Matt Heart wrote his first horror story at about ten years old. It was called Nightmare in a Toy Store. Decades later, after a career in music that took him from Ohio to Los Angeles, he found a box of those early stories while unpacking in his hometown, and started writing again. The result is Tender Eyes, a horror series set in a fictional Ohio town surrounded by very real places, published by Cold Fever Books, the independent house he runs with his wife, Lori. The third book, Tender Eyes 3: The Butcher, came out on 31 October together with a 21-track soundtrack. Maria Bregman interviewed Matt Heart for ArtCulture UK about fear, food and why a book needs music.
What brought you back to writing, and why horror?
"In 1996, I wrote Dare to Wake the Dead, set in the fictional town of Laurelsville, which I affectionately named after my wife, Lori," Heart says. "Back then, I dreamed of creating a children's horror series called Frightmares. I wanted to be the next R.L. Stine." Music came first. Years later, back in Ohio, he rediscovered the old stories: "Finding them felt like rediscovering a part of myself I'd left behind."
Horror, he says, was always where he would return. "I've always been fascinated by fear, especially fear of the unknown. The things we can't explain, or perhaps don't want explained, are often much more frightening than the things we can see."
The town is fictional, but Toledo and the old Tenderloin district are real. How much real history do you let in?
"I like putting fictional horror against real places because it makes fear closer and the readers question where history ends and the story begins." The first book starts far from Ohio: its hero, Daniel Kearns, trains at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, opens a restaurant in New York and becomes a food critic, and an assignment brings him to Tender Eyes. The second moves closer to home, stranding a group of young people from Toledo and Ann Arbor in the town during a winter storm.
As the series goes on, Ohio's past takes a larger part. Heart became fascinated by Toledo's old Tenderloin district and its history of vice before Prohibition. "I take pieces of real history like that and build fiction around them rather than simply retelling them. Ultimately, I want readers wondering how much is invented, and maybe looking at their own communities and asking what history might be buried underneath them."
Where did the premise of a food critic come from?
From a late-night conversation with Lori about conspiracy theories and the idea of people treated as products. "I asked her, 'If someone served us human meat, would we even know the difference?'" The answer that stayed with him was that a trained chef might. So Daniel Kearns became a chef turned critic, "the perfect character to send somewhere that wasn't quite right." The title came from Lori too: he had been playing with "tenderize", and she suggested Tender Eyes. "I immediately knew that was it, not just the title, but the name of the town." The question then turned darker: "What happens when a man who knows food arrives in a town where he doesn't know what's on the menu?"
How did writing the soundtrack change the books?
Heart has worked in music for more than 35 years and says he has always been fascinated by film soundtracks. In 2006, as a member of the group Purpose, he received the Los Angeles Black Music Awards' prize for Best Alternative Performer, and later released a solo album. "I've always believed every good story should have a soundtrack, because life itself has one. Almost everyone has a song that instantly takes them back to a particular person, place or moment."
The Tender Eyes songs, he insists, are not promotion. "They're inspired by the characters, their experiences and situations within the story." The soundtrack reaches across the whole planned six-book saga, including stories readers have not yet reached: "The music doesn't just accompany the books. It expands their world." The same instinct is behind the next step: Cold Fever Books is now pitching the series for a screen adaptation.
What do British listeners hear in a Midwestern horror story?
"No matter our demographic, geographical location or ethnicity, we all share something in common: curiosity about the things we're not supposed to question." The fears in Tender Eyes, he says, are not local. "At some point, most of us have looked at something on our plate and wondered exactly where it came from." When the first book began drawing reviews from as far away as India, he decided to continue Daniel's story. "Tender Eyes isn't just some small Ohio town. Every city has one. Every country has one. You just have to find it. Or it finds you."
Tender Eyes 3: The Butcher and Tender Eyes: The Soundtrack were released on 31 October 2026 by Cold Fever Books and 424 Records. The audiobooks are narrated by Anthony Muth.
Cover image courtesy of Cold Fever Books.
