31 Days of Horror: Day 21-- Why I Love Horror Featuring Becky LeJeune Client, Greg Gifune (Giveaway)

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. 

Today I have prolific Horror author Greg Gifune. Goodreads lists 30 distinct works for Gifune! Cemetery Dance is offering 2 of his books to one winner, a finished copy of their reissue of Gifune's pulp Horror classic Savages from 2022 and an advanced reader's copy of his November 2023 upcoming novel, Smoke, in Crimson.

Gifune has won numerous awards and been praised by legends like Brian Keene, and I am excited to let him introduce himself to more of you today because his books should be on more library shelves. 

Here is Gifune sharing the cathartic power of Horror.

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Why I Love Horror

by Greg F. Gifune

Dario Argento once said, “Horror is like a serpent; always shedding its skin, always changing. And it will always come back. It can’t be hidden away like the guilty secrets we try to keep in our subconscious.”

Not only is that an interesting take, it’s an accurate one. There’s something intrinsic about Horror. It’s part of us in the most primal sense. We are born in fear, live our lives with fear as a component, and even sometimes, sadly, die in fear. Horror is with us, in some shape or form, from start to finish, so despite the universal nature of it, for me, there’s always been something inherently personal about it as well.

I’m a writer, so I see Horror from an artistic perspective, and for me, it is cathartic. Many are uncomfortable referring to Horror as art (unnecessarily, in my opinion), because it most certainly is. In fact, Horror is one of the better examples of art, as art isn’t supposed to be easy, safe, cozy and warm. Can it be an intellectual and emotional sanctuary? Or course, but it’s also supposed to be challenging, and at times, even threatening. In my mind, Horror is about a lot more than simply scaring people. Like all art, it’s supposed to make you uncomfortable. It’s supposed to offend and be confrontational. It’s supposed to make you think about things you’d often rather not, and in ways you might not otherwise. It’s supposed to push boundaries and provide you with personal experiences that speak to you in ways only art can. It can even be pointless, especially if that’s the aim or if irony is at play, but what it shouldn’t be is forced into some vague definition of what anyone else deems “correct.” It shouldn’t be neutered and insulated to protect those it may upset in some way, profoundly or otherwise. That’s for each individual to negotiate, not the responsibility of the artist or the art. The last thing any artist should ever do is censor him or herself, but that’s not to say artists have no responsibility, we most certainly do. Our responsibility is to the integrity of the art, to the truth of our art. And one rarely finds truth, as well as the freedom to mine that truth, to the extent one does in Horror.

I remember discovering Horror as a kid, first in those great old creature features and classic monster movies on TV, and then a bit later in books. Because my parents were educators, I was taught to read before I started school, and became a voracious reader from a very young age. By the time I was in 8th grade I’d already read a great deal of fiction, mostly adventure novels from Alistair MacLean, Hammond Innes and Jack Higgins, crime novels by John D. MacDonald, all of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, numerous Agatha Christie novels, the big three Tolkien novels, a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, some Kenneth Robeson Doc Savage novels, every Conan story or novel by Robert E. Howard I could get my hands on, and a wide variety of pulp westerns and science fiction novels. And then, one day on a trip to the library, I came across a heavily used paperback copy of Richard Matheson’s I AM LEGEND. The cover and the title caught my eye, and when I read the description on the back I was intrigued. I’d seen plenty of movies but had never read a horror novel before. I checked it out, went straight home and immediately began reading. I couldn’t put it down. Sure, it was terrifying and wonderfully done, it’s a classic, but it was while reading that novel that I realized horror had the ability to speak to me and move me in ways other genres rarely did. There was something uniquely base about it, raw, unencumbered and ultimately, antiestablishment. In Horror, there was freedom, vast freedom, and the possibilities were nearly limitless. It got in my head and refused to leave. But it did more than frighten me. It made me think. It challenged me. It caused me to question things about myself, others and the world around me. And of course there was another component to it: Escape. While that’s an element of all fiction, for me it is (generally) the strongest in horror. I continued to read and love other genres, but as Mr. Argento said, Horror kept coming back. From there the floodgates opened, and I soon understood how intricate and complex horror was, that it wasn’t just ghosts and goblins or vampires, it was also about the human condition. It changed and grew, and like that serpent perpetually shredding its skin, it kept coming back. While I continued to read a wide range of fiction (and do to this day), that encompassed everything from literary fiction to graphic novels to nearly everything in between, once Horror joined that lineup, it was there to stay.

As a writer who primarily works in the horror and crime genres, Horror has also become my business, my livelihood. And although I originally set out to be a crime writer, horror fiction was where I found my initial success. That old serpent in a new skin was back again.

So, why do I love horror? Surely it’s because of what I’ve already written about here. It saved me in many ways, helped me turn my life around and eventually pursue writing, the thing I’d always wanted to do. But here are the main reasons. A few years back, I wrote the novel THE LIVING AND THE DEAD. The lead character is a troubled combat veteran. My father was a combat vet as well, so I modeled a lot of what the character was struggling with on his experiences, and then I dropped him into the chaos of the novel. Both were men who had experienced the horror of combat and were still struggling with it years later, but because I have never been in combat myself, I could only hope I’d faithfully captured someone who had lived that hell. And then one day I received a letter from a reader, a Vietnam vet who wanted to let me know he’d read the book and the character had spoken to him so profoundly it actually helped him with his own past. I was deeply moved that a horror novel I’d written had genuinely helped this man, and had in some ways allowed him to quiet the demons he’d been wrestling with.

A few years later, a psychologist I respect enormously confided in me that she often has her clients read my work because it helps those who have suffered severe trauma to lessen their own pain through experiencing and understanding the trauma of others, in this case, the characters in my novels. There’s familiarity but safety in fiction. “Because you’ve experienced trauma yourself, you understand it,” she told me. “The same way that it’s cathartic for you to write it, others who also understand trauma can find catharsis through reading it. And the backdrop of horror presents the pain of trauma perfectly.”

Those things taught me that there’s great power in Horror, the power for good, for healing, for transformation, even transcendence and understanding. And you know what? Sometimes it’s just a whole hell of a lot of scary fun. When it’s done right, it has the opportunity to be all of those things, because amidst all the mayhem and darkness, just like the serpent, what also sheds its skin but always flourishes, is the light.

And that is why I love Horror.

31 Days of Horror: Day 20-- Why I Love Horror Featuring Becky LeJeune Client, CS Humble (Giveaway)

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. 

Next up his CS Humble, who I first encounter when I read All These Subtle Deceits for this review in Booklist. Recently, he has written a Weird Western Trilogy, the first two of which are not only out from Cemetery Dance, but are also being offered to one lucky winner this week. Those titles are, The Massacre at Yellow Hill and A Red Winter in the West. The third, and final book, is due next month. 

Reviewers of the Weird Westerns keep noting great characters, fast paced plot, and heart. So I thought I would share this quote from my Booklist review of a different book by Humble because I noted similar things, so a different series: 

"Opening this first book in a projected series, Humble has succeeded on all fronts, creating a compelling story set in a fascinating haunted city, but it is with the book’s strong emotional core, centered around William and Lauren, whose alternating points of view not only keep the pacing up, but allow the reader to connect with them, where this book will leave its mark on readers."

Seems like Humble already has a winning style. But don't take my word for it. Let's hear from the author itself. Here is CS Humble on how the fact that Horror is always present, fuels his writing.

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Lamplighter

By C.S. Humble

Inside of every person there is a wellspring. A secret place where the truth of us resides. The place where the heart and mind and spirit are distilled, and eddied, all three transforming to a single, beautiful source. Every person has it. It is one of the foundational elements composing the geological cross section of the inalienable and undeniable dignity suffusing every human heart.

I believe that. As firmly as I believe in anything.

I believe that is the place where writers go in order to find their stories. Where all our characters sleep, waiting to be rescued. Sleeping, while dreaming to be unearthed and drawn into the sunlight. Pulled into worlds crafted by storytellers desperate to build imaginary kingdoms connected by yellow-brick roads that will only ever exist inside a reader’s mind. Worlds of great and indeterminable mystery painted in sultry white and black and smoky gray of Noir. Into the great, nameless forests so wide and so vast and so hidden that entire civilizations have been born, surged to power, and vanished beneath the soil without their language ever needing a word for ‘foreigner’.

The fantasy. The romance. The thriller. The mystery. The unknown.

All these places and ten-thousand places more, each a genre.

And each and every one has Horror.

Kingdoms have their dragons. Noir thrillers their slighted lovers angling for revenge and stiffed, vengeful mob bosses decked as kings in their three-piece suits. And all manner of subtle and deceitful predators wait in the green dark of unknowable wild. Horror is there. Always.

Since the beginning.

Forever from the moment we first stepped the Earth.

Horror reaches from the primordial bedrock of our race, weaving itself through our timeline, stretching out of our present vision all the way to the indeterminate and invisible precipice that signifies our complete and total erasure. Beginning to end. Memorial or immemorial, horror is timeless. Its darkness persists against every virtue, save love itself. Horror has a strange power to diminish all that is best in us because it delivers us unto fear.

Readers know that, I think. With its monsters, human and inhuman, and its dark carnivals and killer beasts natural and unnatural and supernatural, Horror evicts love from our hearts and inescapably threatens all we hold dear. Family, home, life, and for many, afterlife. With its desolating power, the horror in our real, waking lives casts an almost impenetrable shroud over all the prospect around us. Stealing from our site the vision of community, security, and joy.

We are, all of us, living in that persistent shadow. Our children are massacred at American schools. Our pale blue dot is slowly losing its winters, becoming hotter and redder every year. And the political landscape seems frozen in phase, an eclipse casting us in the perpetual gloom from the light of a black star.

All this terror, all this indifference. All this trauma, all this darkness.

So many of us are in that place, unable to see. Afraid.

I don’t write horror because I enjoy the residing in the dark.

I write horror because I am a lamplighter, and the only place a lamp is useful is in the dark.

Every storyteller, in some way, is providing that little bloom of light for those willing to look for it – to read. Because every reader is just a person who wants to see something worth believing in, a candle in the night. And in order to see anything in this all-night-forever world of ours the lamps and candles and lanterns of horror writers willing to traverse that shadow realm will forever remain essential to our persistence as a storytelling species.

Writers of horror prove to be the willing, necessary explorers of chthonic realms, gloomy haunted castles, and blood-soaked basements hidden by the veneer of pleasant suburbia. They tell us stories that chill the blood, remind us of the animal living inside us, and the monster that animal can become. Horror shows us who we are. What we are.

The best of Horror, the very best of all literature in my opinion, shows us who we can be. What we can be when we dig down past that primordial rock of ages, down through the near impenetrable stone of our circumstances and our trauma, punching through to find the wellspring inside.

A single story can do that for a person. Especially a horror story.

And once a person finds the wellspring inside themselves, that precious humanity, it is impossible not to see it in each and every person we meet, allowing us to endure all that mankind has so far failed to bear.  

My stories are about exploring those dark places, through the gloom, by the light of a single storyteller lamp, hopefully strong enough to reveal all the strange glory inside each person willing to go with me.

31 Days of Horror: Day 19-- Why I Love Horror Featuring Becky LeJeune Client, Alexander James (Giveaway)

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. 

Today I welcome Alexander James, author of The Woodkin, which is our 4th of 6 giveaway being offered this week, this one courtesy of publisher CamCat. This is James' debut novel and it is getting a lot of buzz, including an entire episode of the Talking Scared Podcast with James.

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

‘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.

31 Days of Horror: Day 18-- Why I Love Horror Featuring Becky LeJeune Client, Todd Keisling (Giveaway)

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. 

Today I welcome Todd Keisling whose latest book is the story collection, Cold, Black & Infinite which his recently reviewed here in Booklist. Like yesterday, you should have read my review and ordered this book already, but if not, Cemetery Dance is going to send 1 winner a finished copy. The rest of you should get on this book.

As I said in that review his stories are immersive, nightmarish, and thought-provoking. Keisling is also a talented and highly sought after Horror illustrator, book layout designer and cover artist. I wrote about that part of his creative life in The Lineup here. And, as I noted in my review of his prose, "Keisling is also a sought after artist, and his skill creating visual unease bleeds into his prose with stories that effortlessly immerse the reader into each story."

In his entry into the Why I Love Horror series, Keisling talks about the comfort Horror has always brought him. 

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The Horror Was Always There

By Todd Keisling

Ten years ago, I wrote a story about my great-grandmother called “Saving Granny from the Devil.” I’d had the idea for a while, based on something Granny had said during one of her post-stroke episodes, and writing it was cathartic in ways I didn’t anticipate. The story revolves around a young boy who makes a deal with the devil to save his grandmother’s life. It contains a fair share of fiction, but mostly, what’s written is what really happened.

I mention it here because I can’t answer why I love horror without talking about Granny’s house. It’s where my earliest memories originated, when Mom and I lived with Granny after the divorce. Age-wise, that would put me from 3 to 5 years old, circa 1986-1988. Formative years. Granny’s house was the basis for Imogene Tremly’s house in Devil’s Creek. Which is to say Granny was the basis for Imogene, but I digress.

Anyway, I wrote about this part of my life in a short essay for Frank Errington’s website several years back, titled “Who Made Who?” after the AC/DC song featured prominently in Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive. I’m not going to regurgitate everything here that I wrote for Frank. I’m telling you about my early childhood to set the scene.

Because Granny’s house is where horror starts for me. That’s where I learned to be afraid of pretty much everything. I grew up afraid. Full stop. You name it, I was probably afraid of it—but not of the usual things a child might be afraid of. Things like:

• I was afraid of the mailbox. Granny used to send me out to get her mail. One day, I stuck my hand inside, and a white-hot pain shot up my arm. I pulled my hand out and screamed. Wasps crawled across my fingers. I’d disturbed a nest. To this day, I always look inside my mailbox before retrieving the mail.
• I was afraid of being left behind. Mom didn’t wake me up before she left for work, but the sound of her old Chevette’s engine did, and I remember crying and banging on the bedroom window as she drove away. Took me a long time to get over that. I’m 40 years old and I still get anxious when my wife leaves to go somewhere without me.
• I was afraid of losing Granny. I was there when she had a massive stroke. She couldn’t see anything, kept saying “it’s all gone dark,” and wasn’t responsive. Genetically, strokes, heart disease, and dementia run on both sides of my family. I’m terrified of anything that might cause me to lose myself.
• I was afraid of going to the hell that Southern Baptists believe in, and later, afraid of telling my parents that I didn’t believe in God or Satan so I kept up appearances and searched for a faith that I’d never find.
• I was afraid of my dad, to the extent that I didn’t want to spend weekends with him. We didn’t have much in common, he was too quiet, and I worried that because he didn’t know how connect with me that something must be wrong with me. Now that I’m older, I see that we’re similar in so many ways, and I’ve slowly rebuilt my relationship with him since reaching adulthood.
• I was afraid of my step-dad. He yelled too much—at me and my mom—and didn’t care enough. When he did, he didn’t know how to show it. We didn’t have much in common. He didn’t like to read, and would give me and Mom a hard time when he saw us reading. I’m still processing my feelings about him. When I write antagonists, he’s never far from my thoughts.

There are plenty more, but those are the big ones. It should come as no surprise that I suffer from ADHD, depression, and severe anxiety, and fall somewhere on the high-functioning side of the autism spectrum. I was more worried about how to navigate conversations, how to deal with unexpected loss, how to manage the fragile relationships I had when I was a child. Things like the dark and the boogeyman didn’t scare me. Quite the contrary.

Which brings us to Horror with a capital H.

Horror was my escape. It was a warm embrace after spending all day in the cold. Mom had inadvertently introduced me to the one thing in which I could take comfort, where no matter what awful things befell the protagonists of a given story, I could always turn it off or close the cover.

Horror gave me Ash Williams, a silly hero who’s afraid of everything just like me, but somehow finds the bullheaded strength to persevere in the face of petrifying evil. It gave me the survivors of the Dixie Boy Truckstop (who are still survivors today), Mike and Reggie and a black Hemi Cuda, Bill Denbrough and the rest of the Loser’s Club, Sally Hardesty, Mark Petrey, Jack Sawyer, Nancy Thompson, Kirsty Cotton, Simon Belmont, James Sunderland, Leon S. Kennedy, Chyna Shepherd, and many more.

From the times I sat alone in front of the old console television in Granny’s house to when I hid from the world in my bedroom, horror was there to show me it could always be worse, and it could always be overcome. Even when the heroes don’t succeed, there’s a strange comfort in knowing it’s just fiction, a peace to be found in escaping your life to experience the otherworldly, fantastic, and surreal.

Horror didn’t judge me for being too quiet, codependent, or staying in my room all the time.

Horror didn’t judge me for the books I read, the games I played, or the movies I watched.

Horror didn’t judge me for being afraid and for being weird, didn’t tell me I’m going to hell for not following the status quo.

Horror’s always been there, one of the few things in my life that’s welcomed me with open arms and without judgment. It’s where the outsider thrives, the weird are praised, and the weak become strong. It’s the place where a weird little kid dons a black cape from Halloween and goes hunting vampires in his grandmother’s backyard. Where the oddball child dresses up as a grim reaper to attend his church’s Halloween party. It’s the happiness this teen feels when all his friends scream and laugh at the flying eyeball scene in Evil Dead 2.

It’s the pride and honor that overwhelms this man when others enjoy the horror he’s created. What began in the bedroom of Granny’s house continues in the dusty attic of my cold, dead heart. Horror is my mask, my coping mechanism, my comfort.

But mostly, Horror is my home.

31 Days of Horror: Day 17-- Why I Love Horror Featuring Becky LeJeune Client, Alan Baxter (Giveaway)

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. 

Today we have Australian Alan Baxter and his book SallowBend which I reviewed (and loved) here in Booklist. You should have already added this book to your collections, but if not, Cemetery Dance will send 1 winner a finished copy and the rest of you who didn't listen to me the first time, can get your orders in now. 

Baxter is winning awards by the handfuls in Australia and with more of his books coming out through American publishers, you can expect and uptick in fans on our shores. He is also a huge friend to libraries in Australia.

Readers who like fast paced, intensifying dread, with awesome characters like Stephen King and Josh Malerman will love Baxter.

But Why does he love Horror, well read on, but it is all centered on the truth at it's core and includes a thought-provoking discussion of Philosophy.

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Why I Love Horror 

By Alan Baxter

Most stories lie. I mean, they’re literally fiction. But where Albert Camus said, “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth” he missed off the bit where fiction is also quite often the lie with which we lie to ourselves. Modern storytelling conditions us for things that are not real. Story so often deals with happy endings and neat resolutions. While that’s an important, essential part of the escapism fiction provides, it’s also a little dishonest. Resolution is a lie, because something else is always starting or has already started. Every end is a new beginning. Happy endings are a lie, because we’re all on the same journey and there’s only one eventual destination.

So nihilistic, Alan!

No, not at all.

In a panel discussion I was on once, someone in the audience put their hand up and said, “Question for Alan. Who hurt you?”

It was partly in jest, of course, but also with a genuine sense of dismay at the darkness of the horror I write. I was promoting my novel Devouring Dark at the time. And you know what? Life hurt me. Life kills everyone in the end. Existence is pain. Some folks are lucky enough to have very little trauma in life and some have way too much. Personally, I’ve had more than my fair share, but I’m far from the worst off. The nature of life is agony.

Such an emo, Alan!

No, not at all.

You see, these things are true, but not automatically negative. Not in and of themselves. Of course they can lead to negativity and even nihilism, but denying them is dishonest. Which is leading me to my key argument.

Why do I love horror? Because it’s the genre of honesty.

Interrogating the world honestly through horror is cathartic, and it’s necessary. Everyone dies, everything breaks, all things end. Entropy is the only certainty. These things are simply true. What we do with that truth is what’s important.

I’m no nihilist. I love life. I think the universe and nature and at least a few people are beautiful and awe-inspiring. I adore showing my kid the wonders of the world. So why do I write such dark and confronting stuff? Because it’s necessary.

Nihilism is the idea that everything is shit, life is meaningless, therefore there’s no point to it all. It’s that last part I disagree with. Life is often shit and, in the greater scheme of things, life is meaningless. We are fleeting specks, easily forgotten, and even the human race in its entirety will one day be less than dust and forgot. But that doesn’t mean there’s no point to it all. That means there’s every point to living. Imagine the odds of you, right there, being alive right now. Nothing matters in the long run, so at this moment everything matters. For a brief moment in time, you can have an impact. You can make a difference. You can affect the universe. One act of kindness can echo through eternity. Not doing that would be a waste of existence.

Ah, existence.

Existentialism is a philosophical theory which emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free agent, determining their own journey through acts of will.

Nihilism is depressing as hell. Existential nihilism gives us more. As there’s no greater purpose, we get to choose our own. As there are no fixed morals to live by, we decide our moral values. The realisation that there is no meaning in the universe is liberating. Existential nihilism means we create our own meaning in a universe of meaninglessness.

So what the hell does all this have to do with a love of horror? Well, horror is the genre that best lets us face these truths. It lets us interrogate what those truths really mean and hopefully allows us a cathartic process of dealing with that knowledge.

The monsters out there would take away our free will. Cosmic horror reminds us just how meaningless we are. Human monsters have made decisions about their morals and free will that are abhorrent to us and drastically affect our own ability to exist as we choose.

Therefore horror is the embodiment, in numerous dark and icky ways, of every facet of the meaninglessness of existence. The reading of horror is part of the fight to remain existentially nihilistic, not simply depressed. My writing of horror is an act of resistance. It’s a fuck you to meaninglessness.

A lot of people write about neat resolutions and happy endings. Which is good, we need that. But I explore things darker, because the honesty of darker things holds my interest. If I come to a literary fork in the road and one way is a well-lit street and the other a dark alley, I’ll take the alley. If there’s a story rabbit hole leading underground, I won’t turn back when the light fails. I’ll follow it all the way down, however dark it gets, and I’ll see it through to the end, because I want the honesty of its totality. I want to face the existentialism of it all.

For me, horror is many-layered, not unrelenting blackness. There is light and shade. There are moments of terror, weird shit happening, bad people making nasty choices and good people making bad decisions. But alongside those there’s a fight for good, and a hope for the light. There’s optimism and realism along with the darkness, though perhaps not always in equal measure. I explore all these themes in work like my novel Sallow Bend and my novella collection, The Gulp.

Bad things happen to good people for no reason at all every single day. That’s a central theme of my upcoming 2024 novel, Blood Covenant. We can question all this stuff with our fiction, and we can look for our own optimism in someone else’s tragedy. Now there’s a dichotomy on which to meditate. I write horror and dark fantasy wherein sometimes the evil prevails, but not always. I write it because there are monsters everywhere, and we must face them, win or lose. Sometimes losing is not the worst thing and sometimes victories are pyrrhic.

G.K. Chesterton said, “Fairy tales are more than true - not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.” I think that’s mostly true and incredibly necessary in our stories. But you know what? Sometimes the dragons win. Sometimes they’re not beaten, and survivors need to live with that. Or the monster is beaten at a terrible cost. That’s the purpose of dark fiction. That’s the horror I explore with my writing. To help us live with those times, to prepare us in some way for the shit that will go down, and to remind us to revel in our existence while it lasts. To remind us what to fight for.

I love the lens of horror, tightly focussed on the visceral, powerful nature of humanity and life. That most honest delving into the rabbit hole and not flinching. Using fantasy and the supernatural allows us to create and explore the deepest rabbit holes. After all, what horrors might await when all the rules are taken away? Or new, impossible to decipher rules take over?

I’ve always struggled at a gut level with injustice, unfairness, bigotry, ignorance, lack of agency. I’ve seen way more terminal illness and premature death than I’d like. I see horrible people getting away with nefarious shit. All these things and more are addressed in the horror I write.

When we read dark fiction, it gives us tools and mechanisms to survive the slings and arrows of unjust existence. It helps us to celebrate existence, despite its meaninglessness. And it helps us to look for the light and the hope and the wonder, and gravitate towards it.

I love horror because horror is the genre of honesty.

31 Days of Horror: Day 16-- Why I Love Horror Featuring Becky LeJeune Client and Horror Legend, Gemma Files (Giveaway)

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. 

Today, it's Gemma Files, author of the modern Horror classic Experimental Film, and a brilliant multiple award winning author. I am not exaggerating when I say you should have everything she has written on your library shelves. 

Her latest release comes out in 2 days, Blood from the Air and Grimscribe, the publisher, is offer a copy to one of you as part of this series [see link above for giveaway rules]. 

I greatly appreciate Files agreeing to participate because I know she does not make many appearances. Her piece below, entitled, "Horror As Self Love" is a great example of the heart and emotion she puts into all of her work, her technical skill at telling a story, and her “Monster pride.”

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HORROR AS SELF-LOVE

By Gemma Files 

There was a time when I knew I was, at base, unlovable. The world around me had been pretty clear on this point, almost since I could remember—received wisdom at its finest, hard-learned from personal experience, a lifetime of blundering through and failing to be anything like “normal” enough to pass, let alone thrive. My interests were narrow and hyper-specific, my marks either extremely high or extremely low. I had trouble understanding why I needed to excel at things I wasn't interested in, or keep on trying if I wasn't immediately gifted in some area. I had serial BFFs, until I inevitably lost them. And I was just too much, for everybody, even myself: Too angry, too horny, too lonely, too excited, too sad, too weird, too off-putting, too apt to talk only in monologues and cut no one any slack, or share, or be “fun.”

Oh yeah, I could lie for a while, pretend to be something I wasn't, but they always figured it out, eventually. And then things went right on back to the way they'd always been—me, alone, trying to tell myself I didn't care but caring anyhow, deeply. Always wondering what was wrong with me, exactly, aside from...fucking everything, apparently.

There was a diagnosis for what I was, I eventually discovered, but it hadn't been invented yet and was rarely applied to girls even once it was, so I never actually got one. I had to re-engineer it from scratch when, after my son was placed on the autism spectrum, I ran across a list of symptoms for what used to be called Asperger's Syndrome and thought: Holy shit, that's me. Of course, I'd been masking socially for more than thirty years at that point, and though I don't think I ever became super-good at concealing my true self's parameters, I'd at least figured out some of the basics, like how to hold a conversation (listen to the other person, express interest, ask questions but don't volunteer), how to keep a job (find something you like enough to become an authority on, learn and set standards, try not to be an asshole), how to make a family.

It was that last part was the part that taught me so much more than any other, only starting with showing me how nothing was ever “wrong” with me—how I wasn't either too much or not enough, just different, exactly like the boy I gave birth to. That I could be kinder and more patient than I'd ever given myself credit for being, now I finally knew how much of my rage had really been fear, and could be let go of. That I was very definitely not unlovable, especially by the one person on earth who matters most.

Throughout all of this, meanwhile, horror somehow became my emotional and creative safe space, long before that particular phrase was ever coined. I'd been making up stories since before I could read, and almost all of them tended towards the darkest side of whatever genre first caught my attention: first myths and fairytales, then comics, then fantasy and science fiction, then finally horror itself, straight from the vein. Dracula led to vampires, vampires led (through 'Salem's Lot) to Stephen King, Stephen King led to Peter Straub, and so on. Around the 1990s, when I was already reviewing movies for money, I discovered a brave new world of (then) female-identified authors who really made my gears shift: Kathe Koja, Poppy Z. Brite, Caitlin R. Kiernan. I'd already started writing stories, but now I started selling them, then teaching other people how to write them. I won an award, had my stuff adapted for television, wrote books, sold them, won some more awards.

After a lifetime's internal struggle against the burden of pretending to be the person I thought the world was telling me I “should” be, I evolved into who I am...what I was always meant to be: A horror writer, and proud of it.

People have always argued a lot about what horror is “good for,” or if it's good for anything at all. Good for letting off steam; good for playing out our fears in controllable ways; good for highlighting the underside lurking beneath a light, bright, perpetually “happy,” virtue-signalling world. Recently, both during and in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, there's been a certain amount of recognition given to the thesis that in times of turmoil, threat and disturbance, horror provides confirmation that the illusion of universal safety was only ever that, so maybe we shouldn't spend so much time berating ourselves for our inability to simply buck up, keep calm and carry on in the face of immediate existential dread.

Another thing horror's always been good for, however, is for routinely skewing perspective away from the default towards the non-. As a genre founded by women, from stories of “raw-head and bloody bones” told by grandmothers over Christmas and Lady Cynthia Asquith's ghost story collections to the world-rocking narrative depth charge of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, its true roots have forever lain less in normativity than in derangement, in prising up the rock of received wisdom to watch what squirms out from beneath. Throughout cultural history, it's been consistently typified as abnormal, sick, Weird and queer and obsessed with things supposedly better left unexplored, unstated...and you know what? So it should be. So it should always be.

Partway through my own personal journey, creative and otherwise, I coined a phrase of my own that still means a lot to me: “Monster pride.” It means accepting the worst parts of yourself, all your most awful impulses, and choosing to love yourself anyways. To know who you are, right down to the blackest thoughts and bloodiest chunks of bone-marrow. To make a house for yourself out of those things, and call it home.

Because when your body and/or brain literally doesn't work the same way everyone else's seems to, you can absolutely grow up feeling like a freak, a weirdo, a monster. But then you start to find other monsters, ones you can identify with...monsters from myths and stories and songs, from books and TV and movies. And after a while, the similarities attract you as much as they scare you, so you become increasingly excited whenever something gives you that jolt, that sting, that electric shock of disgust and terror and existential dread, numinous awe, transportation. You start to want to break it down for parts and analyze them, learn how they work, how to use them, and be used by them—to become a shapeshifter, at least inside your own head. Become the thing that scares you most, speak with its voice, internalize its power. To make your own monsters.

And by “you,” of course, I mean me. But maybe you too, someday, if you're lucky.

Long story short: I love horror unabashedly, the same way I love my son, and for basically the same reasons. Because I never thought I could love myself, or be loved for myself, but I am. I always was.  

Horror taught me that.

31 Days of Horror: Day 15-- Why I Love Horror Featuring Becky LeJeune's Clients Beginning With LeJeune Herself

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.

💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀

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!