Monster, She Wrote

by Lisa Kröger

  2. Connie Willis has cited St. Clair: Willis is an award-winning science fiction writer, whose numerous works include To Say Nothing of the Dog (Bantam Spectra, 1997) and the Oxford Time Travel series. According to the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America website (sfwa.org), she has won more major awards than any other science fiction writer, including eleven Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards.

  3. Margaret Brundage: For more about this popular 1930s Weird Tales cover illustrator, see Antoinette Rahn, “Ten Things You Didn’t Know About: Margaret Brundage,” Antique Trader, October 3, 2017; and Stephen D. Korshak and J. David Spurlock, The Alluring Art of Margaret Brundage: Queen of Pulp Pin-Up Art (Coral Gables, FL: Vanguard, 2013).

  4. The back cover copy on a 1963 edition: Snapshots of the back cover of Sign of the Labrys can be found online accompanying Gideon Marcus’s review of the novel, “The Old School,” at Galactic Journey (galacticjourney.org), posted September 25, 2018.

  5. “The Stephen King of Alabama”: See Kelly Kazek, “Horror author Mary Counselman was the Stephen King of Alabama,” Al.com, October 22, 2015. Kazek’s article provided biographical information, as did Counselman’s obituary on findagrave.com.

  6. He now believes Gertrude Barrows Bennett deserves credit: See Gary Hoppenstand, ed., The Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), x.

  7. Lovecraft and Merritt were influenced by her work: Hoppenstand, xxiv.

  8. Published serially in Argosy Weekly: This magazine changed its name many times, from the original The Golden Argosy to Argosy Weekly, as a result of merging with different publications. For more on the history of pulp magazine publishing, see Tim DeForest, Storytelling in the Pulps, Comics, and Radio: How Technology Changed Popular Fiction in America (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004).

  9. Earlier, and perhaps the earliest, examples of parallel universes: Some critics assert that Margaret Cavendish, discussed in Part One, was the first author to write about alternate realities.

  10. One of the most popular stories of the April issue: Every issue of Weird Tales invited readers to write in and name their favorite story. The results were then tallied and published in a later issue. Colter was frequently among the favorite authors listed. Her fourth installment of “On the Dead Man’s Chest” nearly beat H. P. Lovecraft for top story in the April 1926 issue, as reported in the June 1926 issue. Her January 1927 Weird Tales story “The Last Horror” came in second for reader favorite, again behind a Lovecraft story, and was reprinted in the February 1939 issue.

  Part Five: Haunting the Home

  1. The 1944 film The Ininvited: This movie was a favorite of director Martin Scorsese. See Rodrigo Perez, “Martin Scorsese Names His 11 Scariest Horror Movies of All Time,” IndieWire.com, October 31, 2010.

  2. More negative mail than ever before: For readers’ intense reactions to Jackson’s story, see Ruth Franklin, “ ‘The Lottery’ Letters,” New Yorker, June 25, 2013.

  3. Modeled his famous haunted Overlook Hotel: In a footnote in Danse Macabre (Gallery Books, 2010; see page 297) King noted that The Shining “was written with The Sundial very much in mind.” Both King’s grand hotel and Jackson’s Hill House are isolated spaces that seem alive as they prey on their vulnerable inhabitants.

  4. Recognize similarities to her in Tremblay’s protagonist Merry: It’s easy to see the resemblance between Tremblay’s Merry and Jackson’s Merricat Blackwood; it’s right there in the name. Tremblay wrote in an August 2012 post on his blog, The Little Sleep (thelittlesleep.wordpress.com), that “Merricat is the ultimate unreliable narrator of Jackson’s masterpiece, We Have Always Lived in the Castle. And, all right, I’m kind of in love with Merricat, too.”

  5. The 1973 Nicolas Roeg–directed film: So convincing was the sex scene in Roeg’s adaptation of Don’t Look Now that some forty-five years later, in 2018, star Donald Sutherland was still answering questions about the on-screen action. “Donald Sutherland says sex scene in ‘Don’t Look Now’ wasn’t real despite rumors,” New York Daily News, January 14, 2018.

  Part Six: Paperback Horror

  1. Michael McDowell, a great and underappreciated horror writer of the late twentieth century: In addition to his Blackwater series, six volumes of Gothic horror set in the American South, McDowell also wrote the screenplay to Tim Burton’s 1988 film Beetlejuice.

  2. Every paperback needed disturbing cover art: For more on the insane cover art of paperback horror, see Grady Hendrix, Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction (Quirk Books, 2017).

  3. Little is known about her life: Biographical details for Jensen are difficult to find. We relied on obituaries for some information, like the one found at findagrave.com/memorial/61904674.

  4. “the skeleton farm,” as Zebra was sometimes called: Although the genesis of Zebra Books’ nickname is unknown, the name was widely used in the publishing industry. See Hendrix, 185.

  5. no mention of “dirty pillows” in this book: Stephen King, in our opinion, wrote the best evil mother of all in his novel Carrie (Doubleday, 1973).

  6. The Audrina series: The Audrina series includes My Sweet Audrina (New York: Pocket Books, 1982), written by Andrews, and Whitefern (New York: Pocket Books, 2016), penned by Andrews ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman.

  7. Kept her literary legacy alive through a ghostwriter: The Complete V. C. Andrews website (completevca.com) is a great source of information about the author, her career, and the ghostwriters who’ve written under her name since her death.

  Part Seven: The New Goths

  1. This term’s meaning is slippery: Just as the Gothic has always embraced the blending of genres, for example Gothic romance, the Gothic surge of recent years isn’t limited to horror fiction. See Kate Morton, The Distant Hours (New York: Atria, 2010) and Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry (New York: Scribner, 2009). These authors follow the Southern Gothic literary tradition of writers like Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor.

  2. Rice was skeptical of the decision to cast Cruise as the lead character: See Judy Brenna, “Rice’s About-Face: Cruise Is Lestat: After Screening ‘Interview With the Vampire,’ Author Lauds His Work,” Los Angeles Times, September 21, 1994.

  3. caused the gossip mills to turn: See Richard Eden, “Husband of The Woman in Black author Susan Hill exits, stage left,” Telegraph, December 8, 2013.

  4. representing lesbians in fiction: See “Author Sarah Waters on being that ‘lesbian writer,’ ” Wales Online, October 1, 2011; and “ ‘It was an electric time to be gay’: Sarah Waters on 20 years of Tipping the Velvet,” Guardian, January 20, 2018.

  5. the white-haired fairy godmother you always wished you had: See “Margaret Atwood: By the Book,” New York Times, November 25, 2015.

  6. raised by a great-grandmother: See Gomez’s interview with Rochelle Spencer, “Of Afrofuturism and Social Change,” Gay and Lesbian Review, June 21, 2016.

  Part Eight: The Future of Horror and Speculative Fiction

  1. Horror was “having a renaissance”: See Bill Sheehan, “Horror novels are having a renaissance. Here’s what to read,” Washington Post, October 6, 2018.

  2. Their plots are more in step with lives of modern readers: This trend is not limited to books. A notable addition to the vampire canon is the award-winning 2014 Iranian vampire film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night by writer and director Ana Lily Amirpour. Variety described Amirpour’s film as a “Middle Eastern feminist vampire romance,” proving that the vampire is well equipped to cross—in this case, by skateboarding in a hijab—genres and refuses to be limited to any mold. Guy Lodge, “Sundance Film Review: ‘A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,’ ” Variety, January 24, 2014.

  3. “plenty of serious snark”: Stephen King’s shared his thoughts on Kepnes’s debut novel on his Twitter feed on December 15, 2014. In a follow-up to her reply, he added “Hope you’re working on a new one.”
/>   Suggested Reading

  It quickly became clear to us when writing this book is that there are too many women writers of horror fiction to include in a single volume, and we had to sacrifice many of our favorites simply for the sake of space. If you’re wondering what to read next, we can help.

  General Reading

  A good starting resource is the Ladies of Horror Fiction online directory (ladiesofhorrorfiction.com), which features an extensive list of women authors. We also recommend the Graveyard Shift Sisters website, which is dedicated to women of color who write horror and science fiction (graveyardshiftsisters.com).

  To find your new favorite author, anthologies are a good bet, especially those devoted to, or including, female writers. If speculative fiction interests you, try the anthology Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology, edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer (PM Press, 2015); this includes writing by Octavia Butler and Joanna Russ. Lisa Yaszek edited The Future Is Female!: 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin (Library of America, 2018). Although not exclusively female-focused, Jeff and Ann VanderMeer have edited two anthologies on weird fiction that include great stories by women writers: The Weird (Tor Books, 2012) and The New Weird (Tachyon, 2008).

  Sycorax’s Daughters (Cedar Grove Publishing, 2017) is a Stoker Award–nominated anthology showcasing African American writers, edited by Kinitra Brooks, Linda D. Addison, and Susana Morris. We also enjoyed Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora edited by Sheree Renée Thomas (Warner Books, 2000), which includes stories from Nalo Hopkinson, Tananarive Due, Linda Addison, and many more. In June 2015, Lightspeed Magazine released a special issue, titled Queers Destroy Science Fiction! and guest edited by Seanan McGuire, that featured some great authors.

  We relied on Eric Leif Davin’s Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926–1965 (Lexington Books, 2005), a nonfiction book about women who created many of the stories in the pulp magazines of the mid-twentieth century. If pulp horror is more your speed, we highly recommend Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction (Quirk Books, 2017).

  Specific Authors and Topics

  Much of the biographical information for the British authors profiled in this book came from the Orlando Project (orlando.cambridge.org), an online resource available by subscription from Cambridge University focused on women’s writing in the British Isles.

  Margaret Cavendish: Forgotten Women: The Writers by Zing Tsjeng (Cassell Illustrated, 2018). An explanation of Cavendish’s philosophies can be found in The Well-Ordered Universe by Deborah Boyle (Oxford University Press, 2017).

  Ann Radcliffe: Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe by Rictor Norton (Leicester University Press, 1999).

  The Year Without a Summer: For more on the bizarre weather events of 1816, see William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman’s book The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History (St. Martin’s Press, 2013).

  Frankenstein: Charles E. Robinson edited The Frankenstein Notebooks: A Facsimile Edition of Mary Shelley’s Novel, 1816–17 (Parts One and Two) (Garland, 1996), which shows the drafts of the novel, along with notes written by both Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley that reveal the changes and edits suggested by each.

  Christmas Ghost Stories: Find the spirit of the season in The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories, vols. 1–3 (Valancourt Books, 2016–18).

  Elizabeth Gaskell: Mrs. Gaskell: Haunts, Homes and Stories by Mrs. Ellis H. Chadwick (Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1913).

  Charlotte Riddle: The Collected Ghost Stories of Mrs. J. H. Riddell (Dover, 1977). Riddell’s magazine career is detailed in the book Riddell’s City Novels and Victorian Business: Narrating Capitalism by Silvana Colella (Routledge, 2016).

  Pauline E. Hopkins: See the Biography section at the Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society website (paulinehopkinssociety.org).

  Vernon Lee: Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography by Vineta Cole (University of Virginia Press, 2003). We also appreciated the Stuff You Missed in History Class podcast episode titled “Vernon Lee” from October 8, 2018, which can be found online at https://www.missedinhistory.com/podcasts/vernon-lee.htm.

  Edith Wharton: The biography Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee (Knopf Doubleday, 2008).

  Alice Aksew: Biographical info for the Askews can be found in The Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction edited by Sandra Kemp, Charlotte Mitchell, and David Trotter (Oxford University Press, 2002).

  Dion Fortune: See Gareth Knight’s edition of her letters The Magical Battle of Britain (Skylight Press, 2012).

  Margaret Brundage: Stephen D. Korshak and J. David Spurlock’s The Alluring Art of Margaret Brundage: Queen of Pulp Pin-Up Art (Vanguard, 2013). Also Steven Heller’s “The Revenge of Margaret Brundage” in the Atlantic (January 31, 2013), and Susan Karlin’s “Weird Tales: Meet Margaret Brundage, The First Lady of Pulp Pinup Art” in Fast Company (May 7, 2013).

  Catherine Lucille Moore: Biographical information can be found on the blog Tellers of Weird Tales (tellersofweirdtales.blogspot.com) and in “The Many Names of Catherine Lucille Moore” by Andrew Liptak in Kirkus Reviews (February 7, 2013).

  Toni Morrison: Conversations with Toni Morrison, edited by Danille K. Taylor-Guthrie (University Press of Mississippi, 1994).

  Elizabeth Engstrom: Much of the biographical information came from Engstrom’s website (elizabethengstrom.com). Some also came from “Evil Eighties: The Creepy Nursery Rhymes of Elizabeth Engstrom” by Grady Hendrix (Tor.com, March 6, 2015).

  Jewelle Gomez: You’ll find a great entry on Gomez written by Josie A. Brown-Rose in Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers, edited by Yolanda Williams Page (Greenwood Press, 2007). Also see Ezra Kronfeld’s article “Jewelle Gomez on Queer Activism, Feminism, and Founding GLAAD” in Out Front (January 12, 2018).

  Index

  The index links provided will take you to the beginning of the corresponding page of the print edition. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader.

  A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

  Index of Works

  Affinity (Waters)

  “Afterward” (Wharton)

  Agents of Dreamland (Kiernan)

  Akata Warrior (Okorafor)

  Akata Witch (Okorafor), c41.1, c45.1

  “All Souls” (Wharton)

  All Souls trilogy (Harkness)

  “Amour Dure” (Lee)

  Annabelle (Jensen)

  “Ann Mellor’s Lover” (Bowen)

  Apartment, The (Grey), c44.1

  “Les aventures d’une pièce de monnaie” (Lee)

  Aylmer Vance: Ghost-Seer (Askew), c16.1

  Baby Dolly (Jensen)

  Bad Brains (Koja)

  Bad Man’s Trail (Colter)

  Barbara’s History (Edwards)

  Beauty Is (Engstrom), c29.1, c29.2

  Belcaro (Lee)

  “Beleaguered City, A” (Oliphant)

  Beleaguered City and Other Tales of the Seen and Unseen, A (Oliphant), c12.1

  Beloved (Morrison), c24.1, c28.1, c28.2

  “Bewitched” (Wharton), c13.1, c13.2

  Binti (Okorafor), c41.1, c45.1

  “Bird, The” (St. Clair)

  Bird of Night, The (Hill), c38.1

  “Bird of Space, The” (Worrell)

  “Birds, The” (du Maurier)

  Birthgrave, The (Lee), c35.1, c35.2

  Bishop of Hell and Other Stories, The (Bowen), c14.1, c14.2

  Black Helicopters (Kiernan)

  Black Magic: A Tale of the Rise and Fall of the Antichrist (Bowen), c14.1

  Blazing World, The (Cavendish), c01.1
/>   “Bloodchild” (Butler)

  Blood on the Range (Colter)

  Bloody Chamber, The (Carter), c40.1

  “Blue Lenses” (du Maurier)

  Bluest Eye, The (Morrison), c28.1

  Body (Nonami)

  Bohemian Glass (Lawrence)

  Bones & Ash (Gomez)

  Boy, Snow, Bird (Oyeyemi), c37.1

  “Brenda” (St. Clair)

  Bridge of Wonder, The (Lawrence), c17.1

  “Brightness Falls from the Air” (St. Clair)

  Broken Monsters (Beukes)

  Brotherhood of the Seven Kings, The (Meade and Eustace), c15.1

  Brown Girl in the Ring (Hopkinson)

  Butterfly Garden, The (Hutchinson), c46.1

  Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession (Rice), c36.1

  “Canal, The” (Worrell), c23.1, c23.2

  Candyland (Engstrom)

  Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, The (Radcliffe), c02.1

  Children of the Abbey, The (Roche), c04.1, c04.2

  Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder, The (Fischmann), c30.1

  Cipher, The (Koja), c33.1, c33.2

  Citadel of Fear, The (Bennett), c22.1, c22.2

  Claimed! (Bennett)

  Clermont (Roche)

  “Cold Gray God, The” (Moore)

  Collected Ghost Stories of Mrs. J. H. Riddell, The (Riddell), c08.1

  Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Amelia B. Edwards, The (Edwards), c09.1

  Come Along with Me (Jackson)