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Women in Horror Month: 5 Books By Women Writers That Horror Readers Might Not Know (But Should)

Far be it from me to dictate an entire canon of works (at least today) but there are definitely some books by women authors that deserve to be known better than they are, and they often get shorted because the story of Mary Shelley and Frankenstein is pretty amazing, so everybody writes about her. There are lots of great women writers who aren’t Mary Shelley, though, and I can only claim to have read a few of them, despite my intention to do better. Here are some books you might have heard of but passed on for some reason– or maybe they are unknown to you.

1.) Beloved by Toni Morrison.

Toni TheMorrison is a great American writer, so I hope most people at least recognize her name. Beloved was made into a movie, so it’s you may at least know of that. The story concerns Sethe, an escaped slave, living in Ohio many years after her escape, in a house haunted by a ghostly child.  To say more than that is to give away what was (to me, anyway) the breathtaking, visceral shock of some of  the book’s later events. Morrison uses a nonlinear writing style, and the events move back and forth in time, so this is not a quick, light, beach read. But it is certainly one that will leave an impact.

2.)  The Keep by Jennifer Egan

The Keep is a nested story, with a story about a character situated in a Gothic trope– visiting an acquaintance who is renovating a castle with Gothic terrors and trappings, which is also a playground for bored people who want to imagine they are living in the Gothic… and all of this is framed by yet another story. The Keep does not tie up all of its loose ends, so if that bothers you, be warned. It’s really hard to describe this in just a few sentences without giving up some of the surprises in the plot, but suffice it to say that it is suitably creepy and unsettling. I’d save this for when you have plenty of time.

3.) The Castle of Los Angeles by Lisa Morton

The Castle of Los Angeles won a Stoker award in 2010, and was mentioned in the second edition of The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror. Two of our reviewers chose to review it independently of each other, and both of the reviews were glowing. Despite her reputation as a horror writer, though, it is possible that you might not have come across this book, because it was published by a small press, Gray Friar Press, that does not (to my knowledge) seem to exist anymore. Cemetery Dance has republished it as an ebook, but hard copies appear to be only available used, so you would probably have to be looking for it specifically, or be blessed with serendipity, to come across it. The Castle of Los Angeles  takes place in a haunted theater, the Castle. While it uses many Gothic tropes, Morton makes them her own, and her eccentric mix of characters and their reasons for living in the Castle make it a unique contribution to the haunted house genre. It is a treasure for lovers of quiet horror.

4.) Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

If you are purely a horror reader you might not have come across the brilliant Connie Willis, who is primarily known as a science fiction writer. Among her other works, she has written a loosely connected series of books about historians in an alternate future who use time travel in their research. In Doomsday Book, history student Kivrin’s research trip to the Middle Ages is derailed when the tech running the machine collapses, having entered incorrect coordinates that send her to the time of the Black Death. The tech turns out to have contracted an unknown and deadly disease that spreads rapidly through the area, and the time travel lab is quarantined due to suspicion that the disease escaped from the past when Kivrin went through, trapping her there. This isn’t horror in the traditional sense, but the reader is a witness, through Kivrin, to the despair and terror caused by the Black Death. The parallel plot of the quarantine during the spread of the unknown disease in the future is more science-fictional, but Willis does not pull her punches, and she doesn’t seem to have compunctions about killing off characters you’ve grown to care about. The story builds over the course of the novel, and it is exhaustive in its detail, so you have to be patient, but it is so worth poking your toe outside the horror genre to delve into the horror and consequences of the spread of an epidemic disease.

5.) Nameless: The Darkness Comes by Mercedes M. Yardley

While she has published short stories and novellas before, this is Mercedes Yardley’s debut novel, and the first book in her Bone Angel trilogy. It’s relatively new, having just been released in December. We just reviewed it here, and when I asked my reviewers for a book by a top woman writer in the horror genre, this is the one that was suggested.  Luna, the protagonist, can see and speak to demons. When her niece is kidnapped by Luna’s brother’s ex-wife, a demon named Sparkles, the game is on! Described as “whimsical”, “gritty”, and “macabre”,  this novel, while technically an urban fantasy, gets high marks from lovers of horror as well.

 

I hope you’ve had a great month of reading women horror writers this month– but don’t stop now! Enjoy!

Posted on February 29, 2016 by , Reply

Women in Horror Month: An Invitation to Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”

On the heels of Tor.com’s blog post stating that the horror genre doesn’t claim Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, I feel like it’s necessary to set the record straight. As much as I would personally like to claim it for the horror genre, some people might consider that appropriation, given its topic and the context in which it was written– and certainly, horror isn’t the only genre represented(it has also been described as magic realist, historical fiction, and African-American fiction, and Morrison has said she prefers to be identified as simply an American writer). But as a widely read person and a reviewer of horror fiction, I personally, and as a representative of Monster Librarian, will argue that it most certainly should be included (I have always considered it to be part of the genre) as it spotlights one of the most innovative and powerful depictions of horror and the Gothic by women, in recent literature.

In the way that it taps into the feelings we attach to American history, Beloved is a unique book that I am not sure any other can quite measure up to.  I won’t argue that it doesn’t also have a relationship to other literary genres and styles. But there is room in the horror genre for things we haven’t yet even imagined, and there is certainly an honored place for Beloved. 

 

 

Posted on February 25, 2016 by , Reply

Women in Horror Month: Mother Goose On The Loose

Mother Goose telling tales, from the frontispiece of Perrault’s Histoires.

The dark mystery behind the tales and rhymes that today we attribute to Mother Goose is something most people don’t notice now, because taken for granted that they were written for children in the nursery– and who today would entertain the littlest of us with violence and nightmares? Her image first appears in Perrault’s Histories, published in 1697, as an old woman telling stories to children, but her name and role as storyteller already existed in France. In Halls of Fame, Olive Beaupre Miller writes that John Newbery, the first publisher to concentrate on children’s books, was the first to publish an edition of Mother Goose rhymes in 1786,  and that in the preface, the editor writes that the rhymes  “are of great antiquity… some as old as the time of the ancient Druids”.  Miller was writing in 1921, and she wrote to educate small children, but recent research bears this out.

Apparently Americans’ puritan tastes led to “refinement” of the rhymes, although overseas, children were purchasing chapbooks of Mother Goose rhymes and fairytales in unexpurgated form. Gillian Avery notes that originally, few of them were written for children at all, but were “wrenched” out of adult contexts by children, and were “ruthless” and “often violent” until adult writers and illustrators toned down the content to what modern audiences recognize as Mother Goose rhymes today (to the objections of those who prefer the violent, political, and sexual nature of some of the originals). Samuel Goodrich, who later became the popular American children’s author, Peter Parley, was sheltered from these rhymes and tales until the age of ten, and outraged by them when he finally encountered them. Avery quotes Goodrich as saying,

“Little Red Riding Hood, Puss In Boots, Jack the Giant Killer, and some of the other tales of horror,[are] commonly put into the hands of youth, as if for the express purpose of reconciling them to vice and crime. Some children, no doubt, have a ready appetite for these monstrosities, but to others, they are revolting; until by repetition and familiarity, the taste is sufficiently degraded to relish them.”

Goodrich made a career of writing nonfiction and realistic, moral fiction for children, in a mostly successful effort to drive works of imagination and fantasy underground (for several decades, at least), and once the rhymes emerged, there continued to be censors who criticized and edited them (Geoffery Handley Taylor’s 1952 catalogue of the dangers in nursery rhymes is notable) but as this story shows, in the end, especially in the age of the Internet, you can’t keep Mother Goose down.

Sources not available online:

Avery, Gillian. Behold the Child: American Children And Their Books, 1621-1922. London: The Bodley Head, 1994.

Miller, Olive Beaupre.  “The Interesting History of Old Mother Goose”. Halls of Fame. Chicago: The Book House For Children, 1953.

 

Posted on February 18, 2016 by , Reply
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