Monster, She Wrote

by Lisa Kröger

  The narrator is a doctor named Faraday who constantly reflects on his working-class roots and the sacrifices his parents made for him to become a physician. During his childhood he developed a preoccupation with the Ayres family, at whose estate, Hundreds Hall, his mother worked. His obsession continues into adulthood, when he becomes the family’s doctor. In the course of treating Roderick Ayres’s physical and mental wounds from the war, Faraday realizes the family cannot afford to keep Hundreds Hall up to its former glory. He then proceeds to overstep the bounds of his professional role: he pursues Caroline Ayres romantically, discounts the family’s plans to escape their debt, and simultaneously dismisses their fears of supernatural attack from the home.

  Waters builds suspense gradually; each member of the family faces a separate supernatural embodiment of their past and their fears. Dr. Faraday is an unreliable narrator, so the reader is always guessing at what’s happening. Many of the book’s supernatural events can be categorized as what ghost story scribe M. R. James called “the malice of inanimate objects.” Ordinary items become projectile weapons; strange writing emerges from the plaster. A seemingly harmless Labrador retriever is psychically affected by the disturbing environment, as are other animals and people. The Little Stranger was a New York Times best seller, and Stephen King wrote that “several sleepless nights are guaranteed.”

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: Our favorite Waters novel is The Little Stranger, which was adapted for the screen in 2018, starring Domhnall Gleeson and Ruth Wilson. Read the book, and then watch the movie. Let the chills linger.

  Also try: Waters wrote a historical novel in 2006 called The Night Watch (Virago), which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. The novel follows a group of people—two lesbians, a straight woman, and her brother—whose lives interconnect in World War II–era London. The horror comes from the realities of life in wartime. A television adaptation was made for BBC2, starring Claire Foy and Jodie Whittaker. In 2014, Waters released The Paying Guests (Virago), a part satire, part drama, with more than a little sex appeal, set in post–World War I England. The Sunday Times named it “fiction book of the year.”

  Related work: Fans of Waters who appreciate her ability to develop characters’ relationships against a historical setting might enjoy Frog Music (Little, Brown, 2014), set in 1876 San Francisco, by Emma Donoghue, who is the author of the thriller Room (Little, Brown, 2010).

  Teller of Bloody Fables

  Angela Carter

  1940–1992

  The arts and entertainment blog Vulture has called her “the feminist horror author you need to read immediately.” Joyce Carol Oates, Jeff VanderMeer, and Neil Gaiman, among many others, have cited her as an influence. The horror author Brian McGreevy wrote that his novel Hemlock Grove (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) “was one extended piece of Angela Carter fan-fiction.”

  That might be enough to convince you to read her books. Nevertheless, let’s talk about Angela Carter.

  Born in 1940 in Eastbourne, England, Angela Olive Stalker—which admittedly is a better last name for a horror writerr—grew up in a middle-class family. Her father was a night editor for a newspaper and her mother was attentive…sometimes too attentive for the rebellious Angela, who longed for a life outside her family’s home. She married Paul Carter when she was nineteen years old; in 1972 they divorced. She later married Mark Pearce, with whom she had a son. As a child, she was shy; as an adult, she was the opposite. She traveled. She pursued a career as a journalist. And she reveled in the freedom she found while exploring writing in the 1960s.

  Carter cannot be pinned down in a single genre and is known for writing unconventional fiction and nonfiction. Feminist views of sex and the female body are recurring themes in her work; for example, her nonfiction book The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (Pantheon Books, 1978) examines the writings of the Marquis de Sade through a feminist lens.

  Carter’s best-known collection of stories is The Bloody Chamber (Gollancz, 1979), all of which are based on traditional fairy tales. In her 2006 introduction to the collection, the author Helen Simpson discusses Carter’s love for ornate stories—what Carter described as “Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of wonder, tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unconscious”—over humdrum accounts of everyday life. Simpson also cites Carter’s complaints about how her work was interpreted. Carter insisted that she did not intend to create “versions” of fairy tales, or fairy tales rewritten for adults. She wanted, rather, to “extract the latent content from the traditional stories and to use it as the beginnings of new stories.” In other words, she wanted to use fairy tales as thematic inspirations for her original, contemporary stories.

  The Bloody Chamber was groundbreaking upon its release in the late 1970s, and it inspired numerous writers to pursue magical or speculative fiction. To quote Helen Simpson again, the collection is “a multi-faceted glittering diamond reflecting and refracting a variety of portraits of desire and sexuality—heterosexual female sexuality—which, unusually for the time, 1979, are told from a heterosexual female viewpoint.” Simpson also notes that Carter would later come under fire for that focus on heterosexual relationships. The book has since become a staple of British and American high school and university classrooms.

  What Big Eyes You Have

  The stories in The Bloody Chamber are of varying length. The title story clocks in around forty pages; others are more like sketches, although potent ones. For example, “The Snow Child” may be just a few pages long, but its tale of a magical girl born from snow bites as fiercely as the rose that spells doom for the titular character. The lush descriptions of the worlds Carter creates sharply contrast with intense moments of physical, sexual, and emotional violence. Her multiple reworkings of Little Red Riding Hood, “The Werewolf,” “The Company of Wolves,” and “Wolf-Alice,” upend readers’ expectations of the familiar story: women are sometimes victims, sometimes not, as they grasp at unknown powers and reserves of courage. The wolf stories never turn out well for Granny, but Little Red at times finds herself in a better place by the end. Sometimes she gets a house; sometimes she prospers; sometimes she sleeps soundly. Sometimes she doesn’t.

  Carter’s style may be best classified as “feminist revisionist.” In her novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (Picaresque Fiction, 1972), she reimagines the Doctor Faustus legend less as horror and more as surrealist fiction, or perhaps surrealist weird fiction. The book cemented Carter as one of the strongest literary feminist voices of the twentieth century. In an article for the Atlantic published in 2017, forty-five years after the novel’s release, the author Jeff VanderMeer said that it “still [feels] fresh and dangerous today.”

  Another testament to Carter’s enduring legacy: In 2015, a New York Times reporter asked Margaret Atwood who she would invite to a literary dinner party. Among Atwood’s picks was Angela Carter, saying: “What an inexhaustible source of strange details and worldly wisdom she was. How instructive, how fundamentally helpful. How like the white-haired fairy godmother you always wished you had.”

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: The Bloody Chamber should be first on any reader’s Angela Carter list. Each fairy tale is as horrific and thought-provoking (and sometimes disarmingly sexy) as the last. Carter’s version of Little Red Riding Hood was adapted to film in 1984 as The Company of Wolves. Carter wrote the screenplay with the director Neil Jordan, and the movie starred Angela Lansbury as the grandmother.

  Also try: In 1984 Carter published Nights at the Circus (Chatto & Windus, 1984), a novel about an aerialist who tells people she hatched from an egg. The story follows a fairy-tale structure and has a good dose of postfeminist magical realism, much like The Bloody Chamber, but the tone is not as dark. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and was adapted as a play. Carter returned to
the setting of the theater in her last novel, Wise Children (Chatto & Windus, 1991), which also plays with magical realism and the carnivalesque. In 2016, Chatto & Windus published The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography by Edmund Gordon.

  Related work: Werewolf fans may enjoy St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (Knopf, 2007), a story collection by Karen Russell about nuns, wolf-girls, and alligators set in the Florida swamps.

  If dark fantasy and horror mixed with the carnivalesque is your brand of fiction, we suggest Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love (Knopf, 1989), the story of a traveling circus and the family of freaks that thrives there. Word of warning: although the novel is a cult classic and a perennial favorite among writers and readers, it’s not for the faint of heart. It is a moving story that challenges perceptions of what is odd and what is normal.

  Afrofuturist Horrorist

  Jewelle Gomez

  1948–

  What do queer activism and vampires have in common? Turns out, a lot.

  Jewelle Gomez was born in 1948 in Boston and raised by a great-grandmother who was Native American (of Ioway heritage) and African American. Gomez attended Northwestern University, where she first became involved in the civil rights movement. She began her long career as an activist and worked in public television in Boston. In 1971 she moved to New York, where she earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. Gomez conducted research and interviews for the 1982–83 PBS documentary series Before Stonewall, which told the history of queer communities prior to the 1969 riots that kickstarted the gay rights movement. She was also one of the original writers for the PBS educational show The Electric Company. In 1984 she sat on the founding board of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD); she also sat on the boards of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation, the Open Meadows Foundation, and the Human Sexuality Archives of Cornell University. Her résumé includes working to legalize gay marriage in California, where in 2008 she married her partner, Dr. Diane Sabin. Gomez was sixty years old at the time of their wedding, though she had known Sabin since the early 1980s. According to the couple’s wedding announcement in the New York Times (published October 31, 2008), Gomez knew that she and Sabin were valuable to the movement, saying, “We had an important face to put on this issue. Would you tell your grandmother she doesn’t have the right to marry?”

  In addition to her extensive activist work, Gomez is the author of seven books. Her vampire novel, The Gilda Stories (Firebrand Books, 1991) offers an inspired take on the age-old horror trope. Unlike previous popular vampires, Gilda is a woman, she is black, and she is a lesbian.

  Through Gilda’s journey from life as a runaway slave girl to eternal life as a vampire, Gomez takes the reader through the history of African Americans from the nineteenth-century plantations of Louisiana and Mississippi to the dystopian Earth of the year 2050. By presenting a progressive, and transgressive, future that is both distinctly feminine and black, The Gilda Stories became an important pillar in the Afrofuturism genre. Afrofuturist literature and film imagine a future that not only includes people of color but is shaped by African and African American identity and culture. Examples range from the work of the poet and musician Sun Ra to the novels of Octavia Butler to the 2018 superhero film Black Panther to the music of Janelle Monáe.

  Gomez’s portrayal of vampires focuses on issues of race, gender, and sexual consent, as well as the beauty and terror of a life that does not end. Rather than existing as isolated predators, most of her vampires create communities to stave off loneliness and seek to live life on their own terms for as long as they choose. Their relationships, both with one another and with humans, are long and powerful, and they practice a nonviolent way of taking blood from humans. These vampires may be as hungry as Stoker’s iconic count, but they use their superior physical and mental powers to protect humans and leave them with a gift in gratitude for the snack. As Gomez repeated in Bones & Ash (1996), her theatrical adaptation of The Gilda Stories that was performed by the New York–based dance troupe Urban Bush Women: “We take blood, not life, and leave something in exchange.” While writing Gilda, Gomez worried that the popular Bela Lugosi–style image of the vampire was so entrenched in the collective consciousness that her creations might seem too strange, but she was heartened by the example of Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction.

  In a foreword to a 2016 edition of The Gilda Stories, Gomez describes an experience of being verbally abused by two men while in a phone booth in Manhattan. Feeling her isolation and powerlessness, she exploded in anger at the strangers, who in turn accused her of overreacting to their lewd threats. The experience inspired her to write the first chapter of her novel. In Gilda, she envisioned a woman who gains the ultimate power over life and death yet still lives in a world hostile to her gender, skin color, and sexuality.

  Gilda may be an immortal creature, but she looks like a woman. Plus, she must adhere to the rules of vampires: she needs to avoid human food and feed on blood at night; she must carry the soil of her homeland with her; she must sleep during the day to avoid direct sunlight. She and Gomez’s other vampires worry about many big issues that we mortals contemplate: life, family, community, and memory. But they also live for centuries and experience more than is possible in a human lifespan.

  In a 1991 Ms. magazine article Gomez said that she created Gilda as a direct contrast to “exploitative and patriarchal” elements in horror. In correcting the wrongs she saw so clearly, Gomez created something completely new.

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: The Gilda Stories is Gomez’s best-known foray into horror. An expanded twenty-fifth anniversary edition was published in 2016 by City Lights Publishers, at which time several literary luminaries praised the novel for its groundbreaking reimagining of the vampire myth, including Sarah Waters, Dorothy Allison, and Tananarive Due. In 2018, 13th Gen, a San Francisco–based independent film company, acquired the rights to the work for a possible television show.

  Also try: Gomez’s other Afrofuturist writing includes the collection of stories Don’t Explain: Short Fiction (Firebrand Books, 1998), in which she imagines a dark future America where the government is a corporation; the book also contains a story that continues Gilda’s adventures.

  Fans of verse should check out Gomez’s three volumes of poetry: The Lipstick Papers (Grace Publications, 1980), Flamingoes and Bears (Grace Publications, 1986), and Oral Tradition (Firebrand Books, 1995).

  Theater fans may be interested to know that Gomez, with Harry Waters Jr., wrote Waiting for Giovanni, a play that examines a brief moment in the life of author James Baldwin. Literary figures like Lorraine Hansberry and Richard Wright are characters in the play, which is set in 1957 in New York and Paris. Waiting for Giovanni debuted in 2011 in San Francisco.

  Related work: Readers of The Gilda Stories will see similarities to Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (Seven Stories Press, 2005), about another unusual vampire who looks like an African American girl, though she is, of course, much older. Butler’s book Kindred (Doubleday, 1979) is a time travel story featuring a young African American woman who journeys from the present day to a nineteenth-century Southern slave plantation. Her short story “Bloodchild,” originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine in 1984 and later collected in Bloodchild and Other Stories (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1995) is about pregnant men on an alien planet; it won numerous awards.

  Another author who draws comparisons to Gomez is Nalo Hopkinson. Her novel The Salt Roads (Grand Central Publishing, 2003) tells of a goddess who possesses various female main characters in the course of freeing an enslaved African nation. Her earlier novel Brown Girl in the Ring (Warner Aspect, 1998) is a dystopian postapocalyptic story set in Toronto that follows the struggles of a young mother named Ti-Jeanne. She lives with her grandmother and must come to terms with this powerful woman who holds the family’s past and continues to practice cultural healing knowl
edge in their community.

  Nnedi Okorafor’s novella Binti (Tor, 2015) and its sequels, Home (Tor, 2017) and The Night Masquerade (Tor, 2018), are wonderful examples of what science fiction can be when it includes the African diasporic experience. The heroine of this Nigerian American author’s trilogy is a young African woman who has been accepted to an elite interstellar university and must discover her potential without forgetting her family and home. Okorafor’s Akata Witch (Viking, 2011) tackles the same kind of African diasporic material, but this time imagines it for a young adult audience. The fantasy involves a group of magical teens of the “Leopard people” in Nigeria. The series continues with the prequel Akata Warrior (Viking, 2017), which won a 2018 Locus Award. It would seem that fantasy stories with Afrofuturist twists are Okorafor’s sweet spot; in 2018 she wrote Shuri, the Marvel comic that tells the story of Black Panther’s genius sister.

  “Murder was as much a part of their hunger as the blood.

  —“Chicago 1927”

  As the previous chapters have proven, women authors have been writing horror fiction since the birth of the genre. And they’ve kept the category moving, contributing to the various offshoots and subcategories and innovating along the way.