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Women in Horror Fiction: Women in Horror Month– Introducing “Shelley’s Daughters”, by Colleen Wanglund

 

February is officially Women in Horror Month, and while it began with a focus on women in the horror film industry—including actresses, writers, directors, and others working behind the scenes— our goal is to expand this focus to include female horror authors. There are so many women writing horror, some famous but many who are not well-known. Their work is not published and pushed by the major publishing houses; most female authors are published by small houses and in some instances, they self-publish (hooray for the internet!).  And yet, time and again, “Best of” lists continue to be made up of male writers.  Are the women any less worthy?  Is their work not as good as their male counterparts?  Hell no!  We don’t know why female horror authors, for the most part, are overlooked, but we hope to remedy that. So, here at Monster Librarian, we are going to make an active effort to promote women in horror not just by occasionally publishing interviews, but by compiling an index of published women horror writers from Ann Radcliffe to the present.  It’s an ambitious project, but there is no resource that really addresses this topic: in her Reader’s Advisory Guide to Horror Fiction, Becky Siegel Spratford was able to spotlight only five women writers, although I know she would have liked to include more.  Colleen Wanglund and I are going to be spearheading this project, which we’re calling “Shelley’s Daughters”, If there are people who would like to contribute, you can contact  me at our general email address, monsterlibrarian@monsterlibrarian.com, or at kirsten.kowalewski@monsterlibrarian.com. And now, some words from one of my favorite women in horror, and partner in crime (or at least in promoting women writers of horror), Colleen Wanglund.

 

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Women in Horror Month

by Colleen Wanglund

I am a woman in horror; I am one of Shelley’s Daughters, and I am proud to be able to say that.

I was exposed to horror at an early age, both books and movies, thanks to my parents. When I was in high school I wanted to be a writer, but life got in the way and I got sidetracked. At the age of 39, I was asked to write a book review as a favor for a friend of mine. The book was Vicious Verses and Reanimated Rhymes: Zany Zombie Poetry for the Undead Head (2009 Coscom Entertainment). That began my journey back to being a writer. And I cannot thank that friend enough as he has also become a sort of mentor. For years I’ve written book reviews, eventually branching out into film reviews, and the genre I’ve always written about is horror. I have dabbled in fiction here and there, but only recently have I begun to seriously write horror fiction. I won a horror fiction contest for unpublished writers with my short story “Slugs”, I’ve recently sold a short story titled “The Mad Monk of St. Augustine’s” to an upcoming anthology, and I’m working hard on finishing up a novella based on Japanese Pinku (exploitation) films.

But why the love affair with horror? One answer is that I have many fears in this life and horror allows me to face some of those fears at a safe distance. I can put my fears and anxieties to paper as a sort of therapy. It has the potential to help me wrap my brain around some of the horrible atrocities committed by humans all over the world and throughout history. I also find horror to be the most “real” genre out there. Everyone suffers tragedy—in varying degrees, mind you—and horror can act as a catharsis for the feelings associated with those tragedies. We can relate, empathize, or sympathize to what is happening on the page (or on the screen).

As a society horror brings people together to face our collective fears, whether real or imagined. Serial killers, monsters, ghosts—they all represent something for everyone. And I’ve said before that I think women have a unique perspective to bring to the table when it comes to writing horror. We are more emotional and I believe that translates well to the development of characters and the situations they may find themselves in. We live our own horrors in childbirth, letting our children out into the real world, love and loss. We are viewed as the weaker sex, depicted as needing saving, yet at the same time we are expected to be strong for the people around us—our children and loved ones. We are the caregivers and that doesn’t stop because the apocalypse is upon us.

I would like to eventually see Women in Horror Month become unnecessary, but for now it’s needed.  All too often women are being overlooked in a genre they—we—love, and that’s just wrong. I think my main objective is to get the reader to see that gender shouldn’t matter in writing horror stories.  What should matter is the story itself.

 

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Stay tuned and see what we come up with next to promote “Shelley’s Daughters”, and the women of horror fiction!

 

Posted on March 2, 2014 by , Reply

Women in Horror Month: A Look Back

An enormous amount of content was produced by and about women in horror during Women in Horror Month, 2014. I linked to a lot of this content via our Facebook page  However, since a lot of people don’t visit our Facebook page, I’m going to provide a list of links to places I visited and shared during the month that are related to WiHM(I really recommend that you visit there often, because not only will you get all kinds of awesome content that comes my way, but there are also links to all our blog posts– not just this blog, but the one for Reading Bites, and the one that notifies you of new reviews. So it’s a great way to see everything current).

Enjoy!

Mary Shelley Letters Discovered in Essex Archive-– The Guardian, January 15

Flowers in the Attic: The Value of Young Reading Perspectives-– Kelly Jensen, BookRiot

The Ghost of V.C. Andrews: The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Mysterious “Flowers in the Attic” Author—  Kate Aurthur at Buzzfeed. For the first time, the family and colleagues of the author speak out to provide a fuller picture of her life.

The Literary Gothic— A web guide to biographical information on early supernaturalist authors, set to close down in June

Please Don’t Bring Me Flowers— Allison Peters, BookRiot

20 Black Women in Horror Writing— Sumiko Saulson. Essential reading for the month of February, for multiple reasons. Saulson also published a short ebook on black women horror writers in February of this year, available for free at Smashwords.

Women in Horror Recognition Month Facebook page

Gothic Pioneer Ann Radcliffe May Have Been Inspired by Mother-In-Law— The Guardian, January 30

Women Who Write Lovecraft by Silvia Moreno Garcia of Innsmouth Press

RA for All: Horror— Becky Siegel Spratford asks who your favorite woman writer in horror is.

Ania Ahlborn’s interview with J. Lincoln Fenn

The Rise of the Women in Horror Movement: Admirers, Haters, and Everything In-Betweeners at Brutal as Hell

Statistics on genre writer submissions by gender at Tor UK, by editor Julie Crisp. Crisp’s statistics demonstrated that women submit fewer manuscripts than men, at least at Tor UK, so sexism by the publisher isn’t the only factor at play.

Women in Horror Month: Girls Can Kill, Too!— Bloody Disgusting

Writing female protagonists, by Lisa Morton– HWA blog

Genre-blending from Mary Shelley to the present by J. Lincoln Fenn– HWA blog

Horror Roundtable on Sexism— HWA discussion. Read the comments section– it’s very interesting!

Women Destroy Science Fiction Kickstarter— Lightspeed Magazine. In spite of everyone’s insistence that all-women issues are not desirable, this Kickstarter campaign to fund an all-women writers’ issue of Lightspeed Magazine was so successful that the people at Lightspeed expanded to include issues called Women Destroy Horror (published as an issue of Nightmare Magazine) and Women Destroy Fantasy (published as an issue of Fantasy Magazine). The campaign is over, but this shows there is clearly a demand for work by women writers. Look for the special issues later this year!

Mary SanGiovanni on her personal experiences as a woman writer of horror.

Creating female protagonists, by Lisa Morton (again, although not the same piece)– RA for All: Horror

Women in Horror Month: Pseudonyms and Author Anxiety— KC Redding-Gonzalez

Rabble Rouser Wednesdays: On the Issue of Misogynist Writers and Readers by Paula Ashe

Hugh Howey on Self-Publishing

Mark Coker responds to Hugh Howey

Tonia Brown on her personal experience with self-publishing

What’s Wrong With Female Werewolves in Popular Culture? at Darkmedia

Women in Horror Month Archives 2014— Darkmedia

Spreading the Writer’s Word— A daily spotlight on a book by a woman writer of horror

Siren’s Call Publications— download their free ezine devoted to Women in Horror Month

60 Black Women in Horror by Sumiko Saulson— free download to this guide at Smashwords.

 

There is some great stuff at those links and I hope you will take the time to explore them. I hope you had a great time learning about women in horror, and especially women in horror fiction, during the month of February. Don’t think that just because the month is up that it’s time to stop, though! Keep your eyes open for news on how Monster Librarian plans to keep women writers visible over the next several months– it will be a challenge to keep it up with the Stokers coming up and all kinds of reviews to edit, write, and share, but it’s totally worth it. So welcome to March– another month set aside to recognize women’s contributions to the world. Let’s see where it takes us!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on March 1, 2014 by , Reply

“I’d Like To Submit A Request For Review”

Monster Librarian receives a lot of requests for review. In addition to mainstream and independent publishers, there are many teeny tiny small presses and self-published authors who request reviews. I’m sharing this information especially for them.

Everyone who works on the site is a volunteer. They all have busy lives and they donate their valuable free time to reading and reviewing.  We can’t review everything we are requested to review. Even when we do plan to review a book, it can be awhile before the book is read, reviewed, edited, and posted. To those of you patiently waiting for reviews, thank you for your patience.

Here’s how we handle review requests. When someone requests a review, I send the request on to our reviewers, and if any of them are interested, then they tell me and I let the person who contacted me know who to send it to.

So if you want to get your book reviewed, you’ve got to hook them with your request, and you have to do it fast. I don’t know about you, but in my personal email account I am overwhelmed with email, most of which isn’t very important. I don’t read every one that I get, and many of those I do get I just take a few seconds to look at, to see if they’re a.) important or b.) interesting. So there isn’t much time to get my attention, and if someone wants me to read what they’ve sent, they have to do it pretty fast. I think most people handle the clutter in their inboxes like that. There isn’t time for more without having your life consumed by email.

I bring this up because I have received a number of requests in the past few weeks for “an anthology of horror short stories”. Occasionally that’s expanded to something along the lines of  “a collection of unique/original/chilling/entertaining/frightening short stories”.  Describing a book this way is pretty generic.  Describing the contents in detail isn’t necessary, just tell us what makes your book stand out enough that we should take time out of our lives to read and review it. If you can’t get it across in a brief paragraph, your request isn’t going to stand out and it probably isn’t going to provoke a reviewer’s interest.  There are plenty of people who DO write requests that tell us what makes their book unique who still don’t get reviewed because of the limited time and energy our reviewers have available, or because it doesn’t fit their interests.

I love to be able to write someone who has requested a review and tell them that we have a reviewer who is interested in reviewing the book. If you would like to be one of those people, please keep in mind that providing us with information about the book that will hook a reviewer makes that much more likely.

We do have a FAQ for authors, located here, which tells you, among other things, what information we need from you to forward a request. Thanks for taking a minute to consider how best to structure a review request, and have a great day!

 

 

Posted on January 15, 2014 by , Reply