From October 15-23, I am bringing you 8 authors, and their agent as part of Why I Love Horror along with 6 giveaways all to be pulled on 10/20 after 5pm Eastern.
Now, longtime readers of this series know that each year I have spotlighted a small press during 31 Days. Well, this year I decided to try something different. I reached out to Becky LeJeune from Bond Literary Agency to see how we can work together to promote Horror authors.
But why Becky LeJeune? That one is easy to answer. LeJeune has not only come to StokerCon the last few years, but also, she has made a point to come to Librarians' Day. I have gotten to know her over the last few years. I both trust her as a human and trust her to not represent a-holes.
Look, I was honest with LeJeune and I will be honest with you, I have had pretty good luck with the small presses I have invited over the years (only one turned out to be shady), but with the number of bad actors out there and having exhausted the publishers I feel confident about, I am trying something new.
So for 9 days, we will meet a variety of authors from genre legends to up and comers and even a nonfiction writer. You will be exposed to a wide variety of horror practitioners, all of whom are great for your public library collections.
I know there are some aspiring writers who read this blog as well, so I also asked LeJeune to share what she is looking for in clients, and she said:
I am looking for authors who are passionate about their work but are also open to edits and discussions about how we can potentially improve the work for submission to editors.
I'll reopen to queries January 2024
Over the course of this series I will note which posts come with a chance to win a book. Please see the most recent giveaway for rules. Those rules apply here as well.
I will pull 6 separate winners over the weekend of 10/21. The winner of each book will be pulled in the order in which the titles are presented here on the blog. Also, note that the mailing of the titles will be orchestrated by LeJeune, so no RA for all pen and sticker for these 6 winners. But honestly, I would not have been able to give away this many books with my October schedule, so I think it is a fair tradeoff. More books, less RA of All swag.
Okay, now on to our first post, Becky LeJeune herself. As I told her, I cannot have this series without her going first, without her explaining why she as devoted her career to promoting and working with so many Horror authors. I cannot think of a better way for you, the library worker, to understand why readers love this genre than to hear it from her.
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Why I Love Horror
by Becky LeJeune
Horror has always been a part of my life.
I like to say that my love of the genre began when my parents took me to see Return of the Living Dead at the drive in. As my mom will point out, I was a baby and I slept through the whole thing.
The truth is that my parents really wanted to encourage reading. When I was 7 my mom bought me a ghost story. That was what kicked off my love of reading and my love of horror. From there I ravenously devoured R.L. Stine’s Fear Street series, Christopher Pike’s titles, and anything else that looked even remotely scary at my local Waldenbooks. I found John Saul at a garage sale. I even spent a summer babysitting my sisters, with payment being 3 new Dean Koontz titles each weekend.
Stephen King was the pinnacle. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with King. But I wasn’t allowed to read him. My mom, never a serious reader, had read a few of his books and that was where she set the bar in terms of “being old enough.” The only reason I got away with reading V.C. Andrews when I did was because it was the Heaven series and not Flowers in the Attic (one of the few others she would have easily recognized and put her foot down about).
You should know too that in these days, the Stephen King Book Club was heavily advertised on TV. Another thing you should know is that even though I wasn’t allowed to READ King as of yet, I was allowed to watch It on TV at the ripe old age of 9. So…
I did finally get to dive into King in middle school. A tree fell into my grandfather’s old house and rather than have to repair it, someone bought the building outright. My job was to clean off the bookshelves, where I found a copy of 'Salem's Lot hiding. I also absconded with my grandmother’s copy of Firestarter and told my mom there was no point holding out on sharing her copy of Pet Sematary. And that was pretty much that!
My reading did eventually branch out. My grandmother (never a fan of horror even though she did have that copy of Firestarter) was a voracious reader herself. Mystery was her preferred genre and as soon as she deemed me old enough for some of her own favorites, they became mine as well.
Nothing could outshine horror, though. My best friend and I would sneak, watching weekend horror movies on cable when our parents weren’t paying attention. Sleepovers were kicked off by browsing the horror shelves at our local video rental store. In fact, I still stick to our tradition of finding a new horror movie for each Friday the 13th and Halloween.
By the time I got my first job, I was a paying member of the Stephen King Book Club! I remember reading The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon on a field trip and Bag of Bones in the breakroom at that same first job. I read Cujo as my Halloween read in my dorm my freshman year in college and joked that King’s doorstoppers would be my self-defense go-to in my first apartment.
When I became a bookseller, my reading tastes evolved even further. Thrillers, fantasy, science fiction, even chick-lit. It all became part of my reading diet.
Over twenty years later, I still work with books. And I work with a wide variety of authors and genres. But a lot of those have a touch of horror to them. To call out a few of my published clients not featured in this series: Emily Layne’s Of Starlight and Bone, first in a YA SF trilogy based on the missing colony of Roanoke, has space cannibals! Matt Wallace’s epic fantasy trilogy that began with Savage Legion is literally about the horrors of war, politics, and expansion (though I did come on board after those were already complete, I love them unabashedly). And while Alex Livingston’s games-based high fantasy debut, Knave of Secrets, doesn’t have much horror to it, I signed with him after reading an-as-yet published Stranger Things-esque fantasy.
Horror is the thing that got me here. And horror is the thing that I often crave.
The question is why? Why horror?
I’m not entirely sure. But I have a few theories.
First: It’s an escape. My preferred escape, whether it be books or movies. And I have a lot of anxiety, so when it’s all TOO MUCH, I reach for escape.
Second: It’s safe. What does that mean? It means the rollercoaster of emotions you feel investing yourself in a good story, growing attached to the characters, and really feeling everything alongside them, can be paused or stopped at any point, and eventually come to an end when those final credits roll. So you can experience it temporarily. (And some even say it’s a way for anxious people like me to exorcise our own anxieties.)
Third: It’s where my friends are and have always been. And I think this one is the key! Even as a kid, my best friends were into horror right alongside me (or humored me). Every good friend I’ve had has been a fan of the genre.
Even my husband, whose first pick is never horror, pitched Shaun of the Dead for our first date. But since it wasn’t playing in our area yet, he took me to see Saw instead. And he didn’t even blink when he saw that I was putting up Halloween decorations in my apartment IN SEPTEMBER when he was picking me up for that very same date.
He humors me year-round when horror is my pick for our evening viewing. And he doesn’t complain when I watch 31 horror movies every year throughout the month of October.
Now whether my son will also be into the genre is a bit of a question. At 4 I don’t push it. But when he requested the Halloween version of Baby Shark in the middle of the summer a couple of years ago, I felt like maybe I was on the right track!
In short, I find horror fun. That’s really all there is to it!
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