Author Chat: Caleb Sierra on The Wetworks Miracle
The Wetworks Miracle by Caleb Sierra
Stelliform Press: Hamilton, Ontario (2026)
Thanks to Stelliform Press for a gifted copy for review!
The horror genre is near and dear to my heart, and I'm always excited to pick up a book that features a creepy theme with the promise of some eco-horror, where the environment can seem a malevolent force. In Caleb Sierra's debut novella, The Wetworks Miracle, I got all of this in a short format along with thoughtful themes about the nature of colonisation and evolution. Horror that made me think! Check out my review of the book here.
From his bio at calebsierra.com:
The horror genre is near and dear to my heart, and I'm always excited to pick up a book that features a creepy theme with the promise of some eco-horror, where the environment can seem a malevolent force. In Caleb Sierra's debut novella, The Wetworks Miracle, I got all of this in a short format along with thoughtful themes about the nature of colonisation and evolution. Horror that made me think! Check out my review of the book here.
From his bio at calebsierra.com:
Caleb Sierra is a horror author based in Washington State. Whether reading or writing, he is drawn to the strange and unexpected.
He holds degrees in Agriculture and Chinese from Texas A&M University. When not writing, he works as an admissions consultant for universities across the globe. Otherwise, he's playing tabletop games, studying history and world religion, or tinkering with electronics.
I had so many questions when I finished the book, so it was great when Caleb agreed to an Author Chat about his book, inspirations and writing process.
***
Trish: Thanks so much for joining me today. Can you tell me a bit about yourself and how you came to writing? What is the origin story behind your debut novella The Wetworks Miracle?
Caleb: I've been writing since I was a kid, mostly short stories and a few first-draft novels until Wetworks. I was under a pretty strict media diet when I was young; practically everything I read was pre-1950s so my stories were mostly inspired by early science fiction.
The Wetworks Miracle in particular started with a bizarre dream: a scarecrow-like automaton disassembling himself to save the life of an injured boy. I wrote the first chapter as a standalone scene, simply to capture the image. But I'd never written a proper horror story and I was hooked by the liberating nature of the genre, so I just kept going until the story felt complete.
Trish: The novella can be a tricky form. How did you strike a balance between what you reveal in terms of world-building and character, and what you have to leave out?
Caleb: Originally I treated it more like a short story, just focusing on key moments of change and revelation. I tend toward brief-and-dense by default, but my editor Selena Middleton knew where to ask for more, which parts deserved spotlighting rather than being left to inference. Still, I tried to keep it character-centered, so I left out details and context that the characters wouldn't have access to.
Trish: Yes, that rings true after reading it. Your ability to bring the characters to life so well in such a short story, and to give them each a distinctive voice.
One thing I enjoyed so much about the book was the aesthetic of steampunk-like elements, with the Stamps and the glass tubes for example, mixed with the eco-horror vibe, all with a touch of Puritanism thrown in. How on earth did you come up with such an inventive mix of ideas?
Caleb: A lot of it springs from my interests: I have a degree in agriculture, I like to build stuff, and I'm a huge nerd for the history of religion and mysticism, so those elements filtered in naturally. And since I was writing horror for the first time, I leaned on incongruous textures to help build sensory discomfort. Glass under skin, blood on paper, hair in eggs, that kind of thing. I knew I'd found the right words when writing them made me squirm a little.
Trish: Yes! It made me squirm a little too. I love the idea of the differences in texture; I hadn’t thought of that until you mentioned it, but it’s true.
Father Stewart is such a compelling character, and you devote a significant amount of pages to his inner dialogue with himself and with God. He’s so desperate to hear the voice of God, yet God remains silent. He uses this as a justification to carry out some horrific experiments, yet, I got the sense that you didn’t want to demonise Stewart; rather, to understand him. When writing the story, how did you see Father Stewart, and how did you hope the reader would understand his role?
Caleb: You're right that I didn't want to demonise Stewart, so much as use him to represent the last gasp of hegemony. I've met a few Father Stewarts. He's trying to uphold a tradition that's fundamentally at odds with the world he inhabits, using secondhand zeal and a warped understanding of history. He's been trained to see sin in any deviation from his worldview, so as a priest he's left with the impossible task of preaching a defunct salvation. He's like a flood insurance salesman in a desert.
Trish: I think that one of the key passages in the book is this: “It’s an irony I’m obliged to appreciate: the old country was built on the industry of its natives. We took their land, their magics, and their gods, and discarded the people. Just as we had done to the country before that, and worlds beyond number before that. But the Root will not be used. We finally found a place that outmatched our methods. Somewhere the clay moulds us.”
The issue of colonisation and its harms are front and centre to me in the book. It strikes me that the eco-horror of possession by the native flora of this new world is only a horror to the coloniser, because the human coloniser becomes the colonised. Very provocative! Am I reading too much into this, or was this something you hoped would come across?
Caleb: I was definitely aiming at that. It's hard to imagine the end of humanity's ecological dominance despite it being relatively new in the grand scheme of things. Even in fiction we assume our environmental adaptability would win any matchup - that we could live in Middle Earth or on Tatooine or in a simulation without losing supremacy over our surroundings. In a way, colonisation is a perversion of that adaptability, using a cleverness for resource extraction to reach beyond our grasp. So I thought it would be fun to depict a future where the consequence for runaway excess wasn't extinction, but getting beaten at our own game.
Trish: I loved how you relieved the oppressive atmosphere with some truly positive characters. Jenny is able to take the truly unsettling in stride, and the Beast is clearly an intellectual and a model for the future, as is Jon Heap. Do I detect a note of hope in your book?
Caleb: Yes, I'd say it's hope, just not in a wistful way. It's the peace you get from taking things as they are instead of as you'd like them to be. Jenny is Father Stewart's foil. The world is dangerous but that doesn't make it ugly, or in need of fixing by her. Both the Beast and Jon Heap are unburdened by old destructive patterns; hopefully they won't simply create new ones.
Trish: Indeed, I’m fascinated by the Root and its motivation or biological imperative. It seems to embody so many positive traits (curiosity, intellectualism, some sort of kindness as we see in its creatures: the Beast, Jon Heap), but it also threatens to end humanity as we know it. The Root isn’t the villain here, right?
Caleb: To me, the Root represents an inevitability: nature was always going to win against us. But wouldn't it be fascinating to survive our sunset and get reincorporated into the ecosystem? "Humanity as we know it" is a pretty limited scope from nature's perspective, and the Root isn't hung up on our mereological boundaries. It could show us non-destructive ways to evolve and flourish alongside the earth.
That said, I think the Root has some villainy in the traits it shares with its new human playthings. The Root is all-consuming, never satisfied, and perhaps even ambitious to its own detriment. Humanity might end up being a bad influence – fast forward a few millennia and maybe the Root has absorbed the humans, or maybe they've formed an unholy alliance and take over the universe together.
Trish: I love that: it’s not only humans who can have complex motivations and evolutionary agendas!
What’s your writing life and routine like? And what of the publishing world: how did your search for a publisher go and how has it been as a writer of a small-press book?
Caleb: I try to write every day, as much as I can after the kids go to bed. Being consistent and reading a lot are what keep me finishing projects.
Everything online says novellas are essentially unpublishable, but I discovered many small presses defying the myth. So I searched out recent, well-regarded novellas and submitted to those publishers, which is how I found Stelliform Press. Independent presses are a nice middle-ground between self- and traditional publishing: professional support but with fewer cooks in the kitchen. Not to mention being more flexible and able to take on weird books like mine.
Trish: As I hear from many authors, reading widely and consistently is indeed important to you in your writing life. I’m wondering if there are some books or authors that have influenced your writing, or that you just generally love?
Caleb: My first favorite authors were Ray Bradbury and H.G. Wells, later Jorge Luis Borges, Octavia Butler, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed has stuck with me like nothing else, and recently The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez kind of blew my mind. And honestly, the textbook Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace [by Joseph Williams and Joseph Bizup] did a lot for me when I first started writing.
Trish: What’s on your nightstand to read right now?
Caleb: A Trade of Blood by Robert Jackson Bennett and The Inverted World by Christopher Priest.
Trish: Altogether, some amazing sci-fi and fantasy recommendations! What’s next for you in your writing projects? And if readers would like to find out more about what you’re up to, where can they find you?
Caleb: I'm shopping around a full-length sci-fi horror novel now, Blessed Are the Hungry, an apocalyptic family drama about cannibalism and conspiracies. I'm also writing a genre-bendy time travel thriller.
I post a bit on Instagram (@sunset.sorcerer) and Bluesky (sunsetsorcerer.bsky.social), and I have a website to keep things centralized: calebsierra.com
Trish: Horror is probably my favourite genre, and both of your projects sound amazing, though I’ve got to admit you already have me hooked with “an apocalyptic family drama about cannibalism and conspiracies."
Thanks so much for joining me for an Author Chat. Congrats on The Wetworks Miracle, and I wish you the best in your future projects.
Caleb: Thanks Trish! This was fun.
He holds degrees in Agriculture and Chinese from Texas A&M University. When not writing, he works as an admissions consultant for universities across the globe. Otherwise, he's playing tabletop games, studying history and world religion, or tinkering with electronics.
I had so many questions when I finished the book, so it was great when Caleb agreed to an Author Chat about his book, inspirations and writing process.
***
Trish: Thanks so much for joining me today. Can you tell me a bit about yourself and how you came to writing? What is the origin story behind your debut novella The Wetworks Miracle?
Caleb: I've been writing since I was a kid, mostly short stories and a few first-draft novels until Wetworks. I was under a pretty strict media diet when I was young; practically everything I read was pre-1950s so my stories were mostly inspired by early science fiction.
The Wetworks Miracle in particular started with a bizarre dream: a scarecrow-like automaton disassembling himself to save the life of an injured boy. I wrote the first chapter as a standalone scene, simply to capture the image. But I'd never written a proper horror story and I was hooked by the liberating nature of the genre, so I just kept going until the story felt complete.
Trish: The novella can be a tricky form. How did you strike a balance between what you reveal in terms of world-building and character, and what you have to leave out?
 |
| Author Caleb Sierra |
Trish: Yes, that rings true after reading it. Your ability to bring the characters to life so well in such a short story, and to give them each a distinctive voice.
One thing I enjoyed so much about the book was the aesthetic of steampunk-like elements, with the Stamps and the glass tubes for example, mixed with the eco-horror vibe, all with a touch of Puritanism thrown in. How on earth did you come up with such an inventive mix of ideas?
Caleb: A lot of it springs from my interests: I have a degree in agriculture, I like to build stuff, and I'm a huge nerd for the history of religion and mysticism, so those elements filtered in naturally. And since I was writing horror for the first time, I leaned on incongruous textures to help build sensory discomfort. Glass under skin, blood on paper, hair in eggs, that kind of thing. I knew I'd found the right words when writing them made me squirm a little.
Trish: Yes! It made me squirm a little too. I love the idea of the differences in texture; I hadn’t thought of that until you mentioned it, but it’s true.
Father Stewart is such a compelling character, and you devote a significant amount of pages to his inner dialogue with himself and with God. He’s so desperate to hear the voice of God, yet God remains silent. He uses this as a justification to carry out some horrific experiments, yet, I got the sense that you didn’t want to demonise Stewart; rather, to understand him. When writing the story, how did you see Father Stewart, and how did you hope the reader would understand his role?
Caleb: You're right that I didn't want to demonise Stewart, so much as use him to represent the last gasp of hegemony. I've met a few Father Stewarts. He's trying to uphold a tradition that's fundamentally at odds with the world he inhabits, using secondhand zeal and a warped understanding of history. He's been trained to see sin in any deviation from his worldview, so as a priest he's left with the impossible task of preaching a defunct salvation. He's like a flood insurance salesman in a desert.
Trish: I think that one of the key passages in the book is this: “It’s an irony I’m obliged to appreciate: the old country was built on the industry of its natives. We took their land, their magics, and their gods, and discarded the people. Just as we had done to the country before that, and worlds beyond number before that. But the Root will not be used. We finally found a place that outmatched our methods. Somewhere the clay moulds us.”
The issue of colonisation and its harms are front and centre to me in the book. It strikes me that the eco-horror of possession by the native flora of this new world is only a horror to the coloniser, because the human coloniser becomes the colonised. Very provocative! Am I reading too much into this, or was this something you hoped would come across?
Caleb: I was definitely aiming at that. It's hard to imagine the end of humanity's ecological dominance despite it being relatively new in the grand scheme of things. Even in fiction we assume our environmental adaptability would win any matchup - that we could live in Middle Earth or on Tatooine or in a simulation without losing supremacy over our surroundings. In a way, colonisation is a perversion of that adaptability, using a cleverness for resource extraction to reach beyond our grasp. So I thought it would be fun to depict a future where the consequence for runaway excess wasn't extinction, but getting beaten at our own game.
Trish: I loved how you relieved the oppressive atmosphere with some truly positive characters. Jenny is able to take the truly unsettling in stride, and the Beast is clearly an intellectual and a model for the future, as is Jon Heap. Do I detect a note of hope in your book?
Caleb: Yes, I'd say it's hope, just not in a wistful way. It's the peace you get from taking things as they are instead of as you'd like them to be. Jenny is Father Stewart's foil. The world is dangerous but that doesn't make it ugly, or in need of fixing by her. Both the Beast and Jon Heap are unburdened by old destructive patterns; hopefully they won't simply create new ones.
Trish: Indeed, I’m fascinated by the Root and its motivation or biological imperative. It seems to embody so many positive traits (curiosity, intellectualism, some sort of kindness as we see in its creatures: the Beast, Jon Heap), but it also threatens to end humanity as we know it. The Root isn’t the villain here, right?
Caleb: To me, the Root represents an inevitability: nature was always going to win against us. But wouldn't it be fascinating to survive our sunset and get reincorporated into the ecosystem? "Humanity as we know it" is a pretty limited scope from nature's perspective, and the Root isn't hung up on our mereological boundaries. It could show us non-destructive ways to evolve and flourish alongside the earth.
That said, I think the Root has some villainy in the traits it shares with its new human playthings. The Root is all-consuming, never satisfied, and perhaps even ambitious to its own detriment. Humanity might end up being a bad influence – fast forward a few millennia and maybe the Root has absorbed the humans, or maybe they've formed an unholy alliance and take over the universe together.
Trish: I love that: it’s not only humans who can have complex motivations and evolutionary agendas!
What’s your writing life and routine like? And what of the publishing world: how did your search for a publisher go and how has it been as a writer of a small-press book?
Caleb: I try to write every day, as much as I can after the kids go to bed. Being consistent and reading a lot are what keep me finishing projects.
Everything online says novellas are essentially unpublishable, but I discovered many small presses defying the myth. So I searched out recent, well-regarded novellas and submitted to those publishers, which is how I found Stelliform Press. Independent presses are a nice middle-ground between self- and traditional publishing: professional support but with fewer cooks in the kitchen. Not to mention being more flexible and able to take on weird books like mine.
Trish: As I hear from many authors, reading widely and consistently is indeed important to you in your writing life. I’m wondering if there are some books or authors that have influenced your writing, or that you just generally love?
Caleb: My first favorite authors were Ray Bradbury and H.G. Wells, later Jorge Luis Borges, Octavia Butler, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed has stuck with me like nothing else, and recently The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez kind of blew my mind. And honestly, the textbook Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace [by Joseph Williams and Joseph Bizup] did a lot for me when I first started writing.
Trish: What’s on your nightstand to read right now?
Caleb: A Trade of Blood by Robert Jackson Bennett and The Inverted World by Christopher Priest.
Trish: Altogether, some amazing sci-fi and fantasy recommendations! What’s next for you in your writing projects? And if readers would like to find out more about what you’re up to, where can they find you?
Caleb: I'm shopping around a full-length sci-fi horror novel now, Blessed Are the Hungry, an apocalyptic family drama about cannibalism and conspiracies. I'm also writing a genre-bendy time travel thriller.
I post a bit on Instagram (@sunset.sorcerer) and Bluesky (sunsetsorcerer.bsky.social), and I have a website to keep things centralized: calebsierra.com
Trish: Horror is probably my favourite genre, and both of your projects sound amazing, though I’ve got to admit you already have me hooked with “an apocalyptic family drama about cannibalism and conspiracies."
Thanks so much for joining me for an Author Chat. Congrats on The Wetworks Miracle, and I wish you the best in your future projects.
Caleb: Thanks Trish! This was fun.
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