Now, longtime readers of this series know that each year I have spotlighted a small press during 31 Days. Well, this year I decided to try something different. I reached out to Becky LeJeune from Bond Literary Agency to see how we can work together to promote Horror authors.
But why Becky LeJeune? That one is easy to answer. LeJeune has not only come to StokerCon the last few years, but also, she has made a point to come to Librarians' Day. I have gotten to know her over the last few years. I both trust her as a human and trust her to not represent a-holes.
Look, I was honest with LeJeune and I will be honest with you, I have had pretty good luck with the small presses I have invited over the years (only one turned out to be shady), but with the number of bad actors out there and having exhausted the publishers I feel confident about, I am trying something new.
So for 9 days, we will meet a variety of authors from genre legends to up and comers and even a nonfiction writer. You will be exposed to a wide variety of horror practitioners, all of whom are great for your public library collections.
I know there are some aspiring writers who read this blog as well, so I also asked LeJeune to share what she is looking for in clients, and she said:
I am looking for authors who are passionate about their work but are also open to edits and discussions about how we can potentially improve the work for submission to editors.I'll reopen to queries January 2024
Over the course of this series I will note which posts come with a chance to win a book. Please see the most recent giveaway for rules. Those rules apply here as well.
I will pull 6 separate winners over the weekend of 10/21. The winner of each book will be pulled in the order in which the titles are presented here on the blog. Also, note that the mailing of the titles will be orchestrated by LeJeune, so no RA for all pen and sticker for these 6 winners. But honestly, I would not have been able to give away this many books with my October schedule, so I think it is a fair tradeoff. More books, less RA of All swag.
Her latest release comes out in 2 days, Blood from the Air and Grimscribe, the publisher, is offer a copy to one of you as part of this series [see link above for giveaway rules].
I greatly appreciate Files agreeing to participate because I know she does not make many appearances. Her piece below, entitled, "Horror As Self Love" is a great example of the heart and emotion she puts into all of her work, her technical skill at telling a story, and her “Monster pride.”
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By Gemma Files
There was a time when I knew I was, at base, unlovable. The world around me had been pretty clear on this point, almost since I could remember—received wisdom at its finest, hard-learned from personal experience, a lifetime of blundering through and failing to be anything like “normal” enough to pass, let alone thrive. My interests were narrow and hyper-specific, my marks either extremely high or extremely low. I had trouble understanding why I needed to excel at things I wasn't interested in, or keep on trying if I wasn't immediately gifted in some area. I had serial BFFs, until I inevitably lost them. And I was just too much, for everybody, even myself: Too angry, too horny, too lonely, too excited, too sad, too weird, too off-putting, too apt to talk only in monologues and cut no one any slack, or share, or be “fun.”
Oh yeah, I could lie for a while, pretend to be something I wasn't, but they always figured it out, eventually. And then things went right on back to the way they'd always been—me, alone, trying to tell myself I didn't care but caring anyhow, deeply. Always wondering what was wrong with me, exactly, aside from...fucking everything, apparently.
There was a diagnosis for what I was, I eventually discovered, but it hadn't been invented yet and was rarely applied to girls even once it was, so I never actually got one. I had to re-engineer it from scratch when, after my son was placed on the autism spectrum, I ran across a list of symptoms for what used to be called Asperger's Syndrome and thought: Holy shit, that's me. Of course, I'd been masking socially for more than thirty years at that point, and though I don't think I ever became super-good at concealing my true self's parameters, I'd at least figured out some of the basics, like how to hold a conversation (listen to the other person, express interest, ask questions but don't volunteer), how to keep a job (find something you like enough to become an authority on, learn and set standards, try not to be an asshole), how to make a family.
It was that last part was the part that taught me so much more than any other, only starting with showing me how nothing was ever “wrong” with me—how I wasn't either too much or not enough, just different, exactly like the boy I gave birth to. That I could be kinder and more patient than I'd ever given myself credit for being, now I finally knew how much of my rage had really been fear, and could be let go of. That I was very definitely not unlovable, especially by the one person on earth who matters most.
Throughout all of this, meanwhile, horror somehow became my emotional and creative safe space, long before that particular phrase was ever coined. I'd been making up stories since before I could read, and almost all of them tended towards the darkest side of whatever genre first caught my attention: first myths and fairytales, then comics, then fantasy and science fiction, then finally horror itself, straight from the vein. Dracula led to vampires, vampires led (through 'Salem's Lot) to Stephen King, Stephen King led to Peter Straub, and so on. Around the 1990s, when I was already reviewing movies for money, I discovered a brave new world of (then) female-identified authors who really made my gears shift: Kathe Koja, Poppy Z. Brite, Caitlin R. Kiernan. I'd already started writing stories, but now I started selling them, then teaching other people how to write them. I won an award, had my stuff adapted for television, wrote books, sold them, won some more awards.
After a lifetime's internal struggle against the burden of pretending to be the person I thought the world was telling me I “should” be, I evolved into who I am...what I was always meant to be: A horror writer, and proud of it.
People have always argued a lot about what horror is “good for,” or if it's good for anything at all. Good for letting off steam; good for playing out our fears in controllable ways; good for highlighting the underside lurking beneath a light, bright, perpetually “happy,” virtue-signalling world. Recently, both during and in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, there's been a certain amount of recognition given to the thesis that in times of turmoil, threat and disturbance, horror provides confirmation that the illusion of universal safety was only ever that, so maybe we shouldn't spend so much time berating ourselves for our inability to simply buck up, keep calm and carry on in the face of immediate existential dread.
Another thing horror's always been good for, however, is for routinely skewing perspective away from the default towards the non-. As a genre founded by women, from stories of “raw-head and bloody bones” told by grandmothers over Christmas and Lady Cynthia Asquith's ghost story collections to the world-rocking narrative depth charge of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, its true roots have forever lain less in normativity than in derangement, in prising up the rock of received wisdom to watch what squirms out from beneath. Throughout cultural history, it's been consistently typified as abnormal, sick, Weird and queer and obsessed with things supposedly better left unexplored, unstated...and you know what? So it should be. So it should always be.
Partway through my own personal journey, creative and otherwise, I coined a phrase of my own that still means a lot to me: “Monster pride.” It means accepting the worst parts of yourself, all your most awful impulses, and choosing to love yourself anyways. To know who you are, right down to the blackest thoughts and bloodiest chunks of bone-marrow. To make a house for yourself out of those things, and call it home.
Because when your body and/or brain literally doesn't work the same way everyone else's seems to, you can absolutely grow up feeling like a freak, a weirdo, a monster. But then you start to find other monsters, ones you can identify with...monsters from myths and stories and songs, from books and TV and movies. And after a while, the similarities attract you as much as they scare you, so you become increasingly excited whenever something gives you that jolt, that sting, that electric shock of disgust and terror and existential dread, numinous awe, transportation. You start to want to break it down for parts and analyze them, learn how they work, how to use them, and be used by them—to become a shapeshifter, at least inside your own head. Become the thing that scares you most, speak with its voice, internalize its power. To make your own monsters.
And by “you,” of course, I mean me. But maybe you too, someday, if you're lucky.
Long story short: I love horror unabashedly, the same way I love my son, and for basically the same reasons. Because I never thought I could love myself, or be loved for myself, but I am. I always was.
Horror taught me that.
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