Interview With Ania Ahlborn, Author Of ‘The Unseen’

If you read horror books, then you must know who author Ania Ahlborn is. From Seed, to Brother, to Palmetto, and now her new book, The Unseen, Ania is synonymous with horror writing. Her books are so sought after that even when they’ve long been out of print, they’re still talked about and sought after, with people paying exorbitant prices just to get their hands on a physical copy.

Isla Hansen, a mother reeling from a devastating loss, is beside herself when a mysteriously orphaned child appears on the outskirts of the Hansens’ secluded Colorado property. Although strange and unexplainable, the child’s presence breathes new life into Isla. But as the child settles in, Isla’s husband, Luke, and their five children notice peculiarities that hint at something far beyond the ordinary—anomalies that challenge the very fabric of reality itself. The tension within the Hansen household grows, and with it, the sense that there is something very wrong with the new kid in the house.

To celebrate the release of The Unseen, I chatted with Ania about what sparked the idea for the book, embracing the horror genre, horror movies, and more!

PopHorror: I’m a huge fan and I really enjoyed The Unseen so I’m super excited to talk to you about it today.

Ania Ahlborn: Thank you!

PopHorror: What sparked the idea for The Unseen?

Ania Ahlborn: I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of an outsider, and I feel like there’s nothing creepier than a kid being an outsider just because kids are unpredictable. You can’t really read them anyway, so for there to be this kid that nobody pays attention to… This is just a very strange looking child that would have been overlooked or avoided. It kind of came from wondering what would happen if a quiet kid like that wasn’t just misunderstood but that he was something much stranger. Also, just the idea of a regular family having this child show up out of nowhere and instead of saying, “Yeah, that’s way too creepy for us,” they instead bring him into the fold, kind of thinking like, well maybe we can help him or maybe he would be good for our family or something like that. A very ill-advised horror trope where it’s like, please don’t do that, and they do the opposite of what a regular family would do. You’re just like, that’s not going to end well. That was really the idea of a stranger coming into something that you are so familiar with and then that stranger not being the thing that you thought that it would be.

PopHorror: Grief makes you do funny things.

Ania Ahlborn: Oh, yeah.

PopHorror: It really messes with your mind, and it messes with your way of thinking. It’s a fickle bitch is what I like to call it. You don’t know how you’re going to respond to certain things and to situations coming up in your life, so I feel like grief was its own character in this book, as cliché as that is.

Ania Ahlborn: Yeah, that’s like in every single one of my books, grief is a big theme and especially in this one for one of the main characters, Isla, she’s just struggling. She sees this kid and instead of thinking, Oh my god, that’s really freaky, I don’t want anything to do with that, she does a hard left and she’s like, but maybe he’s a miracle. She’s looking in any direction to escape from this grief that’s just holding her down. Unfortunately, it’s not the right direction to go in. I’m not going to give anything away!

PopHorror: Going back to what you were saying about creepy kids, people don’t want to believe that they’re bad or intentionally creepy, and I think that makes them even scarier because kids are innocent and you don’t want to think that they’re going to kill you in your sleep.

Ania Ahlborn: Yeah, the uncanny valley of the horror genre is the creepy kid theme. You want to think that they’re innocent. I have a kid of my own and sometimes I wonder. As a parent, there are moments where you’re like, uh, let’s revisit that whole is it possible to be born bad sort of thing. Kids are supposed to be good and that’s what makes them just super scary when they’re not. Like it’s wrong. It’s completely wrong. We can understand how adults become crazy after dealing with whatever in their life or they live in the backwoods somewhere and they’re just nuts. Kids are not supposed to be like that. They’re supposed to be like these innocent little angels, and when they’re not, it completely flips everything that you… It just shifts reality in the most right sort of wrong way for us horror fans. The best wrong kind of way.

PopHorror: I don’t have kids and I’m good, thanks. No thank you.

Ania Ahlborn: Kids are wonderful! Well, my kid is wonderful. But he is also creepy in his own right. I say that probably because he’s being raised by a weirdo.

PopHorror: Was there anything that you were adamant about keeping in the final draft, no matter what?

Ania Ahlborn: I work with an incredible team of people and my editor is really fantastic and they know what I’m all about. They know that you cannot defang my stories because I just won’t let that happen

PopHorror: Good!

Ania Ahlborn: My stuff is typically pretty intense, and it stays that way because that is what it’s supposed to be. I never dull it down to appeal to a wider audience or something like that. I can’t do that. That’s not who I am. But also this book, it really plays a lot with ambiguity. There’s a lot of scenes where you’re not sure, is this really happening or is this maybe somebody’s being an unreliable narrator. What’s going on because there’s so many different points of view and some of the points of view are from the points of view of children in the family. That kind of adds even more ambiguity to it like, oh well, we’re now listening to what happened in this scene from a five year old’s perspective. Like how accurate is it? I was really determined to keep that ambiguity. It was a little bit tricky because you don’t want to confuse the audience. You want to intrigue them but you don’t want to be so confusing that they’re like, you know what? This is too much work, too much energy, I’m putting this away. That was a little bit of a balancing act but really that was the only thing that just had to stay in there. My editor, he pushed me a little bit towards… There are scenes like with the little newspaper clippings and stuff like that. It was something that I had already been playing around with putting in there, and he was like, “Yeah, that’s a good idea,” because it sort of makes the reality of this family a little bit bigger than the family itself. It tells the story of the entire community and how they are experiencing the situation in the book, not just the family in the house on the property. We didn’t cut anything. We didn’t dull anything down. It’s really very close to what I had in my head.

PopHorror: I love that. You said something about not changing it to appeal to a wider audience and I like that you don’t give in to making it more palatable for everyone because not everyone can read horror. I like that you want to keep what makes your writing yours and your style.

Ania Ahlborn: Well, that’s honestly, I feel like that’s what made my career in the first place. I started with Seed and it was, from what I’ve been told by readers, one of the most insane endings that they’d ever read in a horror novel, where it has to do with, again, a creepy child. Creepy children are my thing. But yeah, I just went for it at that point. I was like, I don’t care who likes this and I think that was the winning ticket right there, that I didn’t care who liked it and apparently, a lot of people really liked it because that’s what started my entire career for me. And that was one of those moments for me where as a writer before that, I was kind of trying to cater to a wider audience and then when I wrote Seed, I gave that up and I just wrote what I wanted to. That was the winning ticket.

PopHorror: Why do you feel that some people resonate with the horror genre more than others?

Ania Ahlborn: Horror is a truth teller. There’s no BS in horror. Horror is about the stuff that strips people down. It asks who you are when everything safe is gone. Anybody who’s been through something – grief, trauma, isolation, depression, whatever – we can all relate somehow very viscerally to horror because it’s just truth. It’s reality, right? Obviously, it’s a heightened sort. We don’t want to find ourselves in an actual horror movie or a horror novel. No, no thank you. It really speaks to that, where you find a strange kind of comfort where it doesn’t lie to you. For me personally, I’ve always just been into horror. Even as a child, I was always drawn to the creepy stuff, the weird stuff, the off-kilter stuff. A lot of people ask, “Why do you write horror?” And for me, if I wasn’t writing horror, I would not be writing anything because there’s just nothing else for me to write. Even in just everyday situations, somebody will say something that’s completely mundane and I’ll totally flip it and I can make it dark with just a sentence like, “Well, what if this happens?” That’s how my brain works. It’s the worst case scenario or let’s make it super duper weird and awkward and creepy and I can’t help it. Let me tell ya, if you ever do have a child and you’re sitting around with a mom group, that becomes a really hard thing to suppress because you’re trying not to be the super weird, they’re going to excommunicate you because you’re just totally creeping them out. Things come out of my mouth that I’m like, I really should not have said that, but they’re used to me at this point.

PopHorror: I think that horror lets us experience that adrenaline and that danger safely in the comfort of my own home in my pajamas versus actually running from something.

Ania Ahlborn: Right, right! I’m not a runner so I can’t outrun any kind of a psychopath, so books and movies are definitely my go-to. I can’t marathon it. I would instantly be killed.

PopHorror: It’s like that meme. If I’m running, something is chasing me.

Ania Ahlborn: And honestly, it could be chasing me and I’m still not going to run for very long. It’s not going to take a long time.

PopHorror: I have just one last question for you today. What’s your favorite scary movie?

Ania Ahlborn: I love movies intensely and so it changes a lot. I have a few go-tos that if I don’t know what I’m going to watch, I’ll just sit down and rewatch. Hereditary is one of them. Toni Collette is exquisite in that role. That whole story is just so creepy. I really like that. If you’re talking about a series, The Conjuring. I’ve always liked The Conjuring. Vera Farmiga, she’s one of my favorites as well. If I had to pick an all-time favorite, it’s pretty generic. It’s Kubrick’s The Shining. I don’t know why that is. I feel like I saw it really early on in my life and it just became this… It’s very weird. If I’m ever feeling down, I’ll watch that movie. Obviously, it’s not scary to me anymore. I’ve watched it like a thousand times. It’s like a warm blanket, honestly. Everything about it, the hotel and everything. It feels like going to a favorite place and sitting and just being comfortable.

Thank you so much to Ania for taking the time to chat with us. The Unseen is out in bookstores Tuesday, August 19, 2025!