31 Days of Horror: Day 5- Resources for Non White Male Horror Authors

During this first week of the October blog-a-thon, we have been slowly moving into the world of horror RA. You may have noticed this week's posts are 50% general RA advice and 50% horror specific. This is on purpose. I realize that many of you come to the horror blog with some trepidation each year. You trust me because you follow my general RA advice all year long, but, as is common among our profession, you are a tiny bit afraid of horror, and, to be fully honest, its readers.

First, I will remind you of something I say often [it's in both of my books], "Your horror patrons are not monsters, they just like to read about them."

Second, I truly do appreciate that every October you come over to the dark side [literally, the blog with the black background] in an effort to educate yourself about horror and how to help its readers. For that I thank you, not for me, but for your readers.

Today I am going to have some more of that 50-50 advice, but we are going to slowly transition into full on horror mode starting tomorrow. I promise to take it slow and not freak anyone out.

We are going to an issue I talk about all of the time on RA for All, consciously building diverse and inclusive resources and collections.

The most popular horror authors in terms of sales and space on the library's shelves tend to be white and male. This is not a shocking statement for any genre, but thankfully, in horror, there are many resources to help us identify the excellent work being done by authors of color and women in horror.

Here are three resources I use:

• Diverse Writers of Speculative Fiction: I love this resource. I only found it recently, but you need to check them out. They have articles, lists of authors, genre overviews. It is a great resources for all of the speculative genres. This is a site you need to visit to help all of your science fiction, fantasy and horror readers, of which I know you have many.
• Ladies of Horror Fiction: A new resources that was, "...created to bring about a multi-dimensional way to support women (either cisgender or those who identify as female) who either write in the horror genre or review in it." They will soon podcast too. As I mentioned here at the end of last year, women are writing some of the best horror right now. They need more attention. 
• Goodreads crowd sourced list of "Diverse Horror": As I mentioned in this post, Goodreads is an undervalued resource by many library workers. When readers work together, everyone wins. We get a much broader representation of options both in sheer number AND in what they consider "horror." Plus, we get to see the comments from actual readers about why they like and dislike a title. This is feedback we are dying for [pun intended] and it is right there in front of us.

Also don't forget that when you create readalike lists for a popular white, male horror author like Stephen King, the authors you include don't also have to only be white and male.  I talked about this issue at length and created an inclusive Stephen King readalike list as an example.

Tomorrow I will have a post about my favorite horror resources overall.