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It’s Women in Horror Month!

Yes, it’s that time of year again– Women in Horror Month is here! It’s too bad that it takes a special month for horror lovers and makers who are women to be brought up into the light, but that really does seem to be what it takes. While there are a lot of great women writers of horror, very few of them are well known, so this month we’re going to spotlight some of them. I’ll be bringing up some of the older posts we’ve done on some of the great women we have interviewed or had as guest bloggers previously,  sharing some information about writers of the past, suggesting links on women writers that might be of interest, and publishing interviews with some of the wonderful women writers of horror out there who mainstream readers and librarians may not be familiar with. We are working on putting together an index of women horror writers, but that is a BIG project, so whether that will be done by the end of the month I don’t know.

So here’s the thing. Spotlighting women writers in horror doesn’t mean I think you should read or recommend a book JUST because it’s by a woman. But by not knowing about the work of these women writers, you miss out on some really, really good storytelling. The immediate name that comes up when someone says “women writers of horror” is almost always Mary Shelley, followed by Anne Rice and maybe Shirley Jackson. Even in the Reader’s Advisory Guide to Horror Fiction, Becky Spratford mentions very few women authors outside a short section identifiying five excellent contemporary women writers.(Lisa Morton, Alexandra Sokoloff, Sarah Langan, Sarah Pinborough, and Caitlin Kiernan, as I recall) But there are so many more great books out there that are just MISSED, and I hope that this month we’ll be able to bring some of those to your attention!

Here’s a link to the WiHM Facebook page, which is collecting together posts from a variety of participating sites. And here’s a link to their tumblr– they are collecting donations right now as well. Also check out Becky’s blog, RA for Horror, this month. I know she’s got some great things coming up!

 

Enjoy!

Posted on February 1, 2014 by , 2 comments

Guest Post by Paula Cappa: The Literary Ladies of Horror’s Haunted Mountain

It may not be February, but October is just as good a time (if not a better one) to recognize women in horror, especially women writers. Paula Cappa, author of the supernatural novels The Dazzling Darkness and Night Sea Journey (both reviewed here), gives us her take on women writers in the genre from the beginnings of their journey until the present day. Love quiet horror? Visit her blog to discover what classic story she’s presenting as her Tuesday Tale of Terror. Really. It’s awesome.

Want another take on women writers in the horror genre? Check out this post by Colleen Wanglund, which includes a fantastic list of contemporary women writers and recommended titles.

The Literary Ladies of Horror’s Haunted Mountain

By Paula Cappa

If there is ever a time to hear a night-shriek, it is October, a month that welcomes readers to the dark mountain of the horror genre. Listen to the hallowed voices, their devouring muscular growls and hot stinging hisses. Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, author of MaddAddam, says “Some may look skeptically at ‘horror’ as a subliterary genre, but in fact, horror is one of the most literary of all forms.”

The literary ladies at the summit are as ghoul-haunted as the gentlemen claiming Haunted Mountain as their territory with their persistent footprints and pulsing voices. Their names are familiar: Poe, Hoffman, James, Blackwood, LeFanu, Lovecraft, Stoker, King, Koontz, Herbert, Straub, Saul, Strieber, Bradbury, Barker, Campbell– the list goes on.

With women so under-represented, one would think the only woman writing horror in the early years was Mary Shelley, setting up ropes and spikes, blazing a wide path up horror’s haunted mountain with Frankenstein in 1818. But look closely at the mountain, and you’ll find the distinctive footprints of Ann Radcliffe, who tore open supernatural paths with The Mysteries of Udolpho as early as 1794. Radcliffe’s writing of suspense about castles and dark villains influenced Dumas, Scott, and Hugo. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, author of Eveline’s Visitant, wrote eighty novels and volumes of short stories during the 1800s, and was known as the Queen of Sensation. The little-known and much-overlooked Margaret Oliphant scaled the rocky mountainside with a heady ghost story, “The Secret Chamber.

By 1865, Amelia Edwards’  The Phantom Coach cut popular tracks across the haunted mountain. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky cleared the way for future women writers with her collection of nightmare tales, The Ensouled Violin, as did Elizabeth Gaskell with The Poor Clare, which deals with a family evil curse, complete with witches and ghosts. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, written at the turn of the century, became the earliest feminist literature to expose 19th century attitudes against women’s mental health, in less than 6000 words. I like to think of Charlotte as the Wallerina, dancing up the haunted mountain.

Gothic writers like Edith Wharton (Afterward) and Mary Wilkins (Collected Ghost Stories) remain treasures.  V.C. Andrews, Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier, Mary Sinclair, Rosemary Timperley, Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart, Joan Aiken, Phyllis Whitney, and Barbara Michaels, all were prolific writers on horror’s haunted mountain during the 20th century, and some are still writing today. Then, of course, there’s Anne Rice, with her newest release The Wolves of MidWinter. This queen of the damned has practically established a private driveway up the haunted mountain, with more than thirty enormously successful novels of vampires, angels, demons, spirits, wolves, and witches.

Horror’s haunted mountain, traveled by women writers from Ann Radcliffe to Anne Rice, is still being trailblazed by fresh talents, writers of gothic, ghost, supernatural, traditional, and dark horror: Alexandra Sokoloff, The Unseen; Barbara Erskine, House of Echoes; Caitlin R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl; Chesya Burke, Dark Faith; Elizabeth Massie, Hell Gate; Gemma Files, The Worm in Every Heart; Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed; Kelley Armstrong, Bitten; Linda D. Addison, How to Recognize a Demon Has Become Your Friend; M.J. Rose, Seduction; Melanie Tem, Slain in the Spirit; Nancy Baker, Kiss of the Vampire; Nancy Holder, Dead in Winter; Poppy Z. Brite, Drawing Blood; Rose Earhart, Salem’s Ghost; Susan Hill, The Woman in Black; too many more to list.

What about the short story? Look to Billie Sue Mosiman, with 150 short stories to her credit. Her “Quiet Room” is about a ruthless evil killer, written in “quiet horror” fashion. For collections, try authors Kaaron Warren’s Dead Sea Fruit, Carole Lanham’s The Whisper Jar, and Fran Friel’s Mama’s Boy and Other Dark Tales.

Men may continue to dominate horror’s haunted mountain, just as women continue to be fierce climbers with hawkish voices. But story is story; writers are writers. What does gender matter in art? In the words of Virginia Woolf: “It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.” Oh wait, I forgot one more ghostly title for you: Virginia Woolf’s A Haunted House.

Bio:

Paula Cappa is a published short story author, novelist, and freelance copy editor. Her short fiction has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Every Day Fiction, Fiction365, Twilight Times Ezine, and in anthologies Human Writes Literary Journal, and Mystery Time. Cappa’s writing career began as a freelance journalist for newspapers in New York and Connecticut. Her debut novel Night Sea Journey, A Tale of the Supernatural launched in 2012. The Dazzling Darkness, her second novel, won the Gothic Readers Book Club Choice Award for outstanding fiction. She writes a weekly fiction blog about classic short stories, Reading Fiction,Tales of Terror, on her Web site http://paulacappa.wordpress.com/

 

Posted on October 3, 2013 by , 1 comment

Horror @ Your Library

The American Library Association has a marketing initiative called “@ your library”. Their conference is rolling around (it’s in New Orleans this year) and ALTAFF (Association of Library Trustees, Advocates, Friends and Foundations) is holding a session called “Mystery and Horror @ Your Library”. When I saw that I thought “How cool! My professional association is actually shining a light on horror fiction and highlighting horror authors”!

Library Journal’s description of the event gives you an idea of how a lot of the profession thinks of the genre.

Mystery and Horror @ Your Library. Mystery, of course. But horror? Horrors! Best-selling authors in both genres will make your spines tingle.

So, very cool of ALTAFF to buck the trend, right? Except that not a single one of the authors writes horror. Cammie McGovern is on the panel. She’s written a fantastic literary mystery called Eye Contact. Erica Spindler writes romantic suspense. C.S. Harris writes the Sebastian St. Cyr books- historical mysteries. Bill Loehfelm is a crime novelist. S.J. Watson is the only one who might qualify, as a writer of psychological thrillers, but he appears to be a first time author whose first book, Before I Go To Sleep, came out on June 14 of this year.

It sounds like a great book, and I am sure someone on our staff would love to review it (hint, hint), but I don’t think he’s necessarily the best candidate to represent an entire genre. There are so many horror writers out there who would be articulate and passionate, and happy to promote the genre and talk about their books and their “writing life”. How about Brian Keene, Scott Nicholson, Alexandra Sokoloff, Lisa Morton, or, for a librarian’s perspective, Becky Siegel Spratford?

I think this is why we have such a problem with recognition of the genre. Librarians can’t even identify what belongs in it, or who writes it (except for Stephen King). This week I sent out a list of potential review titles- probably 20 books were on the list, at least. One reviewer wrote me back to tell me that she had searched her library system to find if there were any copies of the books available there. Her library system has 58 libraries. Yep, that’s right. How many of the books was she able to find? One. One horror novel off a list of 20, in a library system with 58 libraries.

I appreciate that ALTAFF is trying to promote the genre, even if they can’t exactly identify what it is or who writes it. But what’s the reality? For all the librarians out there, let me ask… where’s the horror @ your library?

Posted on June 21, 2011 by , 2 comments
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