First Word on Horror
Episode: The Bacchae
Created by Philip Gelatt
Starring Elizabeth Hand
Exclusively on ETCH Studio’s Substack beginning March 14th, 2025

by Sasha Ravitch, Staff Writer

“I was raised Catholic, and that provided some template for belief [...] I think there is enough evidence of things not seen, or things that are inexplicable to suggest there is a kind of a dimension, or something that exists, co-exists, or inside, or sideways to the plane we live on that maybe intersects with it. You know, the ‘thin places.’”
Elizabeth Hand: First Word on Horror.

Philip Gelatt’s First Word on Horror is a prescient and powerful concept, with a pleasing execution and result. This fifteen-part documentary series chronicles five of our most esteemed contemporary horror writers: Stephen Graham Jones, Paul Tremblay, Elizabeth Hand, Laird Barron, and Marian Enriquez. Hosted on Etch Studio’s Substack, a new episode is delivered into the inbox of subscribers each Friday, beginning the week of February 3rd. It feels as if the series has been thoughtfully constructed to illuminate the thinning line between lived experience and crafted story, and the subsequent exploration of narratives (and what shapes them) is rendered afresh by each author who takes the stage. Oscillating seamlessly between the telling of fiction, the telling of truth, the telling of both, and perhaps the sharing of neither, these episodes reveal the integral humanness of these supernaturally talented storytellers.

Our third author for ETCH Studios’ series is the remarkable Elizabeth Hand, an author of astonishing accomplishment, tremendous acumen, and nearly unmatchable heart. Hand has authored over twenty works, many of which traverse the full spectrum of genre literature and range from novels to collections of stories and essays. Her critical work is regularly published by such institutions as the L.A. Times, Salon, The Boston Review, and the Washington Post. She has received an arsenal of awards, including multiple Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy, and Nebula Awards, and her work has been honored as Notable Books by both the New York Times and the Washington Post. Hand’s stories have been optioned for film and TV, and her novels featuring her most charismatic and tortured anti-hero, Cass Neary, are being developed for streaming. Hand is currently a faculty member for the Stonecoast MFA program and has been a guest teacher and workshop leader for such esteemed residencies and workshops as Clarion and Clarion West, Odyssey, Yale Writer’s Conference, and more.

Elizabeth Hand’s episodes are eponymously titled “The Bacchae,” after the short story she reads aloud periodically throughout the propulsive documentary footage. The time we spend with her is eviscerating and full of a pregnant, graceful gravitas one associates with her work. Gelatt is wise to allow these episodes to breathe, to relax into themselves, to unfurl and reveal layer after layer of achingly acute and unrelenting wisdom. Hand is charismatic and grounded, articulating herself with a frankness which lends a sharp edge to the velvety eloquence of her language. Indeed, it is Hand’s eloquence, her unnatural and immaculate ability to choose the perfect word for any sentence or situation, which makes the profound and painful stories she is sharing so eerily medicinal. She is honest and vulnerable, but she is fierce and quick, with intellectual reflexes that uncannily mirror the way she describes wild animals within her stories.

There is something more-than-human about Hand’s capacity to articulate otherness, especially the lush and volatile otherness of the dejected, the abjured, and the exiled. These outsider worlds, these spaces at the margins, are made electric and thrilling and seductive beneath the lamppost of her noir-timbre. One imagines that being privy to the intimate, earnest, and raw birth of early American punk rock helped initiate Hand into neon waters of the Weird. She writes from inside-the-outside, and in these episodes you feel as if a secret invitation has been extended to you. You find yourself with the rare privilege of being somewhere you never knew existed. Of being somewhere that you had to know the right people to get invited.

Listening to Hand tell these stories of her youth, of the worlds she wandered through and how they shaped her understanding of life, of relationships, of the unseen in its transgressive beauty and danger, feels like a sermon. She shares about her discovery of Patti Smith and the way in which sitting at the feet of this artist changed her. It is very easy to feel something similar listening to Hand in these episodes: that someone who is both a master teacher and an outsider-visionary has taken a moment to personally connect with you, to share revelation from somewhere else.

Hand does not speak as explicitly as Stephen Graham Jones and Paul Tremblay do in their episodes re: the process of writing horror or the conceits of genre. She doesn’t need to, because the way she moves through the episodes, the unveiling of trauma, of yearning, of shadow and of haunting, is so rich and redolent. She lives her storytelling, and the story lives through her. For Hand, horror does not mean a lack of beauty, a lack of sensuality. There is lust at the end of a sharp blade; there is something warm, wet, and panting beneath the raining shrapnel of looming Armageddon.

In her blistering humility she exemplifies the way one’s lived experience is what sets them apart as an artist, and these episodes are arguably some of the most remarkable, most moving, and evocative of the series. I anticipate that Hand will have an influx of new fans for her unparalleled corpus of work after these episodes air. Her grounded magnetism, her impeccable wordsmithing, her unflinching storytelling are exactly what the world needs right now.

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