WIHM Special - Tosca Lee

An accomplished and acclaimed novelist and author, Tosca Lee has become a big name on the scene based on several high-profile and concept works over the years. Now, in honor of Women in Horror Month, I talk with her about her early start as a writer, the plethora of novels she's been involved in and her upcoming works.



Me: Hello and thank you for taking the time to do this. First off, how did you get into the genre?
Tosca Lee: Thank you so much for having me! I never really sit down and define what I want to write next by genre so much as by story premise. One such premise was about “Blood Countess” Elizabeth Bathory, which became my novel, The Progeny and its sequel, Firstborn. Most recently, it was a medical/pandemic story that starts off as an apocalyptic thriller in The Line Between and takes a dark detour in the sequel, A Single Light, which is set six months after book 1.

Me: Were you always into genre films growing up? What films specifically got you into watching horror movies?
TL: I wasn’t allowed to watch horror growing up—so my friends were the ones telling me the entire story of movies like Poltergeist. Some of my favorites (once I had a car!) were Alien and Aliens, and, later, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and White Noise.

And now you know how old I am.

Me: When did you discover a passion for writing?
TL: It’s funny, I always wrote as a kid growing up, but I was wholly focused on becoming a classical ballerina. So I was winning writing contests and things like that in school, but my attention was focused on dancing after school an hour away with the Omaha Ballet. It wasn’t until spring break my freshman year in college that I was telling my dad about how great books are like roller coasters and blurted out, “I think I want to write a book” that I realized I wanted to see if I could build a roller coaster like that for someone else to enjoy. By then, I’d also had a traumatic injury that had sidelined hopes of a ballet career, so that definitely played into the shift in my focus.

Me: With your early life focused on other endeavors beyond writing, when did you decide to focus on that professionally?
TL: The day I had that talk with my dad, he made me a deal: he would pay me what I would have made working at the bank (which I already had lined up) if I wrote my first novel instead, did it full time, and treated it like a job. So that summer, I came home, fired up Word on my computer, and dug in. I had NO idea what I was doing, but no one said I couldn’t do it, or that a summer probably wasn’t long enough to write the sweeping epic historical novel about the Neolithic Stonehenge people I envisioned… so I did it.

Me: Your first novel, Demon: A Memoir, was released in 2006. What was the inspiration behind that?
TL: At the time, I was role-playing online, and was trying to envision a new character. I was already writing a fantasy novel about a warrior woman and definitely not interested in writing something else, but as I started exploring the idea of a new-fallen angel gaming character, I found myself fascinated. That night I wrote 40 pages of the book that would become Demon: A Memoir.

Me: The process to get it published was quite a journey. What happened to it?
TL: After writing the book that would become Demon: A Memoir in a six-week flurry (which I completely thought was a God Thing), I got rejected by the best for about six years. All this after trying to publish that Stonehenge book nearly a decade before, after which I wrote on the staff of a computer magazine and co-authored two computer books. I finally got an editor interested in it… and then we left his publishing house. Luckily, he took a new job at another one and was able to acquire it in a three-book deal there. And that started my fiction career.

Me: Your second book, Havah: The Story of Eve, arrived the following year. How did that one come about?
TL: So that was the second book in that book deal. When the editor came back and said, “Okay, we’d like to take this fallen angel novel. What else do you have?” I pulled out a single page of notes that would eventually become the prologue to Havah: The Story of Eve. “I have this!” I said. And literally, that was all I had—one page. They said, “We’ll take that and one more.” I said, “I don’t have another.” They said, “You’ll think of something.”

Me: By this point in your career, had you developed a personal writing style? How do you stay in a creative mindset while writing?
TL: I let the genre of the books (Demon was suspense, Havah was more literary) dictate voice. Honestly, and this might sound weird, I learned a lot about staying in the mindset from role-playing online. I say often that everything I know about characterization I learned from that.

Me: How did the collaboration with Ted Dekkar on the Books of Mortals trilogy come together?
TL: I ended up buying the rights to my first books back and selling them to a second publisher after my first one quit publishing fiction. This gave me the unique opportunity to seek new blurbs for the new covers. So I wrote to Ted to see if he’d blurb Demon. Turns out, my name had already been brought up by his team as a potential co-author, so that conversation started right away.

Me: Once the trilogy was over, you went back to solo work with Iscariot and The Legend of Sheba. Was this easier or more difficult following the collaborations?
TL: This is a great question that I don’t believe anyone has asked me. When you are used to writing with someone and you’ve spent years developing a partnership and system, and then all of a sudden that system is gone, you feel like that second pair of eyes that functioned so much as a safety net is suddenly gone. I felt like I had to retrain myself, in some respects, to function as a solo author again because the process is very different.

Me: Where did the inspiration come from for your next books, the House of Bathory duology?
TL: From a reader! He asked me to consider writing the story of Elizabeth Bathory (AKA the “Blood Countess”—most famous for purportedly bathing in the blood of virgins). I wanted to step away from historical fiction by then, but decided that Bathory’s life would make a great mythology for a supernatural thriller about her modern-day descendants.

Me: The books were picked up and set for development as TV shows. Are there any updates you can provide for this?
TL: There’s always a lot of hoops that have to be jumped through before something like this comes to fruition… the books, which were initially in development by CBS, have recently been picked up by another network, so I’m excited to see what happens next!

Me: More recently, the post-apocalyptic thrillers The Line Between and A Single Light were released. What can you tell us about these novels?
TL: The Line Between (book 1) is the story of 22-year-old Wynter Roth, who has just been ousted from a Midwestern doomsday cult… just in time for the apocalypse. It’s a pandemic story that, honestly, feels a little eerie as I’m watching events in the news play out today. I’m super excited to report that The Line Between was a Goodreads Choice Awards semifinalist for best mystery/thriller of 2019, was picked up as part of the Target stores “Target Recommends” program, and that the book and its sequel are also in development for TV.

Me: What are you working on that you'd like to share with our readers?
TL: Right now, I’m working on a medieval thriller (that may or may not have a witch in it) and a WWII historical.

Me: Lastly, being that this is Women in Horror Month, what special message do you have for any women out there looking to join the industry in any capacity as you are one yourself? Thank you again for your time!
TL: Be the badass you are and work tirelessly on stories you love.

Thank you so much, Don!

This interview ran as part of our month-long Women in Horror Month celebrations. Click the banner below to check out all of the interviews and reviews we've conducted for the event: