31 Days of Horror: Day 6-- Why I Love Horror, Undertaker Books Week Edition Featuring L. Marie Wood

 

Day 2 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 L. Marie Wood author of the Undertaker Books novella If it's the Birds, We're In Trouble. From the publisher:

Something's wrong in Rothwood 

Morgues are overflowing. Social media is rife with conspiracy theories. Neighbors can't be trusted. And the animals aren't acting the way they should...

Part epistolary saga, part apocalyptic nightmare, IF IT'S THE BIRDS, WE'RE IN TROUBLE by L. Marie Wood, a Bram Stoker®, Golden Stake Award-winning author, offers readers a case file of disturbing clues that lead to a horrific discovery, inviting the best and bravest to turn its pages and accept its challenge.

Click here for information about this book and to order. 

Before we get to Wood'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 Wood and her entry into the Why I Love Horror series.

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Why I Love Horror

By L. Marie Wood

Why do I love horror? 

Because.

I could stop here and let my bio be longer than my essay, truth be told, because in the end, that is the answer. But let me try to explain.

In the same way that horror just is, the reason I love it as simple and as complex. I love it because I do. It has always been my go-to, my balm, my sanctuary. And I do mean always. I started writing horror when I was five years old. The story scrawled in crayon and pencil and acted out in something that I can only label interpretive dance now was psychological horror, though I didn’t have a name for it. My poor mother and grandmother were subjected to this expression of the tale that was inside me at a time when I hadn’t heard anything that might have influenced or encouraged such thoughts (to this day I feel sorry for them!). The tale was quiet and off-kilter and scary, and once I’d told it, I skipped away to do the little kid things that actually made sense for my age. That’s how I know I love horror. That’s how I know why.  Because it has always been part of me.

Some of us really have always lived in the castle.

Horror permeates. Even the people who don’t want to admit how much they enjoy the adrenaline rush that comes from being frightened will admit that much. But horror does so much more than that. It cleanses. It cleans out the corners, knocks down the spiderwebs, and dusts off the surfaces. It declutters, clearing out everything that isn’t useful anymore and uncovering hidden gems. Horror does all of this, leaving what matters, what needs to be examined, and then shines a light on it. The meaning will be different for every person who explores the space, which is where the beauty lies. The things we are afraid of manifest in that room; the constructs we cling to reveal themselves as artifacts there. How we navigate that space becomes an exercise in humility and it can’t be ignored, not if the experience is approached honestly… not if the horror is done well. People come away changed when horror hits home. That can be off-putting for some; indeed, it is off-putting for everyone as they evolve into one stage or another. And that is more ok than most readily admit.

Horror is not only the jump scare, the gore, the guts, the shrieking terror. It isn’t only the ghost in the foggy wood or the ax-wielding serial killer. It is also the fear of the darkness within, the din that goes unnoticed until it inexplicably quiets, the reflection in the mirror showing movement under the skin. Horror is pain, value, and disease laid bare, flayed skin revealing those terrors beneath. Horror is vulnerability – the display and the resolution.  Horror contours the expression of these human elements – repressions, biases, exclusion, illness, anxieties, at micro and macro levels - lets the consumer take stock of their accuracy, and challenges them to move forward anew. And everyone does, whether they are aware of it or not.  Because horror seeps into the very tissue of the consumer, it stays there, ready to be called up when needed, ready to be stress-tested in the real world. And it is eerily accurate, because horror, at its most base level, reflects.

Why would I love something like that? Something that forces review, something that demands acknowledgement? I don’t know. Maybe that’s my genetic make-up. Maybe I am critically focused on understanding myself, how I move, where I fit in the world around me. Maybe the era I was raised in (New York in the 1970s and 1980s, which showed me the boom of women in the workplace and the crack epidemic in tandem), my upbringing (suburban living, but city dwelling), and creative inclinations (always seeing the world sideways, as though tilting my head) converged to create a liminal space where these elements could mingle extrinsically and cast the shadow of their combined essence over my perception. Imagining it like that, like the chatter at a party, like the beginning of Marvin Gaye’s song, “Got To Give It Up”, makes sense to me about me and why I’m here, writing what I write and doing what I do. The voices in my head, the experiences they prattle on about, had to express themselves in some way… why not in the investigation of the shadows on the wall or what could be at the end of the darkened corridor ahead?

Or maybe I just think horror is cool.

Both things can be true at the same time.

I love horror because I do, because it sees me, makes me see me, makes me see that there’s someone else like me out there in the world. Sometimes that’s good. Sometimes that’s bad. But it’s always accurate.

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Bio: Celebrated psychological horror author L. Marie Wood is the winner of multiple awards including the Bram Stoker Award®, the Golden Stake Award for Literature, and the International Impact Book Award. She is also a MICO Award-winning screenwriter, an Elgin Award finalist poet, an accomplished essayist, and a playwright. Wood has won over 50 national and international screenplay and film awards, has been published in groundbreaking works, including the anthologies Sycorax's Daughters and Slay: Stories of the Vampire Noire, as well as in industry staples such as the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Nightmare Magazine, and her work has been translated in several languages. Her papers are archived as part of University of Pittsburgh’s Horror Studies Collection, in Old Dominion University’s poet archive, and in NightTide Magazine’s I Am Horror repository. Wood is the president of the Horror Writers Association, the founder of the Speculative Fiction Academy, an English and Creative Writing professor, as well as a horror scholar. Learn more at www.lmariewood.com.