In a lot of ways today is a very sad day for me. My husband, Dylan, who some of you may have known, died on April 17, 2014. Today is our wedding anniversary, a day for looking back and remembering.

As a children’s librarian and school media specialist I always was passionate about reading engagement, and frustrated by the librarians around me who put it down (and I was on an awards committee, believe me, I have experienced that disdain) but it was Dylan, always a horror fanatic, who was most dismayed when he discovered during the internship for his MLS that the only horror writers most public librarians knew were Stephen King, Anne Rice, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Dean Koontz, and that’s all they cared to know. There was almost no reader’s advisory or collection development material out there (with a very few exceptions, notably Becky Siegel Spratford’s reader’s advisory guide) and the lack of librarians’ interest in horror fiction was, he felt, going to lead to a lost generation of readers who could have been engaged through exposure to horror fiction. Anecdotally, I knew a guy in college who read nothing and had no interest in it until he was exposed to Stephen King. But there is so much more to the horror genre than Stephen King.

Dylan founded Monster Librarian, a review site he created to help ameliorate this problem before blogs were a thing and when frames on websites were part of a solid design strategy in building a website. It is a project that has grown up with our first child, who was three months old when the first review went up and is now a freshman in high school.

Horror’s reputation has changed over time as millenials, who grew up reading Goosebumps and similar series,  watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and appreciating the darkness and supernatural aspects in Harry Potter, grew up loving this stuff. 20 years after Goosebumps, they were introducing these books to their kids. And after massive debates over technology in publishing, it is a lot easier and less expensive (kinda, publishers suck when it comes to libraries and ebooks) to potentially expose horror to a larger market, especially with transmedia platforms for popular properties (such as The Walking Dead). I wish Dylan could have seen this explosion, but he’s not here, and there are a lot of other amazing blogs and review sites that have flourished. He would have loved to see this, that we aren’t the only ones out there now, that libraries and librarians are taking the genre seriously, and that readers have so many choices available.

I have said it before but the site makes almost no money– not enough to have paid anything out in years. We are an all-volunteer site and it’s really necessary that we be able to cover hosting fees and postage. Together, that adds up to about $200 a year. Right now we are still looking at having to raise $195. We are an affiliate of Bookshop.com as well as Amazon, and can also take contributions through Paypal from that red “Contribute” button. I hope you will be willing to help us keep going with what is truly, especially for me, a labor of love.