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Women in Horror Month: Mary Shelley’s”Hideous Progeny”

And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart. - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley  When writing about women in horror, it’s almost impossible not to mention Mary Shelley.

Who was Mary Shelley? She was the daughter of two brilliant and unconventional thinkers, whose mother died in childbirth. A gifted and unconventional thinker herself, she read and wrote in five languages, and set herself an ambitious reading program. She was a pregnant teenager– just sixteen– who, accompanied by her half-sister, ran away from home with Percy Shelley, an older, married man. Disowned by her father, looked down on because she was an unmarried mother for most of that time, she saw three of her children die at a young age, the first just a few weeks after she was born.

Pregnancy must have been often on her mind often, and the consequences were often unpleasant: Shelley’s wife was pregnant when he ran away with Mary (she eventually committed suicide); and Mary’s half-sister was abandoned by Lord Byron when she announced she was carrying his child. It was in the midst of these events that Mary Shelley birthed her novel, Frankenstein.  Yet, Mary loved being a mother and loved her children. People familiar with the genesis of Frankenstein know the story of the wager made one dark and stormy night at the Villa Diodiati, between Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, John Polidori, and Mary Shelley; but Mary Shelley’s creation did not emerge from a vacuum. Her birth, which caused her mother’s death; her witness to the abandonment of other pregnant women (Shelley’s wife and her own half-sister); and the early death of her first child, all combined in the emotions and mind of an intellectually advanced teenage girl with intense emotions who was fascinated by the world around her.

In Literary Women, Ellen Moers relates that shortly after the death of Mary’s first child, she wrote “Dream that my little baby came to life again, that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived”. It’s no surprise, then, that the nightmare she wrote is a vision of the terrible power and consequences that accompany the creation,  the possibility of reanimation, and the death of a living creature. In Frankenstein is a synthesis of all the guilt, fear of abandonment, joy, and pain that Mary felt– a story narrated by men and monsters that illuminates a woman’s complex feelings about birth, parenthood, and death.

 

Posted on February 4, 2015 by , Reply

Book Review: Huntress Moon by Alexandra Sokoloff

Huntress Moon by Alexandra Sokoloff

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013

ISBN-13: 978-1491046883

Available: Paperback, Kindle, Audible Book, Digital Lending

 

For those fans of Alexandra Sokoloff’s supernatural gems, such as The Harrowing, The Price, or The Unseen, this thriller (book 1 of The Huntress/FBI Thrillers) will illuminate another facet of this talented author’s skills. For those who are tired of the serial killer novel,  give this one a shot and be prepared to shed preconceptions of the subgenre.  The concept of a female serial killer is relatively untouched territory, with only a couple of other quality entries in modern literature. Sokoloff creates a killer who is complex enough to be real, rising above any tropes, but is stone cold in her methods. Peeling away the layers of this character is worth the price of the book itself, but like any of her novels, Sokoloff presents quite an enjoyable story, as well.

With her background in screenwriting, one might be quick to worry that her books might be static, or lack the three-dimensional quality necessary for a knockout novel. Sokoloff, however, also has a background in theater, and her ability to emote from the point of view of  any of her characters is uncanny. She truly is ‘inside their heads’. To live within the killer’s head is chilling, yet, at times, touching and thought provoking.

The story itself? FBI Agent Matthew Roarke watches a fellow agent become a hood ornament for a passing bus– just a moment after he appears to hear a woman say something to him. The woman disappears into the crowd, leaving readers with the feeling she is somehow familiar. The hunt is on, and it’s far from cliché.

We find the “Huntress” wandering on a beach, where she meets a recently divorced man and his young child. What ensues is unexpected, and ratchets up the suspense to that intense level readers expect of Sokoloff’s horror. While Huntress Moon is not, strictly speaking, a horror novel, terror like this should be found in any psychological thriller worth its salt. The cat and mouse game is nothing new, but Sokoloff’s lean writing mesmerizes the reader; her style quickly captivates and intrigues. Her settings are vividly painted in a manner usually reserved for books that spend many more pages on scenery development. If  a reader’s tastes run towards dark thrillers with fully fleshed-out characters, and stories that keep the neurons firing long after the covers have shut, then this series is for you.

Highly recommended for high school to adults

Reviewed by David Simms

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on July 3, 2014 by , Reply

Women in Horror Fiction: Yvonne Navarro

While we’ve moved on from February and Women in Horror Month, there is absolutely no reason to limit our celebration of women writers of horror to any particular time of year– so even though we interviewed Yvonne Navarro months ago, May is a perfect time to draw attention to an excellent writer of horror who also happens to be a woman.

Yvonne Navarro is a prolific horror author, having written such books as Afterage (2002 Overlook Connection Press), Final Impact (1997 Bantam), and Dead Times (2000 DarkTales Publications).  Her short stories have appeared in anthologies such as Deep Cuts: Mayhem, Menace, and Misery (2013 Evil Jester Press), Skull Full of Spurs (2000 Dark Highway Press), V-Wars (2013 IDW Publishing), and The Haunted Mansion Project: Year One (2012 Damnation Books).

 

1. Can you give our readers a brief introduction?

Hi, everyone.  I’m Yvonne Navarro, and I’ve been writing since way longer than I care to admit.  As of right now, I’ve gotten twenty-two novels published.  Seven were solo novels, and the rest were media-related.  I did seven novels in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Universe, five of which were originals, and won the Bram Stoker Award for YA writing for one of the Buffy tie-ins.  Some other awards and such—it’s always fun to have people appreciate your work.  I’ve also written a big bunch of short stories, somewhere over 100, but I have no idea of the final count because, well, I’m always going to get around to updating that bibliography document “later.”

 

2. Why do you write horror?  What draws you to the genre?

The first movie I remember watching was Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963).  I guess I’ve always thought there’s nothing better than a great, pulse-pounding, scary story.  Nowadays it’s a little harder to entertain me in that area, but when I was a kid Creature Features was a staple in our house every Friday night, and I hit the matinee at the local movie house every Saturday without fail.  My mom liked scary movies, so maybe she’s where I got it from, along with the desire to draw and write.  The first adult horror book I read was Scream and Scream Again by Peter Saxon (originally titled The Disoriented Man, 1968).  I saw the edge of it on top of the fridge where my Mom had hidden it.  I was hooked.

 

3. Can you describe your writing style or the tone you prefer to set for your stories?

That’s a hard question because normally I don’t think I have a specific style.  I write the way I like to read—total involvement in the characters and stories, so much so that I forget I actually am reading.  When I write I don’t think about writing.  I “see” the characters in their environment and it’s like I’m just putting down what they see and do in their own element.  I always have a little romance in a story because if a character can’t care about someone else, he or she probably isn’t memorable enough for the reader to care either.

 

4. Who are some of your influences?  Are there any women authors who have particularly inspired you to write?

My biggest influence was without a doubt Robert R. McCammon.  It was his book, They Thirst (1981 Avon Books), that made me want to try my hand at writing to begin with.  When I wrote and asked him questions, he responded positively even though I was an absolute green-behind-the-ears person who was about as much of a non-writer as I could be.  There are lots of good women writers out there.  I “grew up” with Elizabeth Massie, in particular; we met at the first World Horror Convention I attended and have been friends ever since.

 

5. What authors do you like to read?  Any Recommendations?

I still adore the work of Robert R. McCammon (who recently started writing again after taking quite awhile off), and I have an entire collection of Stephen King.  Right now I seem to be on a YA fantasy craze.  I’m reading Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments Series (Margaret K. McElderry Books) and Veronica Roth’s Divergent Series (Katherine Tegen Books).  I’m always looking for the next Barbara O’Neal novel, which isn’t horror but consistently has some small supernatural thing going on.  And I can’t wait for the final Laini Taylor novel in her Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers).
6. Where can readers find your work?

Most of my solo novels are out of print but I still have copies of lots of stuff (signed, too) available off my website at http://www.yvonnenavarro.com/offerings.htm.  I’m notoriously bad about updating the blog on my main website page (just like my bibliography), but I do keep up with Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/yvonne.navarro.001.  And I’m always trying to cook up something new.  I have big plans for this July, when I’ll be a Writer In Residence for two weeks at the Golden Apple Studio in Bangor, Maine.  I plan on world-building and cooking up a brand new series while I’m there.  I also write the Double X Chromosome column for Dark Discoveries magazine (http://www.darkdiscoveries.com).

 

Thanks, Yvonne, for your patience, and for participating in our Women in Horror project, even though it’s already May!

 

Posted on May 18, 2014 by , Reply
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