31 Days of Horror: Day 31-- Announcing Clay McLeod Chapman as the 2024 Summer Scares Spokesperson

Please note, the knife has been removed from our logo by request of
a few schools who use the program with their students 

HWA ANNOUNCES SUMMER SCARES READING PROGRAM 2024 Spokesperson and Timeline

The Horror Writers Association (HWA), in partnership with United for Libraries, Book Riot, Booklist, and NoveList®, a division of EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO), is proud to announce the fifth annual Summer Scares Reading Program. Summer Scares is a reading program that provides libraries and schools with an annual list of recommended horror titles for adult, young adult (teen), and middle grade readers. It introduces readers and librarians to new authors and helps start conversations extending beyond the books from each list and promote reading for years to come.

Summer Scares is proud to announce the 2024 spokesperson, author Clay McLeod Chapman:

"To this day, I still have vivid memories of my grandmother escorting six-year-old me through our local library -- Go, Bon Air! -- and striking a deal: Pick two books, any two books, one for her to read to me and one for me to read to myself. When we both finished our individual reads, we could always come back and pick another pair. I can still list off practically every book I selected -- beginning with "Monsters of North America" by William A. Wise -- returning to the library to replenish our endless reservoir of reading every week of my childhood. Now I feel as if I'm returning to the library all over again, thanks to Summer Scares, where the deal this time is to pick those books that continue to make an impact on me and share them with as many readers as humanly possible."

Chapman is joined by a committee of six library workers who, together, will select three recommended fiction titles in each reading level, totaling nine Summer Scares selections. The goal of the program is to encourage a national conversation about the horror genre, across all age levels, at libraries around the world, and ultimately attract more adults, teens, and children interested in reading. Official Summer Scares designated authors will also make themselves available at public and school libraries.

The committee’s final selections will be announced on February 14, 2024, Library Lover’s Day. Chapman, along with some of the selected authors, will kick off Summer Scares at the 8th Annual HWA Librarians’ Day, Friday, May 31st, during StokerCon® 2024 at the San Diego Mission Bay Marriott.

Additional content, including podcast appearances, free webinar with Booklist, and lists of suggested titles for further reading, will be made available by the committee and its partners between the announcement of the Summer Scares 2024 titles and the kickoff event.

Of special note is the annual Summer Scares Programming Guide, courtesy of HWA Library Committee Co-Chair Konrad Stump and the Springfield-Greene County Library, which provides creative ideas to engage horror readers. Centered around the official Summer Scares titles, the guide offers tips and examples for readers’ advisory, book discussion guides, and sample programs, enabling librarians, even those who don’t read or especially enjoy the horror genre themselves, to connect their communities with Summer Scares. To see past year’s Summer Scares titles, spokespeople, and programming guides, please visit the program archive: http://raforallhorror.blogspot.com/p/summer-scares-archive.html.

This year, Summer Scares is once again excited to partner with iRead and all ages Summer Reading Program developed by librarians for libraries. iRead is used by libraries across the United States and around the world through their partnership with the US Department of Defense, bringing Summer Scares to our military families deployed all over the world.

2024 also brings NoveList as an official partner after a few years of providing program support.

“The goal of connecting readers with their next favorite book shapes everything we do at NoveList. We know reading can transform and delight, including being delightfully frightened,” said Danielle Borasky, Vice President of NoveList. “The dedication of the Summer Scares program to connecting readers of all ages with horror aligns with our passion for matching every reader with their next book,” she added. “Our team includes devoted genre readers, including die-hard horror fans, so we understand the importance of genre fiction. We're thrilled to support a program that highlights how enriching horror can be for readers.”

“I've been unofficially involved in parts of the Summer Scares program for the last couple of years and have worked to spotlight the selections in the NoveList databases. While collaborating with Summer Scares, I've also become an HWA member and a more active member of the horror community, which has been a wonderful gift,” said Yaika Sabat, MLS, Manager of Reader’s Services for NoveList. “I am fortunate to channel my lifelong love of horror into helping readers discover the genre in my work, both in NoveList and beyond,” she added. “As someone who began reading horror as a child and considers every season the right time to read horror, I'm thrilled to join the Summer Scares selection committee.”

Keep your eyes peeled for more updates coming soon from Booklist, Book Riot, NoveList and United for Libraries, as well as at the HWA’s website: www.horror.org and RA for All Horror: http://raforallhorror.blogspot.com/p/summer-scares.html.

Questions? Reach out to HWA Library Committee Chairs Becky Spratford and Konrad Stump via email: libraries@horror.org.

Summer Scares Committee Members:

Clay McLeod Chapman writes books, comic books, children's books, as well as for film and television. His most recent novels include What Kind of Mother and Ghost Eaters. You can find him at www.claymcleodchapman.com.

Becky Spratford is a library consultant and the author of The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror, third edition. She reviews horror for Booklist Magazine, is the horror columnist for Library Journal and runs the Readers’ Advisory Horror blog, RA for All: Horror. Becky is also a member of United for Libraries and is currently serving as Secretary for the Horror Writers’ Association.

Konrad Stump is a Local History Associate for the Springfield-Greene County (MO) Library, where he co-coordinates Springfield-Greene's popular “Oh, the Horror!” series, which attracts hundreds of patrons during October. He created the Donuts & Death horror book discussion group, featured in Book Club Reboot: 71 Creative Twists (ALA), and co-created the Summer Scares Programming Guide. Library workers who are interested in cultivating horror programming can contact him at konrads@thelibrary.org for free assistance.

Carolyn Ciesla is an academic library director in the Chicago suburbs. She has worked as a teen librarian and reference librarian, and reviews horror titles for Booklist Magazine. She’s currently enjoying providing all the scary books to her teen daughter, and revisiting a few along the way. You can find her all over the internet as @papersquared.

Kelly Jensen is an editor at Book Riot, the largest independent book website in North America. She covers all things young adult literature and has written about censorship for nearly ten years. She is the author of three critically-acclaimed and award-winning anthologies for young adults on the topics of feminism, mental health, and the body. She was named a person of the year in 2022 by Publishers Weekly and a Chicagoan of the year in 2022 by the Chicago Tribune for her anti-censorship work. She has also earned commendation from the American Association of School Librarians for her censorship coverage. Prior to her work at Book Riot, she was a public librarian for children, teens, and adults in several libraries in Northern Illinois and Southern Wisconsin. She is currently enrolled in a clinical mental health counseling master's program to bolster her work with mental health.

Yaika Sabat (MLS) comes from a background in public libraries of various sizes. She nowworks at NoveList as the Manager of Reader Services, where she trains library staff nationwide on readers’ advisory, creates genre-focused content, and works on reader-focused products and services. As a Horror Writers Association’s Library Advisory Council member, she works to help librarians understand and embrace the horror genre. Her other passions include writing, graphic novels, film (the scarier, the better), and folklore.

Julia Smith joined the Books for Youth team at Booklist in 2015, where she is now a senior editor. Her love of middle-grade literature and all things unsettling and strange draws her to creepy children's stories. You can follow her at @JuliaKate32 on Twitter. 

31 Days of Horror: Day 30-- The HWA's Library Committee Wants to Help You All Year Long

We are 1 day away from Halloween, the day we have been leading up to. However, I need to remind you that Horror is popular all year long. 

At the start of the month, I demonstrated all the ways this blog can help you to help your scariest readers every day of the year. Today, I want to close out my blog-a-thon with how the entire team at the Horror Writes Association's Library Committee can help you as well.

Wait, Becky, "close-out?" We sill have one more day. 

Yes we do, but tomorrow is the announcement one of the flashier things our Library Committee does as we will be letting the world know about our 2024 Summer Scares Spokesperson with an official press release, but that is not all we do.

At the Illinois Library Association's Annual Conference last week, I was part of an entire panel where we discussed how the HWA can help any library. And today, I am giving you access to all of the presentations here in one folder. Also below, I have given you a linked list of the individual presentations as well:

• I went first to give an overview of everything the HWA Library Committee can and does do for all of you, our libraries, including everyone on the panel. The moral of my presentation, you want any horror programming for your library, email libraries at horror dot org. But don't it early if you want help for fall 2024. Click here for my slides.
• Next was Becca Boland from iRead presenting about the partnership between their summer reading program and Summer Scares. Click here for her slides.
• Yaika Sabat from NoveList had a presentation about everything they do to support Summer Scares and Horror in general. Thanks to NoveList for sending her to our conference for this persentation. Click here for her slides.
• And then back-to-back, 2 library workers from the Chicago area who both have been a part of awesome Horror programming because they emailed libraries at horror dot org and/or used the Chicago Chapter of the HWA as their starting point.
• J9 from Glen Ellyn Public Library had an idea in early 2022: what if they turned the library into a haunted house by using scenes from actual horror stories, acted out by kids from the high school theater troop. They contacted me early in 2022 to start planning. I connected J9 with authors from the Chicagoland Chapter of HWA and the event went off with 650 people attending and the Chicago Tribune sending a reporter and a photographer. Then they did it again this year with over 1000 people showing up. Click here for their slides with pictures and more, including lessons learned. 
• And rounding it all out, award winning author and library worker, Michael Allen Rose from Oak Park Public Library. His slides show off the nuermous activities and programs he has hosted and been a part of at his library and others, including an all day Book Festival at an IN library a few weeks ago. Michael is a great presenter on this topic and a wonderful resource himself as he is a bridge between the library and author worlds. Click here for his slides.

While these programs give an overview of some of the things the HWA Library Committee has done recently, it is not even close to everything. Anyone, anywhere, can email us-- libraries at horror dot org-- and we will connect you with the HWA chapter in your area or if you are doing virtual, help connect you with authors who can present for you. And of course, there is all that Summer Scares programming we offer. 

As we approach the sunset of another year of 31 Days of Horror, I leave you with my annual plea to NOT forget about Horror the other 11 months of the year. And know that you have me and an entire team of Horror loving library people, ready to help you.

Back tomorrow with our big Summer Scares 2024 spokesperson announcement as well as a special video message on all social media platforms. 

31 Days of Horror: Day 29-- The Lineup, a Resource For Readers of Scary Reads All Year Long

As we inch toward the end of the Spooky Season I am going to be highlighting resources to help you all year long. 

One of my favorites is The Lineup, a champion of dark and spooky books. I like this resource so much, I am under contract with them to write for them 4x a year. I always do two wrap ups, one focused on the Stoker Awards and another as a Year End overview. The other 2 pieces are on topics Senior Editor Lisa Quigley and I agree on. To see all of my From the Haunted Stacks pieces, you can click here.

But The Lineup offers way more to you and your patrons than the four articles I contribute, so I invited Quigley herself to share more with all of you library workers about what both site she oversees, The Lineup and Murder & Mayhem, have for you all year long. And spoiler, one of my favorite parts about these sites is that they prioritize, the backlist. 

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I’m delighted to be back on RA for All once again! By now you will likely be familiar with my love of the horror genre as well as some of my own personal history as a fan and author.

This Halloween season, I want to share just how obsessed I am with my job as Senior Editor of The Lineup and Murder & Mayhem—sister sites owned by Open Road Integrated Media (ORIM). ORIM’s primary mission is to help voracious readers find books they’ll love.

Here’s the thing. In my humble opinion, there is just no other publisher + digital media company quite like ORIM. In the broader publishing industry, we are uniquely positioned due to our unapologetic emphasis on breathing new life, love, and readership into the backlist. A book doesn’t stop being worth reading just because it was published more than six months ago…and we help readers discover treasures in the backlist, whether the books are published by us or another publisher. After all, "a book is 'new' if is to the reader."

We are a publisher, yes—but we are first and foremost a champion of books. In addition to publishing our own diverse catalog of books, we also partner with 100+ additional publishers—from small press to Big 5—to market an astonishing number of backlist books with the ultimate goal of matching readers with books.

In many ways, our mission is complementary and often parallel with the mission of libraries and librarians. On that note, we do work extensively with Overdive and Hoopla to make tens of thousands of titles available to libraries in eBook form. We are a very library-friendly publisher, all about reading.

Most publishers would actually love to have the continual flow of reader interest in their backlist. That said, most marketing dollars and energy goes into making new books. So, the focus for most publishers will inevitably be on the frontlist. This strategy is often the result of both budgetary and manpower limits and constraints—and does not reflect the actual passion and hearts of people in the publishing industry. Everyone wishes they could give more time and love to the backlist, but as the publishing machine moves forward, some books inevitably fall out of the marketing schema.

Additionally, backlist marketing is an often a different type of marketing, done over a longer period of time and making use of ongoing reader interest using quite different ways of introducing them to that perfect next read. That’s where ORIM comes in with a number of innovative verticals aimed at matching hungry readers with a whole world of backlist books. But what’s most relevant for you as librarians—as well as your patrons—are our genre-specific content sites that match readers with books: Early Bird Books, The Lineup, The Portalist, The Archive, Murder & Mayhem, and A Love So True. With site content that’s regularly delivered directly to your inbox, these are excellent Readers Advisory resources for both librarians and readers alike.

Moreover, our site editors (hey, that’s me!) are avid and knowledgeable readers with a passion for books. We collaborate with our talented freelancers to produce helpful and informative content that’s actually grounded in knowledge, love, expertise, and respect for our genres and subgenres. Side note: if any of you are ever interested in writing for any of the sites, we LOVE it when librarians write for us! Feel free to send pitches to site editors at any time!

For example, as Senior Editor of The Lineup (our horror, true crime, and paranormal site), it’s crucial for me to work with freelancers who deeply know and love the genre. I’ve deliberately brought on freelancers who are invested in the horror world—genre leaders like Sadie Hartmann and Ashley Saywers of Night Worms, Gwendolyn Kiste, Eric LaRocca, Janelle Janson, Stephanie Sendaula, Gabino Iglesias, Kathryn E. McGee, Mackenzie Kiera, Mary K. McBrayer, Michael J. Seidlinger, and of course—the Library World’s Horror Maven we all know and love, Becky Spratford.

It’s important to me that we’re not only “producing content”, but that we’re writing stories, lists, and recommendations that actually reflect the community’s interests, tastes, concerns, and diversity. My ongoing mission is to make The Lineup a central hub for fans of horror literature.

And finally, I’ll introduce you to an exciting new initiative from this year from ORIM, one that is near and dear to my heart: the Free Voices campaign. Free Voices seeks to promote free speech, oppose book banning, and lift up the voices of the books being challenged across the country.

Additionally, here are some of the pieces published on Early Bird Books in support of books that are being challenged across the United States:

• https://earlybirdbooks.com/banned-books-for-kids
• https://earlybirdbooks.com/banned-books-2023
• https://earlybirdbooks.com/banned-book-club-books
• https://earlybirdbooks.com/ways-to-honor-banned-books-week

Wishing you all a very thrilling end to Spooky Season!

31 Days of Horror: Day 28-- Why I Love Horror by Paula D. Ashe

Well here we are, days away from the end of October. Today, I am ending the run of "Why I Love Horror" guest essays with an author who has had quite an eventful year, Paul D. Ashe. Ashe is an author of dark fiction, including the Bram Stoker Award-nominated and Shirley Jackson Award winning collection, We Are Here to Hurt Each Other. She is a member of the Horror Writers Association and an Associate Editor for Vastarien: A Literary Journal.

I started reading Ashe this year as well and her work blew me away at every turn. She writes honest, direct, and emotionally devastating tales what do not shy away from visceral imagery. Her stories are imaginative and compelling, but be prepared to have both the imagery and the ideas to linger with you long after finishing each tale.

Ashe has a Substack. I highly suggest checking it out.

But back to her Why I Love Horror essay for today. As I began planning this year's series, I not only knew I wanted Ashe to participate, but I wanted her to go last. Ashe is a rising star who needs more attention, especially in our libraries and her essay showcases not only how she writes, by why. 

Thank you for joining me on this journey for yet another year. I will be closing out the month with some resources for helping Horror readers all year long and of course, on Halloween, our big 2024 Summer Scares spokesperson announcement here on the blog and across many media platforms. 

But first, Paula D Ashe on the complicated feelings behind her love and how she uses it all to fight for the genre to evolve and do better. It is the perfect essay (and person) with which to end this series for 2023.

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Why I Love Horror

By: Paula D. Ashe 

My love of horror is dynamic, evolving, and complicated. As a Black lesbian writer of horror, I often find myself tasked with defending my beloved genre from legitimate concerns about the intent of a genre that has in some ways become synonymous with depictions of misogyny, racism, and homophobia (among other things). Why (and how) can I love films and books that revel in having –if any– characters of color who die first, often in service to white protagonists? Why (and how) can I love films and books that glorify violence (especially sexual violence) against women? Why (and how) can I love films and books that cast queer folks as villains, psychopaths, predators, and cowards?

Well, because like my love of the genre, the genre itself is dynamic, evolving, and complicated. Ever since I started to consciously declare both my love of horror and my desire to write horror, someone has always wanted to remind me that what I was doing was wrong. As a child I was told that horror was a corruptive influence and the books I loved reading held literal demons within the pages that would overtake my life if my family didn’t protect me from their schemes*. As a teenager I was told that reading too much would make me unattractive to boys, especially reading all that gross horror stuff. Later in college I was told that writing horror was beneath me, that I was wasting my talents on genre garbage. As an adult I’ve been told that horror is misogynist but also that I can’t write horror because I’m a woman. I’ve been told that Black horror doesn’t sell and that Black people don’t read horror. I’ve been told that queer characters in horror are somehow both ‘too much’ and ‘distracting’ while also being ‘unnecessary’.

The worst part about the majority of these examples, is that they came from people who thought they were helping me, doing me a favor. These were family members, friends, partners, professors, coworkers, and of course the errant internet rando poised to tell me all about myself though they only knew me through a single Tweet or Facebook post. It didn't matter that what they were arguing was clearly false as indicated by the fact that I was standing right there. From those exchanges though, I learned that people have very complicated (and often disappointing) relationships to the things they don’t understand and the things they fear. They’ve been told to view those things with contempt instead of curiosity, because questioning what we fear means questioning what authorities have told us to fear, and heaven forbid we have any of that.

What these folks fail to understand is that it is because of my identities that I love horror. Horror is the place where I feel most complete. I have a tattoo on my arm that’s both a reference to my favorite non-fiction book of all time (Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider) but also a declaration of myself and my pride in that self. I am on the outside, because I like being on the outside. No matter what community I am part of, some fragment of me always seems to stick out. You can learn a lot about people from that vantage point and a lot of it ain’t pretty and I appreciate that. I appreciate that horror is honest above all else.

Horror novels and films that depict marginalized people in less than favorable light are reflections of the assumptions made about those groups by members of ‘dominant’ groups who have been socialized to believe nothing else. Certainly, my argument here isn’t to say that those depictions are fair, accurate, or even desirable**, but rather they instruct us in not what we see but how we should see it. They influence audiences along lines of power and privilege (and I’m sure some of y’all are rolling your eyes but only hit dogs tend to holler so that’s your issue not mine), and in turn that influence carries over into our social interactions, our political beliefs, and our ways of being. Thus, the historically excluded become monsters, become nightmares, become the uncontrollable force waiting to lay waste to the established order of things.

And that is where another power lies.

The rules of normative society were never made for those outside of it and therefore not subject to its parameters. Over the last several decades (and before then in some ways), those ‘outsiders’ started crafting horror stories about themselves and their families, those stories told from generation to generation, by kin, both blood and fictive. Therefore we have the trope of middle and upper class home invasion but the countertrope of urban gentrification. For every depiction of pathologized Blackness, we get depictions of white sociopathy. For every final girl we get what Aigner Loren Wilson delightfully defines as a ‘murder babe’; a woman (or girl) “who revel[s] in and excel[s] at the art of murder and mayhem”. For every tragic, buried gay and psychotic trans stereotype we create multidimensional and complicated queers, because if you’re going to be -phobic, then let us really give you something to be scared of.

Horror for sure isn’t perfect, as any cursory dip into the horror discourse du jour reveals. There are a lot of racists and misogynists and various -phobes and unsafe predators who feel safe in the horror community because of horror’s nature as being confrontational and counterculture. I love horror and truly believe it to be for everyone, which unfortunately includes even the people I don’t like***.

I love horror because it challenges me. Horror makes me think deeply about the social conditions in which I find myself, it makes me more empathic to certain situations that I otherwise would have little access to. I love horror because it empowers me, because it accepts all of me and makes me feel validated in my perspectives and understanding of the world.

I love horror because it kicks ass. 

*Some people in my family are crazy.

**Overly palatable marginalized characters also suck too, to be human is to be complicated. 

 *** It doesn’t mean we have to give them a platform or publish them or not make fun of them for being dumb and dangerous.

31 Days of Horror: Day 27-- Why I Love Horror by KC Grifant

The last couple of days I have featured two of the debut I reviewed in the October 2023 issue of Library Journal. Today I have the author of a debut I began 2023 by reviewing it in the January 2023 issue of Library Journal, Melinda West: Monster Gunslinger by K.C. Grifant

You can click here to read my full review of this imaginative, fast paced, weird western series opener featuring strong world building and great characters.

But the book alone is not why I asked Grifant to share why she loves horror with you. Grifant is also a part of the StokerCon 2024 San Diego team. And for that reason, she is someone everyone needs to get to know better

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Horror is an Arachnid

by KC Grifant

At first, I thought it was a misplaced Halloween decoration, one of those fuzzy black spiders from Target. 

But then I had the horrific moment of realizing the tarantula—larger than my hand and standing in my backyard—was quite alive.

When I first moved from San Diego from the northeast ten years ago, I was enchanted by the desert vibe, the succulents, and the lack of humidity. What I wasn’t prepared for, however, was coming face to face with a massive tarantula in the wild.

Staring at the unexpected wildlife, my latent fear of spiders (that I’ve since mostly outgrown) evoked a deep, shuddering dread. Every terrifying scene from Arachnophobia immediately came to mind—if the spider perceived me to be a threat, would it charge and jump onto my face? Alas, I did not have fire power like Jeff Daniels nor full body protective gear like John Goodman.

I stood a good eight feet away, watching. I was simultaneously rooted to the spot while a primal urge to flee screamed at me to run. I stayed frozen, waiting. Eventually, the tarantula crawled slowly toward some succulents, feeling things out with its feet as it went. This was a spider larger than my hand and I couldn’t help but imagine how fast it could run, how high it could spring, if it decided to attack.

But while I watched its gentle, careful movements as it continued its sojourn across my yard, I gradually saw the beauty in its docile nature. It wasn’t trying to hurt anyone; it was just trying to find a safe hiding place and maybe eat some garden pests. My fear subsided and eventually the tarantula disappeared under an especially overgrown succulent.

When I told people about the sighting, responses were one of two extremes, consisting of essentially: “I’m jealous, that is the coolest thing ever!” or “Burn it all down!”

This experience—and the reactions—is like the genre of horror. Horror can be frightening and beautiful. It means different things to different people. Horror can be pulpy and fun, brutal, goofy, serious. It can consist of the real-world horror of serial killers and pedophiles, dragging us into the darkest corners of the human mind. It can fling us out into the furthest regions of space or keep us trapped in a 6-foot coffin. It disturbs, it makes you think, it nudges you out of your comfort zone and forces you to examine your beliefs, your expectations, your assumptions.

For me, horror is an arachnid: I am terrified but fascinated by it; drawn but also repelled. We all have complex boundaries that dictate if a type of horror story will exhilarate and delight versus upset us in a way that isn’t cathartic. I believe the horror genre can be enjoyable for everyone, once you find that line of what makes you feel deliciously disturbed versus unhappily distressed.

My preferred horror veers toward the fantastical. Serial killers and realistic horrors stress me out way too much, but I will take a creature feature any day. Spiders relate to the subgenres that I love: monsters and sci-fi horror. (It’s no coincidence a lot of alien depictions are insect-like.) Give me all the creative monsters: the experiments gone wrong, the alien invasions, the demon-vampire-zombie mashups, the parasitic entities. Living creatures are so strange and unusual, they are ripe for scary storytelling (see: tardigrades, diving ants, Ophiocordyceps fungus, amblypygi, the flashlight fish, the bobtail squid, Vampirococcus bacteria, etc.).

I especially love the creative remixing of monster horror that underscores a healthy fear of nature and its capabilities: the mega shark attacks in underwater horror; the mind altering- fungi in zombie horror. Monsters show us what can go wrong and are a somber reminder to respect the unknown, tread carefully, and do what you need to to survive.

Naturally, many of my stories star monsters that hunt the unfortunate protagonists. From a shape-shifting Big Foot in disguise, to zombies that seem more human than humans themselves, I adore a good twist on a monster trope.

My fear of arachnids and love of monsters inspired a key antagonist in my debut book, MELINDA WEST: MONSTER GUNSLINGER (Brigids Gate Press, 2023). The first of a series, this supernatural western introduces creatures galore as two monster exterminating gunslingers in the Old West set off on an impossible mission. I had a lot of fun imagining the most bizarre animals possible in this iconic setting while staying in the vein of the type of horror I love—high-stakes, outlandish adventure stories like Buffy, Evil Dead, or The Witcher. In these tales, the evils are (for the most part) contained to discrete and destroyable creatures. But alongside fierce battles, the characters must contend with their own fears and insecurities.

In the book, I strove to push the limits of tropes, both for the genre and for typical monsters. Readers will find enormous flying scorpions, snow kraken, soul-snatching shadows, mega-leeches—and, not surprisingly, plenty of demonic spiders.

31 Days of Horror: Day 26-- #HorrorForLibraries Giveaway of This Wretched Valley and Interview with the Author

Today, I am officially giving up on the numbering of my giveaways. There are too many. But I am NOT giving up on the giveaways themselves. Today, I have an advanced copy of a book coming ou in early 2024, a title I gave a STAR to in Library Journal, a novel that I think will end 2024 as one of the best debuts novels of the year. Details (and access to an interview I did with the author) below but first, the rules:

1. You need to be affiliated with an American public library. My rationale behind that is that I will be encouraging you to read these books and share them with patrons. While many of them are advanced reader copies that you cannot add to your collections, if you get the chance to read them, my hope is that you will consider ordering a copy for your library and give away the ARC away as a prize or pass it on to a fellow staff member.
2. If you are interested in being included in any giveaway at any time, you must email me at zombiegrl75 [at] gmail [dot] com with the subject line "#HorrorForLibraries." In the body of the email all you have to say is that you want to be entered and the name of your library.
3. Each entry will be considered for EVERY giveaway. Meaning you enter once, and you are entered until you win. I will randomly draw a winner on Fridays sometime after 5pm central. But only entries received by 5pm each week will be considered for that week. I use Random.org and have a member of my family witness the "draw"based off your number in the Google Sheet.
4. If you win, you are ineligible to win again for 4 weeks; you will have to re-enter after that time to be considered [I have a list of who has won, when, and what title]. However, if you do not win, you carry over into the next week. There is NO NEED to reenter if you haven't won.

Last week we had 6 winners! It was a spooky season present for all. But this week, I am moving back to our regularly scheduled Thursday programming with This Wretched Valley by Jenny Kiefer. 

As I mentioned above, this book blew me away. It is one of the best debut's I have ever read and it is a not to miss read. I gave it a STAR in the October 2023 issue of Library Journal. 

Below I have my draft review but Kiefer was also very kind to agree to do an interview with me for the issue. You can read that here. 

Now is your chance to enter to win an ARC of this book courtesy of Kiefer herself, who handed me this very copy at StokerCon back in June. It is also signed by the author. Remember, enter once and you are entered going forward. 

For more by me about this book see below or click here. Good Luck

Three Words That Describe This Book: Survival Horror, unrelenting tension, rock climbing frame

DRAFT REVIEW: In March of 2019, four 20 somethings enter the Kentucky woods, on a mission to find a never before discovered, let alone scaled, rock formation. Two of them are scientists eager to study the flora and geology of this unmapped region for their graduate work, while the other 2 are a rising star in the rock climbing world and her boyfriend. However, from the first lines, readers know this story ends with all four of them dead. Told from the point of view of each doomed character, and with time frames alternating between the story’s present, and the past, beginning in the 1700s when this land was first discovered, Kiefer masterfully crafts both vivid characters and a visceral place, a land rooted in evil, with a long history of a thirst for human blood. An unputdownable and realistic example of Survivor Horror at its best, marked by an unrelenting tension that methodically increases, squeezing its characters and readers to their limit. This is a story that will haunt readers for days after turning the final page, and it may keep them out of the woods forever.

Verdict: A terrifying debut rendered with the intensity and skill of cult favorite The Ruins by Scott Smith and touches of The Hunger by Alma Katsu and Echo by Thomas Olde Heuvelt announces Kiefer’s intentions to boldly begin a her climb to the top of the genre.

31 Days of Horror: Day 25-- Why I Love Horror by Sunny Moraine

Sometimes I take a wild stab at titles to include in my LJ Review column. Well, not completely wild.  I make an effort to focus on select publishers and make sure they are represented. In this case, Nightfire had an intriguing, debut coming in February, Your Shadow Half Remains by Sunny Moraine.

I requested it with no further information than the publisher's summary and what I got in return was a book that is "horrifyingly banal," with multiple layers of discomfort, and an engaging narration. Those quotations marks are from a phrase in the book itself.

Here is my full review for more context:

Riley lives alone, on the shores of an isolated lake, in the home that belonged to her grandparents, that is, before they murdered each other, because Riley lives in a slowly collapsing world where for the last two years, looking a human in the eye, be it a real person, an image, or even a reflection, will lead them to violence, killing everyone near them including themself. Until the day she meets Ellis on the road, and Riley dares to connect with another human. Riley is an engaging narrator, recounting the "horrifyingly banal"* downfall of society, drawing readers in with a mixture of details from”then” and philosophical consideration about “now,” gaining their trust even as she is slowly becoming less and less reliable. Creepy from its very first lines, with unease seeping out of every sentence, this deceptively quiet rollercoaster of intense unease, palpable emotional trauma, and engrossing menace, will appeal to a wide swath of readers.

Verdict: While the set-up warrants comparisons to Bird Box by Josh Malerman or The Violence by Delia S. Dawson, the reading experience with its multiple layers of discomfort, is reminiscent of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke by Eric LaRocca.

If you click through you can read even more.

Immediately after finishing this book, I contacted Moraine, and asked them to consider participating in Why I Love Horror.  

Please welcome Sunny Moraine as they share why Horror is the place where we can all feel fully human.

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Why I Love Horror

by Sunny Moraine 

Now and then I do in fact wonder how I got to where I am now, as someone immersed in horror both as creator and as audience, because if you met me as a kid, you never would have pegged me for a future gorehound.

I should be clear that I say “gorehound” a bit tongue-in-cheek here; I appreciate a good spout of gore, I get a kick out of it in my horror media, but I wouldn’t say it’s primarily why I come to the genre. The fact remains that when I was young I didn’t have much tolerance for horror at all, gory or otherwise. I was a lonely, bookish kid with—like many lonely, bookish kids—an overwhelmingly powerful imagination, and as such, the feelings induced by the conjurings of that imagination were often correspondingly overwhelming. I was easily scared, and frightening images stuck hard in my brain. I was well into adolescence before I could watch the Chestburster Scene in Alien (now one of my favorite films) without covering my eyes.

Yet at some point, something changed. Something in the vibe of horror reached out and gripped me by the guts and hasn’t let go. I don’t recall exactly when that was, or what the catalyst happened to be; it might have been reading The Shining one summer, or watching Jacob’s Ladder (now one of my favorite films) for the first time. What matters is that there came a time when those frightening images lingered, and instead of wanting them out of my head, I wanted them to stay.

They were compelling. They were even bizarrely comforting.

By the time I hit adolescence, I wasn’t only a lonely, bookish kid; I was a mentally ill kid, a neurodivergent kid, a queer kid who didn’t know yet that they were queer, with an increasingly difficult home life. So I think part of what happened is that the world itself became more unpredictable, more frightening—and more monstrous, not least because I was feeling more monstrous. My mental illness—primarily OCD—was manifesting in disturbing ways, most immediately in persistent dermatillomania, which is a form of compulsive self-harm as a way to self-soothe. So what I was dealing with wasn’t only the experience of my own mind turning on me, but also of my own body becoming a site of perversely comforting violence.

So horror—especially of the Stephen King variety—presented me with stories in which powerful evil could be confronted and maybe, against all odds, defeated.

But it also presented me with stories in which monsters could belong. In which they could confront normality as an enemy and destroy it, and in which they could seize their own power. Other kids found me strange and disturbing? Fine; maybe being strange and disturbing wasn’t so bad. Maybe, in a monstrous world, a monster is precisely what one ought to be.

That was a long time ago, and I’ve gotten much better. I’ve grown up, I’ve gotten married, I’ve made friends and found fellow travelers, I’ve discovered things I’m good at and carved out a life which is meaningful to me. I understand much more of where my power is, and I’m much more comfortable with not having any control over most of the world—or at least I’m more comfortable with the discomfort. But my attraction to horror has only intensified, and I think the reasons largely remain the same.

I love the uncanny in horror, because I feel uncanny. I love the things that alarm and disturb, because I frequently feel alarmed and disturbed, and I want to learn to live with those emotions rather than constantly fighting them. I love the presentation of the world as dangerous and frightening, because the real world seems more like that every day, and stories reflecting that reality is affirming for me. Perhaps most of all, in many ways I still feel essentially monstrous—and this is where I have to note that there’s something intrinsically queer about a lot of horror in that respect. It’s a counterintuitively safe place for what can’t help but stand against the accepted, the comprehensible, the normal and normative. It’s a place where it’s all right to admit that the abyss holds a certain allure.

It’s also a place where, because the deepest kinds of darkness must be faced, every fragile little flicker of light is that much brighter. Because of the presence of despair, every shred of hope one manages to claw free feels so profoundly earned. Those are often my favorite stories: where things get as bad as they can, where people spiral into the worst places imaginable, and then somehow succeed in carrying on in spite of everything. Maybe they don’t win, maybe even an uplifting ending is uplifting in only the most tenuous way, but they manage to hold onto some crucial piece of themselves.

One of my other favorite films is the 2015 psychological horror indie They Look Like People, which focuses on Wyatt, a man in the grip of terrifying schizophrenia, and Christian, Wyatt’s old friend who doesn’t know how to help Wyatt even as Christian is struggling with his own depression and anxiety. Wyatt is convinced that the world is on the verge of a demonic invasion, and he’s the only one who can do anything to fight back and save himself—not because he’s some sort of messianic figure but instead because he’s cursed to be the only one who sees it coming. (SPOILER ALERT) This conviction leads Wyatt to the verge of unspeakable violence against Christian, yet the film never allows us to stop feeling intense empathy for him and his distress. At the very last minute, Wyatt rejects his delusions, and he and Christian—who has reacted to Wyatt with courage and love and acceptance even though he doesn’t fully understand what’s wrong—embrace. That’s where the film ends: not with Wyatt conclusively getting better or Christian conclusively conquering his own debilitating emotional issues but simply with two broken men together in the darkness, having managed to find hope in each other in spite of their terrible brokenness.

I do love horror that ends in the bleakest places, too, where there’s no hope to be found at all. But I think my favorite stories are the ones that end the way They Look Like People does, where the awfulness of the world is fully realized and never defeated but somehow still doesn’t have the last word. And I really think you get that in horror in a way you rarely do elsewhere. You only find that kind of light in a place where the darkness is allowed to be nearly impenetrable.

You survive, and then it’s up to you to decide what the fact of your own survival means.

In some ways, while it makes a home for those of us who always feel a little bit like monsters, horror is also a place where we can discover what makes us fully human. And I can’t help loving that.

31 Days of Horror: Day 24-- Why I Love Horror by R.J. Joseph

Today let me introduce you to R.J. Joseph as part of the "Why I Love Horror":

Rhonda Jackson Garcia, AKA RJ Joseph is an award winning, Bram Stoker Award™ nominated, Texas-based academic and creative writer/professor, whose writing regularly focuses on the intersections of gender and race in the horror and romance genres and popular culture.

She has had works published in various applauded venues, including the 2020 Halloween issue of Southwest Review and The Streaming of Hill House: Essays on the Haunting Netflix Series. Her debut horror collection, Hell Hath No Sorrow like a Woman Haunted was released in August 2022 by The Seventh Terrace. Rhonda is also an instructor at the Speculative Fiction Academy and the co-host of the Genre Blackademia podcast.

When she isn’t writing, reading, or teaching, she can usually be found wrangling her huge, blended family of one husband, five adult sprouts, six teenaged sproutlings, four grandboo seedlings, and one furry hellbeast who sometimes pretends to be a dog.

She occasionally peeks out on various social media platforms as @rjacksonjoseph or at  www.rhondajacksonjoseph.com.

I met Joseph through HWA events and her spectacular, gut wrenching writing, specifically her excellent, critically acclaimed collection, Hell Hath No Sorrow Like a Woman Haunted. Most recently, I have been super excited about her appointment as editor of the brand new novella line for Raw Dog Screaming Press, one of my favorite, and most trusted, Horror small presses. I featured this new novella line in my Horror Genre Preview in the July 2023 issue of Library Journal. 

With Joseph's importance as a writer, teacher, and editor, I knew I wanted her here on Why I Love Horror. I asked her in person way back at StokerCon in June.

Her essay is one of the best of the month. Please take your time to read why those who live in thee shadows are not the monsters the world portrays them to be, and in fact they may be the exact opposite.

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Those Who Live in Horror

by RJ Joseph

I was destined to exist in darkness—in horror. I’m an autumn baby, born on a chilly November morning, in the shadows cast on the dark threshold between dusk and dawn. And growing up, there isn’t a lot for a poor, inner city autumn baby to do indoors except live through her imagination and that of others—of her kin in horror.

I‘ve always thrived in these horrific shadows.

And I’ve seen what lives in the darkness with me. We are horror. Hungry and mournful, seeking the light but afraid of revelations. Heavy. Wistful. Fearful. Tired. Confused. These are the foundations of the horror genre: but they aren’t the true monsters.

The most bestial of all beings are the creatures that exist in the light of the real world, hiding their deeds behind the false faces and costumes of faux respectability they believe washes away their sins. Greed and envy mark their true natures, and they reek of their desire to harm all they can, seeking to conquer. Aiming to elicit pain and suffering.

They look just like you and me and everyone else—they hide perfectly in our homes and on our streets. They teach our children and drive our buses. They speak with scissored tongues from behind podiums and from atop hills. They lead. They prosper. They sing. We listen. They dine with us and sleep with us and court us and…they destroy. These are they who live in the light.

Many of us in the shadows have been inaccurately labeled as monsters. We are misunderstood. We have been cast into the darkness by a majority that doesn’t truly believe us to be dangerous but say so to keep us outcasts in the dark. We who live in the darkness are harmless. Some of us only exist because we believe in each other. Because we create more of us.

I exist because I know to go back into the shadows for protection. The horror therein keeps me safe.

In the wispy vestiges of a waning sun, horror beckons me to come back to it, again and again, to relish in our dark hearts, away from the light. In the blackness, we can expose every part of ourselves. No one can see us there, and no one can inflict pain where they can’t see. We can be whatever we want to be in that liminal space between the terrors of the real world and those of our own making in the horror world.

In horror, I expect there to be horrible things. I expect the monsters to do monstrous things, even if they’re accidental. No wonder what dastardly deeds they and their creators concoct, the enactment of their actual and perceived monstrosity is predictable. Knowable. Comforting, even. There’s no artifice or pretense in horror. It is as it is stated to be. I am drawn to this authenticity of imperfection, to the void that mirrors the one inside of me.

Outside of horror, this comfort is short lived. Human actions can be debilitatingly surprising. Crushing.  

But if these true monsters happen to venture into our dark domain of horror, we have the upper hand there. We can create any manner of terror to haunt them, to take revenge on them for their misdeeds. I can create dark friends to help me torture them and ensure they never have a moment’s peace. I can wreak eternal damnation onto them with a flash of my imagination. I can banish them to a place beyond the darkness and the light.

But I remain at peace, wrapped in the cold comfort of whispered tales and creepy utterances, decay only pungent to those who don’t recognize the decay for the boon of new life it truly is.

In the rot of horror, I am free. I want for nothing as I dream and create and expand and live. I expect the conclusions to the stories in horror. There is predictability in knowing everything dies. This brings me comfort. Outside of horror, those monsters don’t seem to ever really die. Even if they do disappear, there is always another one to take its place. There’s a never-ending stream of monsters doing monstrous deeds outside the shadows. Horror and I cannot control what happens outside the shadows.

Existing in the shadows, we reign supreme.

I love horror. I’m destined to thrive in these horrific shadows.

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.

31 Days of Horror: Day 22-- Why I Love Horror Featuring Becky LeJeune Client, Jon Bassoff

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.

Today we have Jon Bassoff, high school English teacher by day, "deranged writer guy" by night with 9 Horror novels out in the world. Here is Bassoff explaining why he has loved Horror for different reasons at different ages.

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Why I Love Horror
by Jon Bassoff

I’m not the only one.

Not the only one who longs for haunted screams and blood-soaked floors. Or waking nightmares and hidden corpses.  Or buried traumas and forgotten ghosts.

I’m not the only one who longs for horror.

But not the real kind. Not the real violence. Not the real death. I want it to be pretend. In film. In literature. In art. In music.

After all, horror, the real horror, has been around as long as humans have. Picture Cain bashing in Abel’s skull in with a rock, removing his organs, and covering his own face with his brother’s blood. (Okay, maybe I tend to embellish a bit). And that unpleasant circumstance took place years before God started sending plagues and floods and fires.

And even after we were SIVILEYEZED, we’ve been creating havoc. You know the tales. The Hungarian aristocracy hacking to death peasants who dared to uprise. Harlow’s Pit of Despair. The Alexandra Hospital Massacre.

Yes, horror is all around. Thankfully, the vast majority of us are nauseated by this grotesqueness. We learn about the atrocities committed by our fellow humans and shake our heads in disgust. But if we’re being honest, we want to look. Even if it’s from the safety of our Coke-stained couch. Well, horror movies and novel allow us to quench our curiosity without quenching our bloodlust. Ketchup is cheaper than blood.

As for me…

It begins with The Shining. The first time I heard that title, I was six years old. My parents and their friends were going to go see the Kubrick movie in the movie theater. I asked if I could go. I liked movies. Why, over the past year, I’d already seen Fantasia, The Black Hole, and Clash of the Titans (oh, Harry Hamlin, where art thou?) If I had seen those movies, I asked my parents, why not The Shining? They answered in serious tones. Because it was scary, they said. Because it wasn’t meant for kids. Because it would give me nightmares. No, little Jonny Bassoff wouldn’t be watching The Shining. I would stay with the babysitter instead. We would read wholesome stories.

I tried imagining what images and ideas could possibly be in this movie. I knew about ghosts and goblins and witches. Hell, for the Halloween previous, my mom had placed a sheet over my head, cut out a couple of eye holes, and, voila, I was a ghost. But that didn’t give anybody nightmares. The Shining would.

When my parents returned, they confirmed that the movie was indeed terrifying. Even for them. And they were adults. My mom said she wished she hadn’t seen it. It was too scary.

The legend of The Shining was born. I didn’t see The Shining until years later. In those days, it wasn’t so easy. We didn’t own a VCR. If you missed a movie, you missed it. I saw other great movies in the movie theater—Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back—but not The Shining. No horror movies at all. Not until we rented a cabin in the mountains and rented a VCR. I was fifteen then. I begged my parents to rent the The Shining. I hadn’t forgotten. I wore them down. They finally agreed.

Of course, the setting couldn’t have been better. The middle of the winter. Snow falling. The mountains of Colorado. Finally, that evening, it was time. My dad hooked up the VCR rental. He pushed the tape inside. He pressed play.

And I got scared. Really scared. I mean, Room 237? The Grady twins? Redrum? The blood elevator? All work and no play?

It was everything I could have hoped for. I was now in the know. I had eaten the forbidden apple. And I wanted to gorge on an entire bushel.

Some people get a taste of horror and spit it out. When my son was young, I showed him the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Not horror, exactly, but scary. Especially at the end when Donald Sutherland points and shrieks. You should watch it if you haven’t. And my son was terrified. He couldn’t sleep for days. He would never watch another scary movie, he told me. Even to this day, he’s very cautious about the movies he watches, making sure that it won’t creep him out too much. That’s the way my wife is too. But not me. I can’t get enough. And why is that? Is it because I’m deranged? Well, yes. But not only that. I think I get tired of the mundane. So much in life is routine. Brushing teeth, getting dressed, eating breakfast, going to work, eating dinner, going to bed. Repeat. I long for an escape from the mundanity. Some mystery. Some excitement. I don’t want to skydive. Don’t want to munch on monkey brain. I’ll settle for horror.

Over the years that followed my viewing of The Shining, I tried to watch as much horror as I could. Halloween. Friday the 13th. Nightmare on Elm Street. Even the ridiculous B horror like Sleepaway Camp. And maybe, after a while, I got desensitized a bit. Like a drunk who needs to drink a pint of bourbon for a buzz, I needed more and more blood and dread and terror. Until it got to the point where I couldn’t be scared. Not really. Maybe a bit creeped out. Grossed out, certainly. But not scared. I think that’s where I am today. And yet I still watch as much horror as ever. But these days, I view it in a different way. These days, it’s about the art of the grotesque.

The wonderful thing about genre film (and fiction) is that it follows certain expectations and standards, and when those expectations and standards are twisted or broken, art is created. I think about a movie like Angel Heart, which starts an homage to old film noirs, complete with the gumshoe detective and smoky set pieces but turns progressively dark and horrific. It might be my favorite movie of all time. Or I think about Polanski’s Repulsion, where a woman’s descent into madness is accentuated by the claustrophobia of her apartment. Or I think about Lost Highway, one of my favorite Lynch films, which is so strange and disorienting that a viewing leaves you emotionally exhausted.

There are hundreds of other beautiful horror films, where fear is turned into art. But, of course, there are also exponentially more sleazy, unartful ones. I like those too. They’re like comfort food. Just ridiculous story lines with questionable taste and cheap special effects. And some of them are so weird, it’s reasonable to ask what the hell the filmmakers were snorting when they made the film. Like Tokyo Gore Police. Or Killer Klowns from Outer Space. I talked about my aversion to the mundane? Those films, for all their ridiculousness, are as good a way as any to escape from that mundanity.

Finally, I want to talk about horror fiction. My wife told me about her experience of reading Dracula in college and throwing the book across the room in terror. I haven’t had that experience myself (although I do envy her). What novels can do better than films is get inside the psyche of a person gone mad. And to me, that is the most brutal terror. Because while we can laugh off ghosts and witches and killer klowns from outer space, we know that madness is always just one trauma away. I think about a novel like The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe. Or The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson. Or, hell, Lolita by Nabokov. All of them are about losing control. Drifting away from reality. That’s what scares me most.

Most of what I write is influenced by that fear of madness. From the wounded Iraqi war veteran in Corrosion, to the obsessive lobotomy doctor in The Incurables, to emotionally damaged sister in Beneath Cruel Waters, my characters face the horror of their own psyches. My hope is that other people will want to take a peek, just like I did when my parents mentioned The Shining.

Because it beats real madness.

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.

💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀

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.