Where has Erica Waters been hiding?
Just a year after releasing her first book, she was back in 2021 with her second. The River Has Teeth is a stunning mystery exploring the nuances of grief and love for teenage girls, a perfect after-Halloween horror novel for readers looking for something scary yet empowering. The novel is equal parts beautiful, terrifying, and inspiring.

With two horror hits under her belt, some readers thought she might take a well-deserved break, but the new powerhouse author isn't stopping. Only a few weeks ago, she released her third novel in three years, The Restless Dark.

After pumping out so many fun, frightening, and fantastically Queer hits over the last few years, many readers are wondering, where did Erica Waters come from?

"Well, I guess, I had always wanted to be a writer," she said in an interview with the SGN. "I think that's common for a lot of writers... that, even from a young age, you kind of have a feeling of, 'I'm good at this, I'm good with words, I like words, I find a home here.' But for me, it took a long time to get to the place where I could think that being a writer was a reasonable dream for me to have."

Similar to many young women, she struggled with impostor syndrome. She viewed writing as a hobby or a passion but felt that the mature career decision was to aim for a more practical career. "Growing up low income, going to college, it was like, 'Let's just try to be practical and get a job, and you know, take care of myself.'"

Everything changed for Waters after a family tragedy struck. "It was really only after my dad died... fairly young, of cancer... He had just retired and was planning on traveling and seeing the world. He'd never really gotten to do anything, and then he died.

"I was working at this job, and it was good and stable, but it was just soul-killingly boring, and I realized, okay, if I ever really want to write, do this thing that feels like the truest part of me, then I need to go ahead and do it. This is my time."

A nonstop writer
She then got to work and hasn't stopped. "That's when I got serious about writing. I wrote two novels before Ghostwood Song. That was kind of me learning how to write a novel. And after that [was] when I wrote Ghostwood Song."

She drafted her first novel with the help of an author mentorship program, which helped Waters get her foot in the door, and within only a couple of years of starting the process, she was able to see her name on the bookshelf.

While writing Ghostwood Song took a bit longer due to Waters learning the tricks of the trade, she has revised her process to now become a "book a year" author. Writing The River Has Teeth was an entirely new one, though.

"So, at this point, I was working with an editor. Harper Teen had already bought my second book before I'd even written it, so it was a very different writing experience, because it wasn't just me writing what I wanted to write, in my little world of trying to tell myself a story," she said. "Now I [had] deadlines. I had reader expectations, and I had to work with my editor. It was a very different process of trying to write more as a team. I'm still the person writing the book, but more people have a say in [it] at that point. It was a more collaborative process, and it went more quickly, because of course I had deadlines...

"The River Has Teeth came out just one year after Ghostwood Song. My next book, too, will come out in a year. So, I'm kind of on a book-a-year schedule right now."

Horror inspired by nature
Where does an author find inspiration for a story as masterful as The River Has Teeth in such a short amount of time? For Waters, the answer is in nature. "Most of my ideas start from a place, a setting, you know, I visit somewhere, and it captures my imagination. I start imagining [who] might fill this space, what story would take place here."

The setting that sparked her idea for The River Has Teeth was the natural landscapes of the deep South. "For The River Has Teeth, I was visiting some nature parks, in and around Nashville. ...One in particular was Bell's Bend Park ...which has lots of open fields with wildflowers. And on the day I went... it was empty."

She felt something there and knew she wanted to explore it more. "Nobody else was there. I was all alone there, and all of the tall grass was shoulder high and dead and brown and kind of going 'shhh' in the wind. It was... this moment of feeling [that] a place had a stronger sense of self than you'd expect just land to have. It almost felt like it was alive and listening.

"I started thinking about a place that would feel that way and what kind of people would be populating that place, what would be happening there, and so, really, The River Has Teeth grew out of my love for Tennessee landscapes and... how sparked my imagination was by the flora and the fauna and the general landscapes around me."

These inspirations for the beauty in her novel also drew some of the most frightening concepts out of her psyche. "I love being out in nature, but I also am afraid of nature," she admitted. "I love being out in the woods, and there is a sense of peace there. [But], especially as a woman, we have been socialized to be afraid, to watch for danger, and to be hypervigilant.

"So, when I'm in the woods, I am hypervigilant. Every time I hear something creek or crack, or someone coming up behind me on a trail, I feel afraid. I knew from the beginning that... even though I thought it was beautiful and powerful, I would also be viewing [this landscape] with a sense of danger and fear. That's kind of where it grew from."

"For everyone who's been made to feel like prey and wished for sharper teeth"
Not only did she find the seeds of inspiration in the Tennessee wilderness, but she also knew from the conception of the novel that The River Has Teeth would be a book for the LGBTQ+ community.

"I feel like all of my novels tend to change a lot from the original conception to what ends up in the bookstore, but that is something that never changed. From the beginning, I knew there was going to be a love story between two very different girls who, at their core, had something similar at heart. So, yeah, I always imagined this as a love story between Della and Natasha."

She says she will always write LGBTQ+ stories. "I think we write aspects of ourselves in our books, and for me, as a Queer person, I write characters who can reflect something about me and my friends and family members that I love and care about, so that is always going to include LGBTQ people."

Empowering readers, especially LGBTQ+ readers, is always at the forefront of her work. "I hope that readers take away a sense of their strength and resilience," Waters said. "I hope that readers feel, after reading this book... like they've received some sort of catharsis, and I hope that they feel like they can turn to the people in their lives and find meaning and hope and love in their relationships, even amid scary and difficult and even terrible things."

She held her readers in her heart while crafting her book, so much so that she dedicated the work to them. "I'll read the dedication: 'For everyone who's been made to feel like prey and wished for sharper teeth.' That's really who this book is for, and I hope, at the end of it, that anyone who reads that dedication and feels like this book is for them...feel[s] like they have had some catharsis and maybe even a little bit of closure."

For Waters, there is catharsis, and even power, in horror. The genre she chooses to write in reflects the messages she hopes her readers take away. "I think horror and ...dark fantasy ...both... are such a good way of taking the things that we are most afraid of, and putting them on a page in more concrete, tangible ways. We can take these abstract fears, and we can face them.

"So, for me, writing horror is a lot about taking the things I'm afraid of, exploring them on the page, and trying to get at them and seeing why am I so afraid of them... I think horror is a great way to look for things that we tend to keep buried in the dark. Horror is a great way to bring those things to the light and deal with them."