Inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Ladson author Leah Soltis’ novel, Heartless, tells the story of Jolene “Jo” Hall, a young woman who wakes up only to realize she’s dead. With the help of her best friend Lucy and boyfriend Eli, Jo sets off to find out both what happened and who turned her into a monster.
The premise of the novel came to Soltis in a dream, she told the Charleston City Paper.
“I’m sitting on the bed, back up against the wall, and this girl comes into my room and looks at me. She goes, ‘I’m dead. Sort of,’ and she’s falling apart. That was where the book began.”
That moment was over 10 years ago, when Soltis began work on Heartless. Originally self-published on Amazon as Jo, the novel was then picked up by Polis Books out of New Jersey. But things changed six months ago, when Polis Books announced they were closing their doors. The publisher shopped their catalog around to other small presses, and several of the titles which were picked up by Bloodhound Books, a publisher based in Cambridge, England, through which Soltis is re-releasing the horror novel this summer.
“It’s been a joy [working with Bloodhound Books]. They’re still a small press but a much bigger small press. They have marketing, they have PR, they have a whole team behind the book, and it’s been really exciting to launch with a team and having people backing me for the first time.”
Ahead of the novel’s re-release, Soltis revisited Heartless for the first time in years. She said she worried her feelings toward the book would have changed.
“I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I could still make myself laugh,” she said. “It’s definitely a much different experience now, but I still feel very connected to the novel.It’s had a fun little decade-long journey. … It’s kind of ironic because the book is about a girl who won’t die and here this little book won’t die, so it’s a really fun path that it’s taken.”
Building a horror author
As a lifelong fan of horror and genre fiction, Soltis said it was natural she became a horror author.
“My dad raised me on classic horror movies and classic sci-fi, so I grew up watching Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolfman, and then 80s sci-fi flicks like Alien and Terminator, so that is what was in my brain. When I started writing, that is absolutely what came out.”
Soltis started writing after finishing her degree in English at Montclair State University in New Jersey.
“When I said I was an English major, people would always say to me, ‘Oh, you’re going to teach,’ and I was like, ‘No, I don’t want to be a teacher. I want to be a writer.’ And I had no idea how to do that.”
After moving to Charleston from New Jersey for a job in the tech industry, Soltis picked up pen and paper and started writing short stories. Then, a friend challenged her to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a challenge to complete a 50,000 word novel in one month, held annually in November.
Despite never having written anything longer than 3,000 words, she took on the challenge.
“That was when I wrote my first novel, but I did not finish the first draft in a month. I think it took about a month and a half. I had a small child, so it was a lot of writing at night once the kiddo was asleep.”
In 2012, Soltis published her first novel, Undead America: Zombie Days, Campfire Nights with the now-closed Muse It Up Press.
Now, she’s looking forward to new projects, including a crime novel about “another female main character getting into trouble.
“I’m setting it in Charleston because I love this weird little city we call home,” she said.
Women find space in horror genre
Despite horror — and genre fiction like sci-fi, fantasy, and crime — historically being dominated by male authors, women authors like Soltis have begun to make space for themselves in the genre.
She partially attributes the rise of female horror authors to the existential dread of everything happening in the world.
“It hits us hard, and we’ve got to find outlets for it,” she told City Paper. She highlighted authors Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Mexican Gothic) and Mariana Enriquez (Our Share of Night) as breaking open horror for both women authors and women fans of horror.
“It feels like we’re being found. And it’s our time. And I do think some horrific things have been going on in the worlds of women lately, politically [and] economically… so we’re all dealing with it in our own way and writing these stories and grappling with real life through horror, through sci-fi,” she said.
“I think it’s a really beautiful time for women in horror and women in genre fiction in general, and I’m so excited to be this itty bitty little part of it.”
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