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Women in Horror Month: “She’s a librarian, ok?”

Hi, my name is Kirsten Kowalewski, and I am a librarian.

I am currently living in a state where the governor just attempted to use tax dollars to start a state-run news service and is recommending cutting library funding. The past two weeks have also been the culmination of a year of hostility from the governor and the state board of education toward our elected Superintendent of Public Instruction, who is, like me, trained as a librarian and school media specialist and is a certified teacher.  The state legislature is stripping her of her powers and assigning them to the state board. When Indiana Senate president David Long was asked about it, he implied that she wasn’t up to the job. “She’s a librarian, ok?” This has left me steaming.

The Librarian Avengers are putting you on notice, Mr. Long.

So, what’s all this got to do with women in horror?

A number of awesome librarians have contributed to promoting the horror genre and keeping this website alive. Many of them are women, and all of them are amazing. I have been lucky to work with Becky Siegel Spratford (author of The Reader’s Advisory Guide to Horror Fiction), Patricia O. Mathews (author of the reader’s advisory guide Fang-tastic Fiction), Lucy Lockley (also known as the RAT Queen), Kelly Fann, Julie Adams, and others, and to connect through the site with Heather Whiteside Ward. If you want horror fiction to thrive, and its audience to grow, you’ve got to have the librarians on your side, and (whether it’s right or not) a lot of librarians are women.

In conclusion, I give you Evie Carnahan, Librarian Most Likely To Break A Mummy’s Curse:

 

 

Don’t underestimate the librarian. It could be your last mistake.

Posted on February 2, 2015 by , Reply

Women in Horror Month: Guest Post by Colleen Wanglund– Women Writers of Horror

Yes, I know it’s March 1. Believe me, this guest post is worth extending Women in Horror Month for an extra day.

Colleen Wanglund is a reviewer, writer, and passionate reader of (and about) horror, both in cinema and on the printed page. She reviews books for MonsterLibrarian.com and Horror Fiction Review (among other places) and writes about Asian horror films as the Geisha of Gore for Cinema Knife Fight. In short, she is one of the awesome women of horror this month celebrates.

Because Women in Horror Month usually focuses on horror movies, Colleen wanted to make sure that the women writers of horror and their books got some recognition too. She has written a fantastic piece that is essential reading for anyone seeking out excellent women authors of horror and their books, from Frankenstein to the present. These are her personal choices, not a canonical list, but you can rest assured she has read every one of these books and authors, and many, many more. If you love to read horror, any horror, or if you’re looking to specifically seek out great women writers in the genre, read what she’s written, print it out, and, if you are a reader’s advisory librarian, keep it with your Reader’s Advisory Guide to Horror.

 

 

Women in Horror

 

February is Women in Horror Recognition Month, thanks to a cool chick and my friend Hannah Neurotica. While most of the focus tends to be on the film industry (after all it is a boys’ club) I’m pushing female horror authors. I recently saw a comment left on a particular forum where someone had asked for some recommendations for female authors. The comment in question was a response and went something like “….it is an unassailable fact that men are better writers…” and it really pissed me off. Really? You think across the board that men write better than women? Well, tell me, my friend, who have you been reading? I can name dozens of female horror authors that write stories that are just as disturbing, if not more so. Personally, I believe women can tap into the deep well of our emotions because we tend to lead with them, whether they are positive or negative. This gives women a perspective that men don’t necessarily have.

Let me begin with the obvious. Mary Shelley. Without her there would be no Frankenstein or his monster. There have been countless books and movies that use Shelley’s central theme against playing God, whether it’s creating life or destroying it. Sadly, when her novel Frankenstein was first published, it was done so anonymously, because it was believed that no one would read the book if it were written by a woman.

Then there’s Anne Rice. Lestat is easily one of my favorite literary characters. In the third book of the Vampire Chronicles, Queen of the Damned (Ballantine Books 1989), Rice presents one of the best origin stories I’ve ever read for vampires, and Maharet cuts an imposing figure. How about Shirley Jackson and her novel The Haunting of Hill House (Penguin Books 1959)? It’s been adapted into a few successful films over the years. Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (Penguin Books 1969) was adapted into a film by Alfred Hitchcock. Two short stories by du Maurier were adapted into Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and Don’t Look Now (1973) which has turned up on a few scariest horror movie lists.

I also think you should be reading Linda Addison, the first African-American to win a Bram Stoker Award—and she’s won three for her horror poetry collections—Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes (Space and Time 2001), Being Full of Light, Insubstantial (Space and Time 2007), and How to Recognize A Demon has Become Your Friend (CreateSpace 2011). Elizabeth Massie’s short story “Abed” is one of the most disturbing zombie stories I’ve ever read—by a male or female author. Massie’s Bram Stoker Award-winning novel Sineater (CompletelyNovel 2010) has been re-published for a new audience. Monica O’Rourke’s Jasmine & Garlic (Biting Dog Publications 2011) was so gory and violent it has forever changed how I approach a visit to the gynecologist!

There’s Carole Lanham’s collection The Whisper Jar (Morrigan Books 2011) with its subtle but frightening horror themes, including “The Blue Word”, another very unsettling zombie story with a twist that you won’t see coming. Suzanne Robb’s Z-Boat (CreateSpace 2011) is another great zombie story with a twist—and a relevant message about overpopulation and dwindling resources. Tonia Brown expertly covers all of horror lit’s sub-genres, and Jessy Marie Roberts wrote one of my favorite short stories ever about a woman who literally puts her all into a special Halloween dinner, titled “Pumpkin Soup”.

You should also seek out:

Poppy Z. Brite—Exquisite Corpse (Touchstone 1997), Drawing Blood (Dell 1994)

Mary Sangiovanni—The Hollower (Leisure Books 2007), Found You (Leisure Books 2008)

Carol Weekes—The Color of Bone (Genius Publishing 2012), Dead Reflections (JournalStone 2013)

Lisa Morton—The Castle of Los Angeles (Gray Friar Press 2010), Night-Mantled: The Best of Wily Writers (Wily Writers 2011)

Chesya Burke—Dark Faith (Apex Publications 2010), Dark Dreams: A Collection of Horror and Suspense by Black Writers (Kensington 2004)

Yvonne Navarro—Music of the Spears: Aliens Series (Spectra 1996), Deep Cuts: Mayhem, Menace and Misery (Evil Jester Press 2013)

Melanie Tem—The Deceiver (Leisure Books 2003), Slain in the Spirit (Leisure Books 2002)

Billie Sue Mosiman—Widow (Berkley 1995), Red Moon Rising: A Vampire Novel (DAW 2003)

Caitlin R. Kiernan—The Drowning Girl (Roc Trade 2012), Tales of Pain and Wonder (Subterranean Press 2008)

Gemma Files—Kissing Carrion (Prime Books 2003), The Worm in Every Heart (Prime Books 2006)

Sheri Gambino—Vicious Verses and Reanimated Rhymes: Zany Zombie Poetry for the Undead Head (Coscom Entertainment 2009), Rellik (2011)

Damien Walters Grintalis—Ink (Samhain Publishing 2012), Arcane (CreateSpace 2011)

Fran Friel—Mama’s Boy and Other Dark Tales (Apex Publications 2008), “Wings With Hot Sauce” (The Horror Library 2005)

Tananarive Due—The Between (Harper Perennial 1996), Domino Falls: A Novel (Atria Books 2013)

Lucy Snyder—Chimeric Machines (Creative Guy Publishing 2009), Shotgun Sorceress (Del Rey Books 2010)

Alexandra Sokoloff—The Unseen (St. Martin’s Press 2009), The Harrowing (St. Martin’s Press 2006)

Sarah Pinborough—The Taken (Dorchester Publishing 2007), Breeding Ground (Leisure Books 2006)

Sarah Langan—The Keeper (HarperTorch 2006), Audrey’s Door (Harper Publishing 2009)

Tonia Brown—Badass Zombie Road Trip (Books of the Dead Press 2012), Skin Trade: An Historical Horror (CreateSpace 2012)

Jessy Marie Roberts—Bloody Carnival (Pill Hill Press 2010), Kinberra Down (Pill Hill Press 2010; with Eric S. Brown)

I hope the women I left out will forgive me.

Do yourself a favor and read some of these fantastic women. You will find women have been greatly overlooked in the horror industry, whether it’s film or literature. I’ve heard it said that these women “write like a man” and I guess if that’s what you need to hear to check out female authors, then so be it—but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

~Colleen Wanglund

Posted on March 1, 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
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