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Halloween is Coming! HWA’s Halloween Haunts, Coming Soon.

And with Halloween come special Halloween events. The first one to come to our attention is the HWA Halloween Haunts online blog event,  to take place on their Dark Whispers blog, with at least one new entry every day from October 1-31! Well, I’ll just cut and paste the press release and you can read about it yourselves.

 

The Horror Writers Association Announces Its

Second Annual HALLOWEEN HAUNTS Online Blog Event

 

Spend Halloween with the Horror Writers!

 

September 8, 2012— This Halloween, horror fans will know exactly where to go to connect with their favorite horror writers and discover new ones. The Horror Writers Association is proud to present the Second Annual Halloween Haunts blog event. In celebration of Halloween and horror writing, the HWA will post at least one new blog entry by a horror writer every day from October 1 to October 31—and many posts will feature giveaways, such as books and e-books.

 

HWA members will be blogging about their favorite parts of Halloween, their treasured (or terrifying!) Halloween experiences, what life is like as a horror writer, or even their experience as a member of the HWA. Winners of the HWA’s 2012 Bram Stoker Awards® will be featured in spotlight interviews. No one knows Halloween better than horror writers and there’s no better time of year than October to dig into some horror writing!

 

Halloween Haunts is designed to help connect horror writers with readers, share some Halloween fun (and a few good chills), and showcase the benefits of HWA membership.

 

Halloween Haunts will take place on the Dark Whispers blog (http://www.horror.org/blog/), the official blog of the HWA. Giveaways and prizes will be announced daily, and all giveaways are provided by individual members of the HWA.

 

Last year’s Halloween Haunts event is archived online: http://www.horror.org/blog/?m=201110&paged=5.

 

Founded in 1985, the Horror Writers Association (www.horror.org) exists to promote and protect the careers of professional horror writers, to mentor those seeking to enter their ranks, and to raise the profile of the horror genre in the publishing industry and among readers. The HWA gives the iconic Bram Stoker Awards® for Superior Achievement, named in honor of Bram Stoker, author of the seminal horror work, Dracula, and organizes The Bram Stoker Awards Weekend, a conference for horror writers, which occurs every two years, with the next scheduled for New Orleans in June 2013: http://www.stokers2013.org/ .

 

Contact: James Chambers, Chairman, HWA Membership Committee, membership@horror.org; or Rocky Wood, President, Horror Writers Association, president@horror.org; or to host a Halloween Haunts giveaway on your blog or website, contact Anita Siraki, thedarkeva@yahoo.com

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Posted on September 10, 2012 by , Reply

Wanted: Volunteer Reviewers

MonsterLibrarian.com was started in 2005, while Dylan was finishing up his degree in library science. A voracious reader of horror fiction, he discovered that horror readers were an underserved population in the public library.  He wanted to change that, so he started up this site.

At first he was the only reviewer, writing short reviews of the books he owned, that he thought librarians should be aware of. Because of the attraction of horror fiction to reluctant readers, he also started teen and kids’ sections to the site. As a children’s and school librarian, I was happy to help out.

And then people started sending us books– more than we could possibly review on our own.  We discovered that volunteer reviewers are essential to making MonsterLibrarian.com a useful resource to librarians. Many of the reviewers we’ve had over the years have put serious time into the site, contributing their talents and energy in an amazing number of ways. These are true lovers of horror fiction who really believe in the importance of getting out the news about great horror fiction.

The site keeps growing and we keep getting more books and requests for review.  And thus, we are once again looking for volunteer reviewers to take these off our hands and get the word out about great books.

If you would like to review for us, please email us at monsterlibrarian@monsterlibrarian.com.

We’ll get our review guidelines out to you so you can see if you are interested.

If there’s anyone out there who would like to review teen or children’s books, these are very popular parts of our site, although we don’t get many review copies– but if you’d like to start out like we did, reviewing books from your own collection, you’d rock my world.

We can’t do it without volunteer reviewers. Please spread the word! And thank you for being part of MonsterLibrarian.com!

Posted on August 30, 2012 by , Reply

Defining the Scary Story

In explaining horror fiction for reader’s advisory librarians in The Reader’s Advisory Guide, Second Edition, Becky Siegel Spratford defined it as

…a story in which the author manipulates the reader’s emotions by introducing situations in which unexplainable phenomena and unearthly creatures threaten the protagonists and provoke terror in the reader.

We argued with her definition of horror fiction in our review, because here we consider genres such as human horror and killer animals as subgenres in horror fiction, as do many, many readers.

When I talk about scary stories for kids, I’m talking about something a little bit different, though, because what I consider “scary” doesn’t necessarily easily fall into genres (and sometimes it’s not especially scary, but has a focus on Halloween, or on creatures traditionally considered scary). I decided to ask my Monster Kid what he thought about all this.

Me: Does a scary story have to have a monster in it to be scary?

Monster Kid: No, a dripping, dark wood where you are lost is scary. That can be a scary story.

Me: So there doesn’t have to be a monster for the book to be a scary story?

Monster Kid: No, getting lost far away from your village in the dark is scary even without a monster. Even when there’s no monster, that’s a monster.

There you have it. You don’t need the unexplainable, otherworldly, or supernatural to make a scary story a scary story.

Here’s a list of the kinds of things that fall beneath the large umbrella of “scary stories” in children’s literature, according to several scholars in the subject:

Nursery rhymes
Fairy tales
Where the Wild Things Are and other picture books
A Series of Unfortunate Events
The Graveyard Book
A Tale Dark and Grimm
The Vampire Diaries
Twilight
The Hunger Games

Whether all of these REALLY qualify as scary stories (or horror, for that matter), or whether I should include Halloween books and not-so-scary monster tales in the “scary stories” category here, is certainly up for debate. But that dark and dripping wood that emerged from the mind of my six year old son… well, he certainly scared me with that, more than any monster could.

Posted on August 8, 2012 by , 2 comments
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