Today I begin a special 6 day feature centered around Creature Publishing. From their "About" page:
Based in Virginia with roots in New York, Creature Publishing specializes in feminist horror, dark speculative fiction, women-driven thrillers, spooky fantastical fiction, literary fiction, and the like.
Founded in 2019, Creature has served as a platform for stories which challenge the status quo, offering titles with a broad and inclusive, transgressive and intersectional, understanding of what horror is and who can make it. As Creature has grown and evolved, our initial interest in horror’s potential for social commentary and catharsis, as well as its potential to cross into other genres and subvert genre altogether, has led to our more formal adoption of writing within the realm of thrillers, sci-fi, and fantasy, particularly when fear or horrific elements continue to play a role, but always where the writing is innovative and powerful, the stories reflecting and widening our understanding of others and the world.
About the Name & Those Delightful Spines
Our books have won or been finalists for the Bram Stoker Award, the Ladies of Horror Fiction Award, and the Foreword Indies. Our books are creatures—living, forceful entities with desires of their own, capable of inspiring fear, passion, anxiety, dread. The illustration on the spines of our books speaks to this idea. Our name is also a nod to the content of the genre itself; horror is full of creatures, human and nonhuman and all things in-between. They can be sinister or benevolent, familiar or “other.” The monster under the bed, the monster in bed with us, the monster inside. Our creatures have bones to pick. We like it that way.
Creature is a small press on the rise, and its Founder and Publisher Amanda Manns has everything to do with that and I thought there was no better way to kick off this exciting week of feminist horror than to invite Manns to tell you the story of how Creature came to be. In this essay she also introduces you to the five authors who will be following her in this series as well. If you aren't convinced to order every single one of their books after reading this essay, I promise you by the end of Saturday you will be.
Manns is also offering a giveaway this week-- a five book prize pack of Creature titles for one winner. Click here for the rules and details on how to enter. Get your entries in by 5pm Central this Friday (10/17) to be entered for the week's giveaway.
Now back to Manns and her entry into the Why I Love Horror series.
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Why I Love Horror?
Amanda Manns
I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian environment and taught to be meek and mild. In my earliest memories, I’m obeying, holding myself in reserve, either in trouble or in danger of being in trouble for things that are innocuous. Innocent. Normal.
When I was a teenager, one of my math teachers pulled aside several of my female classmates to warn them against having sex, not speaking to the male classmates at all, and not speaking to me because I…what? Wasn’t attractive? Or was a “good” girl? Or was it my scowl, the one I had accidentally gained a reputation for, that made a superintendent remark to a teacher “What’s that girl so mad about? Why is she so depressed?” while looking at me, while smiling, like I just needed someone to demonstrate how to move my lips.
You know what I love about horror? No one has to smile.
Our math teacher had the God-ordained, patriarchal right to grill these girls. After all, isn’t the question ‘Is 69 as sinful as penetrative sex?’ one every young woman should be forced to answer? He didn’t know which one had done it the weekend before, and while it successfully riled the guilty one—“Like, was he there? How could he know?”—we never found out if he was working from solid information, or if he’d simply been itching to get these girls alone, to encourage them towards a straight and narrow path while thinking about what was below that second button on their uniforms. How could he know which ones were temptations, liable to be led astray or lead our male classmates astray, without experiencing the temptation himself? I understand now that he was likely dealing with his own issues.
As much as I wondered why I wasn’t called out, his actions had an unintended effect: I became a conversation topic. The other girls whispered, they laughed, they tiptoed around me, because...? What was wrong with me? What did they know about me that I didn’t know? I had become the butt of gossip I couldn’t parse, and by this point in my education, I scrutinized everything, half-paranoid, trying desperately not to make a mistake. Because mistakes are easy to come by in an environment in which failing to recommit to Jesus weekly (because you hadn’t meant it hard enough the week before and would therefore go to Hell if you died today) and not tucking in your shirt carry similar moral and social condemnations. It’s an environment well-suited to making a developing girl overly attentive and afraid.
Why do I love horror? Why did I found a feminist horror company? Simply: I’ve been led astray.
Horror is the language of fear, which I understand intimately. Horror takes fear—enters into it fully and without remorse—and transforms it into power. Horror is therapy for the bodies and minds that cannot remember the time before fear—in my case, the time before the straight jacket. Horror thrives in the capacity to state social and cultural horrors without rose-colored glasses or a smile.
The authors we publish at Creature understand the inherent power of horror for social and personal catharsis. For every thing that may scare a marginalized person, for every experience too icky or painful or isolating to describe in life, our authors write it.
I love The Scald-Crow by Grace Daly because it offers us a chronically ill female main character (FMC) who expresses the reality of intense pain without mediating or dulling or otherwise obscuring it. As someone who has suffered from an undiagnosed chronic invisible illness herself, I found Grace’s novel engrossing, funny, cathartic, a perfect description of the horror of healthcare and our medical systems as they relate to women. If the body itself is a horror show, so is how the rest of the world engages with it.
Now that I’m a mother, I relish depictions of motherhood that challenge traditional notions of what’s allowed or allowable in that role. In Bruja’s Nest, the forthcoming debut novel from Brenda LaTorre, we get a chilling, at times darkly comedic, exploration of monstrous aristocrats, monster children, and the monstrousness of motherhood. Brenda’s focus on female rage and postpartum depression is brutally direct; her FMC’s actions to escape from her limited financial circumstances by any means possible, for herself and her child, touches upon what we’re often not allowed to recognize: a woman is going to get what she needs or wants, same as any man. Bruja’s Nest is a powerful, complicated cleanser.
Speaking of women’s wrongs, Tatiana Schlote-Bonne’s The Mean Ones gives us a powerlifting FMC Sadie whose desire for physical strength far exceeds her ability to feed her mental strength. In a relationship with a toxic manchild, Sadie survived cult killings at summer camp as a child, but as an adult she finds herself coerced to go to a cabin in the woods, recalling the events of her past. Cue the transformation of the nice, accommodating girl. This horror-thriller leaves you saying, Midsommar-style, “Good for her” as Sadie journeys towards her own truths.
And what about the horrors of contemporary politics? Necrology by Meg Ripley, the first in the Dirty duology, features the horror of political forces that would have women and the female-identifying deny who they are, swearing off their innate Dirty magic to serve a patriarchal group of Freemen. Who challenges this status quo? A horrific mother called Hyena, her eight-year-old daughter Rabbit, and the evil judge’s daughter, Jane, who has decided that she is one of the Dirty, whatever her father has to say about lost sons. Maybe this is also an answer for our times.
The ideological basis for Necrology’s fictional political group most clearly resembles Christian fundamentalism, and Whitetail, Rabbit’s Dirty teacher, instructs Rabbit on how to combat the Freemen. In this case, Rabbit’s closest teacher makes her feel safe and heard. But what if Rabbit had had my experience? What if she never felt safe? What if Rabbit, at five years old, danced exuberantly, a little Britney Spears in the making—and was reprimanded, harshly, both physically and publicly? What if things like this kept happening? Would Rabbit, at eight, cast in her lot with the Dirty? Or would she, at fifteen, not dream of dancing, not by herself, or with anyone else, but maybe in a dark corner, like a freak? Could she heal? Maybe not. Maybe.
For every mad girl, there is a scared girl first. And by the time I was fifteen, I was pretty mad, my permanent resting scowl an indicator of all the things I couldn’t express. Everything that made me angry or annoyed, but that I’d have to bear, at least for a while.
Becoming a horror publisher is my answer to that teenaged girl’s demand to be a person. And I like to think that it was my frown that kept my math teacher from approaching me. Someone bound that tight and then pressed…well, they might explode, right?
I can’t know, and I can’t know what catalyzed me into a social outcast after he completed his line of questioning. But I do know I wasn’t alone. That math teacher also didn’t see the need, for whatever reason, to speak to that other girl in the class, the one who was a little undersized, also terribly attentive, a competitive runner and gentle friend—who would, fifteen years later, reveal he was not a girl at all.
I love that kind of story. I love that horror isn’t polite, that it opens its mouth, not to smile, but to clamp down bloody on its target. Creature is a house that embraces monsters.
Creature is also a house that, if it doesn’t smile, certainly laughs. We’ve let down our hair to publish something as self-indulgent—sexually and otherwise—as Vampires at Sea by Lindsay Merbaum. A horror-comedy featuring two narcissistic emotional vampires, Hugh and Rebekah, who go on a discounted queer cruise to feast on their fellow passengers, this novella gives no fucks besides the literal ones. Does anyone like Rebekah? No. Is anyone supposed to? No. Do you lick your lips and giggle as she proceeds with her—in this case—bloodless misadventures?
I do. I fornicate with horror stories because I love them.
You can too.
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