31 Days of Horror: Day 21-- Why I Love Horror Featuring Becky LeJeune Client, Greg Gifune (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 have prolific Horror author Greg Gifune. Goodreads lists 30 distinct works for Gifune! Cemetery Dance is offering 2 of his books to one winner, a finished copy of their reissue of Gifune's pulp Horror classic Savages from 2022 and an advanced reader's copy of his November 2023 upcoming novel, Smoke, in Crimson.

Gifune has won numerous awards and been praised by legends like Brian Keene, and I am excited to let him introduce himself to more of you today because his books should be on more library shelves. 

Here is Gifune sharing the cathartic power of Horror.

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Why I Love Horror

by Greg F. Gifune

Dario Argento once said, “Horror is like a serpent; always shedding its skin, always changing. And it will always come back. It can’t be hidden away like the guilty secrets we try to keep in our subconscious.”

Not only is that an interesting take, it’s an accurate one. There’s something intrinsic about Horror. It’s part of us in the most primal sense. We are born in fear, live our lives with fear as a component, and even sometimes, sadly, die in fear. Horror is with us, in some shape or form, from start to finish, so despite the universal nature of it, for me, there’s always been something inherently personal about it as well.

I’m a writer, so I see Horror from an artistic perspective, and for me, it is cathartic. Many are uncomfortable referring to Horror as art (unnecessarily, in my opinion), because it most certainly is. In fact, Horror is one of the better examples of art, as art isn’t supposed to be easy, safe, cozy and warm. Can it be an intellectual and emotional sanctuary? Or course, but it’s also supposed to be challenging, and at times, even threatening. In my mind, Horror is about a lot more than simply scaring people. Like all art, it’s supposed to make you uncomfortable. It’s supposed to offend and be confrontational. It’s supposed to make you think about things you’d often rather not, and in ways you might not otherwise. It’s supposed to push boundaries and provide you with personal experiences that speak to you in ways only art can. It can even be pointless, especially if that’s the aim or if irony is at play, but what it shouldn’t be is forced into some vague definition of what anyone else deems “correct.” It shouldn’t be neutered and insulated to protect those it may upset in some way, profoundly or otherwise. That’s for each individual to negotiate, not the responsibility of the artist or the art. The last thing any artist should ever do is censor him or herself, but that’s not to say artists have no responsibility, we most certainly do. Our responsibility is to the integrity of the art, to the truth of our art. And one rarely finds truth, as well as the freedom to mine that truth, to the extent one does in Horror.

I remember discovering Horror as a kid, first in those great old creature features and classic monster movies on TV, and then a bit later in books. Because my parents were educators, I was taught to read before I started school, and became a voracious reader from a very young age. By the time I was in 8th grade I’d already read a great deal of fiction, mostly adventure novels from Alistair MacLean, Hammond Innes and Jack Higgins, crime novels by John D. MacDonald, all of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, numerous Agatha Christie novels, the big three Tolkien novels, a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, some Kenneth Robeson Doc Savage novels, every Conan story or novel by Robert E. Howard I could get my hands on, and a wide variety of pulp westerns and science fiction novels. And then, one day on a trip to the library, I came across a heavily used paperback copy of Richard Matheson’s I AM LEGEND. The cover and the title caught my eye, and when I read the description on the back I was intrigued. I’d seen plenty of movies but had never read a horror novel before. I checked it out, went straight home and immediately began reading. I couldn’t put it down. Sure, it was terrifying and wonderfully done, it’s a classic, but it was while reading that novel that I realized horror had the ability to speak to me and move me in ways other genres rarely did. There was something uniquely base about it, raw, unencumbered and ultimately, antiestablishment. In Horror, there was freedom, vast freedom, and the possibilities were nearly limitless. It got in my head and refused to leave. But it did more than frighten me. It made me think. It challenged me. It caused me to question things about myself, others and the world around me. And of course there was another component to it: Escape. While that’s an element of all fiction, for me it is (generally) the strongest in horror. I continued to read and love other genres, but as Mr. Argento said, Horror kept coming back. From there the floodgates opened, and I soon understood how intricate and complex horror was, that it wasn’t just ghosts and goblins or vampires, it was also about the human condition. It changed and grew, and like that serpent perpetually shredding its skin, it kept coming back. While I continued to read a wide range of fiction (and do to this day), that encompassed everything from literary fiction to graphic novels to nearly everything in between, once Horror joined that lineup, it was there to stay.

As a writer who primarily works in the horror and crime genres, Horror has also become my business, my livelihood. And although I originally set out to be a crime writer, horror fiction was where I found my initial success. That old serpent in a new skin was back again.

So, why do I love horror? Surely it’s because of what I’ve already written about here. It saved me in many ways, helped me turn my life around and eventually pursue writing, the thing I’d always wanted to do. But here are the main reasons. A few years back, I wrote the novel THE LIVING AND THE DEAD. The lead character is a troubled combat veteran. My father was a combat vet as well, so I modeled a lot of what the character was struggling with on his experiences, and then I dropped him into the chaos of the novel. Both were men who had experienced the horror of combat and were still struggling with it years later, but because I have never been in combat myself, I could only hope I’d faithfully captured someone who had lived that hell. And then one day I received a letter from a reader, a Vietnam vet who wanted to let me know he’d read the book and the character had spoken to him so profoundly it actually helped him with his own past. I was deeply moved that a horror novel I’d written had genuinely helped this man, and had in some ways allowed him to quiet the demons he’d been wrestling with.

A few years later, a psychologist I respect enormously confided in me that she often has her clients read my work because it helps those who have suffered severe trauma to lessen their own pain through experiencing and understanding the trauma of others, in this case, the characters in my novels. There’s familiarity but safety in fiction. “Because you’ve experienced trauma yourself, you understand it,” she told me. “The same way that it’s cathartic for you to write it, others who also understand trauma can find catharsis through reading it. And the backdrop of horror presents the pain of trauma perfectly.”

Those things taught me that there’s great power in Horror, the power for good, for healing, for transformation, even transcendence and understanding. And you know what? Sometimes it’s just a whole hell of a lot of scary fun. When it’s done right, it has the opportunity to be all of those things, because amidst all the mayhem and darkness, just like the serpent, what also sheds its skin but always flourishes, is the light.

And that is why I love Horror.