Today I am excited to feature two authors from The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories which I reviewed in the October issue of Library Journal. From my Goodreads entry for the book:
Three Words That Describe this Book: translation, meticulously researched, wide range of scares
Known for their updated editions of classic horror stories, editors Jenkins and Cagle have taken on a new mission, collecting contemporary, acclaimed horror authors from around the world, translating may of them into English for the first time, adding a short introduction to each story in order to place them a context to be best enjoyed by a new, wider audience. This collection is stellar from top to bottom, but standouts include Christien Boomsma [Netherlands] with a nightmarish story of guilt spiraling out of control, and Bathie Ngoye Thiam [Senegal] who brings the rab [evil spirits] from his country’s oral history tradition to the page, terrifying readers near and far.
Verdict: This desperately needed anthology is meticulously researched and translated, offering stories from a variety of perspectives across five continents, and representing the broad range of storytelling styles and tropes that are used by all horror storytellers regardless of nationality. Readers will be clamoring for these fresh tales by current authors they probably didn’t know existed. Consider pairing it with A WORLD OF HORROR edited by Eric Guignard.
I am also giving away my review copy of the this book to 1 lucky #HorrorForLibraries giveaway winner. As a reminder, here are the basic rules to enter:
- You need to be affiliated with an American public library. My rationale behind that is that I will be encouraging you to read these books and share them with patrons. While many of them are advanced reader copies that you cannot add to your collections, if you get the chance to read them, my hope is that you will consider ordering a copy for your library and give away the ARC away as a prize or pass it on to a fellow staff member.
- If you are interested in being included in any giveaway at any time, you must email me at zombiegrl75 [at] gmail [dot] com with the subject line "#HorrorForLibraries." In the body of the email all you have to say is that you want to be entered and the name of your library.
- Each entry will be considered for EVERY giveaway. I will randomly draw a winner on Fridays sometime after 5pm central. But only entries received by 5pm each week will be considered for that week.
- If you win, you are ineligible to win again for 4 weeks; you will have to re-enter after that time to be considered [I have a list of who has won, when, and what title]. However, if you do not win, you carry over into the next week. There is NO NEED to reenter.
Click here to see giveaway #24. Our 2 winners were Patrick from Hancook County [KY] Public Library and Lorna from Greenup County [KY] Public Library.
Back to today's featured authors. After reading and greatly enjoying the stories in The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, I reached out to editor James D. Jenkins to see if any of the authors could contribute a "Why I Love Horror" essay to the blog. Now, let's be clear, most of the authors in this collection do NOT write in English. One of the best things about this collection is how hard the editors worked to find the very best horror authors across the world [many have won awards in their home countries] regardless of the language in which they write. Jenkins and Cagle were committed to producing worthy translations, and it shows.
However, this also meant, my ask for contributors to write me an essay, in English, was a HUGE ask. But thankfully, 2 authors came through- Yvette Tan and Flavius Ardelean. I greatly appreciate their willingness to speak to you in their second language.
I hope you enjoy their contributions, but even more so, I hope you understand that horror is being produced across the entire globe and there are thousands of amazing authors we have yet to hear from. Tan and Ardelean are just the tip of the iceberg.
Why I Love Horror
By Yvette Tan
I was—and still am—afraid of everything. I was always the weird kid. I was sheltered, unkempt (much to my mother’s chagrin), had no social skills, and had the tendency to take things literally. This last quality would serve me well because I grew up in a haunted house, but didn’t realise it until we moved out.
I only have three stories about that house that have to do with the supernatural, but I will only tell you two because the last one is quite long, and involves shape changing, possession, and telenovela-level acting. The first one is quite innocuous. Us kids would hang out in our parents’ room every night before we went to bed. And every night, someone would knock on the door. I’d usually be the one to open it, because it might be the maid, and sometimes it was, but usually, there would be no one there.
“There’s no one here,” I’d say, holding the door wide open so everyone could see.
“That’s just the wind,” my mom would say. “Come back and watch TV.”
So I’d close the door and go back to watch TV, and because my mom is wise and I’m quite gullible, none of this was scary. It was only when I got to high school, after we had moved to a different house, that I realised that the wind didn’t knock on doors.
The second story is stranger, but just as fun. One day, my mom called an herbalist over to make “tawas.” “Tawas” is Tagalog for the alum burned as incense during mass, but it’s also the name of a traditional Filipino divination technique where the person making tawas holds a lit candle over a basin of water while reciting prayers in what is usually pig Latin and then interpret what’s going on based on the shapes that form on the surface of the water. I watched her do this, and saw the shape of a Disney dwarf, complete with the floppy cap, form. The lady said we had dwarves in our house, and to get on their good side, my mom had to lay out a small table in out sky well and on all four sides put a pack of crackers, a boiled egg, and an unlit cigarette.
Now, even as a child, I thought that it would be very easy for the lady to surreptitiously move her hand so that the way took the shape of a Disney dwarf, and it would be very easy for her to take a look at that and say, “You’ve got duende.” What I did not expect was for my mom to follow the lady’s instructions, and for everyone to see how the food remained untouched by either mould or rats, and how the cigarettes slowly burned down to ash without ever being lit or lifted from their positions. I thought I might be imagining the memory, but I asked my sister about it and she says that she saw it too. Again, all of this was done in such a matter-of-fact way that it didn’t occur to us how strange it was until we were in our late teens.
Stories like these are why I am drawn to the supernatural, and also why I live in near-perpetual fear of the unknown. Many Filipinos don’t believe in the supernatural, but they also kind of do. And our monsters are intertwined with real life to this day. For example, there’s a theory that the aswang ins’t an ancient monster, but actually the product of American pay-ops during WWII. I’ve always gravitated towards true stories that have a hint of the dark fantastic in them, which is why there are hints of “it could happen in real life” in my fiction.
As a reader, I really, really like the language used in horror fiction. The way words like sublime and blood slide off the tongue. As a writer, I didn’t know I was writing horror at first. I just wrote stories that I wanted to read (it was the 90s; using Philippine mythological creatures in stories written in English wasn’t a big thing in the Philippines yet, though Filipino horror movies and komiks with local monsters in them has been popular since forever), and was always slightly puzzled when people would come up to me to say that my stories gave them nightmares. A friend had to sit me down and explain that what I wrote technically qualifies as horror, even when they aren’t scary. This is something that I learned, and it’s also what I try to remind people: that horror isn’t a genre, it’s an emotion.
Working with horrific themes means being open to the good and the bad in the world. It’s being able to achieve catharsis on the page or onscreen. It’s being able to tell compelling stories using elements that most people want to keep hidden: the dark, the terrible, the ugly. It’s the ability to bring the world’s shadow self to light.
I love horror because even though I am afraid of everything, its stories are told in a language that resonates with me and that compels me to tell tales of my own.
When you think about it, I didn’t choose horror; horror chose me.
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All my horrors, distilled
Flavius Ardelean
In Transylvania we don’t need Halloween in the shape of that modern, commercialized and cute celebration of the dead, to feel the dread of horror. We grow up with our parents and grandparents dragging us to the graveyard on All Souls’ Day or the Day of the Dead, watching the candles burn between tombstones, throwing shapes and shadows in the darkness, making everything once dead alive again in our tiny minds. Tales of bands of Roma witches and fortune-tellers roaming the country with their aura of mystique and otherworldly dangers populating our days when we stayed out too late in the evening playing with the other children in the dark streets. And in our homes, at gatherings, old women whispering about the tribulations of the dying in the family, about curses and spectral apparitions, about that wandering mercury that can enter bodies – no children allowed in the room, of course, but who cares, really.
These things and others like them filled my childhood in Romania with dark wonders that set my imagination alight. There was that neighbour who suddenly woke up with a crooked neck, and there was no suspicion of disease in my mind, no, it was – it had to be – demonic possession. Didn’t we hear about cutlery flying dangerously through his apartment in the night? And then that one week when I was certain I had discovered a dead alien stuck between pipes in the staircase of our block of flats, visiting it daily to watch it through that tiny opening, only to understand eventually that it was just a rotten eggplant. That winter evening when a stranger wielding a knife and speaking in tongues reached our staircase and attacked our door and my father, who decided to confront him. This, and that other violent evening – the one when, hidden under the bed and between my grandfather’s legs, I could watch the lights of the bullets flying in front of our windows during the revolution of ’89 – are stuck in my mind. And even now, after all these years, I can hear the desperate cry of a mother pulling her electrocuted son from the small power plant built between our playing grounds. I watched from afar but could imagine the smell coming out of that hole in the skull – the moment I experienced the unrelenting power of my imagination. The doorway to the cellar, that made its way into many of my later stories and novels. That skull one of my older metalhead friends apparently stole from a graveyard, showing it to me from his bedroom window. And yes, that oh-so-exciting-and-wonderful cover art of the heavy metal, death and black metal albums I was handed down from my older metalhead friends. All this created a great breeding ground for later ideas and discoveries in the ’90s, when we could watch foreign TV and films and be awed – I remember the cackling laugh of the Crypt Keeper of the Tales from the Crypt and hiding in the shadows of the corridor watching in the mirror the dwarf’s dance in the Red Room of Twin Peaks, or the walk of the skinless, bloody shape from Hellraiser walking slowly through white rooms. Sure, scaring the hell out of me, but also filling my head with possibilities beyond the immediate and, therefore, leaving me wanting more.
All this happened exactly as I am telling it. Or maybe not, who knows what holes in my young reality my hungry mind observed and what parallel world it deemed fit to create for me.
But fear was not only lurking in the unknown corners of the outside world. Dread was also at home, as a necessary companion of growing up – hearing my maternal grandmother talking with the spirits of her dead relatives on her deathbed, the diseases amassed within ourselves over the years and the tendencies to self-destruct, seeing the dead bodies of my grandparents in their coffins, finding out about the fathers of our family and their dreams visited by the powerful dead women of their lives, summoning them to a better world, all culminating in that sunny afternoon where, as an eleven-year-old boy, I received a phone call from my dead grandmother, enquiring about her son, my father.
All this happened exactly as I am telling it. Or maybe not, who knows…
So through all of this, my passion and inclination for the aesthetics of horror might be the sum of temperament and acquired taste – horror as by-product of nature and nurture –, but it also represented a tool in my toolbox though life, a way of trying to understand the world around me in those moments where rationality and common sense failed me. As a child I often imagined the world as full of barely visible zippers; if I could only reach out and open one of them, I might be able to see what lies beyond the visible and the immediate. What wonders and horrors dwelled beyond, I could only imagine. But in that imagination was also the necessity to equip myself with both the possibility for horror, as well as the inference of beatitudes.
For a long time I used horror as a gateway towards those aspects of my life where I lacked understanding of myself and those around me, filling in the blanks of the unknown with images of dark fantasies, only recently truly asking myself why. Why did I choose horror as the vessel for understanding? And only recently, while cracking myself open like a nut and looking inside, I fully understood that I needed to in order to prepare myself for the descent towards the darkness that lies within. I built the stairs of that downward spiral with pages upon pages of stories and novels. I am now descending into my human nature, treading on my books.
Beyond the excitement, the giddiness, the jump scares and the laughs, horror for me is a way of making the darkness visible, or, even better, of making it conscious. Dealing with the shadows of this existence is a way of welding the inferior with the superior into the shape of a better person. Horror was the pathway to becoming whole, offering me a chance to bring a torch in the darkest recesses of existence and to search for that which shines in the darkness. For I truly believe that what can pierce the darkness, must indeed be a most powerful light source that can help us all in guiding our steps towards enlightenment.
Flavius Ardelean is a Romanian writer of dark fantasy and horror, the author of ten books for adults and children. His works have been translated into German and Russian. He made his debut in the English language with the short story, “Down, in Their World”, published in the Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories and named “an outstanding contribution” to "a ground-breaking anthology" by Publishers Weekly. Website: www.flaviusardelean.com.
