From Frankenstein’s monster, purportedly dreamed up by Mary Shelley following a night of ghost stories at the poet Lord Byron’s Swiss chateau, to the corrupted domesticity of Shirley Jackson’s short fiction and her classic haunted house novel The Haunting of Hill House to the groundbreaking vampires of Anne Rice, women have always been significant contributors to the horror genre.
Yet a belief persists, even among creators and fans, that it’s largely a genre for men. It doesn’t help that what is perceived to be “horror” is today dominated by the imagery of movie sub-genres, with the slasher films of the 80s, which birthed the so-called “torture porn” of the 00s, still prominent in most mainstream impressions of the field. Women are so often the victims in these offerings it’s little wonder that it’s perceived as a field tainted with an unhealthy dose of misogyny. (See Carol J. Clover’s seminal Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Field, for a feminist take on these tropes.)
“I don’t like horror,” women sometimes say to me, and yet they are happy to read and watch supernatural fiction and film; what they often really means is, “I don’t like endless loving depictions of women tortured, mutilated, raped, and generally victimized, with no seeming point to it all.”
It’s not all the fault of the movies, though. Some horror fiction—going all the way back to some of the more downmarket pulps of the 1920s and 1930s—exploits and revels in detailed descriptions of violence (particularly sexual violence) against women.
But let’s face it—we’re talking about horror fiction here, not nice stories of people sitting around drinking tea and wondering who’s going to get married next. Slasher films and serial killers and buckets of gore have their place; I’m always up for, say, a screening of a good Italian giallo, and you want to watch Human Centipede Eleventy-Thousand or Hostel 35 (both franchises which revel, incidentally, in savagery against both men and women—maybe we can call that progress?), knock yourself out. (Although I probably won’t turn up for that particular film fest.)
What I object to is the suggestion that horror is a very limited genre—that it’s inherently misogynistic—most of all, that women don’t read, write, or watch it.
Or: only certain types of horror appeal to women. (Horror stirred with a heavy flavoring of sex and romance! Horror focused on home and children and family! Quiet horror, with all the violence happening off the page!) That women can’t write “dark enough” fiction, or that somehow being “dark enough” in the first place (which is sometimes a euphemism for “can you depict rape and torture as lovingly as the boys can?”) qualifies one as a “real” fan and writer of horror.
In the interest of dispelling all these notions, in hopes of giving a better sense of the scope of this field, and to round out your autumn reading list, I asked some women who write in the horror genre to recommend some work by women writers they enjoy. I got replies from writers in Canada, Australia, Britain, Ireland, and the US. Because my deadline was tight and I did want responses, I asked people to just send me a title or two if that was all they had time for; I was delighted with the enthusiasm with which they all replied, and so I’m including all the answers in full. Their recommendations range from the subtle to the savage and span nearly two hundred years of horror fiction
Everyone I asked is a terrifically accomplished writer as well; be sure to check out their work too. And now I’ll let their words and recommendations speak for themselves.
SARAH LANGAN
Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan
Illyria by Elizabeth Hand
Sarah Langan’s website: http://www.sarahlangan.com/.
KAARON WARREN
Deborah Biancotti, whose fiction is collected in A Book of Endings, from Twelfth Planet Press.
Lucy Sussex, whose fiction appears in many places, most recently in Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies, from Ticonderoga Publications.
Margo Lanagan, a terrifying writer whose novel, Tender Morsels, is brilliant.
Anna Tambour, a writer who is always surprising and whose work can be found in many places. Her most recent collection is Monterra's Deliciosa from Infinity Plus.
Livia Llewellyn, whose fiction is collected in Engines of Desire, from Lethe Press.
Chesya Burke, whose fiction is collected in Let's Play White, from Apex Publications.
Sarah Pinborough, who writes some heartbreaking work, including PS Publishing's The Language of Dying.
Some of the women writers I adore from a previous era are:
Celia Fremlin, author of many short stories, including By Horror Haunted.
Daphne Du Maurier, especially Rebecca but also The Scapegoat.
Elizabeth Walter, whose work was collected in the wonderful The Sin Eater.
I have two short story collections in print, The Grinding House, from CSFG Publishing, and Dead Sea Fruit, from Ticonderoga Publications. My three novels are all from Angry Robot Books: Slights, Walking the Tree and Mistification. I've always written the sorts of stories I love to read; if I don't feel disturbed or moved in some way when researching or writing a story, I'll give it up.
Kaaron Warren’s website: http://kaaronwarren.wordpress.com/
MAURA McHUGH
Audrey's Door (2009) by Sarah Langan. Set in modern Manhattan the story follows young architect Audrey Lucas as she moves into an apartment after leaving her boyfriend. Her new digs are in an architectural novelty, The Breviary, a building created with the theories of Chaotic Naturalism. The building is populated by weird and scary tenants, and as time goes on Audrey is increasingly affected by the palpable, malevolent presence of the building and the activities of its occupants. Stressed by work, her break-up and memories of her destructive mother, Audrey begins to believe she must build a new door in her apartment... but what will come through if she opens it? This psychologically powerful, haunting novel marks her a stellar talent in the horror market.
Maura McHugh lives in Ireland and has been a horror fan all her life. She's the writer of the comic books Róisín Dubh and Jennifer Wilde, which are published by Atomic Diner in Ireland, and her short stories have appeared in publications in the USA and the UK. She's had one short script filmed, and was the co-organiser of the Campaign for Real Fear short story competition. She is a member of the jury for the 2010 Shirley Jackson Awards for horror fiction.
Maura McHugh’s website: http://splinister.com/
GEMMA FILES
I'd probably start off with the Dell Abyss line novels of Kathe Koja (The Cipher, Bad Brains, Strange Angels), particularly Skin (1993), which I consider her masterpiece in both content and execution. There’s nothing supernatural in it at all; it’s a story of interlocking obsessions, of two artists—one into body-modification to the point of transhumanism, the other a sculptor who crafts a series of animatronic, increasingly dangerous pseudo-robots—whose artistic ambitions and desires both enable and destroy their relationship and (eventually) each other.
Then there's another Dell Abyss book, Wilding (1992), by Melanie Tem. Perhaps the grossest and most body-driven werewolf story ever told, built around the struggle for supremacy in an all-female pack. The first chapter is a tour-de-force which I don't think has been topped since, and things just get more and more bleak, more and more crazy, as the book careens to its delirious climax. (Interestingly, though it pre-dates yet pre-figures the "The Curse as a curse" Ginger Snaps movies so perfectly, I don't believe their original screenwriter Karen Walton has ever read it.)
Finally, there's always Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls (also 1992), first published (strangely enough) as yet another Dell Abyss book. Now known as “Doc,” Brite abandoned horror over a decade ago after reaching an apex with her dementedly precise fin-de-siecle serial killers-in-love book Exquisite Corpse, which posits a cannibalistic/necrophile spree through New Orleans co-piloted by a not-quite-Jeffrey Dahmer type vs. a not-quite-Dennis Nilsen type. But Lost Souls sets the template for her specific brand of decadent, poetic, utterly ruthless horror, grabbing the Anne Rice “suffering, angelic killer” vampire trope and turning it inside out like she's printing a waterlogged corpse's hands.
For my money, one of the prime ladies to have continued along the path charted by these three is Caitlin R. Kiernan, whose latest book—The Drowning Girl: A Memoir—is right at the top of my Give It To Me Right Now list. See also Livia Llewellyn, Kaaron Warren and that eternally-young witch-queen Tanith Lee, with a side-order of creepy surrealists like Helen Oyeyemi, Kelly Link and Karen Joy Fowler. And for a real blast from the past, check out the Virago Book(s) of Ghost Stories or go straight to the work of one of their best featured authors, Vernon Lee, whose antiquarian tales of tortured love and psychological undoing rival M.R. James’.
Gemma Files' first novel, A Book of Tongues: Volume One of the Hexslinger Series, won the DarkScribe Magazine Black Quill award for Best Small Press Chill award, and was nominated for both a Bram Stoker award and a Gaylactic Spectrum award. She followed it with A Rope of Thorns, and is currently hard at work on the trilogy's conclusion, A Tree of Bones.
NANCY KILPATRICK
Elizabeth Massie. Beth Massie is a writer who can be counted on to always come up with a peculiar and unique angle on a story. One of my all-time favorites of hers is the short fiction "Abed" in the anthology Still Dead.
Gemma Files. Gemma is so sharp with word choices that reading her work is staggering. She is writing three books under the banner of the Hexslinger Series, and so far the first and second are out. I particularly love her short story "The Emperor's Old Bones", which blew me away.
Nancy Kilpatrick is an award-winning writer and editor of horror, dark fantasy, mysteries and erotic horror. She has 17 novels published, around 200 short stories and is just now editing her 12th anthology, Danse Macabre: Close Encounters of the Reaper, which will be out in 2012. She also has a new collection of short stories out in 2012 called Vampyric Variations. She's on Facebook, where you can join her, and her website is nancykilpatrick.com
ALLYSON BIRD
Horror is ‘any medium which intends to scare, unsettle or horrify.’ Think about original fairy tales for children - quite gruesome sometimes, told perhaps as a warning to children and so for didactic reasons there is the good old fashioned ghost story too. Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol (by the end of that tale Scrooge indeed treated people a little better). Oscar Wilde...The Picture of Dorian Gray. There are always consequences for usurping the natural order of things. Be careful what you wish for- for indeed it may come true; “The Monkey's Paw” by W. W. Jacobs comes to mind. Fear of the unknown and 'the other' in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.But to narrow it down…take the last author named in the above and add Shirley Jackson. Fear of 'the other' is written about time and time again through the years.
Shirley Jackson and We Have Always Lived In The Castle followed by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (a book which has influenced a novel I have recently written). The strange, shunned family of the former and the terrifying creature of the latter. So we have the people in the village not only avoiding the family but then attacking where they live and in Frankenstein again the villagers do a similar thing…quite understandably with regard to Shelley's monster. By the end of each of these novels I'm left with conflicting feelings about just who/what is/are the real perpetrators and what drove them to their crimes.
Allyson Bird now lives in the Wairarapa, New Zealand, with her husband and young daughter. Occasionally she is drawn to strange places and people and they are occasionally drawn to her. Her favourite playground, as a child and adult, had been the village graveyard. Once she wondered what would happen if she took one of the green stones from a grave. She has been looking over her shoulder ever since but has never given it back.
Allyson Bird’s website: www.birdsnest.me.uk