This week I have a special 6 day feature centered around Creature Publishing. From their "About" page:
Based in Virginia with roots in New York, Creature Publishing specializes in feminist horror, dark speculative fiction, women-driven thrillers, spooky fantastical fiction, literary fiction, and the like.
Founded in 2019, Creature has served as a platform for stories which challenge the status quo, offering titles with a broad and inclusive, transgressive and intersectional, understanding of what horror is and who can make it. As Creature has grown and evolved, our initial interest in horror’s potential for social commentary and catharsis, as well as its potential to cross into other genres and subvert genre altogether, has led to our more formal adoption of writing within the realm of thrillers, sci-fi, and fantasy, particularly when fear or horrific elements continue to play a role, but always where the writing is innovative and powerful, the stories reflecting and widening our understanding of others and the world.
About the Name & Those Delightful Spines
Our books have won or been finalists for the Bram Stoker Award, the Ladies of Horror Fiction Award, and the Foreword Indies. Our books are creatures—living, forceful entities with desires of their own, capable of inspiring fear, passion, anxiety, dread. The illustration on the spines of our books speaks to this idea. Our name is also a nod to the content of the genre itself; horror is full of creatures, human and nonhuman and all things in-between. They can be sinister or benevolent, familiar or “other.” The monster under the bed, the monster in bed with us, the monster inside. Our creatures have bones to pick. We like it that way.
Meg Ripley was born in Ontario and raised in Newfoundland, Canada, surrounded by whales and icebergs. After a BFA from the University of Western Ontario with a focus in drawing and an interest in women’s studies, she won a stint as a fry-cook at the local diner. She set her sights on NYC and an MFA in illustration from The School of Visual Arts. The program’s mandatory (ahem, I-can’t-believe-they’re-making-me-do-this) writing workshop came to hold more value than she could have ever anticipated
Her illustration work for various fashion and design agencies culminated in a tenure as creative director for a brand development firm—but then came her beautiful children, and an idea for a book that she couldn’t ignore.
These days, she writes horror and dark fantasy from her family’s Brooklyn apartment while ceaselessly singing the praises of both boredom and the outdoors to her two sons.
In her essay, Ripley contemplates how her relationship with Horror has changed over time and what that has taught her about herself and the world.
Reminder: Creature is offering a giveaway this week; a five book prize pack of Creature titles for one winner. Click here for the rules and details on how to enter. Get your entries in by 5pm Central this Friday (10/17) to be entered for the week's giveaway.
Thank you for following along with Creature this week. One winner has been notified and will receive a 5 book prize pack, but everyone else, you should add their titles to your collections.
Back tomorrow to begin another fun series. But first, here is Meg Ripley sharing why she loves horror.
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Why I Love Horror
By Meg Ripley
’Cause we are livin’ in a latchkey world. And I’m a hypervigilant girl
When I was a kid in the ’80s, my librarian-single-parent-mum had a copy of Stephen King’s Night Shift on a bookshelf in our living room. The bookshelf, ceiling height, loomed ominous until it eventually got anchored securely to a wall, but King’s paperback endured as a years-long threat. The question of whether to pull the book off the shelf and look at its cover––or not, was a daily dilemma for me. The cover I speak of features an open hand, studded with eyeballs being unwrapped from medical gauze. At ten-years-old, I found it terrifying.
As I’d sit on our couch in front of the television discovering The Twilight Zone, Eleanor Vance, Freddy and Jason, Dracula, and the Xenomorph, I’d find my eyes drifting to the bookcase to check the status of the—inevitably—firmly shelved book, because deep down, inexplicably, I knew…Those unblinking, dead-eyed peepers were trying to look at me.
Isn’t the idea of someone-thing secretly watching you terrifying?
The kicker? Like any other latchkey kid of the era, my sisters and I were feral until the streetlights came on. No one was watching. Or if they were, they weren’t supposed to be.
As a woman coming of age, you are watched. Constantly.
My mother once found my twin sister and I awake past midnight on a school night because we’d watched some pseudo-documentary on alien abductions or Bigfoot. My poor, sleep-deprived mother’s reassurances that “no one would be coming to take us away” because “we weren’t that special” gave us little comfort. Not special? Fortunately, not to entities driving UFOs.
Had Laurie Strode been special before the fall of 1978?
I survived the ’80s without run-ins with “the man in the van,” or the Satanists who lived in the haunted house down the street, and I never died sledding on Dead Man’s Hill, but oh, the fear of potential victimhood, especially female victimhood plagued me, as I’m sure it did most girls coming out of the ’80s. Because one thing was very clear in the media we consumed: it wasn’t safe out there for women––and I mean on any planet––unless they were the villain.
The “gaze” as a concept wasn’t something I’d ever considered before art school. And it was a lot later still before I ever connected it to any literary work. The male gaze, female gaze, direct, or indirect—gazes are so powerful because they’re the entire perspective of any work of art. They define who’s at risk and who’s in control. And that play-out of the struggle for control is the thrill of horror for me. Historically speaking, women have not been in control. Certainly not if she played by the rules.
I grew up with a distinctly male gaze in horror because men were the primary creators of it in the ’70s and ’80s. “The victim” was not only so often a woman, but a highly attractive and unassuming one at that. Even the music video for “Thriller” reinforced the rule. I’ll admit that watching a monster creep through the forest, stare into some poor girl’s window, only to be presented as a ruse, just-Joel-from-next-door, then, his inevitable re-reveal as the monster-all-along was so satisfying because that nugget of wisdom could be stowed away. I could approach any future real-life run-ins with a just-Joel with skepticism. And it could prove paramount to my survival.
But horror has grown, and today, the reasons I love it have shifted. Or at least, I’ve become more aware of the feeling of control I get from it. There are obvious reasons why Women In Horror has whittled a special place into my heart, but we can all agree that writers like CJ Leede, Carmen Maria Machado, Rachel Harrison, Catriona Ward, Gretchen Faulkner Martin, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia are telling spectacular stories through women’s lenses. Fernanda in V. Castro’s Goddess of Filth and Han Kang’s Yeong-hye in The Vegetarian are both examples of women rallying against patriarchal-established archetypes. I love a final girl, but these particular “women in peril” buck bigger societal beasts, ones that prowl to this day as our toxic reality. These characters are refreshing because they showcase resistance against the toxicity responsible for very real women falling victim to real-life monsters, past and present.
I love horror because I love watching Them, whoever our hero might be, become empowered by gaining control, albeit after being covered head to toe in blood. Maybe the feeling of control is something I mourn for when I look back at my childhood from my now middle-aged wisdom. Maybe it’s because control is something I presumed I had little of as a young girl. Or while I navigated any reality of female-victimhood of the ’90s when, prepared as I was, I failed to recognize just-Joel at my window. Like Jill Johnson, I hadn’t expected “the call to be coming from inside the house.” The subsequent shame of naiveté––feelings of dirtiness––they very nearly destroyed me. I’d readied to identify just-Joel from miles away. Maybe as a woman in America today, power is something I yearn for, for me, but also my nieces, my neighbors of color, and my sexually diverse friends.
These days, despite any fluctuations in my domestic life, human rights, or gendered powers, The HorrorsTM, I do see the cover of The Night Shift through a new lens: it, of course, wasn’t looking at me, at least not any more than I was looking at it––but I’d been conditioned to think otherwise, and for good reason. The monsters are everywhere. So much so, it’s exhausting.
And so, I always, always, seek out horror, for its ability to grant me the feelings of power and control vicariously through our hero. After all, a feeling of power may be something we’re all entitled to, but the truth is, some of us might only find it fleetingly, or even just between pages and credits.
