From October 15-23, I am bringing you 8 authors, and their agent as part of
Why I Love Horror along with 6 giveaways all to be pulled on 10/20 after 5pm Eastern.
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.
Today we have Australian Alan Baxter and his book
SallowBend which I reviewed (and loved) here in Booklist. You should have already added this book to your collections, but if not, Cemetery Dance will send 1 winner a finished copy and the rest of you who didn't listen to me the first time, can get your orders in now.
Baxter is winning awards by the handfuls in Australia and with more of his books coming out through American publishers, you can expect and uptick in fans on our shores. He is also a huge friend to libraries in Australia.
Readers who like fast paced, intensifying dread, with awesome characters like Stephen King and Josh Malerman will love Baxter.
But Why does he love Horror, well read on, but it is all centered on the truth at it's core and includes a thought-provoking discussion of Philosophy.
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Why I Love Horror By Alan Baxter
Most stories lie. I mean, they’re literally fiction. But where Albert Camus said, “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth” he missed off the bit where fiction is also quite often the lie with which we lie to ourselves. Modern storytelling conditions us for things that are not real. Story so often deals with happy endings and neat resolutions. While that’s an important, essential part of the escapism fiction provides, it’s also a little dishonest. Resolution is a lie, because something else is always starting or has already started. Every end is a new beginning. Happy endings are a lie, because we’re all on the same journey and there’s only one eventual destination.
So nihilistic, Alan!
No, not at all.
In a panel discussion I was on once, someone in the audience put their hand up and said, “Question for Alan. Who hurt you?”
It was partly in jest, of course, but also with a genuine sense of dismay at the darkness of the horror I write. I was promoting my novel Devouring Dark at the time. And you know what? Life hurt me. Life kills everyone in the end. Existence is pain. Some folks are lucky enough to have very little trauma in life and some have way too much. Personally, I’ve had more than my fair share, but I’m far from the worst off. The nature of life is agony.
Such an emo, Alan!
No, not at all.
You see, these things are true, but not automatically negative. Not in and of themselves. Of course they can lead to negativity and even nihilism, but denying them is dishonest. Which is leading me to my key argument.
Why do I love horror? Because it’s the genre of honesty.
Interrogating the world honestly through horror is cathartic, and it’s necessary. Everyone dies, everything breaks, all things end. Entropy is the only certainty. These things are simply true. What we do with that truth is what’s important.
I’m no nihilist. I love life. I think the universe and nature and at least a few people are beautiful and awe-inspiring. I adore showing my kid the wonders of the world. So why do I write such dark and confronting stuff? Because it’s necessary.
Nihilism is the idea that everything is shit, life is meaningless, therefore there’s no point to it all. It’s that last part I disagree with. Life is often shit and, in the greater scheme of things, life is meaningless. We are fleeting specks, easily forgotten, and even the human race in its entirety will one day be less than dust and forgot. But that doesn’t mean there’s no point to it all. That means there’s every point to living. Imagine the odds of you, right there, being alive right now. Nothing matters in the long run, so at this moment everything matters. For a brief moment in time, you can have an impact. You can make a difference. You can affect the
universe. One act of kindness can echo through eternity. Not doing that would be a waste of existence.
Ah, existence.
Existentialism is a philosophical theory which emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free agent, determining their own journey through acts of will.
Nihilism is depressing as hell. Existential nihilism gives us more. As there’s no greater purpose, we get to choose our own. As there are no fixed morals to live by, we decide our moral values. The realisation that there is no meaning in the universe is liberating. Existential nihilism means we create our own meaning in a universe of meaninglessness.
So what the hell does all this have to do with a love of horror? Well, horror is the genre that best lets us face these truths. It lets us interrogate what those truths really mean and hopefully allows us a cathartic process of dealing with that knowledge.
The monsters out there would take away our free will. Cosmic horror reminds us just how meaningless we are. Human monsters have made decisions about their morals and free will that are abhorrent to us and drastically affect our own ability to exist as we choose.
Therefore horror is the embodiment, in numerous dark and icky ways, of every facet of the meaninglessness of existence. The reading of horror is part of the fight to remain existentially nihilistic, not simply depressed. My writing of horror is an act of resistance. It’s a fuck you to meaninglessness.
A lot of people write about neat resolutions and happy endings. Which is good, we need that. But I explore things darker, because the honesty of darker things holds my interest. If I come to a literary fork in the road and one way is a well-lit street and the other a dark alley, I’ll take the alley. If there’s a story rabbit hole leading underground, I won’t turn back when the light fails. I’ll follow it all the way down, however dark it gets, and I’ll see it through to the end, because I want the honesty of its totality. I want to face the existentialism of it all.
For me, horror is many-layered, not unrelenting blackness. There is light and shade. There are moments of terror, weird shit happening, bad people making nasty choices and good people making bad decisions. But alongside those there’s a fight for good, and a hope for the light. There’s optimism and realism along with the darkness, though perhaps not always in equal measure. I explore all these themes in work like my novel Sallow Bend and my novella collection, The Gulp.
Bad things happen to good people for no reason at all every single day. That’s a central theme of my upcoming 2024 novel, Blood Covenant. We can question all this stuff with our fiction, and we can look for our own optimism in someone else’s tragedy. Now there’s a dichotomy on which to meditate. I write horror and dark fantasy wherein sometimes the evil prevails, but not always. I write it because there are monsters everywhere, and we must face them, win or lose. Sometimes losing is not the worst thing and sometimes victories are pyrrhic.
G.K. Chesterton said, “Fairy tales are more than true - not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.” I think that’s mostly true and incredibly necessary in our stories. But you know what? Sometimes the dragons win. Sometimes they’re not beaten, and survivors need to live with that. Or the monster is beaten at a terrible cost. That’s the purpose of dark fiction. That’s the horror I explore with my writing. To help us live
with those times, to prepare us in some way for the shit that will go down, and to remind us to revel in our existence while it lasts. To remind us what to fight for.
I love the lens of horror, tightly focussed on the visceral, powerful nature of humanity and life. That most honest delving into the rabbit hole and not flinching. Using fantasy and the supernatural allows us to create and explore the deepest rabbit holes. After all, what horrors might await when all the rules are taken away? Or new, impossible to decipher rules take over?
I’ve always struggled at a gut level with injustice, unfairness, bigotry, ignorance, lack of agency. I’ve seen way more terminal illness and premature death than I’d like. I see horrible people getting away with nefarious shit. All these things and more are addressed in the horror I write.
When we read dark fiction, it gives us tools and mechanisms to survive the slings and arrows of unjust existence. It helps us to celebrate existence, despite its meaninglessness. And it helps us to look for the light and the hope and the wonder, and gravitate towards it.
I love horror because horror is the genre of honesty.
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