DEEP CUTS
EDITED BY
Angel Leigh McCoy
E.S. Magill
Chris Marrs
Cover art by Anja Millen
New York
Deep Cuts
Copyright © 2013 Angel L. McCoy, Eunice S. Magill, Chris Marrs
All rights reserved
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any electronic system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the authors. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All stories have been published with the permission of the authors
ISBN-13: 978-0615750897
ISBN-10: 0615750893
Published by Evil Jester Press
First Digital Edition
This book is dedicated to the women who write horror—
past, present, and future.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword by Angel L. McCoy, E.S. Magill, Chris Marrs
Introduction by Lisa Morton
MAYHEM
E.S. Magill on Nancy’s Holder’s “Crash Cart”
“Crash Cart” by Nancy Holder
“The Poison Eater” by Sandra Odell
“The Ditch” by Samael Gyre
“Practical Necromancy” by Sara Taylor
“Awaiting the Captain’s Ghost” by Michael Haynes
“Hollow Moments” by R.S. Belcher
“Mr. Casey is in the House” by Stephen Woodworth
MENACE
Chris Marrs on Yvonne Navarro’s “Santa Alma”
“Santa Alma” by Yvonne Navarro
“Sanctity” by C.W. Smith
“Red is the Color of my True Love’s Blood”
by Colleen Anderson
“Lost Daughters” by James Chambers
“Mules” by Ed Kurtz
MISERY
Angel Leigh McCoy on Mehitobel Wilson’s “The Remains”
“The Remains” by Mehitobel Wilson
“Beavers” by Rachel Karyo
“Lucky Clover” by Kelly A. Harmon
“Pinprick” by Scathe meic Beorh
“Abby” by Patricia Lillie
“Clown Balloons” by Satyros Phil Brucato
“I am Victim” by Rob M. Miller
More Deep Cuts Recommendations
Deep Cuts Supporters
Deep Cuts Bios
Editors’ Foreword
If you were lucky enough to grow up with records, you probably remember handling the vinyl by its edges, trying not to smudge oily fingerprints on it and messing up the purity of the music. If it was a much-loved record, you had your favorite songs, ones that seemed to belong only to you—and not the ones regularly played on the radio, the “hits.” No, your songs required moving the needle to the grooves closer to the center or to the record’s flipside. These songs earned the moniker deep cuts—songs buried deep in an album’s playlist.
We’re using that deep cuts concept for this anthology and applying it to an idea we conceived while at a World Horror Convention sitting together at a table with a scrap of paper and a pen dug up from the bottom of one of our purses. The idea was to recognize great horror stories by women writers.
But, we had a dilemma: we didn’t want to do a book of all reprints, and we didn’t want to exclude men writers. We did want new stories and new voices. That’s when we came up with the idea of having our contributing writers, women and men, recommend great horror stories by women writers through a mini-essay. We’ve come to call these recommendations deep cuts.
So, this book accomplishes much more than your typical anthology. There are new stories and recommendations for stories you should hunt down and read. We even included stories by three of today’s great women horror writers—Nancy Holder, Yvonne Navarro, and Mehitobel Wilson.
So why the focus on women who write horror?
When it comes to women horror writers, most readers (or writers) don’t associate women with extreme horror. Well, that’s their initial reaction: women don’t write that stuff. But if you make them pause and think it through, they’ll suddenly start coming up with the names of women horror writers who do write that stuff. It’s probably social convention that clouds their memories for those first few moments.
Much of Nancy Holder’s current work is Young Adult, but there was a time when she was part of a group of writers who were taking horror to literary extremes: “I became a Splatterpunk because someone turned to me at a con and said, ‘Of course, women can’t write splat.’ I think sometimes we’re still considered somewhat unusual. But I love seeing more women in all aspects of horror publishing—editors, agents, executives, artists, writers.”
Women have been integral to the horror genre since its gothic inception. There are so many great stories out there that have already been published, but that are languishing in a literary purgatory. We wanted to remind everyone of these stories by digging them up out of their moldering graves and singing their praises once again.
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During the course of putting together Deep Cuts, we were asked why the request for a recommended woman horror writer and her story? Why not have an anthology of stories written only by women? While there isn’t anything wrong with anthologies containing only stories written by women, we wanted to do something different. We wanted to have an anthology honoring women writers that wasn’t gender exclusive.
Coming up with a way to do that wasn’t an easy task; we kicked around many ideas before we decided on the recommendations method. And, as an added bonus, they tied-in with our deep cuts theme, as a good number of the recommendations are for women writers of whom, otherwise, you may not have heard. The same goes for their brilliant stories. By asking that submitters include a recommendation with their submissions, we felt we could achieve our goal of honoring women, no matter the gender of the person submitting. We believe we were successful in this and hope you do, too. Hopefully, you’ll discover, or rediscover, some of the horror genre’s lesser known but talented women writers, as we did.
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The response to Deep Cuts has been phenomenal. Not only was our Kickstarter fully funded, so we could pay beyond pro rates, but we also received more than 250 submissions. We used Sub-mittable.com, an online submission tracking service, to keep it all straight, or we’d have been lost! Fortunately for us, Submittable has a voting system. Each of us read every story and then voted on it. Yes, No, or Maybe. By the time we’d finished, we had a fairly clear idea of which stories had made it into the final stage of decision-making. We eliminated two-thirds of the stories in the first voting round. Then, we settled in to do the really hard work.
The editors all converged at a writers retreat (in a haunted house, no less) to discuss the remaining third of the stories and choose which would make it into the anthology. We had so many amazing stories to choose from. We talked for hours, analyzing and arguing; and ultimately, we got our list down to sixteen stories that didn’t put us over our word-count limit.
Our original intent was to choose only stories that were “extreme” horror, but we learned that a story doesn’t have to have a lot of blood and guts to be “extreme.” Our submissions taught us that, and we’re thankful for the lesson. We ended up choosing stories based on their emotional or conceptual intensity instead.
&n
bsp; Most importantly, we chose stories for their merit, and in our final list of authors, we have nine women (including our three spotlight writers) and ten men. We had anticipated an equal split, but we refused to artificially force that balance. We discussed it and opted to be true to our standards and take the very best stories, independent of the author’s gender. We were delighted that more than a third of those chosen from the slush pile turned out to be women writers, and maybe that’s a fair representation of the gender split in the Horror community. One can only conjecture.
After being chosen, each of the writers underwent an intense line-editing process with us as well, and the stories were all further polished to an obsidian shine. This is something that not many anthology editors take the time to do but that we felt was an important part of our process. The resulting quality of each story was naturally enhanced with revisions done by its writer, and we're deeply proud to present them here.
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We the editors would like to say how pleased we are with the final line-up. Now, we offer them to you, our readers, with the hope that you enjoy them as much as we enjoyed choosing and editing them. We thank you for buying this copy of Deep Cuts, and thank those of you who received a copy because you supported our Kickstarter. Thank you all very much.
So, join us as we knock the needle over a few grooves to find and recommend those deep cuts by women horror writers.
Warning: Cuts May Be Deeper Than They Appear
—Angel Leigh McCoy, E.S. Magill, and Chris Marrs
Introduction
Lisa Morton
“…if our authoress can forget the gentleness of her sex, it is no reason why we should; and we shall therefore dismiss the novel without further comment.” – From The British Critic’s review of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, April 1818
“Modern female horror writers…are not as good as modern male horror writers. That is an unassailable fact.”
–From an internet discussion forum, 2009
In the nearly 200 years that have passed since the publication of Frankenstein—arguably the most important horror novel of all time—Mary Shelley would undoubtedly have been gratified to see what advances women have made in general. We’ve been granted the rights to vote and own property, birth control has given us more voice in choosing whether to conceive or not, and we are no longer confined to deciding between housewife/mother and spinsterhood. You’ll find us everywhere from your local police department to the boardrooms of major corporations.
And yet those of us who practice the craft of dark fiction sometimes still feel like it’s 1818.
Peruse any internet site where horror fiction is discussed, and you’ll invariably find the “Can women write horror?” thread. At its most tolerable, it will appear as a “List your favorite female authors!” topic; just as often, though, it’s presented as some variant of the 1818 criticism of Frankenstein—that women either are or should be too gentle to write that nasty horror stuff.
Of course, there are still plenty of men out there who don’t think women should be writing anything. Take, for instance, the esteemed literary novelist V. S. Naipaul, who believes that women live too much in “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world” to write truly worthwhile fiction (guardian.co.uk, June 02, 2011). Other genres have their own problems, which have been the stuff of much discussion among their respective communities recently: Female science fiction authors are so often stalked at gatherings that many conventions now routinely post anti-harassment statements; fantasy critics have decried their authors’ tendency to describe female characters in terms of their breast size; women who write in the comics field recently initiated legal action against an online stalker; and those who specialize in computer hacking not long ago attended a major trade show in which the event’s security made a game of passing out cards that suggested one way of earning points to get a woman to show her tits.
Ugly, isn’t it? Oh, but wait…it’s about to get much worse.
Because, as awful as all those scenarios are, and as much as they reveal that some men aren’t interested in women as anything other than sex objects, at least—in fantasy and science fiction circles—readers aren’t accustomed to picking up books that feature graphic depictions of women being viciously raped, mutilated and murdered.
Unfortunately, there really is no question that horror is the most misogynistic of literary genres. Buy and read any stack of horror books, and chances are you’ll come away wondering why any woman would ever want to write in this genre. Horror, after all, is where you’ll find “extreme fiction,” a sub-genre that is almost solely about rape, dismemberment, and killing, nearly all directed at women. Rape may follow mutilation, with those offensive arms and legs removed so that the female form is rendered down to nothing but the sexual organs (and the parts required to keep those operating). I once saw a post on a discussion board defending this obsession with rape on the basis of how horrifying it was in real life; when I responded that I could instantly think of about 973 other real-life things that were horrifying that I rarely or never saw mentioned in horror novels (including the rape of men), I killed that thread pretty quickly.
Even in books that don’t cater to these violent male fantasies, female characters are often treated in an offhand or openly derogatory way. One midlist author with a fervent fan following has used the word “bitch” so often in referring to his female characters that I was once tempted to write him and suggest that he also use “cunt,” “pussy,” “whore” (or “ho”), “twat,” “snatch,” “slit,” or “slut” just to break up the repetition.
At some point, the question must become, “Why?”
Why has the horror genre become home to such savage and blatant sexism? Part of the answer is obvious and has already been mentioned: Horror allows men the stage on which to act out their ultimate fantasies; the other end of that scale is pornography, and I have often espoused my notion that extreme fiction really should be considered pornography and not horror, because the ultimate intention is to provoke a physical reaction, not to horrify.
But beyond that, one has to wonder if men aren’t—subconsciously, deeply—threatened by the presence of women in a genre that we not only started, but are better equipped to excel in.
Yes, that’s right: I just suggested that women should make better horror writers than men. And here’s why:
Those of us born into female bodies learn from a young age to deal with fear and blood. Some of us may be molested (and yes, I know boys are molested, too, but the number of girls who suffer sexual abuse is around three times as many as boys). Some of us may grow up watching fathers abuse our mothers; most of us grow up aware of how dominant our father is. All of us who survive pre-adolescence will reach a day when we experience the shock of seeing blood gush from between our legs, only to be told this is a normal process that will occur once a month for the next forty or so years. All of us at some point or other will experience fear at the greater physical strength men wield over us (and don’t tell me that proves how right those internet pundits are about rape as a useful horror trope). If we choose to give birth, we’ll understand all too well that life begins in pain and blood. We will learn that we can only succeed by asserting ourselves, something we’ve been programmed not to do…or we’ll simply never be seen.
We, the women writers, have an intuitive grasp of the mechanics of fear and blood, in other words.
And we can look back to the women who gave birth to this genre and advanced it: Ann Radcliffe, who so perfected the art of the Gothic novel that she was known by the likes of Keats as simply “Mother Radcliffe”; Mary Shelley, who practically invented both the horror and science fiction genres; Shirley Jackson, who wrote what may just be the most famous horror story of the twentieth century, “The Lottery”; and Anne Rice, who redefined vampires—and the horror novel—forever, with Interview with the Vampire.
So, beyond those shining examples…why aren’t there more women writing
horror? If we have the nature, the nurture, and the examples that should make us the perfect horror writers, why are horror reference guides in 2012 (like the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror) noting that “horror is still a very male-dominated world” and confining the discussion of “Ladies of the Night” to five of us?
You might find a few clues lurking in the small essays on female horror writers that accompany each of the stories in Deep Cuts. Here’s a list of the authors who are cited as having influenced and inspired the contributors: Tanith Lee, May Sinclair, Diana Wynne Jones, Frances Garfield, Shirley Jackson, Roberta Lannes, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Melanie Tem, Joyce Carol Oates, Lucy Taylor, Elizabeth Massie, and Monica O'Rourke. At least three of these authors are primarily known for writing in other genres (or, in the case of Joyce Carol Oates, for writing in no genre). Several of these writers have never had a major publishing deal (at least not for their stand-alone work). I confess that I’ve never heard of May Sinclair (although I intend to seek her out now). Once again, the ladies don’t seem to have an easy path to horror fame.
More interestingly, though, at least three of these writers—Lannes, Taylor, and Massie—are mentioned for their extreme fiction, which my own experience with their work affirms can rival the most gut-churning the men have to offer. So much for the “gentler sex.”
And one of these women—Shirley Jackson—was mentioned no less than three times. The authors who admired Jackson herein all discuss how her work found horror in the ordinary (an idea that was still fresh when these authors all first read the story) and suggest once again the extraordinary importance of “The Lottery” in the history of the horror genre.
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