31 Days of Horror: Day 18-- Why I Love Horror Featuring Becky LeJeune Client, Todd Keisling (Giveaway)

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 I welcome Todd Keisling whose latest book is the story collection, Cold, Black & Infinite which his recently reviewed here in Booklist. Like yesterday, you should have read my review and ordered this book already, but if not, Cemetery Dance is going to send 1 winner a finished copy. The rest of you should get on this book.

As I said in that review his stories are immersive, nightmarish, and thought-provoking. Keisling is also a talented and highly sought after Horror illustrator, book layout designer and cover artist. I wrote about that part of his creative life in The Lineup here. And, as I noted in my review of his prose, "Keisling is also a sought after artist, and his skill creating visual unease bleeds into his prose with stories that effortlessly immerse the reader into each story."

In his entry into the Why I Love Horror series, Keisling talks about the comfort Horror has always brought him. 

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The Horror Was Always There

By Todd Keisling

Ten years ago, I wrote a story about my great-grandmother called “Saving Granny from the Devil.” I’d had the idea for a while, based on something Granny had said during one of her post-stroke episodes, and writing it was cathartic in ways I didn’t anticipate. The story revolves around a young boy who makes a deal with the devil to save his grandmother’s life. It contains a fair share of fiction, but mostly, what’s written is what really happened.

I mention it here because I can’t answer why I love horror without talking about Granny’s house. It’s where my earliest memories originated, when Mom and I lived with Granny after the divorce. Age-wise, that would put me from 3 to 5 years old, circa 1986-1988. Formative years. Granny’s house was the basis for Imogene Tremly’s house in Devil’s Creek. Which is to say Granny was the basis for Imogene, but I digress.

Anyway, I wrote about this part of my life in a short essay for Frank Errington’s website several years back, titled “Who Made Who?” after the AC/DC song featured prominently in Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive. I’m not going to regurgitate everything here that I wrote for Frank. I’m telling you about my early childhood to set the scene.

Because Granny’s house is where horror starts for me. That’s where I learned to be afraid of pretty much everything. I grew up afraid. Full stop. You name it, I was probably afraid of it—but not of the usual things a child might be afraid of. Things like:

• I was afraid of the mailbox. Granny used to send me out to get her mail. One day, I stuck my hand inside, and a white-hot pain shot up my arm. I pulled my hand out and screamed. Wasps crawled across my fingers. I’d disturbed a nest. To this day, I always look inside my mailbox before retrieving the mail.
• I was afraid of being left behind. Mom didn’t wake me up before she left for work, but the sound of her old Chevette’s engine did, and I remember crying and banging on the bedroom window as she drove away. Took me a long time to get over that. I’m 40 years old and I still get anxious when my wife leaves to go somewhere without me.
• I was afraid of losing Granny. I was there when she had a massive stroke. She couldn’t see anything, kept saying “it’s all gone dark,” and wasn’t responsive. Genetically, strokes, heart disease, and dementia run on both sides of my family. I’m terrified of anything that might cause me to lose myself.
• I was afraid of going to the hell that Southern Baptists believe in, and later, afraid of telling my parents that I didn’t believe in God or Satan so I kept up appearances and searched for a faith that I’d never find.
• I was afraid of my dad, to the extent that I didn’t want to spend weekends with him. We didn’t have much in common, he was too quiet, and I worried that because he didn’t know how connect with me that something must be wrong with me. Now that I’m older, I see that we’re similar in so many ways, and I’ve slowly rebuilt my relationship with him since reaching adulthood.
• I was afraid of my step-dad. He yelled too much—at me and my mom—and didn’t care enough. When he did, he didn’t know how to show it. We didn’t have much in common. He didn’t like to read, and would give me and Mom a hard time when he saw us reading. I’m still processing my feelings about him. When I write antagonists, he’s never far from my thoughts.

There are plenty more, but those are the big ones. It should come as no surprise that I suffer from ADHD, depression, and severe anxiety, and fall somewhere on the high-functioning side of the autism spectrum. I was more worried about how to navigate conversations, how to deal with unexpected loss, how to manage the fragile relationships I had when I was a child. Things like the dark and the boogeyman didn’t scare me. Quite the contrary.

Which brings us to Horror with a capital H.

Horror was my escape. It was a warm embrace after spending all day in the cold. Mom had inadvertently introduced me to the one thing in which I could take comfort, where no matter what awful things befell the protagonists of a given story, I could always turn it off or close the cover.

Horror gave me Ash Williams, a silly hero who’s afraid of everything just like me, but somehow finds the bullheaded strength to persevere in the face of petrifying evil. It gave me the survivors of the Dixie Boy Truckstop (who are still survivors today), Mike and Reggie and a black Hemi Cuda, Bill Denbrough and the rest of the Loser’s Club, Sally Hardesty, Mark Petrey, Jack Sawyer, Nancy Thompson, Kirsty Cotton, Simon Belmont, James Sunderland, Leon S. Kennedy, Chyna Shepherd, and many more.

From the times I sat alone in front of the old console television in Granny’s house to when I hid from the world in my bedroom, horror was there to show me it could always be worse, and it could always be overcome. Even when the heroes don’t succeed, there’s a strange comfort in knowing it’s just fiction, a peace to be found in escaping your life to experience the otherworldly, fantastic, and surreal.

Horror didn’t judge me for being too quiet, codependent, or staying in my room all the time.

Horror didn’t judge me for the books I read, the games I played, or the movies I watched.

Horror didn’t judge me for being afraid and for being weird, didn’t tell me I’m going to hell for not following the status quo.

Horror’s always been there, one of the few things in my life that’s welcomed me with open arms and without judgment. It’s where the outsider thrives, the weird are praised, and the weak become strong. It’s the place where a weird little kid dons a black cape from Halloween and goes hunting vampires in his grandmother’s backyard. Where the oddball child dresses up as a grim reaper to attend his church’s Halloween party. It’s the happiness this teen feels when all his friends scream and laugh at the flying eyeball scene in Evil Dead 2.

It’s the pride and honor that overwhelms this man when others enjoy the horror he’s created. What began in the bedroom of Granny’s house continues in the dusty attic of my cold, dead heart. Horror is my mask, my coping mechanism, my comfort.

But mostly, Horror is my home.