Rooting in the Rot

Somewhere in Saskia Nislow’s fridge is a lemon, slowly growing a skin of mold. It rolls around in the crisper, trailing a scum of spores, waiting to be noticed. To be needed. When Saskia holds the lemon again, turning the blued peel in the kitchen light, it won’t be disgust that floods them but wonder. In Saskia’s hands, rot isn’t worthless; it’s renewal, reinvention. It’s the material of life as we know it. 

Saskia’s debut horror novella Root Rot entertains the same fixations on organic breakdown. Nine unnamed children—who narrate in the plural “we”—find themselves set loose at their family’s lake house, an overgrown property replete with mushroom circles and strange happenings. The rules are different on vacation, including those governing reality: bodies morph, time flickers like candlelight, stars eat other stars out of the sky. As the children observe “Everything’s alive”—for better or for worse. A writer, ceramicist, and psychoanalytic training candidate, Saskia asks questions about the body as place. We spoke about sinister spirals, the grotesquery of family, and getting mad while watching Possession (1981).

This interview was conducted over video in May 2025. It has been lightly edited for concision and clarity. All images are courtesy of the author.

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LUKE SUTHERLAND (LS): One of the things Root Rot does so successfully is create an atmosphere. We hear the phrase “atmospheric horror” a lot, but I think atmosphere is one of the least talked about craft elements, and one of the most difficult ones in our toolbox to use. I’m curious, where does atmosphere come from for you? How do writers build it with purpose?

SASKIA NISLOW (SN): I’ve always been drawn to reading literature that feels like I’m having an experience while reading it. All the writing I admire is very good at that. I think for me, atmosphere usually starts with the feeling of place. It’s easy to get caught up in describing things visually in a way where you “know” what’s going on, but for place, I focus on and am interested in creating a feeling of being in a space. 

Back when I was in college, all of my writing was incoherent in setting. It was just me describing the outdoors forever and never getting to any sort of plot. That’s naturally what I’m interested in. What I try to do is create a sense for the reader that they are in the space with the characters because they can taste it. 

In Root Rot, part of why it was a fun piece to write is because the setting and the characters are so interchangeable; they are seeping into each other. Not only am I trying to create an experience for the reader where they feel like they’re inside of a setting, but where they feel like they’re inside of a character. Not so much inside the character’s mind, but inside the character’s skin.

LS: Well, there’s plenty of skin in this book. [Laughter] 

This dissolution of boundaries is really an engine throughout Root Rot. You’re playing with a lot of subgenres, body horror and eco-horror being the two that step forward. I always think of how the body is not a self-contained ecosystem. For you, where is that intersection of body horror and eco-horror, and what’s queer about that intersection?

SN: Body horror is always interesting to me because I actually think it’s hard to write if it’s in isolation. Our bodies are so rarely in isolation, especially the feelings of the body. What is body horror if it’s not navigating the surface of the skin, which is inside and outside? My favorite body horror is always in conversation with another type of horror. That’s why films like Tetsuo the Iron Man work so well, because it’s not just about being in a body, it’s what a body can be. That’s where I start thinking about how body horror is queer, because it’s perpetual creation, unmaking, remaking, making something new. 

I’m very interested in cycles of rot and soil. In Root Rot, I’m working with eco-horror and body horror to think about these cycles outside of the body, within the body, and when they start to come together. That always feels very queer to me. Thinking about queer negativity, soil is this incredibly rich, generative, creative place full of life, but all that life is coming from things dying. It’s made up of all of these things at various stages of life. 

 Think about the pretty common queer experience that if you’re going to live in the way you want to live then you are going to have to lose something, or something is going to change in a way that feels unknowable. That can feel like a kind of death, not in the “my old self died” way, but in a “I don’t actually know what it would be like to be this way.” All three of those types of horror meet at this place of exploring transformation beyond imagination, at the very edge of imagining.

Our bodies are so rarely in isolation, especially the feelings of the body. What is body horror if it’s not navigating the surface of the skin, which is inside and outside?

LS: When it comes to body horror in particular, transformation is often a locus of fear. I think about the transformation scene in An American Werewolf in London, for instance. There, transformation is this horrifying thing, but in Root Rot, when characters are undergoing really rapid and radical transformation of their bodies, we see them react across a spectrum of emotions, including delight. Is there space for pleasure in horror? What is that push and pull relationship of awe and disgust?

SN: There is definitely space for pleasure in horror. That’s why so many of us love it. I really struggle to sometimes distinguish between awe and disgust. Horror pushes at that. It’s challenging in a way that’s important, especially as an art form. As someone who is an audience for horror, you are hopefully experiencing emotions or ideas that you might not know how to navigate, or might be challenging to untangle. It forces you to meet the art where it’s at, which does require a change on your part. I still remember the first time I saw Possession (1981). For the first twenty minutes I was furious; I was like, “What the fuck is going on, this makes no sense!” Then I realized that I was feeling that way because I was being challenged, and that was such an exciting moment. This film is making me have to think and feel so differently than I do normally that I’m angry at it. How often does that happen, where you feel like you’ve reached the limits of your own mind or your own body?

How often does that happen, where you feel like you’ve reached the limits of your own mind or your own body?

LS: You were talking about the family earlier. Family horror in Root Rot and in general can encompass the idea of property and capitalism as extensions of the family. The book takes place at the Lake House, which is a family vacation home. Right on the first page, we hear the way that the family describes the Lake House: it was “… like our Grandfather had built himself a larger body, one big enough for all of us to fit into.” When we think about family and body in horror, where does capitalism come into that?

SN: Property can be a really rich place to explore the family within this capitalist framework because it’s often where the idea of a family starts to depart from what the family actually is. The idea that in order to feel at home or to feel safe or contained, the property needs to continue to grow more and more, or it needs to become more fortress-like, or more comfortable, or more removed. Individual family members’ understanding of what a family is to them can be  reflected in the space where they live, and what they think they need out of that. Especially in wealthy families when there aren’t barriers on that. 

In Root Rot, we have the patriarch who is accumulating. This is where I started again having the setting-character line blurred because I was thinking about overplanting, and how that kills the soil if you’re constantly trying to get something out of it. When you begin to think of a property as your family, it’s a reflection of thinking of your own body or self as the family. If the house is your body, and the body is always getting bigger and bigger, then everyone else is getting absorbed into that body. It’s very deadening, especially in terms of connection. The members of the family are no longer connected to each other; they’re only connected in the same way that you’re connected to your fingernails which you trim when you need to. There’s not a sense of self and other anymore.

LS: The structural framework of Root Rot is the collective “we” voice that embodies the children of the family. Thinking about all these questions of body and family and place in horror, how can children be an entryway into these questions, especially queer and trans children?

SN: Children are where a lot of stuff gets acted out in the family. They’re at the most liminal position—they’re not their parents, but their parents view them as, “That’s me, I made that, but that’s also different from me.” This is a person, but maybe not quite a person yet. When do they become a person? A lot of different parents have different understandings of when a child might become a person. “They’re the dearest thing to me, but they’re also a challenge to me.”

Especially with queer and trans children. It’s a very dangerous position to be a child whose parent can’t see themself reflected in you. To be a child and have your parent look at you and see themself is scary, but it’s also protective on a certain level. To be a child who can’t serve that function for a parent—the parent looks at them and sees something different, something foreign, something challenging—is very precarious. Children necessarily will try to connect with their caregivers even if there’s no connection to be had. The struggle to do that when it’s hard to do and the journey of figuring out other ways to survive is very interesting.

To be a child and have your parent look at you and see themself is scary, but it’s also protective on a certain level. To be a child who can’t serve that function for a parent—the parent looks at them and sees something different, something foreign, something challenging—is very precarious.

LS: It brings up all these similar questions of property, too, in the way that some parents view their children as things that they own. This is a big question, but what do we owe children, in our stories and in real life? 

SN: We owe them personhood. That feels so basic, but I am frequently frustrated by how infrequently that is afforded to children, in stories and in life. Part of me writing this is in reaction to a lot of mommy horror I was reading. There’s so many stories of motherhood that are essentially about a mother who has a child that is too challenging. There’s something wrong with the child: “My child is my enemy!” That goes really unexamined in order to make a certain type of feminist point. You get a bad child and no one believes you and people are sexist about it. There’s a space for that, but there are a lot of ways in which both stories and people in general pretend that what they want for children is for them to be free to be themselves, to become the person they are, but there’s a real limit on how much a child’s selfhood can disrupt an adult’s comfort before it becomes unacceptable. 

I particularly wanted to write about trans children not only because that’s where a lot of adult anxieties are being acted out, but also because that is a place where you start to see children being denied personhood about literally their own bodies. They can have their own minds, maybe. Maybe a parent can allow the child to have their own mind, but they cannot allow them to have their own body. The body still belongs to someone else.

LS: Some recurring symbols that I glommed onto in the book are spirals and whorls, things that consume other things, and doubles. Literal body doubles and doubled images. I can’t help but think of Uzumaki for spirals, or about the incredible prevalence of twins in horrors—like in Dead Ringers or The Shining. What is compelling about these shapes? Why do they scare us?

SN: I also love Uzumaki. For the spiral, I was thinking about the idea of the magic circle, a place that’s within the world you know, but once you’re inside of the circle, there are different rules. It’s a different place within the same place. It’s maybe why the image of the spiral is so appealing, because it’s essentially a stationary two dimensional shape that gives the appearance of leading somewhere else, or of moving you in relation to it. It pulls in without having anywhere to pull you into, without being anywhere else. Especially because I was drawing a lot on folklore around fairies and fairy tales—which is where I believe the idea of the magic circle originates. 

Doubles are just uncanny. You’re right that twins are really common in horror. In [Root Rot], they sort of evoke an idea of boundarylessness between bodies. There’s always that psychic twin thing, the idea that something is shared between them even if it’s not visible. In thinking about doubling in Root Rot, I was trying to play with a feeling that, as you brush up against a different kind of world, how you expect things to move and work is going to change.

LS: With doubles, twins, or copies in horror, sometimes the uncanniness is rooted in the exact reflection between two things—like the twins in The Shining speaking in perfect unison. What’s interesting in Root Rot is that a lot of the discomfort comes from imperfect doubles. The flooded yard doesn’t perfectly reflect the sky, body doubles are off but you’re not able to place why. 

SN: [That’s part of] trying to create a sense of characters being tricked or drawn in. With the doubled sky in the yard—is that actually what it is? What’s underneath that? Who is that for?

LS: Right. I remember a character saying “That’s not our sky.” 

In addition to being a writer, you’re also a ceramicist. Looking at your portfolio, your ceramics are getting at some very similar themes of transformation, of embodiment. There’s a lot of natural motifs of scavengers and decomposers, rotting or melting fruits. I would love to hear what your ceramics practice brings to your writing and vice versa.

SN: I’m working out a lot of the same thoughts in both, but what ceramics does for me is that it feels like a practice that’s more rooted in the unconscious. I am a control freak, and in writing, that tendency comes out really intensely. If I know I can make a sentence the way I want it, I will get hung up on it. As I’m forming it, I will want it to be exactly the way I want it to be. 

Ceramics is almost like an exercise in revealing and being able to consider my own imagination.

I can’t do that in clay. It does not do what you want it to do. It’s just going to do what it does. It can take months to make something, and it will be in really gnarly stages where it looks like shit and you can’t even picture what it’s supposed to look like. It’s a practice of having something you’re thinking about and working on it and working on it and working on it until it becomes what you’re thinking about in whatever way it’s going to want to do that. That’s such a fruitful way for me to actually understand what I’m thinking about. Half the time as a writer, just figuring out what’s in your mind is very hard. I find that very easy with clay. I didn’t really know that rotting fruit is something that I think about all the time, because that’s not the sort of conscious thought you have. Usually what happens is, I leave lemons in the drawer and they go bad. I’ll examine those lemons and find them cool, but I’m never thinking to myself: “Wow, I’m so interested in rotting fruit, this is a motif for me! What am I thinking about it, why do I like it?” If I have a lump of clay and I want to make a mug, and it starts being about mold on lemons, then I am thinking about it. Ceramics is almost like an exercise in revealing and being able to consider my own imagination.