able to say, hey, look, here's the exposure to this, and let's have a discussion about it, or at least let's have fun with it, or it's supposed to be like spooky, like ooh, and everything else it allows them to develop a sense of okay, I can identify this if I'm anxious, I can identify something totally shielding kids from all of that is actually more detrimental. When a kid would come to me and say, Oh, yeah, Ms. Serge, I've seen that before. I'm like, oh, wait a minute, how do you see that? That's rated R and everything else. And I'm then I think back to my own. I'm like, okay, yeah, you've been you were sneaking just like I was, okay, and now you're talking about it, but you're not afraid of it. And it wasn't something that was desensitizing them to the world, it is just desensitizing them to something that might cause anxiety, and that's very important, you know. And if somebody genuinely says, No, no, I don't like that, the blood and guts are gore or something like that's no fun. I don't like that. But maybe they like the classic monster. Oh, the vampire. Oh, what a you know, suave, seductive kind of force, you know, and those tropes and archetypes and everything else exist today. I used to tell my students all the time, I said, you're being affected by a vampire now. It's called your cell phone, it's draining your life force, you know, and so when they can make that kind of connection in a metaphor, then it's less scary, but it also helps with their own mental processing.

SPEAKER_03 21:59

Yeah, absolutely. So I feel like I'd be missing an opportunity having a former English teacher and writer on it. Not ask about your opinion about this banning of books, which is pop it back up again.

SPEAKER_00 22:13

You know, I think that honestly, that's the true evil. To ban books you can go back to World War II, that's what uh Adolf Hitler was doing, it's to control the narrative. And if you go back to the slavery periods, you know, the darker periods of time, they prevented people from reading and writing because they didn't want them to have ideas. They banned them. It was punishable by death. The more you ban the worse things become. They don't have exposure to literature, they don't have the ability to ask questions and have productive debates and conversations. The only thing that ever happened to me from reading banned books is I got smarter and more empathetic. That's it. You know, so for somebody to ban books, it horrifies me. It truly is one of the scariest things that exists now in real life. Now, as a writer, I want to get on the banned book list because guess what? That means everyone's gonna read it. I mean, come on, that's the goal. It's like I want to send my books to them saying, hey, this is a good book to have in a classroom and put them on the band book list, boom, I'm national bestseller. Yeah. That's crazy.

SPEAKER_03 23:39

Controversy breeds sales. That segues nicely to my next question, which is where can our listeners find your books?

SPEAKER_00 23:46

Yeah. Anywhere. Yeah. I mean, if you want to go to Amazon, it's on Kendall, Nook, Barnes and Noble, you know, so you can go anywhere to order. I like to direct people directly to my website, readertorwriter.com, just because they typically have the best prices, but at the same point in time, especially now with our brand new release that just came out, Dead Avenue, it helps the the most people going straight from the publisher's website to the printer. The print on demand kind of craze and trend right now is such a positive experience because it does allow small presses like my own to be able to say, okay, well, here, come to the website, you can go straight to the printer. And so that's probably the best way to go. I do have to have a little plug. Dev Avenue Volume 1. Okay, it is out, it is available, it's hardback. This is an ongoing series that we have decided to launch. And again, it really kind of goes with the whole premise of horror has helped me tremendously. And there's other authors out there that feel exactly the same way. It's not just about, oh, I like to write it and I just want to make money or something like that. That's part of it. But there's a lot of people that write this because it is exactly what we've talked about this whole time. It's therapeutic, it's great. And I want to be able to offer that opportunity for other authors to have a safe space to write that stuff, but also have somebody to have those ideas that they can bounce off of to say, hey, look, I went through trauma too. I went through, you know, these situations too. I understand PTSD, I understand depression. And the only thing good that came out of the pandemic, honestly, is we learned how to actually identify and become a little bit more accepting of mental health and how it affects everybody. But beyond that, it's like you got a lot of people that are suffering and they're trying. So let's give them an outlet. That's what Reader to Writer Press is about. It's from readers to writers. So Dead Avenue is our first launch, the traditional publishing realm and everything else. So it's a lot of fun. Eight stories, you know, Death finds us all on Dead Avenue.

SPEAKER_03 26:02

So we'll be sending out the good vibes for success. I think we try to with the show over and over again the message that whether you're a writer or an artist or a cosplayer, whatever your outlet is, there's camaraderie available. We're all part of a bigger community. We've all got our favorite stuff and our niches and everything. But we can all come together with the idea that horror is good for us, you know.

SPEAKER_00 26:30

It is a classic genre for a reason. It exists for a reason. I mean, we've been writing stories and telling stories around campfires since the dawn of humankind. With that being said, it's not gonna go away. You can't ban it. If you ban it, it's just gonna become better. You know, so just like you did you can't ban romance, you can't ban all of those other genres and stuff that can potentially be controversial. Yeah, the controversy is good. You want to have a voice of dissent, you want to be able to have people who can read this and say, let's talk about it. You know, and when somebody says, Nope, nope, it's just gone. Yeah, and yes, we are a good community. I love going to the horror conventions, a patron, but also as a vendor, I love talking with people. So yeah, I agree with you 100% on that. So, Brian, who is your favorite final person in a horror movie? Oh, that's a good question. God, I have so many of them. It's I'm very much a traditionalist. Jamie Lee Curtis and Halloween is just classic. I mean, my gosh, I grew up watching Halloween every Halloween. So, of course, I fell in love with her a long time ago. But then also Sigourney Weaver Aliens. I mean, what an incredible franchise. But Alien and Aliens were just fantastic movie making, fantastic storytelling. I'd truly say that Aliens is probably just as good, if not better, than the first one. And that's rare, right? To have a franchise, that's rare, but a lot of that is because Sigourney Weaver's character was just spot on perfect. Yeah, and so I have loved her for a long time. That was one of the first movies that scared the pants off of me, too. Those are really scary creatures. So you know.

SPEAKER_04 28:25

I love that combination of sci-fi with the horror aspects.

SPEAKER_03 28:29

Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Well, this has been a great conversation, Brian. Thank you so much for being open with your story.

SPEAKER_00 28:36

Well, thank you very much for having me. I absolutely adore being here, and you both do the same. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_05 28:44

That was a whole lunar cycle of brilliance. Brian Hershey reminded us that horror isn't just for the thrill, it's for the healing too.

SPEAKER_03 28:52

From broken bones to broken narratives, he rewrote his story with werewolves, trauma metaphors, and a whole damn publishing press to give others that same outlet.

SPEAKER_05 29:02

Can we talk about how genius it is to use werewolves to explore identity, pain, and transformation? Harry on the outside, healing on the inside.

SPEAKER_03 29:13

So if you're a horror nerd with a story clawing to get out, or you've ever felt like a misunderstood monster, just know. You're not alone, and your howl matters.

SPEAKER_05 29:22

Brian's books are available at reader to writer.com. So go grab one, light a candle, and unleash your inner beast responsibly.

SPEAKER_03 29:31

Until next time, friends, when someone asks, is horror good for mental wellness? You tell them, of corpse it is. The Horror Heals podcast is produced and presented by How the Cow Ate the Cabbage LLC.