Monster, She Wrote Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson

  All rights reserved. Except as authorized under U.S. copyright law, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Number: 2019930321

  ISBN 9781683691389

  Ebook ISBN 9781683691389

  Ebook design adapted from printed book design by Andie Reid

  Illustrations by Natalya Balnova

  Production management by John J. McGurk

  Quirk Books

  215 Church Street

  Philadelphia, PA 19106

  quirkbooks.com

  v5.4

  a

  To all the girls who still sleep with the lights on, but read the scary stories anyway

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  PART ONE: THE FOUNDING MOTHERS

  Margaret Cavendish: Mad Madge

  Ann Radcliffe: Terror over Horror

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: The Original Goth Girl

  Regina Maria Roche: Scandalizing Jane Austen

  Mary Anne Radcliffe: Purveyor of Guts and Gore

  Charlotte Dacre: Exhibitor of Murder and Harlotry

  PART TWO: HAUNTING TALES

  Elizabeth Gaskell: Ghosts Are Real

  Charlotte Riddell: Born Storyteller

  Amelia Edwards: The Most Learned Woman

  Paula E. Hopkins: The Most Productive Writer

  Vernon Lee: Ghostwriter à la Garçonne

  Margaret Oliphant: Voice for the Dead

  Edith Wharton: The Spine-Tingler

  PART THREE: CULT OF THE OCCULT

  Marjorie Bowen: Scribe of the Supernatural

  L. T. Meade: Maker of Female Masterminds

  Alice Askew: Casualty of War

  Margery Lawrence: Speaker to the Spirits

  Dion Fortune: Britian’s Psychic Defender

  PART FOUR: THE WOMEN WHO WROTE THE PULPS

  Margaret St. Clair: Exploring Our Depths

  Catherine Lucille Moore: Space Vamp Queen

  Mary Elizabeth Counselman: Deep South Storyteller

  Gertrude Barrows Bennett: Seer of the Unseen

  Everil Worrell: Night Writer

  Eli Colter: Keeping the Wild West Weird

  PART FIVE: HAUNTING THE HOME

  Dorothy Macardle: Chronicler of Pain and Loss

  Shirley Jackson: The Queen of Horror

  Daphne du Maurier: The Dame of Dread

  Toni Morrison: Haunted by History

  Elizabeth Engstrom: Monstrosity in the Mundane

  PART SIX: PAPERBACK HORROR

  Joanne Fischmann: Recipes for Fear

  Ruby Jean Jensen: Where Evil Meets Innocence

  V. C. Andrews: Nightmares in the Attic

  Kathe Koja: Kafka of the Weird

  Lisa Tuttle: Adversary for the Devil

  Tanith Lee: Rewriting Snow White

  PART SEVEN: THE NEW GOTHS

  Anne Rice: Queen of the Damned

  Helen Oyeyemi: Teller of Feminist Fairy Tales

  Susan Hill: Modern Gothic Ghost Maker

  Sarah Waters: Welcome to the Dark Séance

  Angela Carter: Teller of Bloody Fables

  Jewelle Gomez: Afrofuturist Horrorist

  PART EIGHT: THE FUTURE OF HORROR AND SPECULATIVE FICTION

  The New Weird: Lovecraft Revisited and Revised

  The New Vampire: Polishing the Fangs

  The New Haunted House: Home, Deadly Home

  The New Apocalypse: This Is the End (Again)

  The New Serial Killer: Sharper Weapons, Sharper Victims

  Glossary

  Notes

  Suggested Reading

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Introduction

  Why 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.

  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.

  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.

  For women especially, writing is often a kind of noncompliance, which calls to mind the prisoners in the comic book series Bitch Planet 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.

  The writers you’ll meet in Monster, She Wrote 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.

  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.

  These misbehaving women who write horror in all its nasty forms.

  Horror, strangeness, and fear have always been part of literature. Humans love their monsters; for evidence, look back, oh, four thousand years, give or take, to The Epic of Gilgamesh. Or consider that the “Inferno” section of Dante’s Divine Comedy is by far the most popular among readers, thanks to the descent into Hell. Shakespeare wrote about ghosts and witches, and his Titus Andronicus (first performed in 1594) is one of the bloodiest and most violent plays of his career (maybe even the bloodiest play in European history…until the G
rand Guignol, that is).

  Clearly, audiences have always craved horror. But like all fiction, horror and other types of so-called weird fiction have ebbed and flowed in popularity, as well as changed forms, throughout history. So where did it all begin? There’s a strong argument that horror as it exists in the twenty-first century evolved from the Gothic novel, a literary style fashionable in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

  Gothic fiction started with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, published in 1765. The novel tells of a royal wedding that goes very, very wrong. Manfred, owner of the titular castle, is obsessed with marrying his son to a beautiful princess, Isabella, in order to continue his family line and secure wealth. The only problem? His son, Conrad, is rather sickly, and not a great prince at all. Before Conrad can marry Isabella, he is crushed to death…by a giant helmet.

  The castle, you see, is cursed by a statue of a knight that has come to life and is causing general chaos. Manfred is so fixated on perpetuating his family name that he decides to marry Isabella himself (not even his pesky wife can get in the way of his plans). But he thinks Isabella is in love with the mysterious Theodore…who actually loves Manfred’s daughter, Matilda. Confused? So is Manfred, and he kills his own daughter thinking that she is Isabella. Things go downhill from there, with plenty of mistaken identities and lots of knives that are meant for one person but end up in someone else’s heart. As nuptial celebrations go, the book makes the Red Wedding in Game of Thrones seem not so bad.

  Walpole’s novel became so popular that it created a genre called the Gothic, named for the architecture found in so many of these books. And in the following decades, the new genre’s popularity would shoot through the roof, primarily due to the work of women writers.

  Gothic fiction might never have taken off without Ann Radcliffe, the English author who published The Romance of the Forest (T. Hookham & Carpenter, 1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (G. G. and J. Robinson, 1794), The Italian (Cadell and Davies, 1797), and other novels. Radcliffe’s writing popularized the genre, but truth be told, her books seem tame compared to works that came after; they’re more like cozy mysteries than eerie horror stories. Her spooky and dark castles played on the imagination without delivering actual ghosts.

  An army of women writers followed Radcliffe, using the Gothic formula she’d developed to explore their own bloodier, more violent, and fantastic nightmares. These women, whom you’re about to meet, in turn inspired generations of authors and filmmakers, including those creating horror stories today. Without Radcliffe and her successors, we wouldn’t have the 1977 nightmarish fairy tale film Suspiria—or its 2018 remake. Likewise the quiet but brooding domestic horror of Daphne du Maurier or Shirley Jackson. The women who put pen to paper back at the beginning of horror and weird fiction—even before such terms were used—were unafraid to try new things, to take their stories into unexplored territory. And in doing so, they inspired and enabled writers for centuries to come.

  SPOTTING THE GOTHIC

  Here’s a handy checklist of attributes that indicate you’re reading a Gothic novel.

  □ A virtuous young woman who’s prone to quoting poetry and/or singing music while deep in the woods (not unlike Snow White), and equally prone to fainting and/or falling unconscious (also not unlike Snow White).

  □ A handsome man with a mysterious background who shares the heroine’s love of poetry and/or music and/or the forest.

  □ A sinister-looking villain (almost always male, usually foreign, and — gasp! — Catholic) who’s out for money (especially if the heroine is loaded and an orphan)

  □ Some sort of crumbling castle or abbey or convent—really any kind of once-majestic building now in ruins.

  □ A supernatural being (a ghost, a talking portrait, a giant statue that kills people by dropping helmets on them) that makes life difficult. Bonus points if the supernatural element is revealed by the end of the book to be not supernatural at all.

  Mad Madge

  Margaret Cavendish

  1623–1673

  In a time when women had few career options outside the home, and even fewer rights, one lady was writing a breathtakingly prolific body of work that prefigured the genre we now call speculative fiction.

  Margaret Cavendish is an outlier, producing her strange fiction a century before Gothic novels came along. That seems appropriate for a woman who so refused definition. She was a poet. She was a philosopher whose intellect was on par with that of Thomas Hobbes—famed English political philosopher—and other thought leaders of the day, and she boldly added her voice to male-only discussions of politics and philosophy. She wrote an autobiography when this literary form was relatively new. More than that, she published plays, essays, and novels. And Cavendish may well have been one of the first literary “celebrities” in English history. Her open pursuit of fame was one of her ways of thumbing her nose at society—she was a Kardashian before there were Kardashians.

  She was born in 1623 to the wealthy Lucas family of Essex—but her parents were not part of the titled aristocracy. Tragedy struck early; her father died when she was a young child. Her mother raised Cavendish as other daughters of rich families were raised, which meant no formal education, especially not in the sciences. Instead, she was taught to entertain in polite society, which included learning to read and write (as well as to sing and dance). Some women of her rank were afforded private tutoring, but Cavendish was not. So she read every book she could find, embarking on a self-navigated education in history and philosophy. Her brother John, who was highly educated in these fields, taught his sister what he learned.

  In 1643 Cavendish applied to be, and was accepted as, a “maid of honour” to Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of King Charles I. Though her parents had been wealthy, Cavendish inherited no money following the death of her father (and certainly received no dowry for marriage). She knew she’d have to make her own way in the world. When the queen was exiled to France (following the execution of Charles I in the First English Civil War), Cavendish moved to Paris with her. There Cavendish met her husband, William, who would become Duke of Newcastle Upon Tyne. Despite protests from friends (they felt William was on the “wrong side” politically), theirs was a good match. William had been educated by Thomas Hobbes, and he found Cavendish to be his intellectual equal. The couple traveled before settling in England, where they began to restore the Cavendish estates that had been confiscated during the war. And soon Margaret Cavendish became socially infamous, known among the upper-class circles as “Mad Madge” for her wild fashion and her loud, flirtatious behavior.

  Calling her the Kardashian of her day is no exaggeration; Cavendish was acutely aware of her notoriety and cultivated her reputation as a celebrity. Once, in London’s Hyde Park, she was mobbed by crowds, hoping for a glimpse of the infamous woman. How infamous was she? Cavendish scandalized polite society more than once; on one occasion, she showed up to a theater event wearing a dress that exposed her breasts, including her nipples, which she had thoughtfully painted red. Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist, called her “mad, conceited and ridiculous.”

  Which is perhaps another way of saying that Cavendish pushed against the societal roles available to women in her day, who were expected to be demure and polite and, most important, silent in social situations. Women certainly were not supposed to speak about what were believed to be “men’s subjects” like philosophy or politics. And, should they know how to write, women definitely were not supposed to publish their writings. Not only did Cavendish read the major philosophers of the day, like Hobbes and Descartes, but by 1668 she had published numerous letters and essays on matters of philosophy, all with her name proudly on the front page.

  Out of This World

  Most relevant to our purposes, Cavendish wrote what could well be considered the first science-fiction novel. Her 1666 book The Description of the N
ew World, Called the Blazing World (often shortened to simply The Blazing World), was published some 150 years before Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. To be clear, scholars debate who holds that title of “first,” or if Cavendish’s book is even science fiction. Perhaps it’s better described as speculative fiction or philosophy. Ultimately, that’s not the point. The Blazing World is a breathtakingly creative narrative, worthy of study particularly for its treatment of women and its inventive technology. The main character, simply named the Empress, is kidnapped by a lovesick sailor and finds herself on a ship meeting a storm at sea. The crew doesn’t survive, but our protagonist is thrust into a magical world—what science-fiction readers would recognize as an alternate universe, entered through a portal.

  This “Blazing World” is full of dreamlike inventions. Enormous boats are propelled by air-powered engines and can lock together in an intricate design to make them impermeable to weather. The society the Empress encounters is a feminist utopia where science and philosophy reign supreme. The adventure is part fantasy, part philosophical enquiry, part almost steampunk.

  This new world is a vehicle for Cavendish’s own philosophies (the author even shows up as a character named the Duchess), which resemble those of Thomas Hobbes. This doesn’t mean she wasn’t an original; she published several works detailing her personal theories. Like philosophers Hobbes and David Hume, Cavendish was a naturalist, believing that everything in the universe had a purpose and a mind—and every working part collaborated in the machine of the greater universe. She was interested in the intellect of humankind and the motions at work in the universe, much of which helped her build The Blazing World.

  Cavendish wrote for most of her life, penning poetry, plays, and philosophical essays. She and her husband lived happily and never had children. But as possibly the first woman to publish science fiction, and the female frontrunner in the speculative fiction genre, she left quite a legacy.