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Women in Horror Month: Silvia Moreno-Garcia and New Visions of Lovecraft

So, I’m noodling around on the Internet looking at what comes up when I search for “women writers and horror” and trip across Broad Universe, which is an organization that promotes women writers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. I’ve been there before, but not in a while, so I decided to explore a little and soon I discovered a blog entry by someone whose name seemed familiar. Silvia Moreno-Garcia, who runs horror micro-publisher Innsmouth Free Press, wrote about new ways of approaching Lovecraft. She wrote:

“Lovecraft does not need to be all lily-white New England gentlemen cloned from one of his stories, any more than an epic fantasy needs to include hobbits”.

With Innsmouth Free Press she is approaching Lovecraft in new ways. Not that long ago, we reviewed Historical Lovecraft: Tales of Horror Through Time, an anthology produced by Innsmouth Free Press that explored Lovecraft’s universe through a variety of times and cultures (you can check out the review here). I like seeing that even the old white dead guys can escape the restraints of their time and place, with a little push from the right person. Not every woman involved in the horror genre is a big name, but there are many, like Silvia Moreno-Garcia, who put a lot of time, money, and love into making it what it is, not just for women, but for anyone interested.

(For the record, I don’t know Silvia Moreno-Garcia beyond our contact regarding the review mentioned above. I just like what she said).

Posted on February 16, 2012 by , Reply

Angry Penguins, Anne Rice Returns, and Other Stuff.

Well, the drama from November, when Penguin pulled all their ebook titles from OverDrive (read: libraries) for dealing with Amazon, and then later decided it was okay for libraries to continue to check out ebooks they had already purchased but not new releases while they negotiated, has concluded for the moment, with Penguin choosing to stop releasing new ebooks to libraries at all and any Kindle versions to libraries at all. Instead of me summing it all up for you, I now present you with further reading: an article from Publishers Weekly that provides a basic summary, and some more information here. A bit of analysis shows that while this is extremely frustrating for librarians and library users,  it probably doesn’t do either Penguin or Overdrive much good, since it appears that now the only Big Six publisher making ebooks available to libraries is Random House, even though there is a huge demand for ebooks. So if you’re a small press publisher, willing to make it easy for libraries to work with you, this could be good news for you.

And a few tie ins to Women in Horror Month (kinda):

Anne Rice is back, this time with a werewolf book. Here’s an interview with her, published just a few days ago in the Wall Street Journal.

And this month Madeline L’ Engle’s classic A Wrinkle in Time celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. You can argue that it’s science fiction or fantasy or both, and you’d be right, but it’s also terrifying. I liked this article that talked about how central women writers have been to the renaissance of science fiction and fantasy, especially for the young adult crowd. The author mentions extremely cool writers like Diana Wynne Jones, Susan Cooper, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Lois Lowry, all of whom came long before J.K. Rowling and Suzanne Collins ever hit the scene. Although it’s not addressed in the article, if you look at YA horror, I suspect you’ll find a number of women writers there too; Lois Duncan and V.C. Andrews were staples when I was growing up (although not as likely to be assigned reading in school). It’s interesting to note this, as these are frequently perceived as male-dominated genres… does that just happen when we grow up?

And Rose Fox, over at Genreville, notes that there are more starred horror titles (horror-ish, to use her exact wording) this year already than there were all last year. Woohoo!

 

Posted on February 13, 2012 by , Reply

Women In Horror Month Is (Almost) Here!

February is Women in Horror Month, and that means it’s a great time to promote and celebrate the incredible women who write and create in the horror genre, and really throw open the doors of the library to an audience that is nearly invisible to the rest of the world- women who unapologetically read, watch, review, and LOVE the horror genre. To find out a little more about it, you can check out this manifesto (warning, it’s R-rated) on the importance of reccognizing women and horror, by Hannah Neurotica, of the feminist horror zine Ax Wound. This year, one of the online events that will be part of WiHM is a “Women of Horror” series of blog posts at Darkeva’s Dark Delights. where she’ll be writing about her top twenty writers, editors, and journalists in the horror community.

Looking for a few writers to showcase? You can always start with the classics, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Check out the doings of the Horror Writers Association, which nominated Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Hotel Transylvania and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire as possibilities for Vampire Novel of the Century. Lisa Morton, the current treasurer of HWA, is an incredibly talented writer who made our Top Picks list for 2011 with her book The Samhanach. And that’s just a beginning. I challenge you to do something different this month in your library display case- celebrate the creative talents of women in the horror genre.

Posted on January 30, 2012 by , Reply
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