Librarian Avengers | Musings of the Monster Librarian

Women in Horror Month: “She’s a librarian, ok?”

Hi, my name is Kirsten Kowalewski, and I am a librarian.

I am currently living in a state where the governor just attempted to use tax dollars to start a state-run news service and is recommending cutting library funding. The past two weeks have also been the culmination of a year of hostility from the governor and the state board of education toward our elected Superintendent of Public Instruction, who is, like me, trained as a librarian and school media specialist and is a certified teacher. The state legislature is stripping her of her powers and assigning them to the state board. When Indiana Senate president David Long was asked about it, he implied that she wasn’t up to the job. “She’s a librarian, ok?” This has left me steaming.

The Librarian Avengers are putting you on notice, Mr. Long.

So, what’s all this got to do with women in horror?

A number of awesome librarians have contributed to promoting the horror genre and keeping this website alive. Many of them are women, and all of them are amazing. I have been lucky to work with Becky Siegel Spratford (author of The Reader’s Advisory Guide to Horror Fiction), Patricia O. Mathews (author of the reader’s advisory guide Fang-tastic Fiction), Lucy Lockley (also known as the RAT Queen), Kelly Fann, Julie Adams, and others, and to connect through the site with Heather Whiteside Ward. If you want horror fiction to thrive, and its audience to grow, you’ve got to have the librarians on your side, and (whether it’s right or not) a lot of librarians are women.

In conclusion, I give you Evie Carnahan, Librarian Most Likely To Break A Mummy’s Curse:

Don’t underestimate the librarian. It could be your last mistake.

Kelly Link, Small Beer Press, and Weightless Books

Kelly Link is one of the most original writers I have come across in many many years of reading all kinds of things. She started out writing for small press, and in the past few years had a collection of short stories for teens, called Pretty Monsters, published by Penguin, and reviewed here. I first discovered her work when I was looking for books published by Shaun Tan (I had just experienced his graphic tale, The Arrival) and once I started reading, I couldn’t stop with just one story. I told everyone who would listen to me about the book, and was very excited to have the opportunity to interview her last summer when the paperback edition of Pretty Monsters came out.

Pretty Monsters was not her first book. Stranger Things Happen, her first full length collection, was published in the small press, by Small Beer Press, in 2001. This is the book Karen Russell described and read from on NPR recently (here’s a link to Karen Russell’s introduction. If you’d like to listen to her read from the book, you can do that from this page too). Karen claimed that Kelly’s work transcends a librarian’s ability to catalog it. Which is nonsense. To quote one of my favorite essays “Librarians can catalog anything… They can even catalog you.” Even though we can (and do) catalog Kelly’s work, though, she is an amazing, boundary-defying writer. In addition to writing, she also is a college professor, and runs both a zine (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet) and Small Beer Press, with her husband, Gavin J. Grant.

When I learned about the story on NPR, I was inspired to revisit Kelly’s website, where I learned that Kelly and Gavin had published an ebook called Sea, Ship, Mountain, Sky. A new book I could try… I had to find it. A link sent me to Weightless Books, which I had never heard of. But it’s a pretty neat place! It’s a small, independent online bookstore, and it provides an opportunity for writers to publish things that don’t fall into established categories, for small presses to make their works available, and for readers to acquire DRM-free ebooks that can be downloaded in a variety of formats to a variety of devices. Weightless Books does appear to be selective about the authors and publishers they will accept, but also appears to be slowly expanding its offerings, and many of their titles fall into genres such as science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction and, yes, horror. It’s an interesting place to explore, and I encourage you to check it out. I think Sea, Ship, Mountain, Sky is a fantastic story, and I like the philosophy behind the site. Amazon.com is well-known, and library wholesalers capture a significant chunk of the library market. Places like Weightless Books will make it possible to fill in gaps for audiences who want to read interesting authors and books from interesting presses, that aren’t available easily in any other way.

Once again, Kelly, and Gavin J. Grant (who runs the site) rock.