Publisher Description

Satisfy your craving for extraordinary authors and exceptional fiction- Meet the women writers who defied convention to craft some of literature's strangest tales, from Frankenstein to The Haunting of Hill House and beyond.Meet the women writers who defied convention to craft some of literature's strangest tales,from Frankenstein to The Haunting of Hill House and beyond.Frankenstein was just the beginning- horror stories and other weird fiction wouldn't exist without the women who created it. From Gothic ghost stories to psychological horror to science fiction, women have been primary architects of speculative literature of all sorts. And their own life stories are as intriguing as their fiction.Everyone knows about Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein, who was rumored to keep her late husband's heart in her desk drawer. But have you heard of Margaret "Mad Madge" Cavendish, who wrote a science-fiction epic 150 years earlier (and liked to wear topless gowns to the theater)? If you know the astounding work of Shirley Jackson, whose novel The Haunting of Hill House was reinvented as a Netflix series, then try the psychological hauntings of Violet Paget, who was openly involved in long-term romantic relationships with women in the Victorian era. You'll meet celebrated icons (Ann Radcliffe, V. C. Andrews), forgotten wordsmiths (Eli Colter, Ruby Jean Jensen), and today's vanguard (Helen Oyeyemi). Curated reading lists point you to their most spine-chilling tales.Part biography, part reader's guide, the engaging write-ups and detailed reading lists will introduce you to more than a hundred authors and over two hundred of their mysterious and spooky novels, novellas, and stories.

Author Biography

Lisa Kr gerholds a PhD in English. Her short fiction has appeared inCemetery Dancemagazine andLost Highways- Dark Fictions from the Road(Crystal Lake Publishing, 2018). She's an adjunct instructor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi, Gulf Coast. She co-hosts the Know Fear Podcast (knowfearcast.com).Melanie R. Andersonis an assistant professor of English at Delta State University in Cleveland, MS. Her bookSpectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison(Tennessee Press, 2013) was a winner of the 2014 South Central MLA Book Prize. She co-hosts the Know Fear Podcast (knowfearcast.com).

Table of Contents

Introduction

PART ONE: THE FOUNDING MOTHERS
Margaret Cavendish: Mad Madge
Ann Radcliffe: Terror over Horror
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: The Original Goth Girl
Regina Maria Roche: Scandalizing Jane Austen
Mary Anne Radcliffe: Purveyor of Guts and Gore
Charlotte Dacre: Exhibitor of Murder and Harlotry

PART TWO: HAUNTING TALES
Elizabeth Gaskell: Ghosts Are Real
Charlotte Riddell: Born Storyteller
Amelia Edwards: The Most Learned Woman
Paula E. Hopkins: The Most Productive Writer
Vernon Lee: Ghostwriter à la Garçonne
Margaret Oliphant: Voice for the Dead
Edith Wharton: The Spine-Tingler

PART THREE: CULT OF THE OCCULT
Marjorie Bowen: Scribe of the Supernatural
L. T. Meade: Maker of Female Masterminds
Alice Askew: Casualty of War
Margery Lawrence: Speaker to the Spirits
Dion Fortune: Britian's Psychic Defender

PART FOUR: THE WOMEN WHO WROTE THE PULPS
Margaret St. Clair: Exploring Our Depths
Catherine Lucille Moore: Space Vamp Queen
Mary Elizabeth Counselman: Deep South Storyteller
Gertrude Barrows Bennett: Seer of the Unseen
Everil Worrell: Night Writer
Eli Colter: Keeping the Wild West Weird

PART FIVE: HAUNTING THE HOME
Dorothy Macardle: Chronicler of Pain and Loss
Shirley Jackson: The Queen of Horror
Daphne du Maurier: The Dame of Dread
Toni Morrison: Haunted by History
Elizabeth Engstrom: Monstrosity in the Mundane

PART SIX: PAPERBACK HORROR
Joanne Fischmann: Recipes for Fear
Ruby Jean Jensen: Where Evil Meets Innocence
V. C. Andrews: Nightmares in the Attic
Kathe Koja: Kafka of the Weird
Lisa Tuttle: Adversary for the Devil
Tanith Lee: Rewriting Snow White

PART SEVEN: THE NEW GOTHS
Anne Rice: Queen of the Damned
Helen Oyeyemi: Teller of Feminist Fairy Tales
Susan Hill: Modern Gothic Ghost Maker
Sarah Waters: Welcome to the Dark Sance
Angela Carter: Teller of Bloody Fables
Jewelle Gomez: Afrofuturist Horrorist

PART EIGHT: THE FUTURE OF HORROR AND SPECULATIVE FICTION
The New Weird: Lovecraft Revisited and Revised
The New Vampire: Polishing the Fangs
The New Haunted House: Home, Deadly Home
The New Apocalypse: This Is the End (Again)
The New Serial Killer: Sharper Weapons, Sharper Victims

Glossary
Notes
Suggested Reading
Index
Acknowledgments

Review

2019 Bram Stoker Award® Winner for Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction
2020 Locus Award Winner for Non-Fiction
A 2019 Booklist Editors' Choice in Arts and Literature

"I was elated when Monster, She Wrote arrived in my mailbox. It is a book I have been waiting to read for a long time...Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson deserve a standing ovation."—Danielle Trussoni for The New York Times Book Review

"A great gift for anyone fascinated with genre writing."—SFX Magazine

"Presented in a breezy, conversational style that makes it easy to gobble up whole sections at a time...Anyone from casual fans to horror historians will benefit from reading this important book."—Cemetery Dance

"Your necronomicon for all women writing horror."—Book Riot

"A perfect way to find your next spooky story."—Tulsa World

"The curatorial quality of a literary anthology, the historical rigor of an academic text, and the pleasure of a picture book."—Tor.com

"Kröger and Anderson write in consistently engaging prose and display depth and breadth in their knowledge of literary matters. Besides demonstrating great synthetic acuity, they provide the fruits of original scholarship."—Locus

"Straddling the divide between highly useful reference and compulsively readable stories about the writing lives of the women of horror, this book will keep you up all night (one way or another)."—Booklist, starred review

"Inspired not only in the way it explores what the off-kilter, the monstrous and the half-known has meant to women for centuries but also in how it illuminates the often unusual lives of the women who crafted these dark worlds."—BookPage

"This biographical index will reawaken readers' admiration for established virtuosos of literary terror and inspire curiosity in lesser-known specialists in fictitious fear."—Publishers Weekly

"An engrossing, eye-opening encyclopedia on the pioneering women who went against convention and broke down barriers to mold the horror fiction genre, thereby inspiring generations of writers and even filmmakers with their works."—Geeks of Doom

"Unique, fascinating, informative...an extraordinary and unreservedly recommended addition to personal, community, college, and university librar[ies]."—Midwest Book Review

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Satisfy your craving for extraordinary authors and exceptional fiction- Meet the women writers who defied convention to craft some of literature's strangest tales, from Frankenstein to The Haunting of Hill House and beyond.

Review Quote

"Straddling the divide between highly useful reference and compulsively readable stories about the writing lives of the women of horror, this book will keep you up all night (one way or another)."-- Booklist , starred review

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Satisfy your craving for extraordinary authors and exceptional fiction- Meet the women writers who defied convention to craft some of literature's strangest tales, from Frankenstein to The Haunting of Hill House and beyond .

Excerpt from Book

Introduction Why are women great at writing horror fiction? Maybe because horror is a transgressive genre. It pushes readers to uncomfortable places, where we aren''t used to treading, and it forces us to confront what we naturally want to avoid. And women are accused of being transgressive all the time--or, at the very least, they are used to stepping outside of the carefully drawn boundaries that society has set for them. Women are told what to do and who to be. Women are taught to be sweet, to raise children, to stay in their place. Women are pushed to the edges of society, where they are expected to keep their mouths shut and their heads down. The marginalization of women may have been more overt in the past, at times when women couldn''t vote or own property or work outside the home, but it still happens today. Women are still instructed to be good girls. In any era, women become accustomed to entering unfamiliar spaces, including territory that they''ve been told not to enter. When writing is an off-limits act, writing one''s story becomes a form of rebellion and taking back power. Consider, for example, Margaret Cavendish, who in the 1600s brazenly wrote about science and philosophy, two subjects then considered the purview of only male minds. More recently, Jewelle Gomez brought an African American and lesbian perspective to the vampire tale, which had long been the province of European male protagonists. Today, writers like Carmen Maria Machado and Helen Oyeyemi subvert the so-called safe storytelling formats of the fairy tale and the supernatural yarn, adding women''s voices to these traditional narrative forms. For women especially, writing is often a kind of noncompliance, which calls to mind the prisoners in the comic book series Bitch Planet by writer Kelly Sue DeConnick and artist Valentine De Landro (Image Comics, 2014-17). The comic is brilliant--it tells a female-driven dystopian story about women sent to a prison planet as punishment for being noncompliant. What a great word to describe the women in this book. The writers you''ll meet in Monster, She Wrote are all rule breakers. And here''s the funny thing: society doesn''t always pay attention to what''s happening over there on the edges. So while society was ignoring them, they were taking up their pens. While everyone else has been doing their own thing, women have been doing theirs, crafting tales about scientifically reanimated corpses, ghosts of aborted children, postapocalyptic underground cities. Horror has been penned by men and women alike, but it''s important to acknowledge that women have been contributing to the genre since its inception. As you''ll discover in the following pages, the horror genre that readers love today would likely be unrecognizable without the contributions of these women. These misbehaving women who write horror in all its nasty forms. The Queen of Horror Shirley Jackson 1916-1965 In 1948, the New Yorker published a short story by a then-unknown writer. The tale, about an ordinary town with a sinister secret, so outraged readers that the magazine reported receiving more negative mail than ever before, including many subscription cancellations. That story was "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson, which went on to become one of the most famous short stories in American literature. Though Jackson had been an obsessive writer since her youth and began publishing her writing during college, "The Lottery" made her a household name. For decades she received letters about it, which typically fell into one of three categories: bewilderment, speculation, and "plain old-fashioned abuse." The New England setting of the story was an integral part of Jackson''s writing, which often features main characters who are outsiders and find themselves persecuted in a hostile small-town environment. This was an experience familiar to Jackson. Born in 1916, Jackson spent her childhood in California. She met her husband, the literary critic and professor Stanley Edgar Hyman, at Syracuse University, where they were students. The couple married in 1940 and moved several times before settling in 1945 in North Bennington, Vermont, where Hyman took a faculty position at Bennington College. She wrote, in what has become a famous anecdote from her life, that when checking into a hospital for the birth of her third child, the nurse asked Jackson what her occupation was. Jackson replied that she was a writer, to which the nurse said, "I''ll just put down housewife." The truth was that Jackson always struggled against her roles as wife and mother--or, to be more accurate, the roles that others cast her in. Professionally she was a successful author, but at home in North Bennington, she was Hyman''s wife and the mother of four children. Her husband expected her to play the part of faculty wife: to maintain the household, to rear the children, to cook, to clean, and to entertain people he brought into their home. The residents of the college town never quite accepted her as one of their own, which likely informed how she wrote about various groups'' intolerance of outsiders (see: the stone-wielding townsfolk in "The Lottery"). Hyman controlled the family''s finances, but often it was Jackson''s income that kept them afloat. Jackson''s posthumously published collection Come Along with Me (Viking, 1968; Penguin, 1995 reprint) contains an anecdote about a time the family needed a new refrigerator. So she wrote a story, was paid, and bought the fridge. In this way, writing was, for Jackson, a real kind of magic. Hyman encouraged his wife''s work, especially because it supplemented his income. But when eventually her career eclipsed his, Hyman no longer tolerated her success and belittled her in front of his university colleagues. What''s more, he was frequently unfaithful, being particularly fond of his former students. It''s no wonder that Jackson wrote about women who were lonely and ostracized. Her characters are haunted, sometimes literally and sometimes figuratively, by pasts they can''t escape. Jackson became a master of both types of hauntings, the supernatural and the psychological, the interior and the exterior. Haunted Housekeeping Haunted house stories are a staple in horror literature; nearly every writer of the genre has told one or two. None have come as close to perfection as Jackson in creating houses that loom larger than their actual size, describing a past that haunts the present. What also sets her domestic stories apart is how quickly and effectively the mundane scenarios she depicts turn violent. Even a setting as seemingly humdrum as a grocery store transforms into a downright bloodbath in We Have Always Lived in the Castle , her 1962 novel about two sisters living in a family home following an infamous multiple murder. "The Lottery" established Jackson as reigning queen of the horror genre, though she wrote everything from campus novels to darkly comic domestic sketches about family life. These sketches were first published in magazines like Good Housekeeping and Woman''s Day and, later, in the books Raising Demons (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1957; Penguin Books, 2015) and Life among the Savages (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1953; Penguin Books, 2015). She cemented her status as a titan of terror with the 1959 publication of The Haunting of Hill House (Viking), which was adapted in 1963 into the film The Haunting, which then developed a cult following of its own. Director Jan de Bont brought a less popular adaptation to the screen in 1999. And in 2018, the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House took the bare bones ofJackson''s story into new territory. Hill House is a lovely work of ambiguity. Four characters from different walks of life converge on the titular property, which has a bad past and a bad reputation. Eleanor Vance, the protagonist, has answered an advertisement posted by Dr. Montague seeking assistants for a haunted house investigation. She sees it as the first adventure of her life, which until that point she has spent taking care of her invalid mother. Once the action begins, it''s hard to tell if the four people are cracking under the strain of their isolation in the bizarre mansion, or if the house truly is haunted. It doesn''t help that every angle in the building is off by a few degrees, and the decorations are . . . well, let''s just say, strange. In addition to the usual cold spots, bangs and knocks, and even a s

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