To open her mobile horror bookstore, Iza Hudson has had to learn how to drive a stick shift.
“I’m only stalling out once a day now,” she tells the Scene at The Forge, where Papercut Horror & Other Dark Lit is being built.
The book truck will officially open with a launch party at Fait la Force Brewing on Aug. 28, and will sell horror books as well as less scary stories with “rich gothic elements.” Soon it will be lined with books and decked out in a fresh coat of paint — the shop’s color scheme, black and red and cream, is inspired by vintage horror art. But for now, it looks like a standard 1990s kei truck, a kind of compact vehicle that Hudson had imported from Japan. Riding shotgun, though, is a life-size skeleton — affectionately known as Skelly.
Hudson, a Nashvillian by way of Ocean City, Md., is a longtime horror fanatic. She traces her obsession back to Mercer Mayer’s book There’s Something in My Attic, which she memorized as a child.
“It’s so easy to say that [horror is] just entertaining or fun, or it’s just blood and guts,” Hudson says. “But it’s so much more than that.”
A selection of books from Papercut
She previously worked in the publishing industry, and since then she’s found herself “yearning to do something with books again.” After seeing the success of local book trucks like Slow Burn, which moved into an East Nashville brick-and-mortar in 2025, Hudson decided a mobile store focusing on her favorite genre was worth a shot — and hit the ground running.
“I got the idea for it earlier this year,” she explains. “I was like, ‘Why not? Let’s try.’”
Across media formats, horror stories have been growing in popularity in recent years. In the book world, Library Journal points to a publishing boom in epic-length horror novels and gothic retellings, and many have analyzed the genre’s avenues for social commentary and marginalized perspectives. The new Apple TV horror-comedy hit Widow’s Bay features a character who runs a book truck, and recent series like Yellowjackets and The Haunting of Hill House have pulled impressive streaming numbers. Film buffs, meanwhile, rejoiced in March as Oscar wins for Sinners, Weapons and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein — not to mention Sinners’ record-breaking nomination count — signaled the end of longtime Academy horror snubs.
Iza Hudson and Skelly
Hudson ties the rise to the also-growing physical media trend, and thinks that both connect back to “the tumultuous time we’re having in America.” “It feels like a moment of resistance,” she says.
But what is it that makes horror the perfect genre for that moment? To her, it’s the way horror dismantles the status quo and creates “a mirror to reflect our cultural anxieties.”
Many of Hudson’s personal favorites provide that mirror, confronting social fears around domesticity and oppression. Hudson cites Stephen King’s The Shining as an all-time favorite, declaring it “much better than the movie.” In Elizabeth Hand’s Wylding Hall, which she calls “a perfect Nashville story,” a British acid-folk band records an album in a haunted manor in the 1970s. Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory considers the horrors of Jim Crow-era Florida, and Indigenous author Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is described on the dust jacket as “an Indian revenge story.”
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To Hudson, the genre’s focus on what she calls “big dark themes” like these also makes its audience unique.
“My hot take is that horror readers are some of the most empathetic people,” she says. “They’re people that willingly sign up to sit with uncomfortable emotions for long stretches of time.”
So far, bringing Papercut to life has been a community affair. The truck is being built at The Forge by Hudson’s partner Reagan Wallbaum and friend Ethan Warner, and the shop’s graphic designer is her best friend Stefanie Lipp. Hudson is particularly excited about the launch party because of Fait la Force’s emphasis on community events, and teases more events to come as the shop opens for business.
She thinks Nashville’s support for small businesses makes it the perfect place for Papercut to call home. “This city loves independent shops. They love supporting the community.”
But she also emphasizes the need to keep Nashville weird.
“New Nashville is home to franchises and hospitality-group-owned restaurants and bars. We need more mom-and-pop stuff. We need more weird stuff.”
