Braving the Horror: A Conversation With Usman T. Malik

In November 2025, Tasavvur Community & Outreach Manager Maliha Rao and Non-fiction Editor Mushba Said sat down with Pakistani author, Usman T. Malik, to discuss horror, advice for young writers, and writing even when the world is on fire.

Usman T. Malik is a Pakistani-American speculative fiction writer, known for his critically acclaimed short fiction such as The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family (2014), The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn (2015), and City of Red Midnight: A Hikayat (2020), amongst others. In 2021, he released his short story collection, Midnight Doorways: Fables From Pakistan, which went on to win the Crawford Award. He is the first Pakistani to win the Bram Stoker Award for short fiction. His work has been nominated for the  Locus, Nebula, World Fantasy and Ignyte awards, and reprinted  in several Year’s best anthologieslists. His debut novel A Dark and Narrow House is forthcoming from Putnam in spring 2027. 

“I’m almost done with it; I might do one more minor pass, but mostly it’s ready for prime time.” Malik’s upcoming dark fantasy novel will be the first of a three-book deal, which prompted us to ask: Is it part of a trilogy? “No it’s standalone. I ; could turn into a trilogy but the plan is for it to be[it is to be] standalone.” The pitch for his second novel, as he excitedly explains, is Heart of Darkness meets The Terror (the show). “So I want to do something that I’ve been thinking about for a while., I have a general idea in my mind as to what I wanna do. It’s basically going to be about colonialism, of course, because it’s set in that historical period, but it’s also gonna be about… history.”

Malik is joining us from his home in Orlando, Florida, where he lives with his wife and two sons. He divides his time between his medical practice and his writing. “I’m setting up a brand new medical practice, so that’s been very, very challenging – fun, but also a lot of work […] And that is besides my usual day job.” He is sporting a bright red jersey, standing out against the white background as he takes bites of an omelette in between questions – it’s morning in Orlando and he’s booked for the day. We start off in English but slowly switch to Urdu, Malik happy to converse bilingually “after a while.” Hence it is important to note that some of Malik’s comments have been translated as a result of that. 

It is not our first time speaking to Malik, he is actually an old friend and collaborator, hence as we catch up asking about family and life, we decide to ask Malik how he feels about his eldest son’s writing. “He has been writing since he was a kid, but he’s bloomed recently,” he says with a big smile across his face before humbly adding on, “he’s way more globally literate stuff than I am, so it’s exciting to see him expand his wings.”

Hailing from Lahore, Malik is fairly self-taught. He started, starting out writing fiction in Urdu as a child before eventually making his way to writing speculative fiction and horror in English. In 2013, after publishing a couple of short stories, he was selected for the prestigious Clarion West Writing Workshop. In 2024, in a full-circle moment, he returned to Clarion West as an instructor. “That’s rare, obviously not every alumnus goes back to teach, and it almost happened ten years to the time when I was a student.” 

When asked what that experience was like for him as a teacher, he is quick to point out how his self-taught background influenced what he taught the students. “I just tell them my own experience – I’m not a trained writing teacher, I never went to college for it. So whatever I learned, I learned on my own. And so, for me, going to Clarion West [as a teacher], my goal was to share my experience with them and tell them things that I think are important and things that you have to be careful about, things that I’ve learnt through experience.” Malik goes on to talk about how young writers should be wary of social media clout chasing and cliques, emphasising the importance of choosing battles wisely. “People always miss the forest for the trees,” he says when discussing the importance of distinguishing between discourse that is solely for optics versus discourse that carries impact. “I don’t believe in the idea of punching up or down, I don’t – I don’t like the idea of punching people at all. I like the idea that we should have – generally – we should have a big tent and we should invite people in for dialogue.” But he feels that, for younger writers especially, creating art is a better and more important task than online discourse. “It is so much better to put your energy into creating art than gaining followers. Because followers are ephemeral. I’ll give you an example, right now I’m reading a book on Indian history – I’m obsessed with history right now, that’s all I’m reading […] the only reason we know about the Indian conqueror kings of the 11th and 12th centuries is because of travelers like Ibn-e-Batuta and Marco Polo as well as local scholars and writers” Malik ardently points out “If we didn’t have the written sources we would’ve never known about these people – all of history is dependent on penmanship. So your writing is so much more important than you think.”

Malik’s passion for his craft is not just limited to the stories he writes or the books he reads. His own background and journey have heavily influenced how he has navigated his writing career. In 2017, he co-founded the Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction – the first speculative fiction writing award for Pakistani writers. In 2023, he and his team members from the Salam Award organised a speculative fiction workshop with Elizabeth Hand and Mary Anne Mohanraj as instructors, a Clarion-style space for Pakistani spec-fic writers. While he has stepped away from the Salam Award due to work commitments, he continues to contribute wherever and whenever he can to help the community. In 2024, The Salam Award and Malik collaborated with Clarion West by offering two scholarships; the former sponsoring Pakistani writers, and Malik and his family sponsoring Palestinian writers.

“At Clarion I told people, listen, if you’re going to be – and this is important for all of you guys actually – if you’re gonna pick up a cause, you should be ready to lose your job, your book, your agent, your publisher over it. If you’re not ready for it […] don’t go all crazy for stuff that is going to be completely meaningless in one year.”

Malik is no stranger to becoming a martyr for causes he believes in. H; he has openly spoken up against the genocide in Palestine since 2014, “I lost my long-term editor, I lost many friends.” Malik points out how the tide is turning and the industry is becoming more progressive, ”Do you know who won the National Book Award for non-fiction yesterday?” He asks, beaming, “Omar El-Akkad won for the book, One Day Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This.” He won the National Book Award for non-fiction.” Malik also believes the shift isn’t limited to the industry or by borders – good, progressive people exist everywhere, giving the example of Lavie Tidhar, an Israeli writer and editor, who has reprinted Malik’s stories in the past. Overall, despite the difficulties it has brought, Malik has no regrets and is happy he has done what he can in his capacity, including sponsoring the $2,500 scholarship for Palestinian writers at Clarion West. When asked how younger writers should navigate the industry, Malik offers one piece of advice for clarity: “Do not be a martyr to causeless causes.”  

The longer you speak to Malik, the more you realise he is someone who understands how to negotiate reality better than some – how he is solution-oriented even in the most hopeless of scenarios. It is not new to hear how the state of the world for the last few years has caused many writers and artists to be unable to create work at the rate they used to, or create work at all. Malik has gone through this personally. “I had a lot of difficulty in the beginning of the genocide, and I was on a novel deadline – the clock had started then […] I couldn’t write, my brain wasn’t working. I needed a hack.” Well, I’ll give it to you guys a hack, because a friend of mine, after ten years of no writing, wrote a hundred thousand words using this hack.”  Malik points out that the trick he uses is similar to something fellow author Cadwell Turnbull does. “Cadwell gave it a nice term. So instead of giving yourself a ceiling, give yourself a bottom or a floor.” In Malik’s case, he gave himself 200 words to write per day. “That’s three paragraphs, can I do that? Yeah, I can do that, and that instantly hacks my brain and now I can do that. [Now] I don’t have to live in that perpetual guilt, I can reward myself, go for a walk, have ice cream, or whatever. Now, if you’re doing two hundred words a day, if you do that for five days, that’s one thousand words. On Saturday, Sunday, I can do 500 words [each day]. So that’s two thousands words a week; multiply by 52 and that’s a hundred thousand words a year. Doing this, literally just doing this, I finished my novel in less than a year.” 

Of course, Malik’s medical background sneaks in during our discussion, when he points out how writing everyday builds a habit that trains one’s synapses, making the process itself easier the stronger the habit becomes. “However, I will quote John Crowley who once said ‘Writing is the only craft in the world where if you don’t write for five years and you come back to it you find you might have become better at it.’ ”

This leads Malik to point out how every writer has their own process, and he recalls an interaction he had with author Stephen Graham Jones many years ago at a convention. “Stephen Graham Jones has written everyday probably since he was 17 and he’s published some fifty-odd books. He’s amazing and his brain is so well trained that, [I remember] when I was at a writing convention with him and he was coughing, and we started talking about it. So three days after that – the conference hadn’t even ended, mind you – he pinged me on Facebook Messenger [saying] that he wrote a story about it. At the conference. Because his brain is trained to write and respond that quickly. My brain isn’t like that, I could never do that.”

While we’ve discussed writing in general, one thing we haven’t discussed at this point is writing horror, something Malik has done plenty of. So we must ask: Has he ever written anything that has scared him?  He admits he has, and believes it to be a common experience for horror writers. “When writing horror you need to really get into that creepiness and unease. […] Horror is something where you, as the writer, want the reader completely freaked out. So in order to do this you need to dig into your own fears.” Malik gives the example of his story Lal Aandhi, which is based on an experience he had as a 10-year-old, of being locked in a basement by a cousin, and that experience allowed him to vividly recreate that unease in his story. “So yeah, surfing your fears – that does happens and it should happen because it tells you how true you are to your own emotions.”

But for someone like Malik, who has both written and read a great deal of horror, is there a point where horror becomes predictable for him? Does he find his tolerance for horror being higher than others? “I think so. The more you read or watch, it becomes a part of your memory bank, so the fear of the unknown is mollified. The more you read the more your understanding and expectation shifts. But if you keep reading good writers who delve darker and darker then you start seeing different things.” He gives believes it depends on someone’s ‘memory bank’, giving the example of his former editor:, “Surprising Ellen Datlow is hard because she’s read so many stories and novels. Her referencememory bank is huge.” This is where he feels readers in Pakistan miss out when it comes to horror, “A lot of horror readers, especially in Pakistan, just simply don’t have access or they haven’t really been exposed to writers who write literary or experimental horror. They’re not exposed to that kind of literature, cause we don’t get small press or indie press books.”

Horror being the genre that is, whether it’s in writing or media in general, often pushes boundaries with its content, sometimes touching upon subjects which can traumatise the consumer of that content in unexpected ways. How, if at all, should horror be navigated? Malik feels the matter isn’t about the subject matter but rather how and why it’s in the story to begin with. Giving the example of Stephen King’s Pet Cemetery, which explores themes of childhood death and animal crueltydeath, Malik points out how those themes were not solely for sensationalist reasons, rather the use of themes was with purpose and created an impactful story. “So in terms of topic there isn’t a limit, but the real limit is when horror isn’t horror anymore but a kind of gratuitous torture porn,,” he points out. 

As writers from the Global South or non-Western spaces, one struggle that pops up in writing circles is negotiating our culture into our stories. Some fear white-washing their culture, some fear making their stories too complex for Western audiences. “So it’s a tricky balance, right? First off, the balance is between writing for your own people (if you want to) and knowing your audience. That is what  Ellen [Datlow] would often tell me whenever I would add a lot of cultural references that I didn’t want to explain […] and I was expecting the reader to do some grunt work. And that’s important too: ; dDon’t we read Spanish words in English? Or Italian? Didn’t Edgar Allen Poe have us translating Latin? […] I’m also obsessed with history and if we start talking about how rich our linguistic tradition is you’ll be surprised how powerful it is, maybe at some point I should do a talk about it. But the point is you need to[to] know your audience; if you’re writing short fiction for a Western audience, who are they? If you’re writing for Tasavvur magazine, who are they? If you’re writing for Tor.com, then who are they? What does yourtheir readership look like? It’s important to know so that you can ease things and ‘hold the reader’s hand’ so that you don’t abandon theme reader with the presumption that they reader will figure it out on their own. So the reader needs a little bit of context, a little bit of help. That balance is tricky – that takes time and practice, and a good editor really helps.” 

Within the industry, editors play a crucial role for writers of both long and short fiction “It’s extremely important to have a good editor, but even editors are human beings with their own aesthetics. So when we discuss why western publishing is so white, well, it’s because historically western editors have been mostly white. TAnd that’s why it’s important to bring diverse faces into the fold. And Publishing has become more diverse now with more with, there are more interesting voices.”

This leads us to discuss publishing, and Malik references the would-be merger of 2022 between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, that is before the US government blocked it. “The legal documents from that process showedpostulated that the majority of earnings for these publishing houses isn’t from faces like us, but rather from five to ten books that go viral and become household names and sell millions of units. And because of those millions of units, these publishing houses get the budget to then publish works that don’t guarantee profit. If these titles don’t sell, publishers don’t have enough money to spend on the literary/experimental side. That was the way it worked. Now unfortunately more and more Western publishers are shying away from books they think will be small, whereas previously they would take the risk.”

But what about publishing in the Global South? Or his home-country of Pakistan? Most will dismiss the idea of local publishing thriving because the markets aren’t big enough or h, aren’t sophisticated enough, but contrary to popular belief, Malik points out “There is reading in Pakistan and an audience, especially in regional languages. Midnight Doorways sold out in seven months. We do have a local ecosystem, it’s just a matter of focusing.” In his own opinion, Malik feels the industry needs to be more organised, “Create a union or guild for publishing, so that when you talk about distribution there’s a guild behind it. But this needs endurance. You could make a lot of money but it requires a lot of hard work.”

As we reach the end of our time together, we couldn’t resist asking Malik what he’s reading these days? He admits he’s on a “history kick” right now, and presently reading “Alexandar Burns’ 1935 memoir of his travels from Sindh up the Indus to Kabul. It’s called Travels into Bukhara, a fascinating account of his travels as an English spy. Oh, and India by John Keay.”

When asked which authors and books should aspiring horror writers read reading, Malik has a comprehensive list:, “I think all writers should be reading Stephen Graham Jones. He is one of the biggest voices in horror right now. Stephen Graham Jones, Paul Tremblay, Silvia Moreno Garcia, Brian Evenson. Everyone should be reading Ellen Datlow’s annual anthologies – even though she and Iwe disagree politically. I, because I believe we should still be reading people whom we disagree with.  This is very important. Especially [for] young Pakistani writers, because you need to build up your chops. 

“Also, important to read Vajra Chandrasekera; Indraparmit Das, for young writers especially those interested in South Asian horror. Cormic McCarthy – he’s a horror writer in the garb of a literary writer honestly. William Peter Blatty who wrote the Exorcist, that’s important too. Clive Barker is mandatory readinger. Mariana Enriques as well. Horror has such a vast history… Agustina Bazterrica’s  Tender is the Flesh. Samantha Schweblin… There’s so much, just start and you’ll work your way through it… David Hartwell’s Dark Descent Anthology, a landmark anthology of horror to learn the history of horror and how it’s moved through the centuries.”

And to aspiring horror writers who may be confused about where to start and how he says, “Write horror that speaks to you and terrifies you; because if it terrifies you it will terrify the reader.”