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Illusion of Control
Be Wary of Wishes Gone Awry is a collection of horror and dark fantasy stories where ordinary desires like love, relief, and progress are granted in twisted forms. From ships to suburbs to labs, your settings feel grounded before they unravel. Why start from the ordinary?
I often begin with the ordinary because that’s where trust lives. A quiet suburb, a research lab, a ship at sea. These are places we believe we understand, and they give the reader something solid to stand on. Once that foundation is set, the unraveling feels closer and more invasive.
To me, horror works best when it grows out of the familiar rather than arriving from something distant or unknown. The ordinary holds its own vulnerabilities in routine, comfort, and assumption. Those become the fault lines where something darker can take hold. By the time the world begins to warp, it is already too late to step away cleanly.
Many characters believe they’re making rational, even loving choices. Why was that illusion of control important?
Because it’s one of the most human illusions we have. People rarely see themselves as reckless or destructive in the moment. They see themselves as justified, careful, or acting out of necessity or love.
That illusion of control creates a kind of tragic tension. The reader often senses the danger before the character does, which makes each decision feel heavier. The characters are not foolish. They are navigating incomplete truths, emotional blind spots, or quiet desperation.
In many ways, the horror doesn’t come from losing control. It comes from realizing you never had it in the way you believed you did.
Many stories use guilt, grief, and shame as part of the fear. Why lean into those emotions? Do you see horror as a way to process those feelings or to expose them?
I believe it is both. Guilt, grief, and shame are already haunting emotions; they linger, they distort memory, they reshape how we see ourselves and others. Horror gives those feelings a kind of narrative body. It lets them move, speak, and sometimes retaliate.
I’m interested in how these emotions refuse to stay buried. Horror becomes a space where what’s been avoided or suppressed is forced into the open, often in exaggerated or symbolic ways. Yet, there is also a quieter side to it. Writing through those emotions can be a form of understanding them, tracing their edges, seeing how they grow, and what they demand.
In this sense, horror is both exposure and exploration. It reveals, but it also listens.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?
My upcoming novella, Patchwork: An Ozian Tale of Dark Fantasy, is set to release at the end of May. It reimagines Oz as a haunted, decaying fairyland, a place where creation and decay exist side by side, and every act of transformation leaves its mark.
I also have several other projects in the works, but after Patchwork, my focus will shift to a dark fantasy novel titled The Dreamer. The story follows Maddie, a young woman struggling with a prophetic bloodline she can no longer keep locked away. Standing on the edge of revealing her curse, Maddie must decide whether to confront the fate it foretells or be consumed by it.
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Be Wary of Wishes Gone Awry : Tales of Horror and Dark Fantasy
Be Wary of Wishes Gone Awry is a horror and dark fantasy collection that gathers six shorter pieces and a longer three-part novella, moving from sea-haunted myth and biotech dread to grief-soaked domestic horror. Across stories like “Sailor’s Warning,” “The Aberration,” “Dearest Diary,” and “The Enhancement,” author M. Ainihi keeps circling the same uneasy question: what happens when people reach for relief, certainty, progress, or love and get something warped in return. The book’s structure, split into “One-Shot Shorts,” “Slightly Bigger Bites,” and the closing “Miracle Baby,” gives it a steady build, with the final section carrying the heaviest emotional weight.
The book understands one of horror’s oldest pleasures: dread lands harder when it grows out of something ordinary. A sailor wants to finish a voyage and go home. A woman makes a greedy decision she cannot morally outrun. Someone wants the pain to stop. Someone wants to be more productive. Those setups are simple on purpose, and that works. The writing is often most effective when it stays close to a character’s physical unease, the heat of a fever, the sting of a wound, the metallic shock of blood, the hush before something awful fully shows itself. “Sailor’s Warning” especially caught me with its mix of folklore and fatalism, while “The Aberration” and “The Enhancement” feel like sharp modern horror, interested in guilt, ambition, and the cost of trying to correct what should maybe be left alone.
I also found myself noticing the author’s choices around control. That feels like the live wire running through the whole collection. These stories keep putting people in situations where they think they are making a practical choice, a smart choice, maybe even a loving one, and then the ground shifts under them. Sometimes that works brilliantly. It gives the book a clear identity and makes the horror feel grounded rather than random. I stayed interested because Ainihi is good at building atmosphere and at letting shame, grief, superstition, and obsession do part of the frightening work. The collection isn’t just creepy for the sake of being creepy. It wants to poke at human weakness.
I’d recommend Wishes Gone Awry most to readers who enjoy horror and dark fantasy that lean more toward mood, moral consequence, and unsettling imagery than nonstop shock. It should work well for people who like short fiction with a gothic pulse, creature horror with a human center, and novellas that sit in the uncomfortable space between sorrow and nightmare. I would especially recommend it to someone who enjoys horror that feels reflective after the scare.
Pages: 173 | ASIN : B0GN3KCB59
