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.
Here is the publisher description via Goodreads:
On the trail, anything can happen.After secrets and betrayal shatter his marriage, Josh Mallory seeks solace on the Pacific Crest Trail, in the mountains of Washington. On the trail, he’s just another hiker. On the trail, he can outrun the memories. But this backpacking trip swiftly turns grisly when he comes across the body of another hiker who seems to have fallen to his death.Josh is forced to detour through a small mountain town, where missing hiker posters flutter in the windows, and residents show no interest in hearing about the dead hiker. Unease that something is not quite right chases him back to the trail. But night falls too quickly and in his haste to get away, he becomes trapped on a mountain ridge beneath the light of a full moon. Feeling more and more uneasy, Josh soon realizes that he may not be alone on the mountain, and begins to fear that, like the missing hikers, he won’t make it out alive.
Join the buzz surrounding James and order a copy of The Woodkin for your library today, but first, let's learn why James, also a chef, loves Horror. Spoiler: it involves spices.
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Why I Love Horror
by Alexander James
by Alexander James
‘Hey Becky, whatcha doing on Friday night?’‘Nothing, Sadie, why? You want to do something?’‘I was wondering if you wanted to join me in having heart palpitations, sweaty palms, adrenaline surges and some light nausea.’‘Oh, yeah! Sounds like a blast!’
No one says this. Because by all accounts, the physical symptoms of being a horror fan are mostly things that should be avoided. If you isolate them from the experience, they’re all capital-b Bad—most of them, actually, line up quite nicely with being poisoned. And yet millions of people, myself included, rush to the shelves to buy books packed with gut-wrenching scenes of blood, gore, ghosts and ghouls.
Why? If you’ll permit a hypothesis, I have one to offer.
I don’t like spicy food. Ironic, for a chef of twenty-ish years, but there it is; I find most spicy food deeply unpleasant to eat—it burns my mouth for no good reason, and I’m convinced the people who bleat that it ‘adds more flavor’ are self-medicating or lacking certain crucial parts of their brain. But there are people in the world who love spicy food. I’ll watch them in awe as they plow through wings slathered in something called ‘nuclear hellfire death pepper’ sauce, or take bites out of whole peppers with spiciness rating measured in the absurd. They make faces, start sweating, some start crying, dancing around, swearing—and they love it. They’ll go back for a second bite, just for the experience.
Perhaps horror is the spicy food of the literary world. We love something unpleasant for the experience of being turned inside-out, of feeling like we’re dying sometimes. And it can feel like that, believe me; we’ve all woken up in the middle of the night with a nightmare that felt so fresh and sharp that we were convinced we were dying. But the thrill of it keeps us coming back.
The acrid bite of a heart-pounding chapter, or the moment in a movie when that low music starts building as someone starts creeping down a dark hallway.
And, of course, there's another factor. I think fear can isolate something beautiful in us.
Every October, my wife and I watch thirty-one days of spooky movies. We’ll huddle ourselves in blankets, turn every light in the apartment on, and spend the next two hours flinching, crying out, and watching the tv through the gaps in our outstretched fingers. And I love it. Because when you’re good and properly scared, there isn’t room for anything else. You’re not thinking about your day at work, or about what time your alarm is going to go off in the morning. You’re in the moment. Sure, your heart is in your throat and you feel like your skin is going to float right off your arms, but you’re there.
Fear simplifies things.
If you’re walking in the woods fifteen miles from the nearest other human, and a heavy stick snaps ten feet into the brush, the first thought in your head isn’t going to be whether or not you can make rent. There are countless examples of people pursuing this simplification; physical exercise, meditation, video games...humans are perpetually looking for a way to make the world still. To stop turning for one tiny, fractious second. A way to focus on one thing and let the rest slide.
Horror is how me and my people do it. It’s the ‘dunk your head in an ice bucket’ way of focusing your world to a single point: survival.
But let’s take it a step behind survival. Let’s put you back in the scenario I drew for you earlier; you’re walking in the woods, miles removed from anyone who can hear you scream—let alone help you—and you hear something snap in the brush. What’s the first thought you have, beyond ‘how do I stay alive through this? When facing something that threatens your existence, what’s the one sticking point that matters? Could be a regret, or a cherished memory, or a triumph that you didn’t know you savored until the chips are down. Horror crystallizes what matters to us.
Horror is also about drawing the reader in. It’s about the tension, added incrementally. Stretching a scene until the reader can see the shadows and the pockets of sparking flame in the burning house, until they can smell the woods closing in around them at night, until they can hear the screaming. Horror slows everything down and lets us appreciate each ticking second shivering past us.
So, for me and my people; why horror? Why not meditation, or hiking, or a big bag of weed?
This, I cannot tell you. I’ve spent several contemplative moments staying awake at night because the movie my wife and I watched for Spooktober is still fresh in my head and I know if I fall asleep right away I’ll have nightmares. By every metric, horror should be unpleasant to behold. None of it is fluffy, ‘make you feel good’, heartwarming stuff. Horror is the genre of bloody head lice, carnivorous ghosts, and abusive parents. Not exactly rom-com material.
Now, you might still be clinging to the notion that somehow, somehow, I’ve built up a tolerance for fear and horror and all things lurking in the night.
I am a horror writer. My debut novel, The Woodkin, is about a hiker on the Pacific Crest Trail who falls into the clutches of monsters in the mountains while he’s attempting to flee from his real-life problems by disappearing into the woods. I spend most of my time concocting plots that range from fiendish to genuinely hair-raising, and one might look at that and think ‘this person has a fairly high threshold for fear.’
Wrong. Dead wrong, actually. Neener-neener.
I am potentially the biggest weenie you’ve ever seen. Those Spooktober movies I keep mentioning? I can’t make it through a single one of them without needing a break. I almost cried watching Midsommar, Ari Aster’s masterpiece about a group of young adults who find themselves trapped in rural Sweden for a midsummer celebration.
And yet, I am eyeballs-deep in horror. I write it, I read it, I watch it...almost everything I do these days is related to horror. Does it build a tolerance? For some people, probably. I can
see that. For me? Not at all. Which honestly, I see as a blessing more than a curse. I like that I’m easily scared. I don’t need the ‘nuclear hellfire death pepper’ wing to feel the spice; I can get there with regular old hot sauce.
It’s a blessing because I have a good gauge for how scary something is. As a writer, I know the technical ways to make something scarier—slow the pace down, focus on the sensory details, make the sentences shorter...there are tricks that we have to make the reader to creep closer and closer to the words, so that when they jump out and scream, it has the right effect. But I can also get a feel for how scary something is because I don’t need much.
Horror is also about drawing the reader in. It’s about the tension, added incrementally. Stretching a scene until the reader can see the shadows and the pockets of sparking flame in the burning house, until they can smell the woods closing in around them at night, until they can hear the screaming. Horror slows everything down and lets us appreciate each ticking second shivering past us.
Once people get accustomed to the spiciest wing on the planet, they start needing nuclear hellfire death pepper sauce to taste spice at all.
I feel like this is a good place to mention; I don’t have anything against people who like spicy food. That’s not the point I meant to make, writing this.
(But also, come on do you really need to put eight tablespoons of cayenne in that gumbo? Like???)
Okay, enough rambling. Focus up, Alex.
Horror is the spice that sustains us. It strips away the vibrating, distracting, chaotic noise that is everyday life and lets us exist in a single moment with our heart in our throat. There is beauty in the stillness that exists in being scared.
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