Yelen & Yelena: An Author Interview with C.M. Rosens
- Swords & Sapphics team
- Aug 29, 2025
- 14 min read
The cusp of autumn is the perfect time to dive into all things Gothic, and hybrid author C.M. Rosens has no shortage of weird and wonderful stories for you! In this interview, we talk about dark fantasy Yelen & Yelena, the influence of Beauty and the Beast, as well as mythologies and folklore, on the story, and the importance of exploring aroace identities through POV characters.
Thank you for joining us! Could you start by introducing yourself?
Hello! I’m Mel (she/her), and I write as C.M. Rosens. I’m a queer, neurodivergent, Welsh-Turkish hybrid author of Horror and Dark SFF based in the UK. I’m best known for my Pagham-on-Sea series, a contemporary Weird Gothic collection of novels, novellas and one-shots set in a fictional seaside town in East Sussex (UK), but my latest novel, Yelen & Yelena, is a Gothic Dark Fantasy set in a different universe.
I have a standalone body horror short story coming out this year (2025) with Black Hare Press, in an anthology called Occupying Bodies. My contribution is called ‘Along the Xylophone Road’ and it’s a one-shot from the POV of a revenant, dragging itself along train tracks at the end of the world, looking for the long-distance partner it never got to meet in real life before things went bad.
We would love to know more about Yelen and Yelena and what inspired you to write it!
I have always loved Beauty and the Beast stories, and I beta-read a particularly great sapphic one by Avery Ames called We Are Monstrous, but I don’t know if she ever released that. She also writes as Amy Avery, and has a faerie series, The Faerie Concerto, which is a duology right now, and a romantasy under Amy Avery, called The Longest Autumn.
I think I had been watching a few Beauty and the Beast films around the time that the idea started to grow, and so I deliberately watched a few more to get in the mood. My favourites are Panna a Netvor (1978) dir. Juraj Herz, La Belle et la Bête (1946) dir. Jean Cocteau, the Disney 1991 animation dirs. Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, the live action fantasy La Belle et la Bête (2014) dir. Christophe Gans, and the more recent low budget indie fantasy-horror set in Iceland, Belle (2023) dir. Max Gold, where the beast’s curse changes him mentally, not physically, into an animalistic cannibal.
I fancied writing something fluffy and short that had monster sex in it, and I ended up writing a very dark, much longer novel, with a sapphic riff on Orpheus and Eurydice subplot, an insidious rot plague, dead gods, and monster sex on the enchanted banquet table and in the chained library of forbidden knowledge.
What drew you to the gothic dark fantasy genre in particular?
I prefer to write in the Gothic mode for most of my work, I think that’s just where I feel most comfortable as a writer. I travelled a lot as a child, and more as an adult, and I was raised by three generations of my mother’s family with no contact with my father or my father’s side, so for a long time as I grew up there was a huge gap in terms of understanding my heritage and ethnicity, and then I lost all three maternal generations within a few years of each other.
I feel very personally connected to themes of being haunted by a past that is ever-present but also shrouded and intangible, the deep sense of loss without even fully comprehending the loss and its scale, and the weight of grief and its complexities. I would say all my writing is in some way a means to explore that, alongside other facets of identity, like the strangeness of being without vocabulary to explain or describe oneself and the sense of inherent queerness (in all senses of that word) while growing up under Section 28 with older people who had never heard of asexuality or aromanticism, didn’t understand bisexuality or biromanticism, and didn’t know any ‘out’ queer people beyond distant family members they were no longer in touch with. The Gothic is all about hidden things being revealed, and often the lengths people go to in order to prevent that revelation, as well as the lengths people go to discover the hidden truths. I think that’s another reason why I’m very personally drawn to that genre, and I always find myself asking questions about my plots and characters that end up pulling me back into that darker, Gothic mode.
I think fantasy is an ideal space to bring in these themes and explore them in a world I could play with and design from scratch, which is something I love to do, and the novel naturally took shape as Gothic Dark Fantasy as I drew on the darker feel of the 1991 animated film, itself inspired by the Cocteau version, and the gorgeous cinematography of Herz’s 1978 Czech New Wave version. The themes and aesthetics of a dark castle in the forest with hidden curses and secrets really leant themselves to Gothic Dark Fantasy, and I gave up trying to write a fluffy erotic short and leaned fully into writing a much darker, fully fleshed-out novel than I intended.
And what interests you about exploring body horror in this genre?
In the versions of fairy tales that I grew up with, the stories often equated ‘goodness’ and ‘beauty’. And I fundamentally don’t believe in that equation, and also, you know, how characters look is often the least interesting thing about them. So I didn’t want the body horror to be about the physical attractiveness of the characters. I wanted it to come from somewhere else, which would put my own twist on the story.
That was where the rot plague came in (linked to the curse, not to give too much away!) and how that affected people who came into contact with it. That ended up being much more fun to write than transformations from human to monster or vice versa. It also took away the thorny problem of being punished by someone else’s beauty standards, and have the body horror revolve around subjective ideas of ‘beauty’. Magical fungal rot invading you on contact, and not having a known cure, was much more interesting to play around with and create a sense of dread and decay.
What did the world-building process look like for you? Is the setting inspired by any places, real or fictional?
A lot of my world-building is organic at first, and then I stop, go back, and revise to make it more cohesive and coherent. I knew I wanted a fantasy world with medicine, technology, and magic, and Beauty and the Beast is often set somewhere in the 1700s (or a bit earlier), so I decided to go for an equivalent period but with magic impacting the technological advances. I wanted there to be transport via coach, which would mean Yelena has to travel on foot. I wanted there to be a class system that didn’t exactly copy a real-world one, and as in the tale Belle’s father is a merchant, I decided to make merchants the ruling class, and an oligarchy of Guild Masters with an elected Lord Protector the result of a revolution against the monarchy about 150 years ago. I figured that would be enough time for counter-revolutions and various pockets of civil unrest and political factions to have more or less settled down, so there is no more high-level drama, but be on the cusp of more civil unrest over current policies in local areas.
That’s how we ended up with the setting, with a village struck by this fungal plague and unable to pay rent to their landlord, people constrained by their social status and trade trying to make more money and leaving their homes, a lot of migration to urban areas, civil unrest and uprisings over rent and tax, the threat of the Guild Militia, and in the middle of it all, just a few people trying their best to make ends meet.
That’s where I started to develop the religions and folk beliefs, superstitions, folklore, mythology, and so on, and how people in that scenario might repurpose myths or folktales, how they might retell them, and what those stories would mean. I didn’t want to go too deep into parts of the world I wasn’t going to explore, but I might do for future books set in the same world. I want Yelen & Yelena to remain a standalone, though, and not have the characters return (but never say never!).
Essentially there was a lot of thinking about how the English Civil War of the 1640s panned out, and what could have been, and how the French Revolution panned out, and what could have been, and quite a bit of both real-world Medieval Guilds and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series in the societal structure.
Are you a plotter or pantser, and did any additional, perhaps even unexpected, research go into this book?
I very much pantsed this whole book, and so as I discovered more about the plot, I developed the world and then once I found something that I thought was more interesting, I changed the plot and character arcs to go with that. As a main bit of the plot, after the Beast discovery, is trying to figure out what the fungal rot is and where it came from and how to get rid of it, I thought about what levels of science there might be in this world. I thought it would be fun to have alchemy, both as pseudo-chemistry and as a deeply spiritual process, as a main way people engaged with science. So alchemy ended up as a research topic I wasn’t expecting.
That spawned a new idea, in fact, and I’m going to explore alchemy and magic further in another story with new characters, same world, but different location and time.
Can you tell us a little bit about your characters? Which, if any, do you identify with most and why?
I identify with most of my characters in some way, I think. I definitely relate to Velna a lot, who started off as a side character and an antagonist, and then I thought it would be much more interesting to have her as a main side character with her own POV, and have her dealing with grief and mental health issues, and be very angry with the world and with her loss. I needed to give her an HEA, which I think is the most solid HEA in the book, despite going through hell to get there.
I also relate to Yelena - her aromaticism and bi-attraction, for sure, although I’m ace and she is not - and her own grief and family losses. But I would say I probably most relate to Velna out of the two of them, and that was a surprise to me.
And which characters do you hope your readers will connect with the most?
This is a difficult question, as I don’t ever think about who readers might connect with as I’m writing. I am always intrigued by who people do connect with when they read my work, but because of the themes and the things the characters go through, I’m also really sad that anyone has had to go through something similar.
The story features a diverse range of representation, with aro, bi, and sapphic rep! Why was it important to you to include this in your books?
I never got this growing up, and now I want to write books with characters who don’t necessarily have the vocabulary to call themselves ‘aro’ or ‘bi’ or ‘sapphic’, but simply are, and in their lived on-page experiences, maybe readers who also don’t have words for themselves or who find labels limiting or uncomfortable, might see something they recognise about themselves.
Also, with regards to being both aro and bi, I wanted to show that from an internal perspective, as I don’t see that rep very often. It’s easier to describe and show how you can be aro, bi, and have a full range of relationships and emotions, than it is to just give someone a textbook definition of a label. There are great resources out there now for understanding this stuff, but I think there’s value in writing different experiences in different ways, and exploring this representation in fiction of all kinds.
Is there any additional representation that you’d like to see or write more of in the future?
There are no ace people in this book (a first for me?!) but I would like to write about more sex-positive and sex-neutral ace people, attracted to a variety of genders. (Ricky in my Pagham-on-Sea series is ace and sex-repulsed).
I think it’s better in some ways to show how aces can also be sex-positive/sex-neutral through the medium of immersive story, where you can show the character’s interiority and thought process around various situations, than it is to find the words to explain it to someone. And people also discover things about themselves they didn’t know through finding characters who think and act like they do. This was really important for me in finding out more about myself, and I’ve had readers say that this has been important for them too.
You have a PhD in Medieval British Studies, which sounds fascinating! Does this play into your stories at all? Are there any areas of the subject in particular that you’d love to explore more of?
I think the main things that play into my stories are the way medieval people thought about and played with narrative and story, but a lot of that is also Welsh oral culture, and that plays into Yelen & Yelena quite a bit. I do want to finish (one day) an episodic comedy novel that is set in a fantasy version of the Welsh Marches and Pura Wallia, from the perspective of a really jaded, Guy of Gisbourne type character, who ends up ditching his lord and seeking to serve under someone else, but gets kidnapped by a random band of outlaws on his way across the border.
It’s currently called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Fortress, and that borrows from a lot of Medieval Welsh and Anglo-Norman saint veneration and honour culture for the worldbuilding, as well as the geopolitical landscape of the Marches, and I was going to put in a load of folklore and some bits of the lais of Marie de France (Yonec is set in the Welsh March, for example), for fun. We’ll see if that ever gets finished!
What made you decide to pursue indie publishing rather than traditional?
More creative control, initially. I didn’t want the pressure of working to deadlines, I don’t want to write to market, and I want the freedom to decide which artists I work with. Those are still my main reasons for continuing. I have ADHD, so as soon as something becomes pressurised with timelines, it stops being fun. Writing has always been my way of releasing the pressure valve, so as soon as it turns into work, I’ll stop wanting to do it.
I am in a very privileged and weird position of being trad pubbed by accident, in that I got cold-pitched for two of my novels (the only two I had out, at the time) by Canelo’s then-commissioning editor who had read my stuff and loved it, and wanted it for Canelo’s new horror imprint. I was happy with the contract terms and accepted, and I think that was absolutely the right decision as they’ve been great to work with overall. They were a bigger independent UK press, but now they’ve been bought by DK (Penguin Random House), I guess that makes all of us trad pubbed now. So I’ve already scratched what I thought was a distant goal off my author bucket list, and I will continue to publish independently, on my own terms and in my own time. There might come a time I sub something, but I don’t know yet.
You have quite a few other titles on your backlist! If readers loved Yelen and Yelena, where would you direct them next?
It depends why they loved it!
If you’re looking for more monster sex, it’s the only book I’ve written with on-page sex scenes. The closest would be my ‘weirdly erotic’ contemporary Gothic horror The Crows, where a woman falls in love with her house, but the touch-starved, sex-averse cannibal in the woods next door wants the house too, and shenanigans ensue. I’d point you there for the Gothic aesthetic as well.
If you want something shorter with fade-to-arrrgh breast tentacle sex, but still Gothic and deeply creepy, I’d point you to The Reluctant Husband. That’s about an occult-obsessed civil servant in 1930s England who discovers his employer’s maid might hold more forbidden knowledge than his books and spells have taught him… but she won’t give it up unless he takes her to the pictures first. She’s not that sort of human-passing eldritch horror.
If you’re more about the feminine rage and the relationship dynamics and the character arcs, I’d point you to Thirteenth, my second novel, which can be read as a standalone or first in the loose series. That’s a contemporary eldritch family drama, where an angry girl tries to survive her twisted family long enough to metamorphose into the flesh-eating god she knows is inside her.
If you like Yelen, and characters like him, I’d point you to the third book in the series, The Day We Ate Grandad, where the main character is a terrible man with washed-up Lestat vibes, if Lestat was not a vampire but had eldritch powers that drove people to insanity instead.
Otherwise, try some of my short stories like The Snow Child and see if you like my full range of body horror! It’s really up to you!
We’d love a hint about what readers can expect from you next! What are you currently working on?
My current WIP is the 4th book in the Pagham-on-Sea series, Feed, which I want to be an entry point to the series and work as a first book/standalone, even though it’s chronologically last. That’s a bit of a challenge, so I’ve put out a preliminary call for beta readers who have not read any of my books before, to see how they find it. That’s basically an eldritch soap opera/urban fantasy novel, in which three human-passing eldritch gods live among us, but have no interest in world domination and would rather go to University, keep a stolen goat in the garden and stop it from eating the poisonous plants, or run a nightclub in Brixton. However, when one of them accidentally eats her boyfriend on a livestream (he deserved it), their lives are turned upside down by rituals gone wrong, a stalker from beyond the stars, and a monster-hunting conspiracy.
In the Y&Y universe, I’m working on an alchemy story, As Below, So Above, which is only 10K words in at the moment. That’s going to be deeply weird, I think, and more of a psychedelic, psychosexual fever dream in an alchemist’s tower. Think m/m Rapunzel meets Phantom of the Opera (but alchemists). I think it will have an f/f mirrored frame-narrative, but I’m playing with all of it at the moment.
Our podcast focuses on media we’re currently loving. Are there any books, shows, movies, or games you’re enjoying at the moment? Any recommendations for our audience? Bonus points if it includes sapphics!
Since it’s #100HorrorMoviesIn92Days challenge (01 Aug-31 Oct), I’ll recommend my favourite (so far) lesbian romance horror movie, Natten har øjne / Attachment (2022) dir. Gabriel Bier Gislason. It’s a Danish film about an actress in Denmark who falls in love with a British Jewish academic, and goes home to meet her over-protective mum in London. If you haven’t seen it - it’s a romance with a HEA (but also a lot of supernatural horror and family drama).
Not a romance, but a good horror movie with a lesbian MC, is Fréamhacha / Fréwaka (2024) dir. Aislinn Clarke. This is in Irish, with subtitles. It does not have a HEA. It is a very good Fair Folk horror that I really enjoyed.
Huesera / Huesera: The Bone Woman (2022) dir. Michelle Garza Cervera really surprised me when I watched it for the first time, as I went in cold expecting a neo-natal pregnancy horror, but what I got was a queer (re)awakening of a young Mexican woman trying to be a wife and mother and realising that no matter how badly she thinks she wants that life, it’s not the mould she fits.
Of the films I’ve watched so far for this year’s 100 Horror Movies in 92 Days challenge, I would definitely recommend:
It Lives Inside (2023) dir. Bishal Dutta
The Moogai (2024) dir. Jon Bell
Den stygge stesøsteren / The Ugly Stepsister (2025) dir. Emilie Kristine Blichfeldt
Podcasts I’m enjoying:
Magnus Archives
Magnus Protocol
The Lovecraft Investigations (S02 is available on archive.org, it had to be pulled by the BBC over some contract issues with an actor in it I think)
The Silt Verses
Books I’m into at the moment:
Reaper by Jackson P. Brown - an urban fantasy set in London, written by a Black Londoner with Black characters, exploring race and class and paranormal entities. It’s been compared to Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London, and is blurbed by Charlaine Harris, so you know it’s going to be amazing.
The Darkisle series by Mark N. Drake. Weird, fun, horror-mystery-thrillers with creepy goings-on and cosmic horror shenanigans on an island near the Isle of Man.
If you’re after steamy sapphic romances, try Ruby Dare! Her latest spicy offering is Caught Between Cosy and Kink, and it’s about a cancer survivor and her trans masc non-binary lesbian personal trainer. That has strong themes of disability, cancer PTSD, self-reflection and boundary setting.
About the Author
C.M. Rosens is a hybrid author of Horror and Dark Speculative Fiction. Audio versions of her novels are available on her podcast, Eldritch Girl: Weird Gothic Stuff & Nonsense, along with interviews with other authors and creatives. Find out more at cmrosens.com. You can support her directly on Ko-Fi through her shop, her membership tiers, or a one-off tip here: ko-fi.com/cmrosens.
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