This week I have 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 that "on the rise" statement is not an exaggeration. One of their titles made the October LibraryReads list as the Board Fiction pick-- Vampires at Sea by Lindsay Merbaum! Click here for more on that specific title.
Lindsay Merbaum is a queer author of strange tales, the founder of Pick Your Potions, and the high priestess of the Study Coven. Her first novel with Creature Publishing, The Gold Persimmon, was a 2021 Foreword Indies Finalist. Her new horror-comedy novella, Vampires at Sea, just set sail this fall. Lindsay lives in Michigan with her partner and cats.
Reminder: Creature is 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 here is Lindasy Merbaum sharing why she loves horror.
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Comedy-Horror Catharsis
by Lindsay Merbaum
In one of my favorite 90s movies, two frenemies plot to kill each other, only to discover they’re both undead. They end up facing an eternity of disfigurement, caused by their mutual destruction. The movie? Death Becomes Her, a satire on the superficial values of beauty culture and a shining example of horror-comedy. Horror-comedy satirizes the genre of horror itself, which appeals to my appetite for absurdity.
We approach horror willing to plumb emotional depths through monsters, killers, and mysteries that represent something about our reality. Slashed, persecuted, and pursued, the characters’ pain is for our pleasure–that delicious discomfort of vicarious danger. Such a sensation can be elusive: at worst, a premature reveal or clumsy prosthetics kill the mood.
At best, deliberate levity in traditional horror breaks the tension, creating breathing room for the viewer. Even early attempts at horror films by the Lumière Brothers and Georges Méliès often included dancing skeletons, “spectral pranksters,” and slapstick falls. Humor prompts the audience to feel more empathy towards the characters as well, which aligns with my own taste: I want innovative stories led by protagonists I can invest in. Consider all the jokes in It, a character-driven book and movie(s) that ironically features a child-chomping, shapeshifting murder-clown. One of the leads actually becomes a comedian. Yet no one would ever call It a comedy.
The ooey-gooey film The Substance likewise offers moments of comic relief amidst all the body horror: Demi Moore-turned-hag, cackling over her cauldron of snacks like Baba Yaga. What a delicious scene in a rather wonderfully gross film!
In my new horror-comedy novella Vampires at Sea, the emotional vampire MC detachedly observes the conspicuous consumption and excessive greenwashing aboard a commercial cruise ship. At the same time, Rebekah and her partner Hugh flit about, hypnotizing and manipulating passengers of their choosing so they can feast on their emotions. Sometimes the vampires use the humans as “minions” to do their bidding. Imagine their victims’ terror, waking up somewhere on the ship, naked, or in the wrong clothes, with no memory of where they’ve been or what they’ve done, like the worst blackout ever. Yet Rebekah opines: “Getting eaten by me would be the best thing that ever happened to you.” The vampires’ lack of empathy relative to the situation is absurd, as in the original film that spawned the series What We Do in the Shadows, where a fastidious vamp is more concerned with bloodstains on the couch than the vibrant woman’s life he just ended.
What We Do in the Shadows (film and series) uses horror-comedy to pose the question: what would vampires actually be like if they were real? How would they function in the age of the internet? Would they figure out how to get their clothes dry-cleaned? Would they get jobs? And other equally pertinent questions. Meanwhile the vampires encounter all sorts of monsters, a trail of bodies in their wake. These silly bloodsuckers are now vampire canon; our conception of what a vampire is and can be has been influenced by this hilarious interpretation just as much as Twilight or Interview with the Vampire.
Horror needs humor to relieve tension, but humor is a vehicle for exploring what horror even is. It’s a way of expanding the boundaries of the horror genre, to the point that some consider horror-comedy its own genre. Regardless, horror-comedy gets up close and personal with our monsters, to the point of reimagining not only what those monsters can do, but what they mean to us.
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