Dissecting Zack Zagranis
Welcome back to the Black Hare Press Dissecting Author interviews, where we dissect an author to find out who they are, what they write, and what keeps their creative juices flowing.
Today, we slice open horror writer, Zack Zagranis, to spill his writing secrets and learn more about his new release, The Little Mill Gator Massacre.
Welcome Zack!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Zack Zagranis writes stories about feminist body horror, supernatural horror, and anything else his diseased brain cooks up.
When Zack isn’t crafting 2-bit nightmare fuel for anyone desperate enough to publish his work, he pays the bills as a freelance writer.
Zack has written geeky, pop-culture articles about superhero movies, Star Wars, and comic books for sites like ComicBook and Giant Freakin Robot. Occasionally, he exercises his funnybone by writing satire — both political and non — for fake news site The Hard Times.
Zack resides in a small New Hampshire town, where he spits in the face of conformity by owning neither a pick-up truck nor a firearm. When he’s not click-clacking away at the mechanical keyboard his son made him buy for online gaming, he’s reading or watching movies with his spouse and three children.
The charming creepster has had his short-form horror published in anthologies from Creature Publishing, Sinister Smile Press, and Black Hare Press, as well as the Stygian Lepus literary magazine. His standalone work includes Karma, Heroes Are Hard to Find, The Movers, and The Little Mill Gator Massacre, all published by Black Hare Press.
Connect:
Socials: @zeezeeramone
Tell us about yourself. When did your passion for reading and writing start?
I have been a voracious reader my whole life. I don’t know if it’s undiagnosed ADHD, but as a kid, I could never just sit there twiddling my thumbs; I had to have something to do at all times. For me, books were the original smartphone—small, portable entertainment I could take in the car, to school, pretty much anywhere and everywhere.
The writing came much later when I became a stay-at-home Dad. I needed a creative outlet that I could pick up and put down on a whim, and writing fit the bill. That and it was cheap and easily accessible, which is always a plus.
What drew you to your preferred writing genres?
The horror genre fascinates me. I have always been a big fan of scary movies, but scary stories are a whole other ball game. Horror is such a visual genre; it’s easy to show something scary, but telling a reader why something is scary is much harder. You can’t really do cheap jump scares with a book. There’s no atmospheric lighting or spooky music, just words on a page.
I love the challenge of picking out the right words and arranging them in a way that will make your skin crawl.
Plus, I have a sick mind, and the horror genre allows me to write all of the messed-up, depraved thoughts I have running through my head 
I also write a lot of satire, and that comes from my passion for making fun of people in power who take themselves too seriously.
What elements from your real life creep into your stories?
I grew up reading a lot of Stephen King, and I live in rural New Hampshire, so a lot of my stories take place in small New England towns surrounded by woods. I find the intimate setting makes a better backdrop for supernatural goings on than, say, a big city. I don’t know why, but things are always spookier in the suburbs.
I also have many family members and friends in the LGBTQIA+ community, so I try to include queer representation in my writing whenever possible.
Have you ever based a character on someone you know?
I have based more than a few antagonists on my mother. Make of that what you will.
What’s your favourite or least favourite part of the writing process?
My favourite part would have to be revising. I love editing and paring down my work, sculpting it into the best version of the story I’m trying to tell. My least favourite part, believe it or not, is the writing itself. I love coming up with ideas, but sitting down and actually drafting them, drawing lines between point A and point B, that’s just excruciating.
My dream would be to go to bed with an empty page and magically wake up with a first draft to edit. Unfortunately, that’s not a dream that will be coming true any time soon unless I suddenly start using AI in my writing, and I’m not going to do that. I’d rather chew my own fingers down to the bone and rub BBQ sauce in my eyes with the nubs than partner with Skynet.
How do you come up with character names for your stories?
Some names come from puns, while others are dictated by the subject matter. As much as I hate to admit it, I’m not above Googling something like “Orc names” to make sure I come up with something that sounds right for the character.
ABOUT THE LITTLE MILL GATOR MASSACRE
THE LITTLE MILL GATOR MASSACRE
by ZACK ZAGRANIS
LAUNCH DATE: 20th June, 2026
BLACK HARE PRESS LINK
BUY LINK
In Little Mill, the monster isn’t a bedtime story—and it isn’t the worst thing waiting in the woods.
Everyone in Little Mill knows the story of Gator Face.
Parents whisper it to scare their kids. Older siblings sharpen it into a threat. Camp counsellors dress it up as folklore. A half-man, half-alligator thing that prowls the woods, waiting for children who wander too far.
When a classmate vanishes without a trace, eleven-year-old Eric Grosse stops laughing at the legend. The police search. The town shrugs. Life moves on. But Eric knows something is wrong—and when another boy disappears, fear hardens into certainty.
Armed with nothing more than stubborn loyalty and a Little League bat, Eric teams up with older kids who know the woods better than they should. What begins as a reckless hunt for a monster spirals into something darker, stranger, and far more dangerous than any campfire tale.
Because Gator Face is real.
And in Little Mill, monsters don’t always wear scales.
Bleak, brutal, and steeped in small-town rot, The Little Mill Gator Massacre is a savage coming-of-age horror that drags childhood myths into the cold light of reality—and leaves no one untouched.
What sparked the idea for this story?
I was thinking about cryptids one day, and the name Gator Face popped into my head. I immediately pictured an anthropomorphic alligator man that eats children and thought it would make a cool urban legend. After sitting on the idea for a bit, I began to envision a story in which several narrators offer different accounts of the same urban legend. One person describes the monster as green, another says it’s an albino, and so on.
From there, the story pretty much wrote itself.
Did you plot or pants this story, and would you change your process if you had to start again?
Wait, you can plot your story out in advance? I’m kidding. I pants everything, unfortunately. I wish I could be a plotter, but my brain just refuses to go beyond a basic premise or key scenario. While I admit there’s a certain romance to making everything up on the fly, it can be very frustrating when I have to go back and revise huge chunks of prose because the story I end up telling differs wildly from the one I set out to tell in the beginning.
As difficult as pantsing is, however, if I had it to do over again, I would probably write The Little Mill Gator Massacre the exact same way I did the first time.
What came first? The plot or the characters?
Neither? Both? I knew about Gator Face and the three narrators—the camp counsellor, the weary mother, and the annoyed babysitter—before I started writing, but the other characters revealed themselves as the plot unfolded. This might sound pretentious, but sometimes the characters are like real people who let me know what’s happening instead of the other way around.
For example, I discovered the main character’s sister, Elizabeth, liked girls around the same time she did. It wasn’t something I decided for the character as much as it was something I learned about her as I wrote. Okay, now I know I sound pretentious.
How much research did you need to do for this story?
A bit. Some of it was fun, like looking up the various demons different religions have conjured up, seeing if any of them resemble alligators/crocodiles (spoilers: there are a couple). Some of it was not so fun, like researching various missing child statistics for New England. And some of it was flat-out weird, like searching “Would Rohypnol still work if someone got it in their eyes instead of ingesting it?” Hopefully, Googling roofies didn’t land me on a list somewhere.
How long did it take you to write this story?
Time is an illusion, a social construct with no inherent meaning except that which we ascribe to it. That’s my way of saying I don’t really remember.
How much did the story change from first draft to publication?
Not a ton. The plot didn’t really change at all, just a lot of pruning and tightening up. I try not to limit myself in the first draft in terms of verbosity and passive writing, and then in subsequent drafts, I jump in with a chainsaw and start chopping unnecessary words left and right.
How did you come up with the title?
I thought about calling the story “Gator Face,” but ultimately decided to go with The Little Mill Gator Massacre because it sounded like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
What part of the story was the most fun or the hardest to write?
The hardest part was cutting back and forth between three narrators without making the story feel overly convoluted. Every now and then, the main story cuts to the three people telling it: a camp counsellor telling his campers a scary story around a campfire, a mother trying to occupy her rambunctious toddler, and a babysitter trying to scare the kid she’s babysitting as payback for interrupting her makeout session. The trick was to keep switching POV’s without confusing the reader, and I think I succeeded. I won’t really know until people start reading it.
My favourite thing to write was the dialogue. I love writing dialogue—probably because I love talking so much—it’s the part of writing that comes easiest to me.
What’s your favourite scene? Why?
I’m a big fan of the part where the main character’s sister, Elizabeth, shows up out of nowhere and just starts kicking ass. It’s a bit of a cheap Deus Ex Machina, but I love the idea of a teenage girl swooping in to save the day. You don’t see that a lot outside of YA stories.
Is there a particular message that you hope readers will take from the story?
If you accidentally summon a demon from the underworld, don’t make a deal with it, and more importantly, don’t feed it children.
THE STITCH UP
How do you celebrate when you finish a story?
Video games and junk food.
If you could invite any three authors for dinner, whom would you invite?
Chuck Palahniuk, Alan Moore, and Kathe Koja.
What’s the weirdest thing you’ve used as a bookmark?
Another book.
What’s the oldest book on your bookshelf?
A 1980 paperback copy of Fahrenheit 451.
Describe the perfect writing retreat.
Maybe an isolated mountain resort hotel in the off-season?
Thanks for chatting with us, Zack. This interview is all stitched up.
Learn more about Zack via the links provided, and remember to add The Little Mill Gator Massacre to your TBR list.
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