Steven LaChance Blog

Dear Readers,

On June 29, in Indianapolis, a lay pastor stood before a congregation during a “Men’s Preaching Night” at Sure Foundation Baptist Church and told LGBTQ+ people to “shoot yourself in the back of the head.”

That’s what he said. From the pulpit. In a church. A so-called sanctuary.

This is why I wrote Gorilla.

Gorilla is intense. Unapologetically so. The violence, the raw sexuality, the refusal to look away from the darker corners of human behavior—it’s all there for a reason. I didn’t write this story to make anyone comfortable. I wrote it because we are in a time when hatred is not only reemerging, it’s being glorified, legitimized, even sanctified. It’s dressed up in scripture, spoken from pulpits, and hidden behind crosses.

When someone in spiritual authority can spew such vile rhetoric and face no consequences—not even a reprimand from his church leadership—we are no longer dealing with fringe extremism. We’re dealing with systemic rot.

This is the fire. We’re already in it.

Christian Nationalism is not a literary invention. It’s a metastasizing movement, an ideology that disguises itself as faith while preaching hierarchy, control, and dehumanization. It teaches that hate is holy, that violence is redemptive, and that some lives are simply less worthy. And the worst part? People are listening. People are believing.

What that man preached was not faith. It was not righteousness. It was not love. It was spiritual terrorism—abuse dressed in dogma.

And here’s something we don’t talk about enough. This kind of hatred, when it’s delivered with that much venom, usually isn’t just about the target. It’s about the speaker.

More often than not, that kind of rage is a mirror turned outward. It comes from unresolved shame. It comes from self-hate. From fear of being found out. From private transgressions that don’t align with the public mask. So the louder they scream about sin, the more desperately they’re trying to drown out their own guilt. They cloak themselves in moral authority to hide from the mirror.

Imagine if that self-hate had a body. A voice. A pulpit.

Imagine if it was fed doctrine instead of therapy, dogma instead of empathy.

Imagine it standing at the front of the church, pounding its chest, pretending its wounds are badges of holiness.

That’s what we’re witnessing. The hateful don’t always hate us because we’re different. Sometimes, they hate us because they see something in us that they were never allowed to acknowledge in themselves.

They were told to kill that part of themselves, and when they couldn’t, they turned the gun on someone else.

That’s the real horror. Not the monsters we invent for the page, but the ones who believe that annihilating others will save them from themselves.

That’s why Gorilla had to be what it is. Because this isn’t theoretical. This is flesh and blood and trauma. This is generations of repressed desire and punished identity exploding in the form of cruelty. It’s real. And if you felt that in the story, if it made you uncomfortable or angry or raw, then it did exactly what it needed to do.

I know my readers. I didn’t need to explain this to you. You’re smart enough to get it. You saw the blood under the surface. You understood the metaphor and the message. You stayed in the fire with me. You didn’t flinch. You didn’t look away.

Gorilla is not just a story. It’s a scream. A warning. A refusal to pretend we are safe when we are not.

I’m not interested in writing horror that pretends the world is safer than it is. I’m interested in horror that tells the truth, even when that truth is hard to swallow. Gorilla was never meant to be a comfort. It’s a confrontation.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for understanding.

With fire and resolve,

Steven LaChance