Monster, She Wrote

by Lisa Kröger

  Another example of vampires’ endless versatility is The Vampire Tapestry (Orb Books, 1980) by Suzy McKee Charnas, in which vampirism is more akin to a virus than a supernatural curse. It was a finalist for both the Locus and Nebula Awards.

  On the other end of the spectrum from the horror/science-fiction hybrid are more lighthearted vampire novels, such as MaryJanice Davidson’s Undead and Unwed (Berkley Sensation, 2004), a paranormal romance that follows the (mis)adventures of a young single woman who wakes up one day in a coffin. Davidson proves that even vampires need love in their eternal lives. Undead and Unwed was a best seller, and Davidson continues to write the series for her fans. The books’ fun tone makes them perfect for teenage readers. Also recommended for a younger audience is Sucks to Be Me: The All-True Confessions of Mina Hamilton, Teen Vampire (Maybe) by Kimberly Pauley (Mirrorstone, 2009). We love the main character’s name, which is an homage to the first female vampire hunter, Bram Stoker’s Mina Harker.

  As this long history of the vampire story shows, these creatures may take various forms, but they’ll be with us for some time, lurking in the shadows of our stories for as long as we tell them. Fiction is what makes them truly immortal.

  Home, Deadly Home

  The New Haunted House

  In Part Five, we saw how writers like Daphne du Maurier and Elizabeth Engstrom made perfect use of the haunted house as a setting for domestic and psychological horror. Homeownership is the core of the American dream, and the home continues to hold potential for both comfort and horror, especially in times of economic turbulence. Contemporary writers continue this long-established trope and evolve it, setting stories in spirit-plagued apartments, residence halls, boarding schools, salvage properties, and other living spaces.

  In Japanese writer Mariko Koike’s 1986 book The Graveyard Apartment, which was translated into English in 2016 and published by St. Martin’s Press, a young couple and their child move into a fantastic, newly constructed residence that’s surprisingly affordable and allows an easy commute for the husband. That low price might be due to the graveyard on one side of the apartment building…and the crematorium on another…and the Buddhist temple on a third side. The family’s pet bird dies on their first night in the house. Then the daughter announces that the bird has returned to deliver warnings about their new home. Almost immediately, the other tenants begin moving out. Soon the family is living alone at the top of the complex. And something evil is in the basement.

  Rachel Klein’s debut novel The Moth Diaries (Counterpoint, 2002) straddles a few horror themes. There is a hint of the new vampire; one of the mysteries that obsesses the unnamed narrator is whether or not her fellow student Ernessa is undead. All the weird happenings at the girls’ boarding school where the narrator lives place this book in haunted house territory. The storyteller is at Brangwyn Hall because of her father’s suicide, and the school is haunted by the pain of the girls who live there. They grieve the loss of their parents; they self-medicate with drugs; they struggle with mental illnesses and eating disorders. And given that the narrator has been diagnosed with psychosis, as well as borderline personality disorder and depression, she is unreliable, to say the least. The story vacillates between real and unreal: could the book’s events be evidence of the supernatural or, rather, the very real attempts of young women to cope with trauma? The novel was adapted to film in 2011, directed by Mary Harron and starring Lily Cole as Ernessa.

  Want more dormitory horror? “Poltergeist meets The Breakfast Club” was the Kirkus review blurb for Alexandra Sokoloff’s The Harrowing (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). Celebrated horror writers Ira Levin and Ramsey Campbell also had nothing but praise for this first novel. It’s Thanksgiving, and all the pupils at Baird College have left for home except for Robin Stone and four other students she just met. They are staying in a hundred-year-old dormitory, and a massive storm is approaching. This doesn’t sound bad at all, does it? It turns out there’s an “entity” at the residence hall that also decided to stay at the school during break, proving that you don’t have to go home to be haunted.

  For something a little different, check out The Apartment (Blumhouse Books, 2016) by S. L. Grey, the writing team of Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg, which explores what can go wrong with a house-sharing service like Airbnb. Mark and Steph and their daughter are happy living in Cape Town, South Africa, until armed and masked men break into their home. Although no one is physically injured, the terrifying episode leaves the family wanting a change of scenery. They decide to swap homes with someone in Paris—who, it turns out, never shows up to stay at their place in Cape Town.

  The family’s France vacation is filled with mysterious and uncanny happenings—the authors’ descriptions of shadows jumping across walls induce goosebumps—and their accommodations come with a creepy neighbor who warns them of vague danger and isn’t long for this world. When they return home seeking normalcy, parents and child sink further into darkness, which may be an effect of the Paris apartment or of their own making. For another example of the Grey writing team’s excellence at conjuring haunted spaces, see The Mall (Atlantic, 2011), in particular their description of a dark room full of clothing-store mannequins, discarded in a motionless pile…until one of them starts to move.

  Over the years, the novelist Cherie Priest has written everything from Gothic and zombie fiction to Lovecraftian themes, but The Family Plot (Tor, 2016) is a haunted house novel set in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Chuck Dutton owns a salvage operation that specializes in historic properties, and he has fallen on hard times. Desperate for a job, Dutton jumps at the chance to purchase the Withrow estate for stripping and resale. Unfortunately, the owner, Augusta Withrow, failed to mention that spirits dwell in the house. And the creepy cemetery on the property. And the fact that those spirits are irritated by something that happened in the past. The four people who arrive to salvage the property’s contents will face a dangerous presence that doesn’t like houseguests.

  In Jac Jemc’s The Grip of It (FSG Originals, 2017), a young couple buys their first house and, rather than a leaky roof or appliances that need updating, the issues involve moving wallpaper and strange stains and writing on the walls. The townspeople have many secrets, and the house has a history. Jemc moves beyond typical haunted house tropes by playing the two main characters’ perspectives off each other in an alternating narrative. She shows the reader that the lines between exterior and interior, and real and not real, are thinner than we think. The book has been compared to Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (Macmillan Publishers, 1898), Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (Viking, 1959), and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (Pantheon, 2000).

  “The inability to trust ourselves is the most menacing danger.”

  —The Grip of It by Jac Jemc

  This Is the End (Again)

  The New Apocalypse

  Since the writing of the book of Revelation, the concept of the apocalypse has been part of human consciousness—and the subject of human fear. Though apocalypse originally meant a disclosure of secret knowledge, often with religious connotations, the term is now commonly understood as the end of everything, or at least the end of the world as we know it. The end of everything is scary enough, but even scarier is the question: what will follow the end?

  Spikes in apocalyptic fiction track with major national and world events. An uptick in apocalypse stories accompanied and followed the advent of atomic and nuclear weapons and the concurrent, very real chance of worldwide destruction. Children of the 1950s and 1960s can recall “duck and cover” drills; children of the 1970s and 1980s have traumatic memories of the 1983 TV movie The Day After. Although the threat of nuclear catastrophe remains, fiction from the 1990s and 2000s through today seems to favor a world-ending disease pandemic. Sometimes these global plagues kill most of the world’s population, and terrible things follow; sometimes zombies are the pandemic that kills most of the world’s populat
ion, and terrible things follow.

  The apocalyptic novel (and the related postapocalyptic and dystopian novel) presents a story that emerges from contemporary social issues. It allows for discussion of difficult topics such as poverty, social inequality, and racial injustice. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale (McClelland and Stewart) has moved into the pop-culture zeitgeist thanks to the adaptation that began streaming on Hulu in April 2017, and the iconic red dresses and white hoods worn by her characters have become garb for political protesters advocating for women’s equality. Atwood didn’t leave the apocalypse alone with that book, either. Her MaddAddam trilogy (McClelland and Stewart), which debuted in 2003, follows the survivors of a genetically engineered virus as they deal with the transformations of sentient life in the wake of death, illness, and environmental damage.

  Christina Dalcher’s Vox (Berkley, 2018) is, in many ways, a successor to Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale; it imagines a world in which women are permitted to speak only one hundred words a day. Naomi Alderman’s The Power (Little, Brown, 2017) tells of a different sort of world turned upside down, in which special powers are bestowed upon the most unlikely of beneficiaries—teenage girls. The results are dramatic, though no one who has watched anything made by Joss Whedon will be surprised at what ensues. The question at the heart of the book is whether strength, when unevenly distributed, is a sweet or sinister gift.

  Young adult fiction has been overwhelmed by Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy (Scholastic, 2008–10), whose popularity was amplified by the movie adaptations starring Jennifer Lawrence as the protagonist, Katniss Everdeen. The stories are set in a post-apocalyptic North American dystopia in which a strong authoritarian government punishes citizens for a failed rebellion by holding an annual lottery that selects children to fight to the death in a televised competition. Echoes of Shirley Jackson, George Orwell’s 1984, and the phenomenon of TV reality show abound. On the heels of Collins’s books came Veronica Roth’s Divergent series (HarperCollins, 2011–13). This franchise takes place in a post-apocalyptic Chicago where people are categorized based on personality and social position.

  The popular science-fiction post-apocalypse novel Station Eleven (Knopf, 2014) by Emily St. John Mandel follows several loosely connected characters as they try to survive in a world devastated by swine flu. Mandel explores how human culture, not just human lives, might outlast disaster. Among the surviving population is a group of musicians, actors, and artists who travel among the sparse settlements to provide entertainment and fellowship. Station Eleven won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2015 and was nominated for a National Book Award.

  Tananarive Due, whom we discuss in the Toni Morrison profile (see this page), has also ventured into apocalyptic territory. Her collection Ghost Summer (Prime Books, 2015) includes an entire section of stories, titled “Carriers,” devoted to the end of the world and what may or may not follow. One of those stories, “Patient Zero,” is a painfully poignant account of a young boy who lives in quarantine and doesn’t fully understand what is happening or why. The story is told from the boy’s point of view, and he describes his interactions with the doctor, nurse, and tutor who make up his tiny community. The way that Due unfolds the narrative, so the reader realizes what’s happened before the boy does—if he even can—is devastating. Her story “Danger Word,” written with her husband, Steven Barnes, is an exploration of family relationships: a grandfather who has prepared for the end of the world faces a post-pandemic zombie apocalypse with his grandchild. It was adapted in 2013 as a nineteen-minute short film.

  Urban fantasy writer Seanan McGuire has ventured into zombie territory with her Newsflesh trilogy (Orbit Books, 2010–12), written under her pen name Mira Grant. The series, which includes Feed, Deadline, and Blackout, follows blogger journalists and social media savants as they report on a much-changed world following a drug-induced zombie apocalypse. The first book takes place once things have calmed down and humanity is trying to figure out the new normal. But the intrepid journalists find evidence of a vast conspiracy underneath the events that precipitated the catastrophe, and it turns out that the zombies may not be as easily controlled and vanquished as people thought. Newsflesh is planted solidly in our contemporary moment, with scare-tactic politics and a postmodern text full of blog and social media posts.

  The prolific Nigerian American author Nnedi Okorafor writes science fiction and fantasy for adults and children and is known for her two series, Binti (Tor, 2015–18) and Akata Witch (Viking/Penguin, 2011–17). Her book Who Fears Death (DAW/Penguin, 2010) is set in a future Sudan rent by racial and genocidal conflict and focuses on women’s experiences. The main character is an Ewu, the child of a rape, seeking revenge on behalf of her mother. The novel won World Fantasy and Carl Brandon Kindred Awards, and in 2017, Okorafor announced that it had been optioned by HBO, with George R. R. Martin attached as an executive producer.

  N. K. Jemisin’s three-peat Hugo-winning Broken Earth trilogy, The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky (Orbit, 2015–17), may take place on a fantasy world, but the premise, of an apocalypse created by climate change disasters, hits close to home. Jemisin’s characters face systems of power and oppression represented by various forces that, although fictitious, feel familiar to contemporary readers. Jemisin creates a society based on a caste system in which a powerful leading class exploits the strengths and talents of the workers. In a review of The Fifth Season for the New York Times, Naomi Novik wrote: “The end of the world becomes a triumph when the world is monstrous, even if what lies beyond is difficult to conceive for those who are trapped inside it.”

  Two more post-apocalyptic tales worth praising are Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (HarperLuxe, 2017) and Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning (Saga Press, 2018). Erdrich, a literary fiction powerhouse, is best known for her Native American saga beginning with Love Medicine (HarperCollins, 1984). In Future Home, she turns her attention to speculative fiction in the vein of Atwood’s handmaids. Something is wrong with the babies that are being born; they appear to be devolving into something…not human. But the protagonist Cedar Hawk Songmaker has a “normal” child in her womb, and she must run from kidnappers who, for unknown reasons, are capturing women like her whose babies who haven’t changed. This dystopian world is spinning out of control astonishingly quickly.

  Roanhorse won 2018 Hugo and Nebula Awards for her story “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™.” She also won the 2018 John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. Trail of Lightning takes place in a world where rising waters from climate change have taken over much of the land. Because of its location, the former Navajo reservation now called Dinétah is in a place of power. The protagonist Maggie Hoskie is a monster hunter, and her knowledge and skills are in high demand.

  Sharper Weapons, Sharper Victims

  The New Serial Killer

  If the horror genre had a mascot, it would be the serial killer. Horror films are synonymous with slasher flicks, at least to the uninitiated. After all, what is more ubiquitous in horror than a group of scantily clad teenage girls being pursued first by horny teenage boys and then by machete-wielding, mask-wearing maniacs? Crime and thriller authors who’ve portrayed serial killers include Tami Hoag, Lisa Gardner, and Karin Slaughter. The women writing horror today are taking the familiar plots and character tropes to new and unusual places.

  Joyce Carol Oates is not tied to any specific genre. She’s a superstar in the literary world who has written everything from family drama to a fictional novel about Marilyn Monroe based on facts from the actress’s life. Her writing is proof that serial killer stories can have more depth and craft than just a dull-eyed maniac holding the first sharp object he can find. Her novel Zombie (Ecco, 1995) is about a young man, Quentin P., who wants to make a real-life zombie. That is, Quentin wants a handsome, and compliant, sexual partner. It should be easy—Quentin only needs an ice pick and swift
hammer to the brain to lobotomize his perfect man. When Oates wrote it, she once again turned to a historical figure for inspiration, extensively researching the real-life cannibal killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Though the book is horrific, it is also an interesting look into a depraved mind.

  Modern authors seem to spend more time crafting their serial killers, and as much as we love a charismatic villain, we also love an equally well-realized heroine. South African writer Lauren Beukes has earned critical attention for her socially conscious horror, as well as numerous awards, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Romantic Times RT thriller of the year. Her novel The Shining Girls (Penguin Random House, 2013) adds time travel to the serial killer story, and in this case the hunter becomes the hunted. Beukes is one of a group of modern writers updating the “final girl” trope. These girls are not shrinking violets. They aren’t the virginal survivors who summon the will to live at the last minute of the story. Rather, they are strong and smart and daring from the beginning.

  Beukes writes of a killer on a spree in her novel Broken Monsters (Mulholland Books, 2014), which explores the underground art scene that exists in the abandoned neighborhoods of Detroit. The killer is notable for his attempts to re-create the world through macabre art; the dead bodies are, let’s say, rearranged and left on display. But even more notable is the relationship between the detective on the case, a single mother, and her daughter. Beukes also wrote Survivors’ Club, a horror comic series, with Dale Halvorsen and Ryan Kelly; Vertigo published the complete series in 2016.