31 Days of Horror Day 11: Why I Love Horror by Ladies of the Fright Podcaster and Author Mackenzie Kiera

Today and tomorrow I am featuring the women behind the amazing podcast, Ladies of the Fright. This is a horror podcast that all library workers should listen to, and I am not just saying that because they have had me on as a guest [episodes 13 and 14].

Lisa Quigley and Mackenzie Kiera met in their MFA program [where they were taught by the incomparable Stephen Graham Jones]. They are writers, yes, but there are also huge readers. Their podcast features author interviews, but they also talk to editors, reviewers, and librarians. However, the best thing they do for you, the library worker who helps leisure readers, is that they regularly have discussions about books they have read- books new and old.

I want to especially point those of you who don't really want to read horror yourselves to these episodes of the podcast because they go into such detail about the books that you don't have to read them in order to learn about them. Listen to their discussions and I promise, you will be able then to turn around and confidently suggest that book to a patron. All without scaring yourself too much.

I asked Mackenzie and Lisa to participate both as readers and writers. They are newer horror authors just starting to get their stories into magazine and anthologies, so keep an eye out for them in the future. But as horror readers, women who love dark fiction, all of you can learn so much from them as they share their love for horror. Why they enjoy reading it gets at the heart of why many of your patrons do too.

Up first is Mackenzie Kiera:

Mackenzie Kiera is the author of 30+ articles, essays and short stories. She has been a contributing author for Gamut Magazine and The Last Bookstore’s Dwarf+Giant, where she reviewed books and interviewed various authors. Currently she is working on her second novel and is a contributor to The Mighty. If she's not writing or reading Mackenzie is either running with her rescue dogs or she and her husband are saving the world from zombies. Mackenzie's work can be found at mackenziekiera.contently.com

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I love reading horror because my sister and I are twelve years apart and she left for college when I was six. An empty, silent house surrounded me. Her music was gone and her friends were gone and her big socks and special pillow were gone and I wasn’t exactly a final girl, but I sure felt like the last one. 

I read horror because of Robinson Crusoe. It was the biggest book my parents owned and I’d wanted to read something that was half my weight, so I let the pony-tailed, bearded, shipwrecked man guide my way into books and it’s probably where I developed an affinity for men with untidy hair and cannibals. 

I read horror because I love violent video games. 

I read horror because of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. I sat in the school library in a nest of all the horror books I could find when Stephen King taught me that I wasn’t alone and that horror could be beautiful. 

I read horror because I am most alive underneath the covers with a flashlight, reading to the end of a book trying to figure out who the killer is and my eyes can’t go fast enough and the buzzing in my brain is never quite loud enough to drown out the creaking sounds of the house letting me know that magic is real and the killer could be just outside my bedroom. 

I read horror because blood has never bothered me. 

I read horror because when Mom was grieving over the death of her father, she and I used to watch movies late into the night. Through Mom’s grief, I was introduced to Ripley and the T-1000, Men in Black and Independence Day, Norman Bates and Jack Skellington, Young Frankenstein and Sleepy Hollow, poltergeists and exorcists and Mulder and Skully. 

I read horror because I’d rather be scared than lonely. 

I read horror because the first time I sobbed onto the pages of a book, it wasn’t for the two dead girls or for John Coffey or the mouse on the Mile. I cried for their curse. The Green Mile was the first book I curled my body around, determined to not let anything else hurt those characters. With me, they would always be loved and protected. 

I read horror because in horror you don’t have to be the strongest, smartest, prettiest or strongest. Just the most persistent. 

Reading horror taught me how to fall and keep going, because time is the ultimate killer and if you make excuses and stay down, he’ll get you. Horror taught me to cut my own wrists if I was hungry and guzzle: to be my own source of strength. Let my own beating heart power me up to run. 
I read horror because horror is that helping hand, when you say you can’t take much more of whatever is getting to you, getting you down, eating away at you. Horror is what smiles in the dark, all teeth and knowledge and says: “Oh, sure you can.”