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The Witching Hour @ Your Library

What with vampires, monsters, and ghosts taking center stage, it’s really kind of amazing how much there is out there on witches! For those of a witchy bent, here’s a brew of fictional witches of all kinds. Some of them are good witches, some are bad and even evil, and some fall somewhere in-between. Got someone looking for a spellbinding reading or movie-watching experience? Here are some suggestions. Note, these are all over the map, so take care before making your recommendation.

    The Witching Hour is the first book in the Mayfair Witches series. Sure, it’s long, and it has a gigantic, annoying expository chunk in the middle, but I still find the story addictive and, well, bewitching. Par for the course with Anne Rice, in the next books (Lasher and Taltos) the story gets pretty twisted. But for gothic and erotic supernatural horror, it’s a slam-dunk.

 

 It’s impossible to write about witches without at least a mention of  Shakespeare’s literary creations, as they toil and trouble, making predictions that can lead only to disaster. Just as with The Crucible, the play-that-shall-not-be-named has been made into a movie– actually, more than once. The most recent production stars Patrick Stewart (formerly known as Captain Picard of the Starship Enterprise) who is a brilliant Shakespearean actor and only gets better as time passes. If you really want to make required reading of this play a killer experience, there’s no better way than with a live (or filmed, anyway) performance, right at Halloween.

 

        The ultimate American fairytale is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and from the book, and especially the movie, come some of our most memorable depictions of witches. Who can forget the evil, green skinned, hook-nosed Wicked Witch of the West, in her black dress and pointy hat? When most of us picture witches today, or go shopping for that evil witch costume (as opposed to the sexy witch costume) her face is the one that comes to mind. The recent but mostly forgettable Oz movie spectacular did kick that look up a notch, giving the wicked witch green claws and a truly hideous expression, and was probably the most memorable part of the entire film. Taking a different perspective, Gregory Maguire penned Wicked, a novel sympathetic to the Wicked Witch’s point of view and life. Wicked has a sequel, Son of a Witch, and also spun off a Broadway musical, complete with soundtrack. Seek them out and put them togethe with some of the gorgeous new editions of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and you’ve got a great-looking display that will attract library users of all ages. 

 

 I’ve just discovered Kim Harrison’s Rachel Morgan books and am really enjoying them. It’s not so much that I like Rachel, but she really shows ingenuity in getting out of some crazy scrapes, and she makes friends and allies in the oddest places. Rachel, a witch, lives in Cincinnati in an alternate world where paranormal creatures have “outed” themselves and live in a separate area of the city called The Hollows, with a legal structure parallel to the human legal system. Naturally this leaves a lot of room for chaos, much of which centers on Rachel and her supernatural business partners, who are a hoot, when they’re not being dangerously lethal. Readers who are looking for a fix after finishing the Southern Vampire Mysteries might very well enjoy Kim Harrison. 

 

      Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed are both great television series that had witches as either main or important secondary characters. One character arc follows Willow (one of Buffy’s two closest friends, for the uninitiated) as she grows as a witch, becomes addicted to magic, and overcomes her addiction. Season Six is the season that, while she grieves over her great love’s senseless death, she dives deeply into the black arts to seek vengeance. While not all fans of the show appreciate this season, it’s a very powerful and heart-wrenching television watching experience. Charmed follows the lives and decisions of three adult sisters who discover that they are witches and must work together to defeat evil wizards and demons. There’s no debate over whether these are good witches or bad witches, but their choices aren’t always so black and white. It’s a fun little show, but not one where you can expect chills and thrills. 

 

     The Witches of Eastwick and Practical Magic are both adaptations of literary works. The Witches of Eastwick is based on a novel of the same name by John Updike, and Practical Magic is based on a novel of the same name by Alice Hoffman.The movie of The Witches of Eastwick has a fantastic cast, with Jack Nicholson playing the devil and Susan Sarandon, Cher, and Michelle Pfeiffer playing three very bored women stuck in a small New England town, who are ready to rock and roll. Dramatic, sexy, and funny, it’s a wild ride. Completely opposite in nature,  Practical Magic is the story of two sisters who are also witches, with an unfortunate family curse that leads any man they fall in love with to an untimely death. This is a gentle, magical, and well-acted movie that definitely does not fall into the category of horror, and could be watched not only during the Halloween season but at any time of year.  Those who like Practical Magic might also like the novel The Weird Sisters. 

 

    There’s just something claustrophobic about small towns, whether they’re isolated in the mountains or gated communities.  Once you’re in, it’s hard to escape the supernatural… or the neighbors. That’s what happens in both Chris Bohjalian’s The Night Strangers and Susie Moloney’s Thirteen. In Bohjalian’s novel, a guilt-ridden pilot moves his family into a mountain village only to find that the unfinished basement is haunted by the deceased passengers of the plane he crashed. In addition to his personal ghosts, though, there are hidden dangers to his family from members of the local community as well. In Moloney’s book, the adult daughter of a woman who has recently died returns to settle the estate, only to find herself entangled in the lives of the people living in the suburb in which she grew up– a place where there seem to have been an unusual number of “accidental” deaths, and finds her beliefs tested by the people around her. Where are the witches in an isolated area, when a stranger moves in? Why, they’re all around you.

 

       So now let’s talk movies. The Craft is a mildly scary movie targeted at teens, with four misfit girls discovering they have supernatural powers and one of them deciding to use them for evil purposes. It has Neve Campbell and Fairuza Balk, and probably would appeal to fans of Charmed.  Hocus Pocus is about three witches resurrected by a teenager who spend most of their current Halloween also trying to capture children’s souls. While that sounds positively horrific, the child-chasing witches are played by Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy, and Sarah Jessica Parker, so it’s entertaining as well. This might be a little much for younger children, but the comedy and horror balance out nicely to make this one work as a good Halloween movie for families with older children.

 

               On to scarier stuff. These you won’t want to watch with the faint of heart or queasy of stomach. The Blair Witch Project, is, well, the Blair Witch Project, a movie that’s well-known by now. Supposedly an actual film taken by college students on a trip through the woods as they explore the legend of the Blair Witch, it’s shaky looking and the camera is unreliable as a storyteller, making it incredibly creepy. I don’t know how scary people find it today, but it had me shaking in my seat when I first saw it in the theater. The last movie, Suspiria, is about an American dancer who arrives at her new ballet school to find that it houses a coven. Suspiria is an Italian horror film by filmmaker Dario Argento, who is not well-known here but is considered a master in horror filmmaking. It is extremely vicious, violent, and gory, with a creepy soundtrack, unsettling atmosphere, bizarre colors influencing the set, and disturbing camerawork. In other words, if you have someone looking for an average, mainstream movie, this is not the ticket. But if you have a hardcore horror fan walk in looking for something different, this is it. 

Really, there’s a witch for everyone, be it from fantasy, paranormal fiction, comedy, children’s books, non-fiction, or horror in its various permutations (and you can see from this list that there are a lot of those). Have a great time connecting readers and viewers with the right witchy title for the Halloween season, or, really, at any time of year!

              

 

 


 


 

Posted on October 11, 2013 by , Reply

Monster Movie Month: Guest Post by Becky Siegel Spratford- Marketing Horror All The Year Through

Well, we’ve reached the end of Monster Movie Month. If you’ve been following along, you have a lot of background information, resources, and recommendations for both movies and books at your fingertips, on topics from Asian ghosts to killer rats. So how do you use all this to get horror movies and fiction into the hands of likely readers? We asked Becky Spratford, author of The Reader’s Advisory Guide to Horror, Second Edition (reviewed here), which includes an entire chapter on marketing horror, to share her expertise, and she wrote us this guest post.

 

 

Marketing Horror All the Year Through

By Becky Spratford

 

One of the biggest questions I get from my fellow librarians is how they can best market their horror offerings throughout the year.  Of course it is easy to get patrons to notice horror in October.  Every other marketer in the world is priming the public for all things scary, so when people walk in the library, they are horror hungry zombies, looking for their next meal.  We have to do little more than place the horror books within their line of sight, and patrons snatch up the books by the handful.

 

Ah, but the rest of the year we do not have the entirety of mass media working for us; we have to try just a little bit harder. But as daunting a task as it may seem, marketing horror to your patrons during the other 11 months of the year, is not as difficult as you might think. I have 2 easy ways you can seamlessly incorporate horror into your general work marketing books at your library.

 

First, let’s talk about traditional library displays.  Most of you out there probably put up a big horror display in October.  But why aren’t you doing it other times of the year?  The most common answer is that you think your patrons aren’t thinking about horror outside of October.  But in the last few years this is not necessarily true.

 

Let’s take the first 6 months of 2012 as an example.  In April, we saw the release of The Cabin in the Woods, a terrific and popular haunted house movie.  In May, there was the Johnny Depp vampire soap opera Dark Shadows and in June, the king of mash-ups, Seth Grahame-Smith helped to bring his bloody, smart, and amusing novel, Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter to the screen.  Each of those movie releases had their own marketing campaigns that resulted in buzz about them among the general public.  For each, a small display could have easily been created.

 

You begin by putting up a graphic of the movie poster on regular 8 ½  by 11 paper (just do a Google image search for the movie) next to a handful of books.  Then you grab some books that are connected with the movie.  So for Cabin in the Woods, you could pull out some haunted house books, vampire books for Dark Shadows, and some comic horror novels for Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter.  Displays do not need special shelving.  Just put books out anyplace where you have space.  For example, at the Berwyn Public Library, we put these small, current event displays up on our desk, on a top shelf that we keep clear to rotate with impromptu displays, and even on small side tables in our seating areas.

 

These current event displays not only show your patrons that you understand their interests, but they also make a trip to the library easier for them.  Patrons are daunted by the large number of books on our shelves, so anything we can do to pull out good books for them, makes them less intimidated and more willing to browse.  And, displays linked to current media darlings are a sure fire crowd pleaser.

 

But how do you choose the books?  Here is where I can help.  In my new book and on its companion website, I have a lot of lists that would help you to identify titles that you could highlight.  I am even fine with you using my annotations, as long as you cite where they are from.  In the book I have entire chapters on haunted houses, vampires, and comic horror that include long annotated lists of popular titles available at most public libraries.  On the website, RA for All: Horror, I use tags on each post.  You just need to choose a tag, like vampires, and all of the relevant posts come up.  There are literally hundreds of options at your fingertips.

 

Another way you can work horror into your displays throughout the year is to simply include a few horror titles in the mix in your larger, more planned displays.  For example, we have done displays featuring coming-of-age stories at our library.  Since this is such a popular theme in novels, on the display we included books from every genre.  There was literary fiction, science fiction, fantasy, suspense, and horror, just to name a few.  As I argue in my new book, a coming-of-age theme is huge in all horror.  In most horror novels, the protagonist has to overcome his own shortcomings, face his inner demons, and grow up before he can defeat the physical monster in front of him.  So what horror books can be included on a “Coming-of-Age” display? Any you want.

 

What about a display on gardening? I have lots of “plants of terror” titles to suggest to you in  my book or on the blog, but here are two of my favorites– The Ruins by Scott Smith and The Caretaker of Lorne Field by Dave Zeltersman.

 

This plan works with just about any theme.  If you just make an effort to incorporate horror into all of your displays, I am sure you will find a tale of terror to fit most displays.  The moral here is to consciously mix all genres into your displays.  You will have more fun, and you will make a wider range of patrons happier.

 

My second tip for marketing horror all year also plays off of the media.  I mentioned a marketing strategy for one-time movie releases, but what about the excitement we are seeing for popular horror television series throughout the year?  Again, let’s stick with just the first 6 months of 2012 and talk about two of the most popular series on television, period– AMC’s The Walking Dead and HBO’s True Blood (okay, technically True Blood is paranormal, not pure horror, but trust me, I will address that in a moment).

 

The Walking Dead ran on TV in the winter and spring, while True Blood is currently running this summer.  For each series I took a different marketing approach at the library.  For The Walking Dead, I focused on a web campaign of all things zombie.  On my blog, I ran many Walking Dead inspired posts and worked hard to incorporate book suggestions in these posts.  I did this throughout the run of the show, culminating with a display of zombie books in the library during the week leading up to the finale.

 

True Blood was a little more difficult, since its fans are mostly those who like paranormal stories.  In paranormal, the main thrust of the story is NOT to invoke fear, as it is in horror.  The scares come, but they are not the overall point of the work.  As a result, some horror fans do not like paranormal and vice versa.  But, that doesn’t mean NO horror fans like True Blood.  To address the wide range of appeal in the TV series and the book series, a few years ago, I created this list of Sookie Stackhouse read alikes broken up by appeal.  I considered all of the reasons you may like the series and included plenty of horror options on the list.  This list is available online and in the library and is one of most popular lists.

 

I hope I have inspired you to consider marketing horror throughout the year.  The popularity of horror TV series and movies today proves horror’s staying power.  And if huge production companies think it is okay to push horror during the other 11 months of the year, why shouldn’t you?  We have way less to lose than they do.

 

And don’t be scared of helping your horror patrons.  They are not monsters, they just like to read about them.

 

Becky Spratford is a busy Readers’ Advisor. Between manning a desk at the Berwyn (IL) Public Library and corrupting the minds of library school students at Dominican University, she runs two popular and critically acclaimed RA blogs: RA for All and RA for All: Horror.  Her new book The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror, 2nd edition (ALA Editions, 2012) is available now.  She also writes content for EBSCO’s NoveList database and is a proud member of The Horror Writers’ Association.  She can be reached at bspratford[at]hotmail[dot]com.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on July 31, 2012 by , Reply

The H-Word. Part 3

And now… The tipping point for me. The article that made me want to shake somebody at the Wall Street Journal. Did you know this summer is…

 

THE SEASON OF THE SUPERNATURAL!

 

Yep.  “Real” authors are now coming out of the closet. The genre fiction my creative writing professor, Clint McCown, banned us from writing in his class because it wasn’t “real” or “literary” is suddenly okay.  Except, wait! Let’s not call it horror fiction when literary writer Glen Duncan writes about a werewolf with “a lusty appetite for human flesh”.  Nope- it’s “a high concept literary novel.”  It just HAPPENS to have a man-eating werewolf as the narrator.  Hmm… How can the literary establishment avoid the stigma of writing genre books? Certainly, those books, populated with werewolves, zombies, ghosts, and vampires, couldn’t possibly be horror fiction. Of course not. It’s “supernatural literary fiction”. I’d like to thank Glen Duncan’s publicist for taking the time to offer us here at MonsterLibrarian.com, a horror fiction review site, a review copy of The Last Werewolf.

The Wall Street Journal did briefly acknowledge the horror genre, but none of the books in this article were mentioned as part of the horror genre. And, while I understand that different imprints have different audiences, I was appalled at Knopf’s attitude that “we don’t do those kinds of books”.  It’s so disrespectful to readers’ preferences, and readers are the lifeblood of any publishing house.  The author of the Journal’s article tried to justify the popularity of these titles by counting Homer, Shakespeare, Dante and Milton as writers in the literary tradition who tossed gods, monsters, and the undead into the mix, but those guys cared about telling a story, not whether it was “literary”.

And that’s why my five year old is begging me to tell him about Odysseus and the Cyclops for the billionth time, and preparing for the zombie apocalypse (in spite of my attempts to protect him from all things zombie). The stories and the monsters are just that good. There’s no reason to be afraid of the H-word. There are a LOT of good storytellers out there. Even if they write “those books”, that’s no reason to write them off, or treat their readers with contempt.

Look, the horror community is not as organized as the romance community. RWA has hard data on sales and on who their readers are.  Writers in the horror genre don’t. And it would be hard to collect… are there ANY major publishers who publish horror since Leisure went by the wayside? But horror readers, writers, and books are here, and it’s foolish for publishers, mainstream authors, and book critics to write them off.  Horror fiction. Not “paranormal”, not “supernatural”, not, “thriller”, “science fiction”, “fantasy”, “dystopian” or “lowbrow”.(although it can be any of those things as well). It’s okay to read and write horror fiction with pride. No one should have to defend that choice.

No matter what anyone else doesn’t say.

 

Posted on May 29, 2011 by , 4 comments
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