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Book Review: More Deadly Than the Male: Masterpieces from the Queens of Horror edited by Graeme Davis

More Deadly Than the Male: Masterpieces from the Queens of Horror edited by Graeme Davis

Pegasus Books Ltd., 2019

ISBN-13: 9781643130118

Available: Hardcover, Kindle, audiobook, audio CD

Buy: Amazon.com

 

More Deadly Than the Male gives us 26 tales of terror written by women between 1830-1908. Some of my favorite Gothic and horror tales were written around this time period. Davis has selected some great stories in this anthology by well-known, and some not as well-known, women authors. In addition to select stories, Davis includes brief biographies with information about the authors’ lives and challenges they faced as women writers, and about the stories themselves. While I enjoyed all of the stories in More Deadly Than the Male, there are several that stand out. Some of my favorite tales include the following.

 

The volume opens with Mary Shelley’s “The Transformation,” in which Guido, seeking revenge, makes a deal with a monstrous being to trade bodies. What will become of the man trapped in a monster’s body?

 

In “Lost in a Pyramid, or the Mummy’s Curse” by Louisa May Alcott, Evelyn begs Forsyth to tell her how he came to be in possession of an ancient and strange gold box. He tells a tale of exploration, colonization, greed, hubris, and the mummy of an ancient sorceress and mysterious seeds found in the box.

 

Edith Nesbit’s “The Mass for the Dead” is a haunting story about a couple who change their history because of a vision. Jasper mourns that the woman he loves, Kate, is to marry someone else. When she reveals she is not marrying for love, but for wealth, he still insists that she should break her engagement. Out of familial obligation, she refuses to end the engagement in order to help her father with his finances. When she shares her vision of a mass for the dead with Jasper, they believe it to be a sign of her impending marriage. Later, when he reveals his own vision to Kate, they find they may have misinterpreted the vision entirely.

 

“The Vacant Lot” by Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman is a lovely ghost story. The Townsend family has decided to move to Boston, and the man of the house has purchased a home for a more than reasonable cost, originally $25,000 for a mere $5,000. The family wonders what the catch is with such a low dollar amount. After a month goes by, they find out. There are strange happenings in the vacant lot next door, and shadows moving about with nobody to cast them.

 

Other authors include Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Edith Wharton, Eliza Lynn Linton, Margaret Oliphant, Vernon Lee, Mary Louisa Molesworth, Ada Travenion, Edith Wharton, and more.

 

It’s not new or controversial to say that horror is subjective. When we read the Gothic or older horror tales of the past, we may not be frightened, we may not get the spine tingles we are looking for or may scoff at the fainting or other what we would deem as “quaint behaviors” of the heroines. Descriptions tend to be much longer and go too far for modern audiences. I, for one, love Gothic and older horror stories, thanks to my late grandmother Phyllis, so these early stories were great to read. I just recently heard about a subgenre called “cozy horror,” and I believe these would qualify. Also, not only would this be a good addition to a Gothic fiction collection, but it would also be an interesting addition to a Gothic novels course.

 

Highly recommended

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker

 

Posted on December 24, 2023 by , Reply

Women in Horror Month: In Praise of Scribbling Women (and Louisa May Alcott)!

It’s Women in Horror Month, that time of year when we recognize the amazing women who celebrate and create the horror genre. When it comes to horror fiction, there don’t seem to be very many names that appear in the past. Of course, there’s always Mary Shelley, but, while she was exceptional in many ways, she certainly wasn’t the only woman of her time writing gothic and horror stories .

Anyone who is surprised by this hasn’t read Little Women. Here’s Jo March, the most unconventional of the four March sisters, burning up with her desire to write:

Every few weeks she would shut herself up into her room, put on her scribbling suit, and “fall into a vortex,” as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace.

Jo’s family is much more supportive of her than most families were: writing was not only considered unsuitable for women, but unhealthy (and that’s literal– if you want to read a seriously twisted horror story, try Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s semi-autobiographical story “The Yellow Wallpaper”). But at the same time, the reality of daily life meant that women somehow had to support their families, and many of them did it by writing (KC Redding-Gonzales has written about it here).  The writing that earned a steady paycheck, though, was pulp fiction for magazines and newspapers– “sensational stories” that gave their readers thrills, chills, romance, and murder. So that’s what Jo does. Her publisher “rejected any but thrilling tales” so that’s what she wrote, but with no name attached. Little Women‘s author, Louisa May Alcott, supported her family by writing sensational stories for ten years under a pen name, including a novel, A Long and Fatal Love Chase. But in the end, conventional Louisa won out, and, as in Little Women, where Jo finally gives up her writing, she stopped (this review from Stephen King has more on Louisa).

Alcott, Gilman, and the fictional Jo are just three examples from that time, though (even Frankenstein was first published under a pseudonym)– and we can’t know, really, how many women supplied horror, romance, suspense, ghost stories, and gothic fiction for pulp magazines, newspapers, and even three volume novels, since so many of them, like Jo, left their work unsigned, or like Alcott, wrote under a pen name. They did it because they loved writing, or needed money, or both, and whether they were proud of their work or ashamed of it, these scribbling women shaped popular culture. Many of them may be nameless, but they shouldn’t be forgotten.

Posted on February 7, 2013 by , Reply

Written In Blood

I loved The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian so much that I gave it away to someone I thought would love it just as much. I guess she did, because she never returned it. Sherman Alexie is just that good. Honestly, I couldn’t believe Meghan Cox Gurdon could possibly be calling his work depraved. It’s a book that opens eyes- not one that turns out the light.

I am thrilled that he wrote a response to the Wall Street Journal, in their Speakeasy blog, titled “Why The Best Kids’ Books Are Written In Blood”. And I think what he said about his personal experience with books is so important to the way adults think about teens’ reading. Their experiences, and their reading, are often multidimensional. No one made me follow up Inherit the Wind with Ira Stone’s thick biography Clarence Darrow for the Defense. Reading Carrie didn’t stop me from reading Little Women. It doesn’t have to be an either/or kind of situation. And this is what Alexie expresses in a very personal way. He writes,

“As a child, I read because books–violent and not, blasphemous and not, terrifying and not–were the most loving and trustworthy things in my life. I read widely, and loved plenty of the classics so, yes, I recognized the domestic terrors faced by Louisa May Alcott’s March sisters. But I became the kid chased by werewolves, vampires, and evil clowns in Stephen King’s books. I read books about monsters and monstrous things, often written with monstrous language, because they taught me how to battle the real monsters in my life”.

I know that’s an awfully long quote, but I think his words here are so important. In her book Don’t Tell The Grownups, Alison Lurie writes about how the very nature of important children’s books is subversive. Those books aren’t written to make grownups feel comfortable. They continue to be important because children need to find within themselves what makes grownups uncomfortable, and those books are where they discover how to live in a world in which they have very little control.

Thank you, Mr. Alexie, for speaking up.

Posted on June 11, 2011 by , Reply