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Spring Cleaning Giveaway: Zombified!

It is that time of year again when the dust flies and the creatures emerge from the basement. At Monster Librarian headquarters we are in process of clearing out our basement. You want to live through horror, all you need to do is walk downstairs.

The basement is one of the places the books get stored, and this has necessitated a thorough winnowing of our collection (two trips to donate to the library bookstore already, another one today) and the Monster Librarian is letting go of some of his zombie books. Frankly, I’m impressed. He thought we ought to save a few for you guys, though.

For many of us it has been a long and trying winter, with our only solace is a good horror book or movie. So we are running a new giveaway to share what you have read. To enter just send an e-mail to monsterlibrarian@monsterlibrarian.com with the subject line winter giveaway with a horror book or horror movie that you experienced this winter, your name, and your mailing address. The prize is a zombie response unit bag filled with zombie books!

Now we would like you to spread the word on this contest. For every person you get to enter the contest you get another entry to win. Just have them add your name in their e-mail.

I would LOVE to have a successful giveaway here! In the past we’ve had a terrible time getting people to participate, and even when we do, winners haven’t responded with their mailing address when we announced them. So PLEASE let’s make this giveaway a success, and share the information with your friends!

Women in Horror Fiction: Michele Lee

Image of Michele Lee Michele Lee, one of our own book reviewers and the mind behind our teen-focused blog Reading Bites, is the author of such books as Wolf Heart (2012 Violet Ivy Press), the heartbreaking zombie novella Rot (2013 Skullvines Press), the self-published ebooks The List  (2013)  and On Halloween (a choose-your-own-path book co-written with Mini Lee). Her latest work, Last Brother, Last Sister (2014 Skullvines Press), was published earlier this month.  Michele’s short stories can be found in anthologies including Dark Futures: Tales of Dystopian SF (2011 Dark Quest) and Horror Library, Volume 4 (2012 Cutting Block Press). Michele also writes erotic fiction under the name M. Lush.

 

1. Can you give our readers a brief introduction?

My name is Michele Lee. I’m a multi-genre writer (Horror, SF/F and erotic romance), a reviewer and a vet tech by day.

 

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

Way back when I was a teenager, horror was the only place you could find stories of the paranormal. Now we have urban fantasy and paranormal romance, both of which I also like, but sometimes you just want that spooky story. Also, I think a lot of the setups in horror, especially the monsters, are a powerful thematic way to deal with the darker stuff in our real lives. Violence, rape, fear of the true nature of human evil; the nameless thing that might be waiting to devour us in the dark is a perfect allegory for facing cancer, abuse, fiscal devastation and more. We can, as either writers or readers, work through and face our feelings on some Really Big Issues ™ without freezing up when the boogie man has the face of our abuser or looks like that shadow on the radiogram. And maybe, for a little bit, we can fantasize that beating cancer or a recession is as easy as staking that vampire or stopping that serial killer.

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


The tone of my stories, I hope, is different because I really like to let characterization come through in how things are set up and described and how the characters react to things. I seem to be drawn to people working through things, maybe outside discoveries, but often things about themselves that are exposed because of things happening around them.

In my novella Rot, for example I wanted to take a typical rough/bad ass male character (stoic, former military man, zero illusions about life) and make him incredibly emotional without making him any less of a strong male lead. I also wanted to take on the “flamboyant gay” stereotype and the “damsel in distress” that you see in horror a lot and do something meaningful with them.

 

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


Anna Sewell, actually. My mom was really restrictive with me when it came to…everything, but she encouraged me to read Black Beauty. Maybe because it was about horses, or was a classic. But honestly it’s very brutal. You see horses die in war combat, serious cruelty to dogs, cats and horses and real world events like illnesses and alcoholism which leads to disaster for Beauty. It was the darkest book I had ever read.

An Anne Rice phase led me to the far more amazing authors Poppy Z. Brite and Nancy A. Collins, the latter of which not just writes fairly hardcore horror, but also wedged her way into comics. What geek girl doesn’t admire that?

On the male side of the spectrum, Roald Dahl, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman are all glorious masters among us plebs.

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


I read a lot, over many genres. If you’re comfortable being seen in the urban fantasy section, Ann Aguirre is doing great things with demons and zombies (her zombie books are YA). Stacia Kane is a favorite for sure. Ilona Andrews is an auto-buy.

As for Authors You’re Probably Missing; Sara M. Harvey and Jennifer Pelland write dark speculative fiction, K.H. Koehler, Lucy Snyder and Chesya Burke are all amazing horror authors.

 

6. Where can readers find your work?

I’m mostly in ebooks these days, so all the usually places, Amazon, B&N, Kobo, OmniLit and iBooks. I have a werewolf book out (Wolf Heart), two zombie novellas (Rot and The List) and a zombie novel that just came out (Last Brother, Last Sister). I have short stories here and there, and my erotic romance stuff is published under the pen name M. Lush.

Interested in learning more ? Check out Michele Lee’s Amazon page, this interview, her blog, or Reading Bites.

RA For All: Horror: 31 Days of Horror Project

MonsterLibrarian.com was pleased to be included in Becky Siegel Spratford’s project 31 Days of Horror over at her blog RA for All: Horror. Becky is the expert in reader’s advisory in the horror genre, so if you haven’t heard of her and are looking for a great resource go check her blog out!

The post went up a couple of days ago. Click here to go directly to our guest post there. I hope you’ll also take some time to see who else is featured over there this month– so far, it’s been interesting! Or, if you would rather just keep reading, I’ll include what I wrote below, although none of the links that I included there are active. But you really should go check RA for All: Horror out.

 

TRENDS IN THE HORROR GENRE
By Kirsten Kowalewski

Many of the trends in horror fiction right now reflect trends in publishing and reading in general. Anyone who follows books at all, or has been to the bookstore recently, will note an overwhelming number of YA titles devoted to the supernatural, as well as dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction. So results of a recent study by Bowker Market Research, that show that 55% of YA books (targeted at ages 12-17) are purchased by adults reflect a notable trend not just in general but for the horror genre. The trend towards adults reading YA books is now so strong that popular writers of adult horror, such as Jonathan Maberry are now writing YA titles, and publishers of adult horror are now starting YA imprints–ChiZine Publications recently announced that it will introduce a new imprint, ChiTeen, in 2014.

Something to remember as you consider these numbers is that teens also read a lot of adult fiction. In her book Shelf Discovery, Lizzie Skurnick touches on this, as she recalls reading adult books like Jaws and raiding her parents’ bookshelves , in addition to reading contemporary YA fiction (and as Becky noted in this blog post, as teens are new to the genre, introducing them to these more mature titles is a great way to circulate your backlist). Many, many people start reading Stephen King and other adult horror novels as teens. What young adults read isn’t necessarily fiction targeted at young adults, any more than what adults read is targeted to them.

At MonsterLibrarian.com, we’ve reviewed books with monsters in them that fall all along the spectrum, and the most popular searches for book lists are for YA vampire books and paranormal romances. These are so popular that we started a blog, Reading Bites, just for this audience. However, there seems to be agreement between horror readers and librarians that the vampire novel, for the most part, has lost its bite; as one middle school librarian noted to me recently, middle school girls aren’t scared by a vampire who will take them to the prom. As vampires bleed into the genres of romance and mystery, hardcore horror readers, who prefer their monsters to be monstrous, have started to turn away from this subgenre. Make sure you know what a reader wants when he or she asks for a vampire book.

The trend in YA fiction towards dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, influenced by The Hunger Games, also seems to frequently take on a romantic angle, and often portrays the main characters as catalysts for societal change. Post-apocalyptic fiction seems to be mainly reflected in adult horror in the subgenre of zombie fiction, where the focus is usually on the survivors of a post-apocalyptic event doing their best to survive a zombie invasion. Lovers of this subgenre are sometimes content to read the same kind of story over and over—they like the fast-paced action and gore and aren’t necessarily interested in character development—but in recent years there have been some fresh takes on a genre that, while popular, was starting to get a bit stale (you can see what I mean by checking out our list of zombie titles). Mad science is also taking off in interesting directions, with plague viruses, technology gone mad, genetic manipulation, and man-made monsters showing up with frequency in both YA and adult fiction. One of the scariest books I’ve read in the past twelve months was Kenneth Oppell’s This Dark Endeavor (reviewed here), a prequel to Mary Shelley’s classic horror story Frankenstein. Both Oppell’s short novel and Shelley’s original appeared together in the same ebook. Now that’s a hook! The Frankenstein story takes a totally different turn in Neal Shusterman’s UnWholly, due out later this month. And these days many zombie books start with some kind of virus or plague, with the search for a cure a significant storyline.

Another trend in publishing and reading that is affecting horror fiction is the popularity of ebooks and self-publishing. At the time that we started MonsterLibrarian.com, horror fiction had more or less lost its home in mainstream publishing and migrated to small presses that often specialized in printing collector’s editions—beautiful, but expensive, and not easily available to the average consumer. Some of them, like Cemetery Dance and Bad Moon Books have done very well, but many times books from small presses are only available by direct order, which makes them hard to find.

As ebooks and self-publishing have exploded, horror fiction of all kinds has become much more readily available. Short pieces that weren’t exactly what a publisher was looking for, or were by unknown authors, could be (and are) presented in ebook format, and find an audience. This is great for horror readers who are loyal to a subgenre that isn’t being promoted in mainstream publishing , like werewolf fiction. There is a strong minority of readers who love werewolf horror (enough that we hosted a Werewolf Month for several years), but there are few current werewolf horror books (here’s our list of werewolf titles). A search for “werewolf horror” on Amazon.com brings up over 1,000 titles, mostly self-published ebooks. It’s hard to know what the quality of a self-published book will be before you read it, but many ebooks are very low-priced. Some authors are now publishing serials, with an attempt to hook an audience with episodes of a continuing story. Authors whose rights have reverted to them can introduce their books to a new audience. Small presses sell books in ebook format as well as collector’s editions, making those available to a wider audience. And current mainstream authors (like Stephen King) are finding a demand for shorter pieces . The ways that ebooks are changing publishing in general and horror in particular are many, and it’s very exciting. Unfortunately for libraries and their readers, most of these won’t be easily available through a service like Overdrive. The conundrum of how libraries can help horror readers connect more easily with ebooks doesn’t seem like one that can be solved easily.

A final trend that I see affecting the way people experience horror fiction is the way it is sweeping the media. Television shows like The Walking Dead (originally based on a series of graphic novels) have made zombies more mainstream. Movies such as Joss Whedon’s Cabin in the Woods draw in reluctant viewers (see what blogger Barbara Vey wrote here). Apps allow you to take the experience along with you. The brand-new book Horrible Hauntings by Shirin Yim Bridges uses augmented reality technology to extend the reading experience; ghosts leap out at the reader when you point your cell phone camera at the pictures! Horror is such a visual genre that the way other media are giving readers to experience it is nothing short of amazing.

Getting the horror reader in the door can be a challenge. But the real challenge is this: with so much horror outside mainstream publishing, once you get the reader in the door, how are you going to manage to give them what they’re looking for?