{"product_id":"monster-she-wrote-isbn-9781683691389","title":"Monster, She Wrote","description":"\u003cb\u003eMeet the women writers who defied convention to craft some of literature’s strangest tales, from \u003ci\u003eFrankenstein \u003c\/i\u003eto\u003ci\u003e The Haunting of Hill House\u003c\/i\u003e and beyond\u003ci\u003e.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eFrankenstein \u003c\/i\u003ewas just the beginning: horror stories and other weird fiction wouldn’t exist without the women who created it. From Gothic ghost stories to psychological horror to science fiction, women have been primary architects of speculative literature of all sorts. And their own life stories are as intriguing as their fiction. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEveryone knows about\u003cb\u003e Mary Shelley\u003c\/b\u003e, creator of Frankenstein, who was rumored to keep her late husband’s heart in her desk drawer. But have you heard of \u003cb\u003eMargaret “Mad Madge” Cavendish\u003c\/b\u003e, who wrote a science-fiction epic 150 years earlier (and liked to wear topless gowns to the theater)? If you know the astounding work of \u003cb\u003eShirley Jackson\u003c\/b\u003e, whose novel \u003ci\u003eThe Haunting of Hill House \u003c\/i\u003ewas reinvented as a Netflix series, then try the psychological hauntings of \u003cb\u003eViolet Paget\u003c\/b\u003e, who was openly involved in long-term romantic relationships with women in the Victorian era. You’ll meet celebrated icons (\u003cb\u003eAnn Radcliffe, V. C. Andrews\u003c\/b\u003e), forgotten wordsmiths (\u003cb\u003eEli Colter, Ruby Jean Jensen\u003c\/b\u003e), and today’s vanguard (\u003cb\u003eHelen Oyeyemi\u003c\/b\u003e). Curated reading lists point you to their most spine-chilling tales.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePart biography, part reader’s guide, the engaging write-ups and detailed reading lists will introduce you to more than a hundred authors and over two hundred of their mysterious and spooky novels, novellas, and stories.Introduction\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePART ONE: THE FOUNDING MOTHERS\u003cbr\u003eMargaret Cavendish: Mad Madge\u003cbr\u003eAnn Radcliffe: Terror over Horror\u003cbr\u003eMary Wollstonecraft Shelley: The Original Goth Girl\u003cbr\u003eRegina Maria Roche: Scandalizing Jane Austen\u003cbr\u003eMary Anne Radcliffe: Purveyor of Guts and Gore\u003cbr\u003eCharlotte Dacre: Exhibitor of Murder and Harlotry\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e PART TWO: HAUNTING TALES\u003cbr\u003eElizabeth Gaskell: Ghosts Are Real\u003cbr\u003eCharlotte Riddell: Born Storyteller\u003cbr\u003eAmelia Edwards: The Most Learned Woman\u003cbr\u003ePaula E. Hopkins: The Most Productive Writer\u003cbr\u003eVernon Lee: Ghostwriter à la Garçonne\u003cbr\u003eMargaret Oliphant: Voice for the Dead\u003cbr\u003eEdith Wharton: The Spine-Tingler\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e PART THREE: CULT OF THE OCCULT\u003cbr\u003eMarjorie Bowen: Scribe of the Supernatural\u003cbr\u003eL. T. Meade: Maker of Female Masterminds\u003cbr\u003eAlice Askew: Casualty of War\u003cbr\u003eMargery Lawrence: Speaker to the Spirits\u003cbr\u003eDion Fortune: Britian’s Psychic Defender\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePART FOUR: THE WOMEN WHO WROTE THE PULPS\u003cbr\u003eMargaret St. Clair: Exploring Our Depths\u003cbr\u003eCatherine Lucille Moore: Space Vamp Queen\u003cbr\u003eMary Elizabeth Counselman: Deep South Storyteller\u003cbr\u003eGertrude Barrows Bennett: Seer of the Unseen\u003cbr\u003eEveril Worrell: Night Writer\u003cbr\u003eEli Colter: Keeping the Wild West Weird\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e PART FIVE: HAUNTING THE HOME\u003cbr\u003eDorothy Macardle: Chronicler of Pain and Loss\u003cbr\u003eShirley Jackson: The Queen of Horror\u003cbr\u003eDaphne du Maurier: The Dame of Dread\u003cbr\u003eToni Morrison: Haunted by History\u003cbr\u003eElizabeth Engstrom: Monstrosity in the Mundane\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e PART SIX: PAPERBACK HORROR\u003cbr\u003eJoanne Fischmann: Recipes for Fear\u003cbr\u003eRuby Jean Jensen: Where Evil Meets Innocence\u003cbr\u003eV. C. Andrews: Nightmares in the Attic\u003cbr\u003eKathe Koja: Kafka of the Weird\u003cbr\u003eLisa Tuttle: Adversary for the Devil\u003cbr\u003eTanith Lee: Rewriting Snow White\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePART SEVEN: THE NEW GOTHS\u003cbr\u003eAnne Rice: Queen of the Damned\u003cbr\u003eHelen Oyeyemi: Teller of Feminist Fairy Tales\u003cbr\u003eSusan Hill: Modern Gothic Ghost Maker\u003cbr\u003eSarah Waters: Welcome to the Dark SОance\u003cbr\u003eAngela Carter: Teller of Bloody Fables\u003cbr\u003eJewelle Gomez: Afrofuturist Horrorist\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e PART EIGHT: THE FUTURE OF HORROR AND SPECULATIVE FICTION\u003cbr\u003eThe New Weird: Lovecraft Revisited and Revised\u003cbr\u003eThe New Vampire: Polishing the Fangs\u003cbr\u003eThe New Haunted House: Home, Deadly Home\u003cbr\u003eThe New Apocalypse: This Is the End (Again)\u003cbr\u003eThe New Serial Killer: Sharper Weapons, Sharper Victims\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGlossary\u003cbr\u003eNotes\u003cbr\u003eSuggested Reading\u003cbr\u003eIndex\u003cbr\u003eAcknowledgments\u003cb\u003e2019 Bram Stoker Award® Winner for Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e2020 Locus Award Winner for Non-Fiction\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eA 2019 \u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e Editors’ Choice in Arts and Literature\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I was elated when \u003ci\u003eMonster, She Wrote\u003c\/i\u003e arrived in my mailbox. It is a book I have been waiting to read for a long time...Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson deserve a standing ovation.”—Danielle Trussoni for \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A great gift for anyone fascinated with genre writing.”—\u003ci\u003eSFX Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Presented in a breezy, conversational style that makes it easy to gobble up whole sections at a time...Anyone from casual fans to horror historians will benefit from reading this important book.”—Cemetery Dance\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Your necronomicon for all women writing horror.”—Book Riot\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A perfect way to find your next spooky story.”—Tulsa World\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The curatorial quality of a literary anthology, the historical rigor of an academic text, and the pleasure of a picture book.”—\u003ci\u003eTor.com\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Kröger and Anderson write in consistently engaging prose and display depth and breadth in their knowledge of literary matters. Besides demonstrating great synthetic acuity, they provide the fruits of original scholarship.”—\u003ci\u003eLocus\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Straddling the divide between highly useful reference and compulsively readable stories about the writing lives of the women of horror, this book will keep you up all night (one way or another).”—\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e, starred review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Inspired not only in the way it explores what the off-kilter, the monstrous and the half-known has meant to women for centuries but also in how it illuminates the often unusual lives of the women who crafted these dark worlds.”—\u003ci\u003eBookPage\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This biographical index will reawaken readers' admiration for established virtuosos of literary terror and inspire curiosity in lesser-known specialists in fictitious fear.”—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An engrossing, eye-opening encyclopedia on the pioneering women who went against convention and broke down barriers to mold the horror fiction genre, thereby inspiring generations of writers and even filmmakers with their works.”—\u003ci\u003eGeeks of Doom\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Unique, fascinating, informative...an extraordinary and unreservedly recommended addition to personal, community, college, and university librar[ies].”—\u003ci\u003eMidwest Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eLisa Kröger\u003c\/b\u003e holds a PhD in English. Her short fiction has appeared in\u003ci\u003e Cemetery Dance\u003c\/i\u003e magazine and \u003ci\u003eLost Highways: Dark Fictions from the Road\u003c\/i\u003e (Crystal Lake Publishing, 2018). She's an adjunct instructor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi, Gulf Coast. She co-hosts the Know Fear Podcast (knowfearcast.com).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eMelanie R. Anderson\u003c\/b\u003e is an assistant professor of English at Delta State University in Cleveland, MS. Her book \u003ci\u003eSpectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison\u003c\/i\u003e (Tennessee Press, 2013) was a winner of the 2014 South Central MLA Book Prize. She co-hosts the Know Fear Podcast (knowfearcast.com).\u003cb\u003eIntroduction\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhy are women great at writing horror fiction? Maybe because horror is a transgressive genre. It pushes readers to uncomfortable places, where we aren’t used to treading, and it forces us to confront what we naturally want to avoid.\u003cbr\u003e     And women are accused of being transgressive all the time—or, at the very least, they are used to stepping outside of the carefully drawn boundaries that society has set for them. Women are told what to do and who to be. Women are taught to be sweet, to raise children, to stay in their place. Women are pushed to the edges of society, where they are expected to keep their mouths shut and their heads down. The marginalization of women may have been more overt in the past, at times when women couldn’t vote or own property or work outside the home, but it still happens today. Women are still instructed to be good girls.\u003cbr\u003e     In any era, women become accustomed to entering unfamiliar spaces, including territory that they’ve been told not to enter. When writing is an off-limits act, writing one’s story becomes a form of rebellion and taking back power. Consider, for example, Margaret Cavendish, who in the 1600s brazenly wrote about science and philosophy, two subjects then considered the purview of only male minds. More recently, Jewelle Gomez brought an African American and lesbian perspective to the vampire tale, which had long been the province of European male protagonists. Today, writers like Carmen Maria Machado and Helen Oyeyemi subvert the so-called safe storytelling formats of the fairy tale and the supernatural yarn, adding women’s voices to these traditional narrative forms.\u003cbr\u003e     For women especially, writing is often a kind of noncompliance, which calls to mind the prisoners in the comic book series\u003ci\u003e Bitch Planet\u003c\/i\u003e by writer Kelly Sue DeConnick and artist Valentine De Landro (Image Comics, 2014–17). The comic is brilliant—it tells a female-driven dystopian story about women sent to a prison planet as punishment for being noncompliant. What a great word to describe the women in this book. \u003cbr\u003e     The writers you’ll meet in \u003ci\u003eMonster, She Wrote\u003c\/i\u003e are all rule breakers. And here’s the funny thing: society doesn’t always pay attention to what’s happening over there on the edges. So while society was ignoring them, they were taking up their pens. While everyone else has been doing their own thing, women have been doing theirs, crafting tales about scientifically reanimated corpses, ghosts of aborted children, postapocalyptic underground cities.\u003cbr\u003e     Horror has been penned by men and women alike, but it’s important to acknowledge that women have been contributing to the genre since its inception. As you’ll discover in the following pages, the horror genre that readers love today would likely be unrecognizable without the contributions of these women.\u003cbr\u003e     These misbehaving women who write horror in all its nasty forms.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Queen of Horror\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eShirley Jackson \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e1916-1965\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1948, the \u003ci\u003eNew Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e published a short story by a then-unknown writer. The tale, about an ordinary town with a sinister secret, so outraged readers that the magazine reported receiving more negative mail than ever before, including many subscription cancellations.\u003cbr\u003e     That story was “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, which went on to become one of the most famous short stories in American literature.\u003cbr\u003e     Though Jackson had been an obsessive writer since her youth and began publishing her writing during college, “The Lottery” made her a household name. For decades she received letters about it, which typically fell into one of three categories: bewilderment, speculation, and “plain old-fashioned abuse.”\u003cbr\u003e     The New England setting of the story was an integral part of Jackson’s writing, which often features main characters who are outsiders and find themselves persecuted in a hostile small-town environment. This was an experience familiar to Jackson.\u003cbr\u003e     Born in 1916, Jackson spent her childhood in California. She met her husband, the literary critic and professor Stanley Edgar Hyman, at Syracuse University, where they were students. The couple married in 1940 and moved several times before settling in 1945 in North Bennington, Vermont, where Hyman took a faculty position at Bennington College. She wrote, in what has become a famous anecdote from her life, that when checking into a hospital for the birth of her third child, the nurse asked Jackson what her occupation was. Jackson replied that she was a writer, to which the nurse said, “I’ll just put down housewife.”\u003cbr\u003e     The truth was that Jackson always struggled against her roles as wife and mother—or, to be more accurate, the roles that others cast her in. Professionally she was a successful author, but at home in North Bennington, she was Hyman’s wife and the mother of four children. Her husband expected her to play the part of faculty wife: to maintain the household, to rear the children, to cook, to clean, and to entertain people he brought into their home. The residents of the college town never quite accepted her as one of their own, which likely informed how she wrote about various groups’ intolerance of outsiders (see: the stone-wielding townsfolk in “The Lottery”).\u003cbr\u003e     Hyman controlled the family’s finances, but often it was Jackson’s income that kept them afloat. Jackson’s posthumously published collection\u003ci\u003e Come Along with Me\u003c\/i\u003e (Viking, 1968; Penguin, 1995 reprint) contains an anecdote about a time the family needed a new refrigerator. So she wrote a story, was paid, and bought the fridge. In this way, writing was, for Jackson, a real kind of magic. Hyman encouraged his wife’s work, especially because it supplemented his income. But when eventually her career eclipsed his, Hyman no longer tolerated her success and belittled her in front of his university colleagues. What’s more, he was frequently unfaithful, being particularly fond of his former students.\u003cbr\u003e     It’s no wonder that Jackson wrote about women who were lonely and ostracized. Her characters are haunted, sometimes literally and sometimes figuratively, by pasts they can’t escape. Jackson became a master of both types of hauntings, the supernatural and the psychological, the interior and the exterior.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eHaunted Housekeeping\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Haunted house stories are a staple in horror literature; nearly every writer of the genre has told one or two. None have come as close to perfection as Jackson in creating houses that loom larger than their actual size, describing a past that haunts the present. What also sets her domestic stories apart is how quickly and effectively the mundane scenarios she depicts turn violent. Even a setting as seemingly humdrum as a grocery store transforms into a downright bloodbath in \u003ci\u003eWe Have Always Lived in the Castle\u003c\/i\u003e, her 1962 novel about two sisters living in a family home following an infamous multiple murder.\u003cbr\u003e     “The Lottery” established Jackson as reigning queen of the horror genre, though she wrote everything from campus novels to darkly comic domestic sketches about family life. These sketches were first published in magazines like Good Housekeeping and Woman’s Day and, later, in the books Raising Demons (Farrar, Straus \u0026amp; Cudahy, 1957; Penguin Books, 2015) and Life among the Savages (Farrar, Straus \u0026amp; Cudahy, 1953; Penguin Books, 2015). She cemented her status as a titan of terror with the 1959 publication of The Haunting of Hill House (Viking), which was adapted in 1963 into the film The Haunting, which then developed a cult following of its own. Director Jan de Bont brought a less popular adaptation to the screen in 1999. And in 2018, the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House took the bare bones ofJackson’s story into new territory.\u003cbr\u003e     Hill House is a lovely work of ambiguity. Four characters from different walks of life converge on the titular property, which has a bad past and a bad reputation. Eleanor Vance, the protagonist, has answered an advertisement posted by Dr. Montague seeking assistants for a haunted house investigation. She sees it as the first adventure of her life, which until that point she has spent taking care of her invalid mother. Once the action begins, it’s hard to tell if the four people are cracking under the strain of their isolation in the bizarre mansion, or if the house truly is haunted. It doesn’t help that every angle in the building is off by a few degrees, and the decorations are . . . well, let’s just say, strange. In addition to the usual cold spots, bangs and knocks, and even a séance of sorts, Jackson adds Eleanor’s internal monologues in which she struggles to understand her morbid attraction to Hill House.\u003cbr\u003e    With this book and others, Jackson drafted a blueprint for the modern haunted house in both literature and film. Stephen King modeled his Overlook Hotel in \u003ci\u003eThe Shining\u003c\/i\u003e after another of Jackson’s creepy settings, the Halloran house in \u003ci\u003eThe Sundial \u003c\/i\u003e(Farrar, Straus \u0026amp; Cuddahy, 1958). Moreover, King wrote at length about his debt to Jackson in his nonfiction ode to the horror genre, \u003ci\u003eDanse Macabre \u003c\/i\u003e(Gallery Books reprint, 2010), and in \u003ci\u003eOn Writing\u003c\/i\u003e (Scribner reprint, 2010), his memoir on his chosen craft. Other authors who have cited Jackson as an influence include Neil Gaiman, Richard Matheson, and Sarah Waters.\u003cbr\u003e     If \u003ci\u003eThe Haunting of Hill House\u003c\/i\u003e was the definitive haunted house novel, then Jackson’s final completed novel, \u003ci\u003eWe Have Always Lived in the Castle\u003c\/i\u003e (Viking, 1962), cemented her in the Gothic and horror traditions. Time magazine named it one of the ten best novels of 1962. The story focuses on the Blackwood sisters, Constance and Mary Katherine (nicknamed Merricat), who live with their infirm Uncle Julian in their fenced-in family estate outside of a New England town. Uncle Julian’s poor health and the scorn the townspeople feel for the surviving Blackwoods are the result of a tragedy that occurred six years earlier. One night at supper, four members of the Blackwood family—the girls’ parents, brother, and aunt—were poisoned and died. Constance, who hadn’t used the arsenic-laced sugar on the dinner table, was arrested for the crime but not indicted. The townspeople believe she got away with murder. Her younger sister Merricat had been sent to her room without dinner on that fateful night and now is the only member of the household who ventures outside; she also practices magic rituals in order to keep Constance safe. Out of the blue, their cousin Charles swoops in, believing he is the rightful inheritor of the estate, and establishes himself as patriarch.\u003cbr\u003e     \u003ci\u003eCastle\u003c\/i\u003e is often praised, especially for its protagonist. Merricat Blackwood is an outsider, like many of Jackson’s women, but she maintains an imaginative spirit and a fierce devotion to defending her sister and her home. Fans of the horror writer Paul Tremblay will recognize similarities in his protagonist Merry in \u003ci\u003eA Head Full of Ghosts\u003c\/i\u003e (William Morrow, 2015).\u003cbr\u003e     The Blackwood sisters’ existence at the margins of their community reflects Jackson’s own experience. She didn’t quite fit in with the other wives of her small university town; she spent her days writing and tending children, but her nights were filled with more exotic fare. A lover of the occult, Jackson gave tarot readings to friends and family. She claimed not to believe in ghosts but she owned a crystal ball and a Ouija board and seemed to relish her reputation as a “witch.” Whether or not she practiced witchcraft is debatable.\u003cbr\u003e     Shirley Jackson may not have been understood by the people who knew her, but her literary legacy is indisputable. As an example, consider the Shirley Jackson Awards, a juried accolade that has been given annually since 2007 for excellence in horror, thriller, and dark fantasy fiction.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eReading List\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eNot to be missed\u003c\/b\u003e: Need some Shirley Jackson in your life? Honestly, who doesn’t? Jackson is best known for her novels\u003ci\u003e The Haunting of Hill House\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eWe Have Always Lived in the Castle\u003c\/i\u003e, both available from Penguin Classics. “The Lottery” can be found in \u003ci\u003eThe Lottery and Other Stories\u003c\/i\u003e, a 2009 Penguin reprint, among other editions. But Jackson’s other novels are criminally underread. \u003ci\u003eThe Sundial \u003c\/i\u003eis an apocalyptic tale with all the Gothic trappings: a family with a sordid past, a manor house with secrets, and a storm blowing in. Yet it avoids cliché thanks to a unique exploration of family relationships. The narrative quickly turns into psychological suspense, and readers must question whether the end of the world is, in fact, near. It is available in a 2014 Penguin edition, with a foreword by Victor LaValle.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eAlso try:\u003c\/b\u003e As mentioned, the 1963 film adaptation of\u003ci\u003e Hill House\u003c\/i\u003e has gained a fandom of its own. The ten-part 2018 Netflix series provides a fantastic reimagining (not a straight adaptation) of the novel that is well done and worth viewing.\u003cbr\u003e     Judy Oppenheimer’s \u003ci\u003ePrivate Demons\u003c\/i\u003e (Ballantine Books, 1989) was the first full-length biography of Shirley Jackson. Oppenheimer interviewed Jackson’s family and friends for a more complete portrait than a mere blurb on a book jacket could offer. In it she focuses on Jackson’s supposed witchcraft and occult leanings...maybe a little too much. Ruth Franklin’s more recent and thoroughly engaging \u003ci\u003eShirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life\u003c\/i\u003e (Liveright, 2016) dives deep into Jackson’s personal papers and notes from the Library of Congress archive and interweaves insightful readings of her works into a sharp yet sympathetic biographical portrait. If you read only one biography of Jackson, make it Franklin’s.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eRelated work:\u003c\/b\u003e In a testament to Jackson’s enduring allure, Susan Scarf Merrell’s murder mystery \u003ci\u003eShirley\u003c\/i\u003e (Blue Rider Press, 2014) features Jackson as a character. Like so many of Jackson’s novels, this is a psychological thriller, with a young girl at the center. When the girl disappears, Jackson is a suspect. The director Josephine Decker began adapting the novel to film in 2018, with actress Elisabeth Moss playing Shirley Jackson.","brand":"Quirk Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300386230501,"sku":"NP9781683691389","price":19.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781683691389.jpg?v=1767732931","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/monster-she-wrote-isbn-9781683691389","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}