Nightmare Magazine Issue 25, Women Destroy Horror! Special Issue

by Nightmare Magazine

  Kate: Although it’s done all the time, dividing people into just two categories is problematic. Writers’ work is colored by their interests, history, sexual orientation, and many other things. People aren’t so easy to classify as one thing or another. If the spectrum was a straight line with Alpha Male Bro at one end and a Pretty-in-Pink Princess at the other, I think I’d fall somewhere close to the midway mark on the female side. I write a lot about violence and rage, but my stories are character-driven more often than plot-driven, and explore emotion. Trying to place myself on this timeline makes me realize how ridiculous these male/female stereotypes are. I can think of so many authors who would jump all over the scale depending on the particular story.

  Helen: I suspect it would probably depend on a story-by-story basis whether or not a reader could tell. Women tend to have to deal with a different set of fears and pressures and expectations than men do. (You could say the same thing for any sub-class, or sub-sub-class, or sub-sub-sub-class. The more specific you get in defining an audience, the more specific will be those fears, pressures, and expectations.) I was once given some writing advice that I found very difficult to follow: that was to write dialogue in a scene as if it were ungendered and then only ascribe the gender of the speaker afterward. For me, that’s absolutely impossible because men talk to men differently than they talk to women; women talk to women differently than they talk to men. Sex and power are always subtext to conversation, and men and women have been conditioned to have different ways of navigating those areas. As a woman I suspect I have a better time understanding how women navigate those; but then again, I grew up as a tomboy and so I feel more comfortable in predominantly male social circles. As to whether it’s good or bad that my writing tends to reflect a kind of sexual politics, I don’t know. I write the way I write because of who I am. My greatest struggle is to write honestly and to dig deeply into my own identity. It makes me pleased when readers respond to that, but I couldn’t tell you if my audience is predominantly male or female. And I couldn’t tell you if I want an audience that’s predominantly male or female.

  Rena: Yes, absolutely. Most of the stories I write have female protagonists. I’ve never had any qualms about stating that I write for women because I began writing stories that I personally wanted to read. Whether it was good or bad wasn’t anything I really considered until I began the submission process.

  What percentage of your work has featured female/male protagonists?

  Linda: Off the top of my head I think it’s close to fifty/fifty female/male. If I’ve spent time writing a story with a female main character, I like to switch to male for the next story just to keep me on my toes. I believe most of my characters could be female or male and the story would still work. One story I remember making a point to make the main character female was “369 Gates of Hell,” which is a story about a bodyguard that used to be a hired killer that is haunted by people who had been killed. I thought it would be very interesting to make the main character female since that would be unexpected. It has a twist in the end. I’m very happy about how the story turned out. It’s published in my collection How to Recognize a Demon Has Become Your Friend (which received an HWA Bram Stoker Award).

  Kate: About a year and a half ago, I made a pledge to feature mostly female protagonists in my work. There are plenty of male authors covering the male perspective. If women want to be represented accurately in fiction, they have an obligation to write their own stories.

  Helen: Ha! I have no idea. I suspect I tend to write female protagonists more because frequently when I’m writing I start by writing about myself, and, so, as a result, I tend to write more female protagonists.

  Rena: My work is at least ninety-percent female protagonists.

  Is there something you’ve written that you think is distinctly feminine? If so, what, and why?

  Linda: I’m not sure what it means to be a feminine writer so I don’t know. Perhaps that’s a question a reader can answer better than I. I’ve certainly written work where the main character had to be female; for example, my story “Future, Past, Imperfect” is a Cthulhu-inspired story where the main character is a pregnant American-Indian woman.

  Helen: The only way for me to answer that would be to tell you what I think is distinctly feminine, and that would be repeating the same kind of labeling logic that gets us to our current paradigm. I don’t know what is distinctly feminine. I have noticed that readers tend to regard stories about relationships as “feminine” and stories about action as “masculine,” but I think the divide is dangerous. I’m not great at action sequences, but I feel much more at home writing discomfort and dissonance. As a naturally shy person, I tend to be highly attuned to the moods and the interactions of people around me: discomfort and dissonance are devastating to me. So I can write that quite easily. But I don’t think that’s necessarily gendered. Robert Aickman and Roald Dahl were both masters at presenting exactly the kind of dissonances I find it exciting to write about, but I would say Karin Tidbeck is an excellent example of another female horror writer who uses dissonance to great effect.

  Rena: My first novel, The Evolutionist, is distinctly feminine. The main character goes through the gamut of emotions regarding her family, friends, social hierarchies, and her role relating to each of these.

  Have readers ever responded to your work specifically on the basis of gender? I.e., has a woman reader told you they identified with a female character? Has a male reader told you that you “write like a man”?

  Linda: I’ve had a woman reader say that they notice that women aren’t victims in my work. And that’s mostly because the basis of my actual life has been surviving tough times and not seeing myself as a victim. I can’t remember anyone saying I “write like a man.”

  Kate: I’ve had some interesting responses to Candy House. Male readers especially seem to be disappointed that there is no hero driving the action, male or otherwise. The need for a hero may be a particularly male trait, or maybe it’s just a feature of horror fiction. To say men want order and women want chaos is oversimplified. Maybe that men want order and women want a different kind of order would be better. Me, I want chaos. In Candy House, I wanted to play with the idea that a character is defined by the partner he chooses. That’s an idea that is familiar to most women. If you marry the king, you become queen. If you choose love, you live happily ever after. I gave the male character a wide variety of choices. All of the choices were wrong, of course, because the idea is wrong.

  Helen: I have, definitely. One story I wrote comes to mind, titled “The Old and the New.” It’s about the relationship between a rather manipulative, saccharine female secretary and a recently divorced photographer at a firm (played out as they go on a date to the catacombs in Paris). It’s sort of a ghost story, sort of a black comedy, and sort of just weird. But one of the comments I had from a friend who critiqued the story was that she didn’t like the secretary character because she squealed at one point. This friend was tired of seeing females in romantic situations acting all twitterpated. She wanted me to write a stronger female character. But for me, that story was about the weakness of the secretary character. It was an essential part of both the horror and the black comedy. So that was, oddly, one moment in which I felt like I was being told to write more like a strong woman ought to write—and I didn’t like it any more than I would have liked a male reader telling me to write like a man. I don’t like anyone telling me what to write. I want to be able to write stories about strong women and weak women, women who whisper, women who roar, women who take power for themselves and women who are flawed, fragile and vulnerable—women who do all the things that actual women do! There is no prescriptive formula for female identity.

  Rena: No one has ever told me that I write like a man. And the funny thing is that I get a lot of negative feedback from the women audience that I targeted my first novel to. They tell me they can’t relate to the character(s), and part of me believes that’s because they are
the characters, a sort of denial or what have you. One of the best comments I ever received was from a male who said that he really didn’t want to care about the characters, but found that he did.

  Have you ever considered using a male pseudonym?

  Linda: See my answer about considering L.D. Addison.

  Kate: I have a name and avatar picked out because it is tempting to think that something as simple as a name change will bring me fame and fortune. I can’t decide if I’m going to use it. From a strictly financial perspective, it seems slightly easier for male authors to get reviewed. From all the lists I see the guys posting, it’s also easier for male authors to get male readers. (Luckily, the majority of readers are female.) Higher up the ladder, male authors still get the bigger advances and marketing budgets. Even though these things are true at the moment, this is a great time to be a woman creating fiction, both as an author and a publisher. According to a Publisher’s Weekly article from 2010, “eighty-five percent of publishing employees with less than three years of experience are women.” We’re on the verge of a historical shift. For the first time ever, women are poised to achieve truly meaningful positions of power in the publishing industry. That doesn’t necessarily mean everything will be rosy from here on out, but I think we can expect to see a publishing environment that is much more open to feminine voices. Much of the uproar that we see in response to women making strides in genre fiction is from the small minority of people who are afraid of change. There will always be room for men who are confident in their masculinity and have great stories to tell. Chances are we’ll be seeing a lot less of the misogynist crap.

  Helen: I haven’t. And I wouldn’t. I think it’s more important to grow a core audience who likes my work for the things that only I can offer.

  Rena: Never.

  Does the association of “torture porn” and misogyny with horror hold the genre back?

  Linda: Work like “torture porn” by definition doesn’t have a story, it’s violent imagery without meaning. I wouldn’t even include that as part of horror, in which work is created with storylines. I’m sure many people do because of the fright factor. The same for misogyny as “dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against woman.” This isn’t horror; this is a call for healing of some kind of wound in the person who creates it.

  There’s a huge difference between using images that are harsh as part of the storytelling process and when it becomes the only thing in a story. These things certainly don’t help the genre. I hope most people don’t see these as major representations of horror.

  Kate: I’m not really sure I want to argue in favor of torture porn and misogyny, but violence is an important element of horror. Excluding women, either on the giving or receiving end, would be a mistake. The thing I see again and again that is far worse is weak two-dimensional female characters. These cardboard women fall down and cry when they should fight, or they exist to be receptacles for sex. I don’t have the words to express how bored I am by these tropes. How is it even fun to write this stuff? I’d rather read a story with no women at all. That’s perfectly valid. Also, strippers. Does every other female character in horror have to be a stripper or prostitute?

  Helen: Undoubtedly, and, in all honesty, it holds me back from an unabashed championing of the genre. I don’t like torture porn. It’s not that I can’t take reading stories with violence toward women. I can, when it serves a purpose. I don’t like it when fiction appears to eroticize or glamorize that violence. The language and the logic of the horror genre are still deeply rooted in misogyny. When I was reading slush for ChiZine Publications, the number of graphic rape stories I received was very high. And while I don’t think that reflects accurately the current output of horror publishers, it does speak to a lingering perception of horror, a perception that evidently compels so many writers to start their stories with a graphic rape scene in order to establish that they are edgy or gritty or whatever the hell it is they think they are trying to establish. I suspect slush readers in other magazines who advertise that they publish dark fiction or horror will have encountered the same problem. But if that is the audience for horror writing—and it is difficult to argue that that audience isn’t there and isn’t vocal—then it presents a problem for writers like me at the other end of the spectrum. I get very little enjoyment reading about rape. I get very little enjoyment reading about women being carved up. I adore Stephen King as a writer and his style has had a massive influence on me, but I find it a problem that, for example, It, Pet Sematary, Bag of Bones and Duma Key—four of my favorite books of his—all end with the daughter, girlfriend or wife of the main character being brutally attacked or murdered. It’s a trope, of course, and it works in the context of each of the novels. I don’t think King is being deliberately misogynistic: what’s more disconcerting is that each time I encounter that plot twist, I just roll my eyes and think, “Oh, Stephen King, doing that again, are we?”—because the mutilation of women is considered pretty standard fare, and at some level I have bought into the premise that if I read a horror novel then I shouldn’t be surprised to see it.

  And maybe there’s some fairness to that. We ought to be horrified, right, when reading a horror novel? But my problem isn’t so much that horrific things happen in a horror novel. It’s that we don’t read horror novels for horror alone. We don’t read them only to be scared. What horror writing teaches us is how to calibrate our own reactions to horror. How to survive horror. How to interpret horror. So we need less rethinking of what gets depicted, and more rethinking of the framework in which it is depicted. My problem is that when we encounter those scenes of brutality toward women, we don’t actually feel horrified. We feel as if the narrative has prepared us to accept that violence as necessary or inevitable—even if it happens only at the level of the logic of the story.

  There is a vast amount of brilliant, avant-garde, experimental, literary writing going on in the horror genre that doesn’t do this, and it’s coming from both male and female writers. What this suggests is that the horror genre doesn’t depend on those tropes anymore. We’ve come a long way, but we’re still dragging around a lot of baggage. As a result, I understand the desire to develop terms such as “The New Weird” or “dark fantasy” or “dark fiction” that provide a continuity with traditional horror but also get a bit of distance. I also understand the heartfelt cry of writers in the horror genre who would prefer to alter the perception of the genre by having a broader spectrum of writers identify themselves as horror writers. It’s a tough balance.

  Rena: I’m certain it does on many levels, but the most obvious one to me is that many women don’t particularly care to read stories filled with atrocities against their own sex. I know I don’t. I consider myself an equal-opportunity horror fan and prefer stories that are equal in their violence to both sexes if violence happens to be an integral part of the horror in the story.

  Two of you (Linda and Helen) are also highly regarded as poets. Why does dark poetry seem to have a higher percentage of female authors than dark fiction?

  Linda: I don’t have a good answer to this question. Perhaps it’s influenced by the societal concept that men write horror, not women, so men gravitate to fiction.

  Helen: I don’t really know what dark poetry is, or if it is a separate genre from regular ol’ poetry. To me, this has something to do with that old chestnut that horror is an emotion, not a genre. There are many poets who produce the emotion of horror in their poetry—Sharon Olds, Lorna Crozier, Anne Carson, Anne Sexton, to name a couple—but I would tend to simply consider them poets. The genre of horror is much more easily recognized in fiction than poetry; it’s more codified and has a greater number of examples to point to. There are few institutions that recognize horror poetry (the HWA being an obvious exception), and there are few magazines that publish it as anything except an offshoot of the fiction side. The problem with the classification of horror poetry is that it tends to still be based upon the tropes and co
nventions of horror fiction and has never had a chance to develop as its own entity. But I’m drifting into a different polemic here . . .

  The reason I think there is such a discrepancy in the percentages is that dark poetry is more likely to be perceived as poetry and less likely to be perceived as horror. The audiences are very different, and dark poetry doesn’t carry much of the baggage of horror around with it. What this shows, I think, is that women like writing dark stuff. I mean, of course they do, why wouldn’t they? Fear is a natural emotion. It’s a bit like when people believed women didn’t have orgasms. But. There have been—and still are—substantial barriers in place which mean fewer of them come to the field because their fears aren’t always represented. So the slush pile looks the way it does—both in terms of numbers and in terms of content.

  Has anyone ever tried to steer you into writing paranormal romance/urban fantasy/young adult?

  Linda: I haven’t had that experience. Other than what might occur naturally when I write a story. For example, my story “The Power” from the Dark Dreams I anthology (Kensington Publishing Corp.) has been referred to as young adult because the main characters are young, which was a fair statement.

  Kate: I’ve been more tempted than steered. The audience for romance, urban fantasy, and YA is huge, and I wish I could connect with it. Writing in a new genre requires reading widely in the genre. That’s where I run into problems. I hated being a teenager and have no desire to re-examine those issues, and the predictability of romance novels drives me crazy. I want to keep looking, though. I’m sure there are great stories being written. I just haven’t found them with my limited exploration. I don’t want to dismiss something many women love just because I don’t get it. That happens a lot in pop culture. Women’s interests are by default considered inferior.