R. A. Busby - You Will Speak for the Dead - SSBA Horror Winner
Good evening! Tonight, my SSBA Author Feature is for the winner of the Horror Category - R. A. Busby author of the book with a title I can't stop thinking about - You Will Speak for the Dead. I will be eventually reviewing this book, too (it'll be a bit, I have a bit of a queue right now). But, for now, you can still learn all about R. A. Busby and check out the book yourself.
As usual, more information on the SSBA can be found here, and links to all of my other SSBA posts can be found here. Side note, nominations are open for the 2026 awards - so send them in!
On to the author spotlight!
R. A Busby - Author Biography
R. A. Busby is the 2020 Shirley Jackson Award recipient for short fiction, and the author of the horror novella Corporate Body (Cemetery Gates, 2023). She is a member of the Horror Writers Association. In her spare time, R.A. Busby watches cheesy gothic movies and goes running in the desert with her dog.
Where you can find R. A. Busby:
R. A. Busby hangs out on Threads, Instagram, and sometimes on Tiktok. She also maintains a webpage.Interview
1. How did your writing journey begin/come about?
I can't remember a time when I wasn't writing, to be honest. One of my earliest memories of writing anything creative must have been in about second grade. I remember sitting outside during recess with that lined paper they give you when you're learning how to write capitals and lowercase and writing what today would be termed "Wizard of Oz Fanfic" about how I, a boring girl from the desert, found my way into Oz with my pet mouse, where we had various adventures.
Both writing and reading were escapes for me, ways to process the world in which I was living, and they were imaginative boltholes, places to which I could escape. I continued writing through high school and college, where I minored in creative writing, but it was a terrible idea to do that, because all I learned was that the genres I treasured the most--fairy tales, folk tales, horror, Gothic literature--were definitely lesser-than. Only one professor in grad school convinced me otherwise, and I'll always be grateful to him for combating that myth and focusing in his courses not only on women writers, but Gothic and horror fiction written by women. Those courses were a lifeline to people like me.
2. Who are your biggest influences/favourite authors/books?
Oh, God, how much time do we have? More seriously, my biggest influences have come from all over the map--Angela Carter, Jorge Luis Borges, Shirley Jackson, Toni Morrison, Edgar Allan Poe, Daphne DuMaurier, Stephen King, Shakespeare...I really could go on.
3. What are some recent books you’ve enjoyed and can recommend?
I'm working on a novel right now which is set in a Colorado mining town in the 1880s, so I've been reading about everything from first-hand accounts of being a hard rock miner to the economic impact of sex workers on the development of the West, so I'm not sure that subject matter would appeal to everyone? However, I did do a recent reread of Philippa Gregory's very divisive novel Wideacre, which I love, because though it might be marketed as dark historical fiction, it is absolutely a horror novel with an utterly batshit main character, and it's compulsively readable.4. Please tell us a bit about some of your other writing/work
I think one of my favorites is the first story I ever got published, Bits, which is part of Demain Publishing's Short Sharp Shocks series. It's about a woman who's falling apart...literally.
One of my other genuine favorites is Words Made of Flesh, published through Cemetery Gates, and it's really a love letter to all of those writers whose work shaped me. It begins in a selective club in New Bedford of 1899, and on the last meeting of the year, a man tells a story about a living book, a book whose hunger must be fed.
On my website, R.A. Busby Books, I've got a number of links to previous works if anyone wants to check them out!
5. What’s next for you?
I hope to be done editing the book I'm working on before the new year, fingers crossed, and take it from there. With any luck, I won't be the only one who ever reads it.
You Will Speak for the Dead by R. A. Busby
Paul Simard’s life is a mess. When his mother dies, and his boyfriend moves out, the only thing Paul has left is his hoarder house cleaning business, and that’s not exactly a recipe for dating success. But after Paul gets a call to clean out the home of some elderly biologist, nothing will ever be the same. You see, 928 Avirosa isn’t just your normal cleanout. Something in the house is…alive. It’s not just the fungal carpet or the mushrooms growing over every surface, or even the disturbing smell. It’s the woman’s voice he hears inside his head. The creeping sense he’s been invaded. The powerful connections to memories and people he’s never seen. Yes. Something in that house is alive. And it wants to speak to him. Before long, Paul understands the house hoards more than just secrets – and Paul’s life depends upon uncovering its answers.
1. What inspired you to write this book?
I grew up in a house where my mother saved a ton of things. She wasn’t a hoarder, but she was a keeper, and when she died, it was a wrenching experience to go through the house and sift through all the things she had saved—including the red flannel shirt that made its way into the story.
That got me thinking of houses where the occupant’s keeping of possessions becomes problematic. It’s a phenomenon too often written off as “crazy” or sensationalized for television without asking the more sympathetic question of “Why?” Seeing my childhood house cleaned out made me understand at least one possible answer, though of course they’re as varied as people are. If you never throw anything away, you know it’s still there, still with you. Nothing is lost, nothing is abandoned. Speaking for myself, I find that profoundly moving, because that’s a desire I think many of us share: the desire for permanence even in the face of inevitable change.
2. What was your favourite part of writing it?
Researching fungi! I grew up in the desert, and it’s so dry that we don’t see a lot of mushroom species except your basic agaricus after a rain or on a lawn that gets watered. Hiking chunks of the Appalachian Trail from roughly Tennessee to southern Massachusetts was a revelation, because the fungi there are so varied and weird—mushrooms that taste like chicken or glow in the dark or that look like Japanese pottery or horses’ hooves. Amazing.
In the course of reading about decomposition, as one does, I ran into the works of Merlin Sheldrake and Paul Stamets, who write so meaningfully and beautifully about fungi as organisms—ones much more richly complex and ancient than I had imagined. Their insights were moving and gave me a sense of that permanence-in-change that’s part of all life.
Thanks for reading!
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