Charlene Elsby is absolutely everywhere you turn in indie horror lit. I asked her if she wanted to run a writing workshop. The genesis of it can be summed up in one DM from Charlene, “So I’m thinking of my constant theme of telling people in interviews that what I write is only horror because existence is horrific." My next message was something like, so is that a yeah? And now, here we are

PSYCHODEMONICS: Writing as Exorcism

But this isn’t craft class, Craig Clevenger has that covered. This is initiation.

Charlene Elsby writes with an intellect honed from a PhD in philosophy and the authority of a former tenure track professor. Her voice sharpened by blood, sex, grief, and ecstatic despair. She writes at the edgelands of horror and literary fiction, where the soul contorts and what’s most human starts to feel alienating in its totality. She’s published 10 books in six years including Hexis, Psychros, The Devil Thinks I’m Pretty, Red Flags, possibly the best philosophical horror novel ever written in Violent Faculties,The Organization is Here to Support You, and her newest novel Poor Damned Souls, the millennial starter husband is a shitbird necrophilia divorce novel out now from Merigold Independent, edited by, well, me. And trust me, it’s amazing. (I’m not saying that just because I edited it. I loved getting to work with Charlene on the book.)

She interrogates human consciousness at the philosophical level, dismantles conventional storytelling, subverts form and turns sentences, storytelling, and its philosophy, into a razorwire tango over the void.

This is Charlene’s first solo writing workshop (2nd cohort), designed to be something you’ve never seen before.

PSYCHODEMONICS is an immersion, or a drowning. A generative and philosophical workshop for writers ready to confront their own contradictions, push past instinctive defenses, and channel the voice they’ve long buried beneath imitation, fear, and bad narrative habit. This isn’t about finding the story, it’s about becoming the writer who can tell it.

You’ll get weekly lectures, assignments, and critiques. Then there’s the ineffable something that’s harder to quantify: a shift in how you relate to language, form, and emotional clarity. This is about writing from the inside out, from your own marrow, with no apology appended.

Charlene doesn’t separate form from thought, or thought from feeling. She builds a space where people write differently—because they’ve changed. And by the end of this course, you will have changed.

“Elsby’s work is thrilling and terrifying… bursting with dangerous, sexy rage. It’s evidence of a gripping and unstoppable intellect.”
– Lindsay Lerman, author of I’m From Nowhere

“There’s no one like Charlene Elsby. She’s the scream queen of psycho-philosophical transgressive lit. Her writing is dark magic with brains, blood, and soul.”
– House of Vlad Press

“Elsby lifts patterns of thought directly from inside your head… It leaves you vulnerable, shaking, wrecked—and, maybe, changed.”
– B.R. Yeager, author of Negative Space

“Charlene Elsby is the future of horror literature. She just doesn’t care if it wants her.”
– Emil Ottoman, Television Sky Co-Founder

This Workshop is for:

Writers of literary fiction, horror, autofiction, experimental prose, or anything weird enough that you’ve been told to tone it down.

If you’ve been circling the work you should be doing, this is where you step into it.