Uncanny Valley Girls: Essays on Horror, Survival, and Love

A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year - A BookRiot Most Anticipated Queer Book of the Year

"In these extraordinary essays, Lisowski reads the entrails of her life like a witch and invites you along for the ride. How could you say no?" --Carmen Maria Machado

A sharply personal and expansive memoir-in-essays dedicated to the strange and absurd beauty of horror films, exploring the complications of gender, the insidiousness of class ascension, and the latent violence hidden in our own uncanny reflections.

This is how it worked: first I loved them, and then I loved myself.

At twenty-seven, poet Zefyr Lisowski found herself in the place she feared most: a locked psych ward. While inside, she turned to horror movies--her deepest, most constant comfort.

Rather than disturb, scary movies have always provided solace and connection for Lisowski, as they do many others--offering a vision of a world filled equally with beauty and pain, and a reason to reach out to others and hold them tight. After all, as Lisowski argues, what terrifies us most about these movies is our own uncanny reflection--and at the root of that fear, a desperate desire to love and be loved.

In these wide-ranging essays, Lisowski weaves theory and memoir into nuanced critiques of films such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Saint Maud. From fears about sickness and disability, to trans narratives and the predator/victim complex, to the struggle to live in a world that wants you dead, she explores horror's reciprocal impact on our culture and--by extension--our lives. Through it all, Lisowski lays bare her own complex biography--spanning from a trans childhood in the South to the sweaty dancefloors of Brooklyn--and the family, friends, and lovers that have bloomed with her into the present.

Deeply felt, blood-spattered, and brimming with care and wonder, Uncanny Valley Girls thrusts this seasoned poet to centerstage.

Zefyr Lisowski is a trans and queer writer, artist, and North Carolinian living in New York City. A 2023 NYFA/NYSCA Fellow and 2023 QueerArt Fellow, she's the author of the poetry collections Girl Work, winner of the 2022 Noemi Book Prize, and Blood Box, winner of the Black River Editor's Choice Award from Black Lawrence Press. Zefyr's work has appeared in The Believer, Electric Literature, Catapult, Literary Hub, Split This Rock, and elsewhere. From 2016 to 2024, she served as poetry co-editor for the Whiting Award-winning Apogee Journal. She's seen grave robbers twice.