An Introduction to 'How to Hide Your Body After Death'

Beloved meets Lovecraft County in this queer erotic horror set in the backwoods of North Carolina.

Genres & Subgenres

Primary Genre

• Southern Gothic

Subgenres

• Queer Speculative Fiction

• Dark Romance

• Body Horror

• Erotic Horror

• Dark Fantasy

• Literary Horror

• Magical Realism

• Psychological Horror

---

Blurb:

In this lush, erotic, and grotesque Southern Gothic tale, a dying sex worker who enters a dark supernatural pact in the rotting belly of the rural South. A story of queer found family, ancestral grief, and monstrous intimacy set against the backdrop of racial hatred and decaying religiosity.

---

Protagonist:

Main Characters

Anahita “Annie” Davani-Blanding

• Queer Black woman

• Dying of a genetic illness

• Sex worker and survivor of abandonment

• Complex, sensual, fiercely maternal toward Dale

• Makes a pact with the supernatural being Yalda

Dale Braveboy

• 18-year-old trans masc Native teen (Cherokee/Saponi)

• Deeply traumatized runaway

• Loyal, artistic, guarded but loving

• His mother went missing a few months

Yalda

• Genderless, divine, monstrous being

• Appears in multiple guises of South Asian origin

• Offers erotic healing in exchange for Anahita’s posthumous body

• Seduces with love and terror

Sheriff Boone

• White sheriff who has Anahita encounters during her first week in town

• Obsessed with Anahita

• An antagonist who utilizes power and white supremacy

---

Backstory:

Anahita’s father vanished when she was a child, returning to India to raise a second family. Her mother raised her alone in a Southern Black community until her early death from the same genetic illness Anahita now carries. Her older brother Esmaeil, a tobacco factory worker, became her sole guardian. He too died young, leaving Anahita alone—except for a pastor who once loved her mother and now obsesses over Anahita in increasingly disturbing ways.

With her brother’s life insurance money, Anahita buys a trailer and flees to a nearly all-white rural town in North Carolina, one that doesn’t take kindly to outsiders— especially Black women. She wants to die alone, on her own terms. But death, it seems, has other plans.

---

Setting:

• Love, a decaying, insular rural town in North Carolina.

• Her pink trailer sits at the edge of the woods—where reality thins and the divine rests.

---

Literary Comps (Books, Short Fiction, Poetry)

• The Devourers by Indra Das

• The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez

• Beloved by Toni Morrison

• Bunny by Mona Awad

• The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw

• Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica

• The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi

• Bloodchild by Octavia E. Butler

Southern Gothic / Racial Horror / Erotic Horror

• Eve's Bayou (1997)

• Swarm (2023)

• Lamb (2021, A24)

• Saint Maud (2019)

• Titane (2021)

• Under the Skin (2013)

• Lovecraft Country (2020)

• True Blood (HBO)

• The Green Knight (2021)

• The Haunting of Bly Manor (Netflix)

Video Games

• Kentucky Route Zero

• Silent Hill 2

---

Content Warnings:

• Racism and racialized violence

• Sexual content and erotic horror (consensual and coercive)

• Death and terminal illness

• Religious trauma

• Body horror

• Transphobia

• Consensual Cannibalism

• Homophobia

• Grief