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Women in Horror Fiction: Joan Aiken– Give Yourself A Fright

Joan Aiken, born September 4, 1924, was a British author well known for her children’s novels (especially for The Wolves of Willoughby Chase), but she also wrote excellent short stories, and fiction for teens and adults. While her work could be fantastic (as it is in the Armitage Family stories) and subversively funny (such as the tales of Arabel and Mortimer, her raven)  her writing for all three audiences often contained dark, Gothic, or supernatural elements.

Can you tell that I love Joan Aiken?

I have enthusiastically read everything of hers that I have found since I first read her A Necklace of Raindrops, when I was about eight years old. Which is not to say I have read everything she’s written. The book she’s probably most well known for is her Gothic historical fantasy for middle graders, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, but that was published in 1962, and she continued to write for the rest of her life. Although she died in 2004, her works are actually still being published (The Monkey’s Wedding and Other Stories, from Small Beer Press, was released as recently as 2011). A review from Bookslut, quoted on Small Beer’s website, compared Aiken to Shirley Jackson.

Because Aiken is mainly identified as a children’s author, it’s quite possible that you have never considered reading her work. But if you love ghost stories, Gothic atmosphere, and tales both disturbing and enchanting, you should.

In a blog post on Aiken’s short fiction, Jed Hartman notes:

…In general, Aiken doesn’t much distinguish between stories for children and stories for grown-ups…  And it’s often hard to decide whether to class a given Aiken story as a kids’ story or a grown-ups’ story, which is all to the good. Almost all of the best children’s books — from Alice onward — can be enjoyed by adults as well.

Ready to give yourself a fright, Joan Aiken style? Here’s the official Joan Aiken site’s  list of books specifically with supernatural themes. And here’s the complete biblography, just in case you get carried away.

Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

“I’d Like To Submit A Request For Review”

Monster Librarian receives a lot of requests for review. In addition to mainstream and independent publishers, there are many teeny tiny small presses and self-published authors who request reviews. I’m sharing this information especially for them.

Everyone who works on the site is a volunteer. They all have busy lives and they donate their valuable free time to reading and reviewing.  We can’t review everything we are requested to review. Even when we do plan to review a book, it can be awhile before the book is read, reviewed, edited, and posted. To those of you patiently waiting for reviews, thank you for your patience.

Here’s how we handle review requests. When someone requests a review, I send the request on to our reviewers, and if any of them are interested, then they tell me and I let the person who contacted me know who to send it to.

So if you want to get your book reviewed, you’ve got to hook them with your request, and you have to do it fast. I don’t know about you, but in my personal email account I am overwhelmed with email, most of which isn’t very important. I don’t read every one that I get, and many of those I do get I just take a few seconds to look at, to see if they’re a.) important or b.) interesting. So there isn’t much time to get my attention, and if someone wants me to read what they’ve sent, they have to do it pretty fast. I think most people handle the clutter in their inboxes like that. There isn’t time for more without having your life consumed by email.

I bring this up because I have received a number of requests in the past few weeks for “an anthology of horror short stories”. Occasionally that’s expanded to something along the lines of  “a collection of unique/original/chilling/entertaining/frightening short stories”.  Describing a book this way is pretty generic.  Describing the contents in detail isn’t necessary, just tell us what makes your book stand out enough that we should take time out of our lives to read and review it. If you can’t get it across in a brief paragraph, your request isn’t going to stand out and it probably isn’t going to provoke a reviewer’s interest.  There are plenty of people who DO write requests that tell us what makes their book unique who still don’t get reviewed because of the limited time and energy our reviewers have available, or because it doesn’t fit their interests.

I love to be able to write someone who has requested a review and tell them that we have a reviewer who is interested in reviewing the book. If you would like to be one of those people, please keep in mind that providing us with information about the book that will hook a reviewer makes that much more likely.

We do have a FAQ for authors, located here, which tells you, among other things, what information we need from you to forward a request. Thanks for taking a minute to consider how best to structure a review request, and have a great day!

 

 

The Compulsive Power of Reading: Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews


V.C. Andrews’  1979 novel Flowers in the Attic has been adapted into a Lifetime movie with Ellen Burstyn and Heather Graham, which will premiere later this month (see the trailer here). This movie promises to stay much closer to the book than the 1987 adaptation, which left out some important parts of the book. She also has a  new book coming out soon, The Unwelcomed Child (Andrews died in 1986, after writing just seven novels, and now has over 80 published books– making her possibly the most prolific dead writer ever).

If you were a girl growing up in the 1970s or 1980s you’ve probably at least heard of Flowers in the Attic. It’s been a long time since I read it, but I have a strong memory of reading it. You wouldn’t think that a story about four kids locked in an attic for years would be a compelling read– how much action can there really be? Maybe as a 12 year old the plot didn’t feel as telegraphed to me as it does now. The language feels like it comes straight from “old-skool” romance,  but the setting is gothic and the tone is disturbing. I wasn’t a critical reader at that age, I was just caught up in the story, as told by a grown Cathy Dollanganger about her 12 year old self.  Flowers in the Attic was a compulsive read and I read it cover to cover, and the other books in the Dollanganger saga, although my favorite Andrews book is the stand alone My Sweet Audrina.

At the same time that I am tempted to go back to it, though, I haven’t quite been able to bring myself to do it. It’s like being a moth attracted to bright light– I’m not sure I want to get close enough to go back to the awfulness of the grandmother, the monstrosity of the mother, the incest, rape, physical abuse, and abandonment. It probably doesn’t bother an uncritical teenage reader dealing with unfamiliar (or maybe familiar, but under the surface) emotions and physical changes, but do I want to go there again? Andrews’ books have been compared to the Twilight books because they’re such compulsive reads, across generations–once you start, resistance is futile. Do I really want to lose my weekend to the Dollangangers?

What makes Flowers in the Attic so compelling? Lots of people have tried to come up with an answer to why girls and women would read a story this full of crazysauce (a term I picked up from Sarah Wendell that fits this book so very well) and I’m not sure any of them got it quite right. And unlike Twilight, it doesn’t seem like there will be an entire shelf of knockoff crossover YA creepy family horror stories  in the bookstore anytime soon. Her books, with their distinctive covers, still seem to me like the kind you read under the covers.

In researching V.C. Andrews I discovered that people who asked about books similar to Flowers in the Attic were mostly given lists of Andrews’ books, and more than once someone said that her books are their own genre. In an article on Andrews, Sara Gran and Megan Abbott note:

Though there’s an obvious debt to the Brontë sisters, nineteenth-century sensation novels like Lady Audley’s Secret, and Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic fiction, at heart Andrews’s novels have little in common with the genres where they ought to fit. They’re too offbeat for romance, too slow to qualify as thrillers, too explicit for Gothic, and far too dark and complex for young adult.

Young adult books have gotten pretty dark and complex, if you ask me, but with an audience including 12 year olds and 60 year olds, it does make it difficult to know where to shelve the book.

Curiously, for someone who makes a living duplicating Andrews’ style, Andrew Neiderman, who ghostwrites her books, said in an interview:

The wonder of V.C. Andrews, which makes it hard for people to duplicate, is that it’s not just one genre. It’s not just horror stories or love stories—it’s a recipe, a mixture of these genres in the books that makes it work, that people have not been able to emulate, because a lot of people have tried.

I’d love to know what authors or books he’s referring to, because even if they’re not totally successful, it would be interesting to see what other people have come up with in their attempts to emulate her work. Do people graduate from her books? What do they read next?

Will I go back and read Flowers in the Attic in honor of the new movie? I haven’t decided. But just learning more about Andrews and her books (an interesting challenge) was compelling enough on its own to make me really, really tempted.

 

For some perspectives on the books (and occasionally, some drinking games) here are some links you might check out.

 

“”I May Look Like Her, But Inside I Am Honorable”! Flowers in the Attic, Daughters, and Moms”  by Tammy Oler at Slate.com

 

The Complete V.C. Andrews. This unofficial website links to a variety of articles on V.C. Andrews, her books, and related topics.

 

“Interview with Ann Patty, Editor of Flowers in the Attic by Robin Wasserman at The Toast.net

 

“V.C. Andrews and Disability Horror” by Madeleine Lloyd-Davies at The Toast.net. I loved this. I have been thinking about disability horror a lot lately.

 

Dark Family: V.C. Andrews and the Secret Life of Girls” by Sara Gran and Megan Abbott, in the September 2009 issue of Believer Magazine. This is as close to serious analysis as I found, and I think the authors did a pretty good job of nailing why the books appeal to girls. Although I’m middle-aged, so you would probably be wise to check it against the experience of teen girls of your acquaintance.

 

Twilight vs. Flowers in the Attic: Sick Sex Smackdown, Eighties Style” by Alyx Dellamonica at Tor.com. Another informal look, this one with some more critical thought put into it. I like Dellamonica’s idea that the book falls into a stretch of development between  “unreal” childhood fears like the monster under the bed and the ability to deal with realistic threats in the wider world. I wasn’t a fan of her conclusion, though.

 

Lurid: Flowers in the Attic” by Karina Wilson at LitReactor.com. A rather gleeful look back and critical once-over of the author’s personal favorite “Bad Book”.

 

Flowers in the Attic: Ain’t Sexy, He’s My Brother”. Lizzie Skurnick’s  original column at Jezebel on Flowers in the Attic, which appears in a more polished form in her book Shelf Discovery.

 

“Flower Scowler” by Erin Callahan at Forever  Young Adult. The first post in a series where Callahan reads and dissects each chapter in Flowers in the Attic, which includes the Flowers in the Attic drinking game. This is a very informal, funny examination of the book.

 

Revisiting My Sixth Grade Bookshelf: Flowers in the Attic” by Ashley Perks at xoJane.com. An informal look back at the book.

 

“In The Attic: Whips, Witches, and a Peculiar Princess” by Gillian Flynn at NPR.org.  The author of Gone Girl writes about her infatuation with the book as a teen and how it inspired her interest in “wicked women”.

 

Flowers (And Family Dysfunction) in the Attic” by Heidi W. Durrow at NPR.org. Durrow writes about her personal love of the book, no analysis involved.