Women In Horror Month Has Begun!
Feb. 2nd, 2012 05:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glitter_n_goreHappy February!
As most Americans know, this is Black History Month. As somewhat fewer folks know, it is also Women In Horror Month. With both of those things in mind, I'm compiling a reading list starting with the late L. A. Banks's Minion and Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower--both prolific, black, female authors of speculative fiction, and very successful to boot.
I don't know what else I'm putting in the list yet, but I figure that's a start anyway. (Recommendations are very welcome, by the way!) As![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rachelmanija is trying to show for the LGBT circuit with the YA Floating Diversity Book Club, there are plenty of options out there. You just have to know where to look.
The issue that we try to bring forward this time of year is the existance of dark, weird, creepy stories written by, about and for women--and I'm not talking about the standard Scream Queen types who always wind up getting rescued by the hero (or not) at the end, usually after losing most of their clothing. I'm talking about real characters, with their own goals and passions, outside of a token appearance as the male hero's trophy or backstory.
There is a huge gender discrepancy not just in characters, but in creators of horror fiction, at least when giving the genre a cursory glance. The recognized "greats" of horror fiction--Stephen King, H. P. Lovecraft, Clive Barker, Bram Stoker, Peter Straub, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson--are overwhelmingly male, with a few notable excepts such as Mary Shelley, Shirley Jackson and Anne Rice.
Even putting this discrepancy aside, horror is still mostly perceived as a man's genre, just as romance is seen as a woman's genre. Neither of which is true, by the way.
Given that perception, I've wondered sometimes what draws certain people to horror. What compels a woman to write, read or watch horror, when so much of it is so gender-biased and uneven? What draws me to it?
Obviously I can only speak for myself, but perhaps that's the point--women are a varied demographic with their own individual reasons for cottoning to whatever genre they choose, and I'm no different from any of them in that regard.
The world of the supernatural has always held some fascination for me. When I was twelve, I wrote my first "research paper" for an English class on the occult. (We had the option of picking our own topics, and I jumped on it, learning words like "ectoplasm" and the proper method for sending a zombie back to its grave, according to Haitian mythology anyway. I got an A.) Halloween has always been my favorite holiday, and I read hundreds of stories about ghosts, witchcraft and vampires as I was growing up.
The morbid side of horror doesn't have the same appeal to me, to be honest. I like, not "happy" endings exactly, but ones with some sense of closure or hope that things will get better eventually, even if they're not there yet. When I write, I put my characters through Hell. Sometimes literally. So far, my characters have been stabbed, shot, burned, strangled, trapped in alternate dimensions, crushed by gargoyles, possessed, eaten by worms, and put in iron maidens. But I very rarely kill them. Most of the time, I try to make sure they come out okay on the other side--a little worse for the wear, sure, but they'll have learned something and become better people by the end. If they don't live through it, that says to me I haven't made them tough enough. Not that the story required them to die. (Again, most of the time.)
Tapping into fear is not as important to me as tapping into the inner workings of a character, their hopes and dreams, their flaws and strengths, and sending them on a journey of self-discovery. If that journey leads through a long, dark tunnel infested by creepy crawlies with sharp teeth and poisonous stingers, and plenty of wrong turns and dead ends along the way, so be it.
By some definitions, that probably make me more of a dark fantasy writer than a horror writer. But as I've said before, fear comes in all shapes and sizes. What scares one reader may not scare another; and what might seem innocuous to one might have another hiding under the covers. Fear at its purest is deeply personal and idiosyncratic, and the monsters inside a person's own soul are infinitely more terrible than the ones in the closet or under the bed. So those are the monsters I want to bring out and do battle with in my own writing.
My uncle has a refrigerator magnet with the following saying: "A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until you get her in hot water."
I could not agree more. And I aim to get boiling.
As most Americans know, this is Black History Month. As somewhat fewer folks know, it is also Women In Horror Month. With both of those things in mind, I'm compiling a reading list starting with the late L. A. Banks's Minion and Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower--both prolific, black, female authors of speculative fiction, and very successful to boot.
I don't know what else I'm putting in the list yet, but I figure that's a start anyway. (Recommendations are very welcome, by the way!) As
rachelmanija is trying to show for the LGBT circuit with the YA Floating Diversity Book Club, there are plenty of options out there. You just have to know where to look.The issue that we try to bring forward this time of year is the existance of dark, weird, creepy stories written by, about and for women--and I'm not talking about the standard Scream Queen types who always wind up getting rescued by the hero (or not) at the end, usually after losing most of their clothing. I'm talking about real characters, with their own goals and passions, outside of a token appearance as the male hero's trophy or backstory.
There is a huge gender discrepancy not just in characters, but in creators of horror fiction, at least when giving the genre a cursory glance. The recognized "greats" of horror fiction--Stephen King, H. P. Lovecraft, Clive Barker, Bram Stoker, Peter Straub, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson--are overwhelmingly male, with a few notable excepts such as Mary Shelley, Shirley Jackson and Anne Rice.
Even putting this discrepancy aside, horror is still mostly perceived as a man's genre, just as romance is seen as a woman's genre. Neither of which is true, by the way.
Given that perception, I've wondered sometimes what draws certain people to horror. What compels a woman to write, read or watch horror, when so much of it is so gender-biased and uneven? What draws me to it?
Obviously I can only speak for myself, but perhaps that's the point--women are a varied demographic with their own individual reasons for cottoning to whatever genre they choose, and I'm no different from any of them in that regard.
The world of the supernatural has always held some fascination for me. When I was twelve, I wrote my first "research paper" for an English class on the occult. (We had the option of picking our own topics, and I jumped on it, learning words like "ectoplasm" and the proper method for sending a zombie back to its grave, according to Haitian mythology anyway. I got an A.) Halloween has always been my favorite holiday, and I read hundreds of stories about ghosts, witchcraft and vampires as I was growing up.
The morbid side of horror doesn't have the same appeal to me, to be honest. I like, not "happy" endings exactly, but ones with some sense of closure or hope that things will get better eventually, even if they're not there yet. When I write, I put my characters through Hell. Sometimes literally. So far, my characters have been stabbed, shot, burned, strangled, trapped in alternate dimensions, crushed by gargoyles, possessed, eaten by worms, and put in iron maidens. But I very rarely kill them. Most of the time, I try to make sure they come out okay on the other side--a little worse for the wear, sure, but they'll have learned something and become better people by the end. If they don't live through it, that says to me I haven't made them tough enough. Not that the story required them to die. (Again, most of the time.)
Tapping into fear is not as important to me as tapping into the inner workings of a character, their hopes and dreams, their flaws and strengths, and sending them on a journey of self-discovery. If that journey leads through a long, dark tunnel infested by creepy crawlies with sharp teeth and poisonous stingers, and plenty of wrong turns and dead ends along the way, so be it.
By some definitions, that probably make me more of a dark fantasy writer than a horror writer. But as I've said before, fear comes in all shapes and sizes. What scares one reader may not scare another; and what might seem innocuous to one might have another hiding under the covers. Fear at its purest is deeply personal and idiosyncratic, and the monsters inside a person's own soul are infinitely more terrible than the ones in the closet or under the bed. So those are the monsters I want to bring out and do battle with in my own writing.
My uncle has a refrigerator magnet with the following saying: "A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until you get her in hot water."
I could not agree more. And I aim to get boiling.
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Date: 2012-02-03 11:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-07 03:15 am (UTC)