What a Horror Writer Learned by Leaving the Monsters Behind
What I learned by writing a grounded crime story
(Getty Images)
I’ve spent most of my creative life with things that go bump in the night.
Nothing tawdry — just narrative night bumpers. I write horror. I write fantasy. I write stories where something ancient crawls out of the dark, or where a virus mutates the dead into something worse than dead. If I get stuck, I can introduce a demon. Or a flesh-eating monster from the deep. Or a morally ambiguous AI with a messiah complex.
Then I was hired to write True Crime with Alexandra Kane.
No eldritch fog (though there is a snowstorm). No ghosts in a gothic mansion (though there is a burned-out strip club). No villain who can be killed with holy water.
Just people.
And I’ll be honest — I wasn’t sure I could do it.
1. I Couldn’t Hide Behind the Supernatural
In horror and fantasy, the extraordinary does structural work. When the stakes sag, a creature can escalate them. When the mystery thins, a new rule can deepen it. When the antagonist feels small, you can make them part of a cosmic plan to consume humanity in nightmare pyres.
With Alexandra Kane, I had none of that.
Every problem had to be caused by human motivation, error, greed, or trauma.
Every solution had to make sense in the real world — not because a curse demanded it or a ritual required sacrifice, but because someone wanted money, power, leverage, or revenge.
When you can’t lean on the supernatural, the logic must be airtight.
Plotting — and yes, I’m a hybrid pantser/plotter — becomes critical. Who is the bad guy? Why are they the bad guy? Does the timeline make sense? Do the clues hold?
There’s no mythic fog to hide a weak joint in the plot.
Grounded mystery demands discipline.
2. Real-World Stakes Are Harder Than Monsters
In horror, death is expected.
In fantasy, destiny is expected.
In crime thrillers, injustice is the monster.
The core of Alexandra Kane wasn’t “What is the creature?” It was:
Who was wronged?
Who benefited?
Who manipulated the system?
The villain doesn’t use spell books or ancient artifacts. The villain uses legal structures, financial instruments, influence, and silence.
That’s harder to write than a ghoul.
The ghoul just is. It doesn’t need motive. The system does.
When the bad guy wins in horror, it’s nihilistic.
When the bad guy wins in true crime, it feels uncomfortably plausible.
That required restraint. No theatrical monologues. No ritual chambers. Just controlled conversations, boardrooms, off-record deals, and quiet betrayals.
Subtle is more demanding than spectacle.
3. Impostor Syndrome Usually Whispers; When You Leave Your Genre It Uses a Megaphone
I usually move fast.
Give me a horror concept and I’m drafting in a couple of weeks. The voice arrives quickly. The tone locks in. The danger is immediate.
Alexandra Kane took months of whiteboards, notebooks, and scraps of paper.
Part of that was structural — a single, self-contained season of six escalating audio episodes is different from a novel or supernatural serial.
But most of it was doubt.
Can I keep an audience without a monster reveal?
Can I make a financial conspiracy as gripping as a skinless hybrid zombie?
When you jump genres, your instincts don’t always translate cleanly. You second-guess rhythm. You question tone. You revise more.
A lot more.
But here’s the important part: doubt isn’t a sign you can’t do it. It’s a sign you care about doing it right.
4. Noir Is Just Horror Without the Mask
This surprised me.
The DNA between horror and crime isn’t that different.
Horror explores what happens when something corrupts the natural order.
Crime explores what happens when something corrupts the moral order.
In both:
There is rot beneath the surface.
Someone pays for someone else’s sin.
Truth is dangerous.
The world doesn’t necessarily reward virtue.
The difference is aesthetic, not thematic.
In horror, the rot might be fungal and animate.
In a thriller, it’s legal and well-dressed.
But rot is rot.
Once I saw that, the shift felt less like betrayal and more like translation. After all, Harry Strange was an occult detective with a heavy dose of hard-boiled noir. I’ve been flirting with this territory for years.
5. Real-World Solutions Are More Brutal
In horror, you destroy the demon.
In fantasy, you break the spell.
In a grounded thriller, justice is messy.
The resolution in Alexandra Kane had to function within legal and governmental systems. It had to acknowledge that:
Institutions protect themselves.
Power rarely collapses cleanly.
Even victories come at a cost.
There is no exorcism, but there is exposure. Testimony. Fallout. Consequences. And consequences linger longer than a jump scare.
6. Research Replaces Lore
When I write fantasy, I invent lore.
When I write horror, I invent rules.
When I wrote True Crime with Alexandra Kane, I Googled things that probably put me on a watchlist. A different one, I mean.
Things like: Financial structures. Shell companies. Jurisdictional turf wars. U.S. Treasury authority. Media influence. Political pressure. The deeply unsexy mechanics of how money actually moves when someone doesn’t want it found.
In horror, you build a system and let the dread seep in.
In crime, the system is the dread.
Grounded mystery requires less world-building — but far more world-understanding.
That’s a different muscle.
Mine is still sore; but in a good way.
7. Slower Doesn’t Mean Worse
This project took a couple of months before I found my sea legs.
For someone who usually sprints into a story like my dogs chasing a tennis ball, that was disorienting.
There were no monsters doing the heavy lifting.
No prophecy explaining why everyone was behaving badly.
I kept asking myself: Can I build tension without something clawing at the door?
Turns out: yes.
But it required patience and calibration. There’s a difference between being stuck and letting a story settle. One feels like failure. The other is discipline.
They look very similar at 2 a.m.
8. I’d Do It Again
Here’s the part that surprised me.
I’d absolutely write another grounded thriller. I’d love to do a second season of Alexandra Kane.
Crossing genres didn’t dilute my voice. It stripped it down.
It reminded me that:
Suspense doesn’t require the supernatural.
Moral decay can be as chilling as cosmic horror.
Real-world systems are often more terrifying than demons — mostly because demons don’t have compliance departments.
Storytelling fundamentals remain fundamental: Character. Stakes. Escalation. Revelation. Consequence.
Those don’t belong to horror.
They don’t belong to fantasy.
They don’t belong to crime.
They belong to story.
I’m not abandoning horror. The monsters are still there. They’re patient. I have a story kicking around involving Morgana LeFay and...well, spoilers. But it’s gonna be awesome.
But stepping outside your genre removes your shortcuts.
And that’s more unsettling than anything with tentacles.
If You’re Thinking About Jumping Genres
Here’s what I’d tell you:
Expect doubt. It’s part of the toll.
Respect the mechanics. You can’t bluff your way through money laundering.
Keep your thematic DNA. Your obsessions travel with you.
Let it take the time it takes. Fast is a preference, not a virtue.
If you’re building something with series potential, you will never have as much time as you do on the first installment. Use it wisely.
Storytelling is universal. Genre just changes the costume.
You’re not abandoning who you are as a writer.
You’re stress-testing it.
And if you can build dread without ghosts…
You can probably build it with anything.
Even paperwork.
—
True Crime with Alexandra Kane is currently in production at the Radio Theater Project in Washington State and will be available in Q4 2026.
In the meantime, you can find my other work here:
~Tony