31 Days of Horror: Day 23-- Why I Love Horror Featuring Becky LeJeune Client, Rachel Feder

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 pulled 6 separate winners over the weekend. Those people have been notified. The last 2 days of this feature do not include a giveaway.  However, the giveaway will be back as usual this coming Thursday.

I has been a fun 9 days as we all met authors with a wide range of wiring styles and reasons for loving Horror. And today we end with a bang, at least in my opinion, by welcoming Professor Rachel Feder. Now some of you might be thinking, Becky why is this a bang? Well, as someone who writes about Horror, I believe that those who write Horror nonfiction can add just as much to the conversation about why people crave Horror as the fiction writers can-- maybe more. When Becky LeJeune asked if it was okay to include Rachel as a nonfiction writer to this series, I said, not only is it okay, I am so glad you represent a nonfiction writer so we can include her.

And then, after accepting Feder, I looked up her upcoming book, The Darcy Myth: Jane Austen, Literary Heartthrobs, and the Monsters They Taught Us to Love (11/7/23 Quirk Books), and I was even more excited. This a a book all libraries should own. First of all, it is Quirk, and all of their nonfiction is perfect for a public library audience. They have Bram Stoker Award winning nonfiction by Grady Hendrix and Lisa Kroger and Melanie R. Anderson already. But second, we all know how popular Pride and Prejudice and all of the retellings are with public library patrons. This book brings a whole other level of thought and introspection to the Austen universe, one with much more sinister undertones, the likes of with have not been seen since another famous Quirk Book hinted at them back in 2009.

Back the Feder though. From the publisher's description: 

What if we've been reading Jane Austen and romantic classics all wrong? A literary scholar offers a funny, brainy, eye-opening take on how our contemporary love stories are actually terrifying.

Covering cultural touchstones ranging from Normal People to Taylor Swift and from Lord Byron to The Bachelor , The Darcy Myth is a book for anyone who loves thinking deeply about literature and culture—whether it’s Jane Austen or not.

You already know Mr. Darcy—at least you think you do! The brooding, rude, standoffish romantic hero of Pride and Prejudice , Darcy initially insults and ignores the witty heroine, but eventually succumbs to her charms. It’s a classic enemies-to-lovers plot, and one that has profoundly influenced our cultural ideas about courtship. But what if this classic isn’t just a grand romance, but a horror novel about how scary love and marriage can be for women?

In The Darcy Myth , literature scholar Rachel Feder unpacks Austen’s Gothic influences and how they’ve led us to a romantic ideal that’s halfway to being a monster story. Why is our culture so obsessed with cruel, indifferent romantic heroes (and sometimes heroines)? How much of that is Darcy’s fault? And, now that we know, what do we do about it?

I have already pre-ordered a copy for myself. You need to get on that for your library ASAP. 

Now, here is Feder sharing how she became obsessed with Gothic and now teaches it to others at the University of Denver. And like any good Professor, she included many citations to others books you are going to want to know about.

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Why I Love Horror 

by Rachel Feder

It feels kind of funny to be sitting down to write about why I love horror when I have such a low tolerance for depictions of gore and violence, written or otherwise, and when the last time I watched an actual horror movie I was so freaked out, I lost an entire night’s sleep. But then I remind myself that being a wimp doesn’t make me any less of a horror aficionado and that my preference for the spooky, atmospheric stuff has deep roots in literary history.

Hi! I’m Rachel. I’m an English professor at the University of Denver, where I teach eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature. I first got into this field based on other preoccupations. But as the years went by, my feminist political identity developed. I became a mother. And I started paying attention to which literary texts my students could feel in their very bones. Before I knew it, I was in love with the Gothic.

***

So, what do I mean by “Gothic”? I go into this in detail in the introduction to the Norton Library edition of Dracula, which I edited, and in the opening chapters of The Darcy Myth: Jane Austen, Literary Heartthrobs, and the Monsters They Taught Us to Love (forthcoming from Quirk Books on 11/7), which argues that downplaying Jane Austen’s engagement with the Gothic has led us to get horror mixed up with our romance for generations.

In a nutshell: the earliest novels in eighteenth-century England adhered closely to reality, although this reality was pretty dark—especially when the novels concerned the lives of women. Then, in the 1790s, a new literary trend emerged. Suddenly, fictional characters found themselves trapped in eerie spaces that bore some strange relationship to the past. Things were never quite as they seemed, and encounters with the supernatural were possible. While lots of folks read Gothic fiction, many of these novels were femme-coded—such as the works of Ann Radcliffe, who famously described her mode of writing as “terror,” versus the more heavy-handed “horror” of contemporaries such as Matthew “Monk” Lewis (so nicknamed after his very creepy horror novel, The Monk). And it’s important to understand the explosion of the Gothic as a publishing phenomenon as well as a social phenomenon. Influential publishing houses sprung up to feed readers’ voracious appetites for this type of story, and, in 1795, 38% of all novels published in England fell into the Gothic category.

What made the Gothic so appealing in the 1790s, and what makes it so appealing now? While there are some exceptions—such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s unfinished Gothic novel, which contains her most radical views about the patriarchy—for the most part Gothic novels are subversive, but not overtly didactic or otherwise political. Plunging into a Gothic novel allows the reader to linger in and explore their most intense and even hidden fears and desires, without any injunction to usher these thoughts and feelings into some sort of logical alignment. You can want to kill the vampire and also want to kiss the vampire and that is OK! It is even OK if the vampire represents a specifically transgressive form of desire, or a topic of broad cultural panic, or a vision of the future that seems impossible outside the context of the novel—or all of these at once. The Gothic provides readers with a space to think and feel outside the bounds of the logical world, which means it gives them an opportunity to think and feel about the world without the weight of expectation. These novels can be safe spaces in which to question the very nature of the systems, structures, and mores we live under, and to consider what it might look like to imagine our world anew. The hidden, haunted chambers of the Gothic are sacred openings for our contemplation, and they connect us to the hauntings of our personal and collective histories.

While the Gothic and Gothic horror have stayed with us over the years, I’m particularly fascinated by the recurrent nature of this literary trend. Take the Gothic revival—almost 100 years after the phenomenon I’ve just described, we get Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dracula—and don’t even get me started on the Brontës! With horror having a moment across publishing categories, you could even say that we are experiencing a Gothic revival right now. What might this have to do with our recent, collective experiences—of pandemic, political polarization, ecological calamity, loss of bodily autonomy, policing of gender expression—and what might it tell us about ourselves? I find these questions fascinating, and love that focusing on the Gothic, and on horror more broadly, can give us open-ended opportunities to explore them. 

***

Gothic novels offer a space for possibility. They are sites where our fears and our desires intersect. Personally, I turned to the Gothic, again and again, when I decided to become a mother. In particular, I became obsessed with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which I found myself teaching nine months pregnant, and with the ways that novel, along with its lesser-known companion text, Mathilda, relates to Mary Shelley’s fraught, tragic, and joyful experiences of maternity. This dual inquiry—at once personal and scholarly—became the subject of my first book, Harvester of Hearts: Motherhood under the Sign of Frankenstein (Northwestern University Press, 2018).

Around this time, I began interspersing my courses on the monsters, radicals, and rock stars of British Romantic literature with a series of courses on Jane Austen. But I brought my interest in the Gothic to bear on the discussions in these courses as well, and soon my students and I were seeing things in the novels that I hadn’t expected. For example, in one particularly riveting class discussion, the students and I became convinced that there is a strong likelihood that Austen included a coded abortion in Sense and Sensibility. I promptly cancelled the final paper and collaborated with the students on an essay bringing our reading to light, one that we continued to work on long after the course wrapped, and one that was eventually published—first in the peer-reviewed journal Romantic Circles Pedagogies, and later in Persuasions, the journal of the Jane Austen Society of Australia. (Those students were awesome, y’all.)

With Harvester hitting library shelves and my obsession with Austen’s darkness gaining momentum, I was beyond lucky to connect with my wonderful agent, Becky LeJeune, who believed that analyzing the role literature plays in our real lives could be interesting, not just for scholars, but for everyone. I stayed up all night binging Bridgerton, scream-wrote a proposal, and The Darcy Myth was born. In addition to The Darcy Myth and my edition of Dracula, we have another really fun project coming out in November, AstroLit: A Bibliophile’s Guide to the Stars (Clarkson Potter/Penguin Random House). Co-authored with one of my all-time favorite fiction writers and horror experts, McCormick Templeman, AstroLit looks at literary history through the lens of astrology, and includes deep-dives into the lives and works of some of our favorite figures from the history of horror: earthy Tauruses Mary Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Brontë; ultimate Leo Emily Brontë (who shares a birthday with “Wuthering Heights” songstress Kate Bush!); moody Cancers Ann Radcliffe and “Monk” Lewis; murky Scorpios Bram Stoker and Robert Louis Stevenson; Virgo queen Mary Shelley; and creepy Capricorn Edgar Allan Poe. My goal with all these projects, much like my goal in the classroom, is to invite folks to bring their love of literature (whether that’s horror, romance, or something else entirely) to bear on their real lives, and to gain a deeper understanding of their favorite tales—both the lies they tell, and the worlds they make possible.