5-10-25 — Special Report - Interview with Elizabeth Broadbent

Surprise! I have a special interview with Elizabeth Broadbent, the author of one of the BEST novellas I have read this year - Blood Cypress.

Let’s get find out more about this amazing story.

Christina Pfeiffer: Where do I even start with this interview? Thank you so much for taking time to chit chat with me about BLOOD CYPRESS. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your writing journey thus far?

Elizabeth Broadbent: I started writing when I was five—I remember a poem I wrote in kindergarten! I knew I wanted to be a writer from the time I was really, really young. But I had a hard time socially during my MFA program, despite being very successful as a writer and winning numerous awards, and I quit writing for several years after I finished it.

Of all things, I eventually started a mom blog. One of my essays, A Mother’s White Privilege, went wildly viral—I ended up on CNN, MSNBC, and NPR’s “All Things Considered.” It also earned me a job at Scary Mommy, the largest parenting site on the web, where my work had millions of hits per month.

During my eight years at Scary Mommy, I wrote about the intersections between feminism, mental health, politics, and parenting to an underserved and generally ignored demographic. I also wrote for places like The Washington Post, Insider, and Time’s website; I’m most proud of my work with ADDitude Magazine, the first and only print journal for people with ADHD and autism.

I turned to fiction after the internet journalism bubble burst. When I realized my surrealist poetry had an audience, I decided to try horror fiction. But even after years of being published in WaPo, I had to spend at least a year upping my game for a chance at publication in this field. Literary horror is where all the cool litfic kids migrated. The talent here is unbelievable.

CP: BLOOD CYPRESS is such an unnerving and raw look at family, small town hypocrisy, “good ol’ boy” mentality, sexual identity, special needs children AND sexual assault. Let’s do an easy question first, how did this novella come to be?

EB: This novella was a long process. I’m a little obsessed with William Faulker (understatement), in particular Absalom, Absalom! And The Sound and the Fury, both novels about the tragically doomed Compson family; they’re relics of the Old South who can’t keep up with the changing times. But I always hated two things about Fury: Caddy never has a voice, and they treat Benji horribly.

Blood Cypress is revenge for both. It’s the Compson family in the present day, on the side of a haunted swamp, from Caddy’s point of view. That was my original intention. It spiraled outward, of course, and that’s not as present as it was in former drafts.  

That was the original intention of the framing narrative, by the way. It’s a direct reference to Quentin and Shreve McKenzie from Absalom, Absalom!. And Princeton is the Southerner’s Northern university.

CP: Lila, that poor child. Actually, I shouldn’t call her a child as children have innocence and hers was ripped from her at a young age. Was it difficult writing her character as her trauma would never end, even in death? And is that commentary on purpose? The idea that because of her family and the “blood tells” that her supposed shame will live as long as her name is remembered by others like McKenzie?

EB: It was hard writing her, yes. But this is the reality for women in the South: we’re torn between the virgin/whore dichotomy that Lila’s brothers force her into. She advocates for a third space—bisexuality—which they utterly refuse her as something deviant and wrong.

The idea of “blood tells” is one that threads through all Southern stories. Go to any Southern gathering and eventually someone will ask who your people are. Our favorite games are who-knows-who and who’s-whose-cousin (most of my exes are related to one another if you go back far enough); tell me you’re from South Carolina or Virginia and I’ll start piecing you into my past and present social landscape.

CP: We have to get into the Sheriff and his deputies. Women - everyone one of us - has “that story”, the one where those who were supposed to protect us, used that as a power wield to invoke fear. Davis hurts with words, Quentin - well, we know, and the constant problems with the local law enforcement. Was the theme of power and authority intentional in how subservient Lila was? The “go along to get along” mentality?

EB: Yep. That was central to this novella. The idea of how women are viewed in the South and the roles we’re expected to assume is really what I hope readers will walk away with. You’re a virgin or a whore.

And small town Southern cops? They’re like that. I think Northerners like to imagine I’m exaggerating—a friend from New York read Blood Cypress before it was released and asked me about it. But my Southern friends were all like, “Good job on the cops.” They know. This is real. They are, indeed, that horrible.

CP: Beau. My heart and soul for this novella. My son is ten and autistic. While never completely revealed, Beau does suffer from a severe developmental delay. Some of the quotes and situations hit me hard as a mother to special needs children. And the character of Beau is written so thoughtfully and honestly. He is the light in the darkness of this novella. Can you speak on how his character came to be?

EB: The easy answer: he’s a version of Benji from The Sound and the Fury. I wanted to get revenge for the way the Compson family treated him as subhuman. If they have an original sin, beyond their generational sin of white privilege and oppression (which this novel never touches, because I couldn’t overload a novella), it’s that.

The hard answer: I have a houseful of neurodivergent kids, and I’m neurodivergent myself. While I obviously wasn’t nonverbal, and my issues weren’t nearly as bad as Beau’s, my differences infuriated my parents, and I remember the desperate loneliness and isolation that came with that.

With everything that was happening and had happened to Lila, do you feel she went in search of him to find him and bring him home or to die as he may have? As the monsters she knew were far more terrifying than the unknown.

I think Lila went out praying she’d find him but very much expecting she would die instead. She didn’t think she would live to find Beau.

CP: Quentin and Lila, that relationship broke my heart. He kept telling her, almost as a warning of what was brewing inside of him. His thought process made so much sense to him but the absolute betrayal Lila had to experience, was that the original part of the story or did the characters take you a different path while writing?

EB: This novella was a wild ride in part because I finished it once—in Quentin’s point of view. Then I read it and went, Oh no. This isn’t his story. It’s Lila’s. And I know exactly what happens, too. This absolutely is not his story; it’s about something else entirely.

So I had to rewrite the whole thing, not only in a different point of view, but with a very different theme. And believe me, in that early version, Quentin absolutely did not betray Lila that way.

The decision for that to happen came, in part, from Faulkner—in The Sound and the Fury, Quentin lies to his father and says he committed incest with Caddy in hopes he’ll save her from the shame of getting pregnant out of wedlock with Dalton Ames. His father doesn’t believe him.

That’s such an extreme reaction, such a wild moment in the novel. He’s willing to lie about incest? Because sleeping with his sister is better than the idea that his sister might sleep with a stranger? It’s not such a giant leap from that to the act of it. And it fit so well with the virgin/whore dichotomy I was working with.

CP: The decay and breakdown of Lila’s family home becomes a central and almost pivotal character of the story as well. The reader finds the house, family, community, all of it in some form of decay. With the encroachment of the swap, it adds another timeline that makes everything feel more frenzied causing anxiety. Was this intended for the reader to feel such a sense of foreboding and claustrophobia?

EP: Absolutely. That’s the story of the small town South. It’s falling apart at the seams. The old ways of life, the old ways of being are disappearing. And thank God for it, for more reasons that I have time and room to write. But in so many ways, it’s a chronicle of despair.

You know, I was reading the other day about how this society has changed so rapidly—science has made us aware of the biological reality of climate change, evolution, LGBTQIA+ issues, etc.—so many things that undercut traditional religious “values.” The earth is not ours to subdue. We didn’t come from Adam and Eve. Being gay isn’t a choice. And that’s so traumatic for some people. So many old ways of being and moving through the world are demolished by those ideas.

47 and his goons are so popular because they offer denial. They’re ditching NOAA. They’re erasing trans people from Stonewall. This is what Lila’s brother do, too. If they erase her bisexuality, if they deny it, then they can cling to these old ways of being. The South is in tatters, and none of these people can handle that reality.

CP: Sexual identity and LGBT+ representation is a strong theme in BLOOD CYPRESS. Lila is a lesbian and Quentin is presumed gay. The Sheriff and his deputies play a big part in exacerbating that assumption with Quentin. While Lila has to tell people and isn’t believed - Davis and the kitchen scene for example. How important was this representation for this novella?

EB: Representation is important in the sense that it’s a novella about a bisexual girl—that’s the core of the novella, the same Blood Cypress is about a neurodivergent kid who’s lost in a swamp. This is an LGBTQIA+ novella, I think, more than one with bisexual representation.

CP: Do you have any other works that you can tell us about releasing soon?

EB: In early 2026, Undertaker Books is releasing Ink Vine and Other Stories, a compilation of the interconnected short stories set in Lower Congaree, the same town where all my Southern Gothic works are set, including Ink Vine, Ninety-Eight Sabers, and of course Blood Cypress. Some of the stories have been published already, and some haven’t.

In March 2026, Sley House Publications is releasing an interconnected collection of my sci-fi shorts, Tigers of Greater Antarctica, which deals with questions of sentience, humanity, and grief. Most of it has never been published before.

Then in June of that year, Sley House releases the novel connected to them, Breaking Neverland, It’s 300 years in the future, and a rock star’s super-sheltered kids are released into the world with nothing the navigate the tabloid insanity but an intimidating Russian manager and a vaguely sinister public relations AI. It’s a cyberpunk whirl of a novel with shades ofLess than Zero that uses motifs from Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” But if Blood Cypress is my Faulkner homage, this one owes the most to my other favorite writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald. It breaks my heart in so many ways. I think my favorite line from it is this one, from the perspective of the main character, a guy named Bowie:

I could have cried. I could have taken him to bed. I could have punched his pretty face. “I love you, too,” I said.

https://www.amazon.com/Cypress-Selected-Consortium-Anomalous-Phenomena-ebook/dp/B0DNVK3WSK