Today I have a 2-fer with the regularly scheduled #HorrorForLibraries Giveaway and a Why I Love Horror entry by one of the authors. And this is a follow up book to a Bram Stoker Award Winning nonfiction title that is one of my top print reference titles for all libraries. More below, but first, here are the details and rules on how 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. Meaning you enter once, and you are entered until you win. 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. I use Random.org and have a member of my family witness the "draw"based off your number in the Google Sheet.
- 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 #103. Our winner was Lois from Chest County [PA] Library.
Now on to today's giveaway.
Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction by Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson is an award winning look at the most important women in horror, science fiction and fantasy, this is more than an encyclopedia. Along with extremely fun and compelling stories of the lives of women, some of whom everyone knows and others, who after reading this book you will never forget, it is also a volume filled with lists of read and watch suggestions, discussions of the next generation of women, and insight into the genre itself.
Now they are back with another stellar, must purchase title: Toil and Trouble: A Women's History of the Occult. And the publisher, Quirk Books, is offering you a FINISHED COPY of the book to add to your collection immediately. And if you already ordered it [which I know many have], well we all know what happens to occult books at the library...you will need another copy at come point.
From the publisher's description:
Why I Love Horror
by Lisa Kröger This celebration of forgotten magical women, from Salem to WitchTok, is a fascinating and empowering read for anyone interested in occultism or feminist history.
Meet the mystical women and nonbinary people from US history who found strength through the supernatural—and those who are still forging the way today. From the celebrity spirit mediums of the nineteenth century to contemporary activist witches hexing the patriarchy, women have long used magic and mysticism to seize the power they’re so often denied.
Organized around different approaches women have taken to the occult over the decades—using the supernatural for political gain, seeking fame and fortune as spiritual practitioners, embracing their witchy identities, and more—this book shines a light on underappreciated magical pioneers, including:
• Dion Fortune, who tried to marshal a magical army against Hitler
• Bri Luna, the Hoodwitch, social media star and serious magical practitioner
• Joan Quigley, personal psychic to Nancy Reagan
• Marie Laveau, voodoo queen of New Orleans
• Elvira, queer goth sex symbol who defied the Satanic Panic
• And many more!
And as a bonus in today's post, I also have Lisa Kröger offering her take on Why I Love Horror.
Quick question, horror fans. How do you repel a vampire?
With holy water, of course. The liquid is so powerful, only a few drops will burn the skin of the damned. You could also whip out a crucifix (just the sight of it makes the creature hiss and retract).
Who do you call when your teenage daughter is possessed by a demon?
An exorcist, courtesy of the Catholic Church.
Horror is usually built on the dynamic of good versus evil. It’s why so many of us can call the genre “comfort food.” Unlike the real world, the evil is clearly defined, and so is the good. We know who the savior of the story is. Our job is only to watch—and wait—to see if the good will triumph. Often it does, even if the promise of future evil still remains.
Horror has often been called a transgressive genre. I’ve called it that myself—it’s one of the primary reasons I love it. It’s meant to disrupt the comfortable places we exist in, to make us feel unsafe and insecure. The disruption is meant to be good, mostly, as it shakes us up, wakes us up, and makes us question our world. The transgressive nature is what led me to write Monster, She Wrote and my newest Toil and Trouble: A Women’s History of the Occult. Women breaking rules and taking charge is at the heart of the kind of horror I love.
I grew up in a conservative evangelical Christian community. The rules of my church were strict: no musical instruments, as only human voices were permitted in songs—and no dancing was permitted ever. As a child, I was warned against “mixed bathing” (which meant swimming in pools with boys). I remember overhearing a debate over whether or not women should be allowed to speak at all within the walls of the sanctuary (we already couldn’t pray out loud there). It was a place built by rules, and most of those rules told me that I was “wrong.”
Horror, then, for me was an escape, and if I’m honest, a bit of a rebellion. The first movie I remember seeing was The Exorcist, when I was in middle school. It was a clandestine affair: I was at a sleepover, and we stole the video from my friend’s older brother. No one knew we were watching; surely, we would be told we couldn’t watch a movie like this one. Here was a girl about my age, saying things I could never imagine saying and doing things with (gasp) crosses that I couldn’t comprehend. It exploded my world. I was gleeful—watching horror was an act that my community would shun me for, if they ever knew. I was watching something that was “sinful”—that was “wrong”—and it felt powerful. In a way, it was the first step to my life outside of that community.
As an adult, I’m an atheist, or maybe an agnostic. Truthfully, I don’t care about the label of it all—I just care to define myself as not a believer, as an outsider to that community.
As I grew older, my love for horror grew too, but there was always a strange Christ-shaped shadow that followed me. Even in my escape into horror, there were the crosses and crucifixes and holy water. The power of Christ compels and all that.
Sometimes, a narrative surprised me. Carrie (1976) was one of those films I watched early on that cemented my status as a horror fan. Carrie’s blood-soaked death stare as she targets her classmates at the prom is iconic, pure horror at its best. But for me, the true terror was found in Carrie’s home. It was one of the few movies that I had seen that peeled back the façade of living in a community that was overshadowed by a fundamentalist worldview. My own childhood experiences were vastly different from Carrie’s, of course (there were no prayer closets, no religious abuse, nor accusations of “dirty pillows”), but both the book and the movie really understood the stark difference in the world outside of Carrie’s home and the world inside. Carrie was an anxious outsider—her mother’s religious fanaticism cemented that identity for her. She never stood a chance.
To this day, it is still for me one of the best representations of the dangers inherent in religious fanatism.
Yet, the horror genre as a whole seems to still fall into the narrative trap of making the Christian church the template for the good that will defeat the evil. There’s The Exorcist, of course. But also The Amityville Horror, the movies in The Conjuring Universe, The Omen. They all position the Christian (usually Catholic) church as the ultimate way to destroy evil. Even films like Wicker Man present Christianity as the “right” religion when compared with the murderous pagan cult.
In all of these, there is little examination of the dangers that might be inherent in a religious environment. The “evil” sometimes grows from the inside out.
When Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass premiered on Netflix, I was cautiously optimistic. I’d loved The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor. But this show was something different—no big, haunted house, like the earlier shows, just a small, conservative community with a church at its heart.
But Midnight Mass resists the traditional narrative of a supernatural evil overcome by a religious good. There is a supernatural evil, of course, but there’s also something beneath that, something already rotting on the core of the island town. Flanagan’s story demonstrates how faith can blind people to dangers—in this case, mistaking those dangers for something miraculous. But it also shines a harsh light on how “good” people are really bad (their religiosity has only coded them as virtuous, though their words and actions proved otherwise).
But more than that, Midnight Mass allows the heroes to rest outside of the Christian community. The first to fall to the evil is the most religious of them all, Father Paul, followed by his second-in-command, Bev Keane. Flanagan’s church does not exist to fight evil; rather, the church is the weakest point that allows the evil to take hold in the town. Without the church, without Father Paul, without Bev, the people of Crockett Island would’ve remained safe. Both Father Paul and Bev manipulate the townspeople, using Bible verses twisted to fit their purpose. They make angels out of literal monsters.
The show demonstrates the dangers inherent in blind faith and unexamined allegiance to an ideology better than anything I’ve ever seen.
But the show truly excels in its depictions of the heroes, those characters who stood up against the evil. First was Sheriff Hasan, a newcomer to the island who questions the ethics of handing out the Christian Bible in the public school. He draws the ire of Bev during a school meeting, but he stands his ground. Then there is Sarah Gunning, the doctor who noticed something not quite right with the blood samples of her patients (which seemed to burst into flames in direct sunlight). Sarah has returned to the island to care for her elderly mother, but she never quite felt at home, especially with her girlfriend drawing stares from the more religious folks. There is also Erin Greene, the unmarried and pregnant school teacher who stands up on more than one occasion to the not-so-subtle “slut shaming” verbal jabs from Bev.
A Muslim. A lesbian. A “fallen woman.”
They are all people who would be considered “sinful” or “wrong” by the Christian community on Crockett Island. Yet, in Flanagan’s story, this band of outsiders is the true heroes. They are the ones who rang the alarm when danger entered their community. Midnight Mass is religious horror, but it is one that celebrates the outsider.
I, for one, enjoy horror that examines all the institutions, religious or not, that can breed evil within our society. I especially enjoy the ones that remember we need to see the outsiders as heroes.
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