Steven LaChance Blog

There are moments when fiction stops being fiction. When the story you thought you were writing to escape the world suddenly becomes the mirror that refuses to turn away. Grace was born out of one of those moments.

I first began the story in 1992, in the shadow of the Rodney King verdict. The country was burning. Sixty-three people lost their lives in Los Angeles that week, and the air filled with smoke, fear, and disbelief. That was the beginning of Grace, the character herself. She was born from the ashes of those riots. Out of chaos, injustice, and the broken promise of a better America came a voice that refused to stay silent.

Every few years the world cracked open again. Waco. Oklahoma City. Columbine. Ferguson. Charleston. Charlottesville. Each time I found myself returning to Grace. She waited patiently through every new tragedy as if she knew her story would always find its moment, because the moment keeps repeating itself.

When I finally sat down to finish her, the world had changed once again. Hate had found new language. Lies had found new microphones. And every day the news looked more and more like the pages I had written years before. That is when I realized what Grace really is. Not just a novel, but a warning disguised as a monster story.

The fiction I wrote decades ago reads like prophecy because history refuses to learn its lesson. When you see a drag queen hunted, a government collapsing under its own corruption, or a country turning on itself, you might think I was writing about today. I was not. I was writing about yesterday. The tragedy is that they have become the same thing.

But Grace is not about despair. It is about endurance. It is about the human spirit that still sings when the world burns. It is about finding beauty and defiance in the very act of surviving. Grace herself stands in the ruins of a divided nation, covered in blood and sequins, daring the darkness to swallow her, and it never quite can.

Horror gives us a strange kind of freedom. It allows truth to slip through in ways polite conversation never could. It lets us scream together, not because we have given up, but because we still care enough to be terrified. That is what Grace asks of the reader. To look into the fire, to see the monsters for what they are, and to realize that they look a lot like us.

The book was written in dark days, and it was meant to hold a mirror to them. If it feels like it was written for now, that is because we have not changed enough since then. We are still learning, still repeating, still reaching for grace in a graceless time.

This is how the world dies, but maybe, just maybe, this is also how we learn to live again.