Monster, She Wrote

by Lisa Kröger

  And is it ever moving! In 2018, the Washington Post proclaimed that horror was “having a renaissance.” Readers are reaching for horror and speculative fiction more and more, and books by women are lining their bookshelves. Also in 2018, Kelly Link, a writer of speculative and science fiction (among other things), was named a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship. This was two years after her collection of sometimes dark and always magical short stories Get in Trouble (Random House) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

  Let us repeat: a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer finalist. Fiction, let alone the speculative, horror, and weird varieties, doesn’t get much more acclaim than that.

  Yet there’s still an attitude that these kinds of stories are the territory of male writers. In October 2018, the horror film producer Jason Blum, whose production company, Blumhouse, is responsible for Paranormal Activity, The Purge, and Get Out, nearly started a Twitter war when he told the gaming website Polygon.com that “there are not a lot of female directors period, and even less who are inclined to do horror.” To be fair, Blum also said that he wanted to hire a female director—which the Twitterverse answered with name after name to contact. The debate was so heated that Variety responded with an article by Rachel Yang titled “15 Horror Directors Jason Blum Can Add to His List.” Harper’s Bazaar, the Atlantic, Vulture, and the Washington Post, among other outlets, also published responses expressing support for female horror writers and directors. Blum apologized on Twitter, and in December 2018, Blumhouse announced the hire of director Sophia Takal.

  This online debate is indicative of the paradox facing women writers and other creatives. There seems to be an unspoken assumption that women aren’t interested in horror and speculative fiction, despite ample evidence to the contrary.

  An example of both the renewed interest in the genre and the influx of women writers drawn to it is Carmen Maria Machado. Her breathtaking, and heartbreaking, collection Her Body and Other Parties (Serpent’s Tail, 2017) was critically well received and is reportedly being adapted for a television series by FX. The story “The Husband Stitch” begins with a parenthetical instruction for the voices one should use if reading the text aloud. Her direction for enunciating the character “me” reads: “as a child, high-pitched, forgettable; as a woman, the same.”

  These lines make the reader immediately aware of gender, which Machado deals with quite a bit in her work, particularly in representing how women are perceived in a misogynistic culture. In an interview with the Paris Review (October 3, 2017), Machado said, “Horror is one of my favorite genres because it’s so limber…horror can be a very transgressive space.”

  Machado uses the genre, much in the same way Angela Carter did, to push traditional stories in new directions. In “The Husband Stitch” she plays with the form of urban legends and tales told aloud around a campfire. The story deals with a young woman’s first sexual experience, as well as men’s desire to control women and women’s desire to withhold parts of their experience from men—if only to maintain some power and autonomy. “Eight Bites” touches upon body image; “Inventory” takes a look at one woman’s sexual history. Mere ghost stories these are not.

  As we’ve seen throughout this book, women have long dealt with these themes in genre fiction, and Machado is not alone in picking up the torch. Body (Vertical, 2012) by Japanese horror writer Asa Nonami (translated into English by Takami Nieda) is a collection of stories that each involves some part of the human corpus (and people’s perceptions of their own bodies), with twists worthy of The Twilight Zone. The stories are less supernatural than others discussed in this book—expect more Black Mirror–style horror. However you classify it, this collection marks Nonami as a writer to watch.

  Helen Marshall’s The Migration (Titan Books, 2019) is another noteworthy example of horror and speculative fiction written by a woman. Drawing comparisons to Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (Doubleday, 1983), Marshall’s novel begins with a group of people studying the Black Death. If history has taught us anything, that’s not going to end well.

  Need further proof that women are writing some of the best new horror and dark fiction? We challenge you to read Kea Wilson’s 2016 novel We Eat Our Own (Simon and Schuster), a book in the tradition of Ruggero Deodato’s 1980 gorefest film Cannibal Holocaust, or a harrowing novel like Alma Katsu’s The Hunger (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2018).

  Other favorite new authors include Sarah Langan, Megan Abbott, Marisha Pessl, Sarah Pinborough, Tana French, and Livia Llewellyn. We also can’t get enough of the short stories from Damien Angelica Walters and Kelly Link.

  We are living in a kind of renaissance for horror fiction, which is widely available, maybe more than ever. And so much of it is being written by women. In this final chapter, we look at current trends in horror and weird fiction and discuss our favorite women writers who refuse to stop haunting and terrifying readers.

  Lovecraft Revisited and Revised

  The New Weird

  Weird fiction has been a subgenre of horror since the early 1900s. Like the word Gothic, the term weird has a particular meaning in literature. In his 1927 essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” H. P. Lovecraft insisted that weird fiction is disturbing in a way that goes beyond the tropes of ghost stories and Gothic horror. For Lovecraft, a weird story has an ethereal quality because it deals with things beyond the physical world. It incorporates cosmic fear, or a fear of the unknown and unknowable. Events in weird fiction are truly unmoored from rational or scientific understanding; the weird is alien to humanity, whether from outer space, beneath the ocean, or another universe that is just a hair’s breadth away at any moment. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer define weird fiction like this: “Although dark like horror, it is generally about encounters with the inexplicable where there may never be a full explanation for strangeness.”

  Authors like Margaret St. Clair and Daphne du Maurier, and their successors in the era of the pulps, used the weird as a door into commercial fiction, a world that seemed to be mostly male. In fact, women who write have always used uncanny and supernatural storytelling for sharing tales about their lives and for illustrating the deep traumas of life. They continue to do so today in greater numbers and more diverse forms, maybe because women’s experiences are discredited and considered…well…weird in a patriarchal society. When fiction embraces the strange, the odd, the otherness, women can relate. Women know what it means not only to exist on the margins of society but also to revel in that existence. And so women flock to writing the weird because they can write the nastiest of it, the strangest of it, the most magical of it. Women can see what exists beyond the “normal” society—and we are glad they can.

  Although the term weird fiction most likely calls to mind Lovecraft and his early twentieth-century contemporaries, a more recent iteration of this subgenre has emerged. The so-called new weird began in the 1990s and continued into the millennium with works like China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (Macmillian, 2001), which features a grimy dystopian cityscape and opens with a sex scene between a human character and a half-beast cockroach-like character. New weird fiction may incorporate some themes and tropes of the old (cosmic horror is still a favorite), but authors are moving past Lovecraftian-type mythos and exploring social and political inequalities, race, and gender. More writers of color and women are engaging with the weird than ever before.

  One of the first women to write the new weird is the Australian K. J. Bishop. The Etched City, her first novel (Prime Books, 2003), seems to transcend genre, although it’s usually classified as science fiction. The book is influenced by the Decadents of the late nineteenth century, such as Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, with its excesses, weird imagery, and the coexistence of art and corruption. We meet the story’s main characters after they’ve lost a civil war. In the titular city, Ashamoil, the two men find various cultures, warlords, strange creatures, shamans, occultists, mediums, and medical doctors.
The lines between living and dead, and between dreams and reality, are razor thin, and the very existence of the city is called into question. A review in Publishers Weekly described the novel as “equal parts of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series and China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station,” with “a dash of Aubrey Beardsley and J. K. Huysmans.” Locus magazine compared it to the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, both writers of postmodern works that defy labels.

  The Canadian horror writer Gemma Files described weird fiction this way: “For me, the appeal is the idea of creating something that will make the person reading it look over their own shoulder uneasily, but also feel as though they recognize it on some inmost level…to create an unnatural concept which nevertheless seems part of the natural order.”

  She achieves this level of uncanny weirdness in her 2015 Shirley Jackson Award winning novel Experimental Film (ChiZine Publications, 2013). In it, a film critic named Lois who is struggling to come to terms with her son’s autism diagnosis attends a film festival for an article she’s writing. While there, she sees a rare piece of silver-nitrate silent-film footage that is part of a larger project called Untitled 13. This scrap of footage shows a woman wrapped in a white veil and holding a scythe, and Lois becomes obsessed with learning all about it and its creator. Weird events ensue as she attracts the attention of the woman in the footage…who might not be mortal and who might have some thoughts on Lois’s fascination. In true forbidden text fashion, Lois is haunted by the film she shouldn’t have seen. The Los Angeles Review of Books compared Files’s writing to that of Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, as well as contemporary authors Thomas Ligotti and Jeff VanderMeer.

  Another writer who’s been affiliated with the new weird since the appearance of her first work is Ireland-born, Alabama-raised Caitlín R. Kiernan. Kiernan studied vertebrate paleontology and has written papers in the fields of herpetology and paleontology, and these scientific interests are clearly visible in her fiction. She is a prolific and award-winning writer who so far has penned ten novels, several comic books, and more than two hundred stories and novellas. In the introduction to their 2012 anthology of weird fiction, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer call Kiernan “perhaps the best weird writer of her generation.”

  Kiernan’s well-received 2009 novel The Red Tree (Ace) won the best novel category of the Shirley Jackson Awards, the Locus Awards, and the World Fantasy Awards. It follows Sarah Crowe as she moves to Rhode Island, in an attempt to run from her problems, and discovers an old manuscript in her new home. The novel stands out for many reasons, among them the central queer relationship and the use of an unreliable narrator through the postmodern technique of reading a so-called edited journal. In the course of telling a supernatural story, Kiernan also addresses themes of mental illness and the ambiguity of reality.

  Recently, Kiernan added to her weird oeuvre with her novellas Agents of Dreamland (Tor, 2017) and Black Helicopters (Tor, 2018). Both include dark Lovecraftian forces stalking the Earth, black-ops secret agents for unknown agencies, and characters damaged by science experiments gone wrong.

  Kiernan’s writing demonstrates the fluidity of the new weird genre, moving freely between the boundaries of science fiction and dark fantasy and speculative fiction. Other writers have a more direct connection to the weird fiction of the early twentieth century. For women re-visioning H. P. Lovecraft, check out Cassandra Khaw and Kij Johnson. Johnson’s novella The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe (Tor, 2016), which won a World Fantasy Award, is a woman-centered revisitation of, and commentary on, Lovecraft’s 1943 novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (Arkham House). In it, Johnson weaves a brand-new tale set in a world inspired by Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle series. Mathematics professor Vellitt Boe, who teaches at an elite and otherworldly women’s college, must go on a fantastical journey to rescue a student who has ticked off her grandfather (who is a god, by the way) by running away with a dreamer from the waking world.

  Malaysian writer Cassandra Khaw has married the Lovecraftian weird with noir detective fiction in her novellas Hammers on Bone (Tor, 2016) and A Song for Quiet (Tor, 2017). In the former, a child hires a private eye, who just happens to be a monster, to kill his abusive stepdad, who is also a monster. Khaw carefully inserts an underlying Lovecraftian monstrous horror beneath the terrifying experience of domestic abuse. All of her writing is weird, from her female werebears rooming with vampires in Bearly a Lady (Book Smugglers Publishing, 2017) to Food of the Gods (Abaddon, 2017), part of her Rupert Wong series that includes various gods from all over the world and a cannibal girlfriend.

  Kelly Link, Karen Russell, and Nadia Bulkin also deserve mention. Link’s three short story collections, Stranger Things Happen (Small Beer Press, 2001), Magic for Beginners (Small Beer Press, 2005), and Get in Trouble (Random House, 2015), have garnered comparisons to Neil Gaiman, George Saunders, Aimee Bender, Jorge Luis Borges, and…Karen Russell. Link’s fellow Pulitzer finalist, Russell has written fine and unnervingly weird tales such as Swamplandia! (Knopf, 2011), about a family of alligator wrestlers who live in a Florida theme park; St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves: Stories (Knopf, 2006); and the novella Sleep Donation (Atavist Books, 2014), about an insomnia pandemic that corporate America tries to solve by monetizing sleep that has been donated to insomniacs from healthy sleepers. Bulkin’s 2017 short story collection She Said Destroy (Word Horde) is hard to classify. She uses plenty of cosmic horror that Lovecraft fans will recognize, but her work doesn’t fit neatly into any category.

  Polishing the Fangs

  The New Vampire

  Vampires mean glamour. They are sexy. They are wealthy. They live life without regrets. Ever since Bram Stoker’s aristocratic ghoul from Europe landed on book pages, readers have flocked to vampire stories to find an escape from the mundane realities of everyday life. Contemporary vampires are just as alluring and seductive as their predecessors, but their plots are more in step with lives of modern readers. For example, in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, Lestat, Armand, and the cherubic little Claudia make a family with two dads. What makes vampires so enduring is that they don’t worry about the consequences of their actions, not when they know they will outlast whatever problems currently plague them. Perhaps this is what most appeals to us humble mortals. Thanks to that appeal, vampires have remained a mainstay of horror fiction for decades, and they show no intentions of dying out anytime soon.

  The first decade of the twenty-first century saw a spike in fanged stories, and the trend reached its fevered frenzy with three mega-hits, all written by women: Stephenie Meyer’s novel Twilight (Little, Brown, 2005) and its numerous sequels, movies, and graphic novels; L. J. Smith’s The Vampire Diaries (Harper, 1991), which spawned a series and a hit television show on the CW network; and Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse novels, the thirteen-book series from Ace Books published from 2001 to 2013, which were adapted for television as the series True Blood. Each of these offers a rich tapestry for a vampire story, but they also illustrate a truth: Where there’s a vampire, there’s frequently a werewolf or two not far behind. And sometimes even a fairy.

  Vampires are the gateway to other supernatural beings in the work of Laurell K. Hamilton as well. Her heroine Anita Blake is a vampire hunter—though less a fighter like Buffy and more a necromancer detective. The series begins with Guilty Pleasures (Ace Books, 2002) and posits a world where equal rights have been granted to the living and the undead. Of course, supernatural trouble is always brewing, and Anita ends up contending with not only vampires but also shapeshifters, fey, and various undead creatures.

  One reason the vampire narrative is a perennial feature of horror, science fiction, and fantasy is that the concept is strong enough to evolve in all sorts of ways. Octavia Butler merged science fiction and horror with her 2005 novel Fledgling (Seven Stories Press), which tells the story of an ancient vampire lineage. The main character is fifty-three years old, still young for her race of
beings, but she looks like a child, specifically an African American girl. Butler’s novel is more science fiction than pure horror, but it revitalizes the vampire trope and is a welcome addition to the canon. Another fresh take comes from Karen Russell. The title story of her collection Vampires in the Lemon Grove (Knopf, 2013) is a blend of fantasy and magical realism that demonstrates the potential of the vampire as a metaphor for the struggle of the human condition and, especially, folks who exist on the margins of society. The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

  Elizabeth Kostova rewrote the idea of the historical vampire with her book The Historian, published in 2005 by Little, Brown. The novel is a retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula…sort of. Kostova bypasses what could be an overwrought homage and instead writes a book that is more about the romance of historians who become enamored with a subject than it is about vampire lore. The story of a professor turned hunter and his daughter is compelling and rich with detail.

  Though Kostova’s vampires are the only monsters in The Historian, vampires in fiction are often accompanied by a variety of other supernatural beings. Deborah Harkness, in her All Souls trilogy, explores her own world where the supernatural exists in the same realm as humankind. A Discovery of Witches, published in 2011 by Penguin, introduced readers to Diana Bishop, a professor who finds a long-lost manuscript that awakens magic within her. The book was a New York Times best seller, and the media rights were quickly snapped up. A British television program based on Harkness’s book was filmed for Sky One. Bishop’s adventures meeting witches, vampires, and other magical creatures were continued in the subsequent novels Shadow of Night (Penguin, 2012) and The Book of Life (Penguin, 2014).

  But not all vampires are comfortable in the supernatural world. Some, like Tananarive Due’s African Immortals, are vampires who never claim that title. The first book of Due’s series, My Soul to Keep (HarperCollins, 1997), starts as a family drama, focused on a young couple, David and Jessica, just settling into marriage. Life changes when David confesses to his new wife that he is centuries old, having obtained immortality in Ethiopia. Soon Jessica is fighting for her family and her soul. Due’s story presents an interesting reversal, with humans preying on the immortals for their life-saving blood. The series comprises four novels.