Day 6 of my 7 day feature centered around Undertaker Books continues. From their "About" page:
Welcome to Undertaker Books, where our core values are integrity, professionalism, honesty, and transparency.
At Undertaker Books, our mission is to provide publishing services to indie authors worldwide, spotlighting new and unique voices within the realm of horror fiction. We strive to offer a seamless publishing journey from submission to publication while providing valuable feedback every step of the way.
We believe in collaboration between authors, publishers, editors, and designers to bring diverse voices to the forefront of the horror genre. Our passion lies in creating a long-lasting partnership with authors by focusing on the “less is more” concept: quality releases, not the quantity of them.
Undertaker Books is not limited to any specific theme or subgenre. Instead, we are dedicated to innovative storytelling and embracing the myriad voices that contribute to horror literature.
To our readers, we hope to bring you stories you’ll take to your grave.
Undertaker Books is a small press on the rise, and its Founder and Publisher Rebecca Cuthbert has everything to do with that. She has organized six of her authors to contribute to this week long feature and today, you get to meet Chloe York author of the Undertaker Books novel Our Devil's Awake. From the publisher: Most eighteen-year-olds are worried about college, relationships, and their future.
Blythe Rousseau has a devil named Rosie living in her basement.
Blythe has spent her life protecting the world from the red-skinned creature imprisoned in her basement rec room. Rosie cannot be killed, only sedated with a stake through the heart. Invisible to everyone outside her bloodline, the captured monster is both a prisoner and an inescapable burden.
After her mother’s sudden death, Blythe makes a desperate journey to Winchester, Louisiana, a town that—according to her mother’s notes—may hold the key to Rosie’s permanent demise and Blythe’s first real chance at freedom.
Instead, she finds Elsie Audley, the owner of a local cryptid museum and the first person outside her family who can see Rosie too.
But in Winchester’s moss-cloaked forests and towering cypress swamps, a new threat emerges that Blythe and Elsie must stop together. As Blythe’s connection with Elsie deepens and she learns the truth about Rosie’s past, she will have to face not only Winchester’s monsters, but her own demons.
How much is Blythe willing to sacrifice for the girl she loves?
Click here for more information about this book and to order. Before we get to Urieta's essay, a reminder that Cuthbert is also offering a giveaway this week-- Undertaker Books prize packs for 3 winners! Click here for the rules and details on how to enter (from a previous giveaway post). Get your entries in by 5pm Central this Friday (10/9) to be entered for the week's giveaway.
Now back to York and her entry into the Why I Love Horror series.
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Why I Love Horror
by Chloe York
“I’m a chicken.”
I use this phrase a lot. As a cautious, type A, anxiety-ridden gremlin, there’s a lot in life. I’m too chicken for. Somehow, horror fiction has never been one of them. From cutting my eight-year-old teeth on Goosebumps and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, spooky stories were what made me fall in love with reading and led to a lifetime of crafting my own narratives. But as I sit down to describe my “why” for enjoying this genre, a new fear creeps in—that I have nothing profound or unique enough to contribute to the conversation, that I’m not enough, a trait I share with a lot of my protagonists. So here’s me banishing the chicken and doing it anyway.
Because fear reveals so much about the person experiencing it, horror is one of the most intimate genres. It thrives on character and humanity, both the good and the bad parts. Horror can be so many things—an opportunity to work through your fears, a chance to feed the little violent beast that lives in your chest, or experience prevailing over great evil without consequence. In the best horror stories, the monster is never just a monster. The hero can easily be the villain. The stakes are always high. Horror can be a high-octane thrill or a creeping slow-burn dread. The possibilities are endless.
Writing horror allows me to put a face on what scares me most, which is often myself. You’ll see a lot of my protagonists willingly give up their autonomy in the pursuit of security, comfort, or love. Sometimes they overcome it, but more often, they don’t. Surprisingly, my favorite and most praised works contain examples of the character’s internal bad guys winning.
In my short story, Jericho’s Star, a young woman’s belief that she’ll never make it as a professional singer places her in the alluring Dr. Jericho’s act, where she’s tortured by an audience of his patrons, but in the end, comes out grateful for their adulation of her. In The Gut Wagoner, an old West themed story, a widow chooses to die with a monster formed from the offal she collected on her job working the gut wagon. In Selective Sight, a cosmic horror in which a party girl’s one-night-stand traps her with selective blindness to anything outside their home, she makes the choice to stay and avoid an uncertain future of bills and adulting.
In horror, it’s often expected that the monster will win and somehow that’s the very thing that makes the story feel satisfying despite how badly we want the best for our beloved characters. Because if we read horror to be scared, it’s hard to think of anything more frightening than losing, especially as a result of your own decisions. Horror offers us a way to both be the monster and defeat the monster. Either way, when you put down the book, you’re safe and that’s something even the biggest chicken will no doubt appreciate.
I know I do.
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Bio: Fantasy and horror author Chloe York is an award-winning abstract painter and insect taxidermist. Her short fiction has been featured in various anthologies and her sapphic horror novelette, The Gift of You was a finalist for an OutWrite Scary Award. She currently resides in Alabama with her husband and daughter in their shared home and studio.
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