As the last of the twentieth century wound down, the world prepared itself for the inevitable mass hysteria known colloquially as Y2K1. It was feared to be the end of times (technologically speaking), as all clocks were doomed to revert to the year 1900. Instead of ringing in a bright future, we would start at the beginning. It was a perfect horror story fueled by “hysterical” citizens and sovereigns alike. Except, with few minor exceptions, the old gave way to the new, and the twenty-first century began with a whimper instead of a bang.
Now, nearly twenty-five years later, this may seem like ancient history. So, you might ask, what does the collective dismay over change have to do with horror and the women who write it?
Everything.
To start with, the word “hysteria,” a term so casually tossed around in sensationalist news at the end of the millennium, reflects a fear of women and their reproductive organs, one of the underlying themes stretching across the ages from the first “modern” horror novel, Mary Shelley’s iconic Frankenstein (1818), to Hailey Piper’s award-winning debut Queen of Teeth (2021). After all, the concept of a mad scientist aborting an experiment because his “new Eve” might birth monsters creates a nice juxtaposition with Piper’s tale of vagina dentata2 and corporate control. In fact, women continue to be dismissed as emotional creatures even though the sex-selective identification of “hysteria” was finally removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 19803.
Even though hysteria is no longer in the DSM, the determination and link to women’s bodies remains common terminology in modern medicine, something EV Knight4 knows all too well. “We are still using the base term in medicine today,” says Knight who also works as an OB/GYN. “It drives me nuts to use the term ‘hysterectomy’ because I know where it’s coming from.” Knight’s novel The Fourth Whore debuted in 2020 and went on to win the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. In 2021, she followed it up with her sophomore novel, Children of Demeter and the novella Partum, which delves into the dicey territory of postpartum depression.
“We talk a lot about body horror, and I think with male writers it’s putting an axe into the body. But for women, we also have this generative process in our bodies that can go so horribly wrong; we are very aware of that,” says Angela Slatter5 (A.G. Slatter), an award-winning Australian author who’s garnering acclaim for her recent Gothic novels All the Murmuring Bones (2012) and The Path of Thorns (2022). “Women become ashamed, and they shouldn’t be. They should be saying: ‘Damn right. I do bleed for five days and don’t die. Start running.’”
Despite the rising tide of feminism6, the stigma of traditionally taboo topics—menstruation, maternity, and menopause—have kept women’s horror constrained and on the fringe of a genre overtaken and dominated by cisgender, white men for the better part of history. It wasn’t until recently that a new generation—women raised predominately on a steady diet of works written by such popular paperback writers as Stephen King, Peter Straub, and Clive Barker—came of age. And with the move into a new millennium, this fierce generation reclaimed the genre with a vengeance.
In just the last ten years there has been a renewed interest in women’s literature, which accounts for the influx of popular books on work that has been overshadowed and obscured for more than two hundred years. Indeed, a quick glance at anthologized work from the early 1900s appears to support the common perception that there was a distinct lack of women writing tales of the strange and fantastic. Lisa Morton and Leslie S. Klinger dispel that myth in their ground-breaking collection Weird Women: Classic Supernatural Fiction by Groundbreaking Female Writers: 1852-1923: “There were women writing early terror tales—in fact, there were a lot of them.”
The advent of new printing technologies and the introduction of mass produced “pulp” fiction offered writers unlimited employment opportunities. Often using masculine-sounding pen names or initials to obscure their identities, female authors began crafting stories in what would now be considered the realm of speculative fiction. Today, in an age dominated by branding and consumer culture, the idea of writing without attribution might seem absurd and counterproductive. But back in the day, women who were “satisfied with anonymity” were granted a means of financial freedom in return for their stories (Morton and Klinger, Weird Women: 1852-1923). So how did these works become lost in the first place, and what does this mean for modern writers? To truly understand the magnitude of misappropriation, we must return to the beginning.
Generally recognized as the first horror novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus entered the literary world on January 1, 1818 in a three-volume set published by Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones. However, few today know that this limited edition of five hundred copies was released anonymously. Pressured by reader speculation, critics narrowed down the identity of the author to one of two men: renowned poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and the philosopher William Godwin. No one suspected, or could have even conceived of the notion, that this philosophical contemplation of science had been written by a teenage girl. As British novelist Virginia Woolf points out in her 1929 commentary A Room of One’s Own, “Anon …was often a woman,” and in this case she would have been right. It wasn’t until later that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) received credit for her work7.
In addition to inventing the genre of science fiction, Mary Shelley is widely regarded as the mother of horror. Although Frankenstein contains Gothic elements, it steps away from the popular form refined by the English novelist Ann Radcliffe in the 1790s. In the essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” Radcliffe famously defines the boundaries of fear: terror, she claims, “expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life”; whereas horror “contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.” Radcliffe claims terror is the “high” art; it is the sublime manipulation of “uncertainty and obscurity … respecting the dreaded evil.” And although Shelley evokes dread in the tradition of Gothic fiction, Frankenstein is firmly rooted in horror, creating the popular genre we are familiar with today.
Of the women authors working at the end of the nineteenth century, perhaps no name is as recognizable as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, yet she, like so many women before her, faded into obscurity. It wasn’t until scholar Elaine Ryan Hedges (a founding member of the National Women’s Studies Association) resurrected the story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” as a chapbook in 1973, that interest in Gilman’s work returned. Originally published in New England Magazine (January 1892), this classic, semi-autobiographical short story follows the unnamed narrator’s chilling and claustrophobic descent into madness—the result of a “rest cure” prescribed to treat the “hysterical tendency” so many women suffer from after giving birth. Gilman explains her authorial intentions in The Forerunner column “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper” (1913): “It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.”
A close examination of other women writing tales of terror in the twentieth century shows a continuation of this theme. After all, the feminine form is a landscape filled with “horrors,” and who better to protest the societal conventions designed to shackle women to their wombs than those who bear the anatomical burden in the first place?
Terminology used to describe these emerging voices of the Progressive Era was problematic, as the development of specific branches in fiction is a relatively recent convention. However, genre (a word derived from the Old French word for “gender) as we know it today was eventually born. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long to see the impact these classifications had on women’s authorship. For instance, the reclusive English novelist Dame Daphne du Maurier despised the label of “romance,” which was regularly used to define her work. Adapted to the cinema by Alfred Hitchcock, the film versions of du Maurier’s acclaimed novel Rebecca (1938) and her short story “The Birds” (1952) were described by critics as “psychological suspense” and filled with “terror-tension,” which falls into expectations of the cinematic marvels created by the “Master of Suspense.” After all, Hitchcock’s films, including adaptations of du Maurier’s work, can hardly be labelled as romance.
In 2016, the United States Library of Congress selected Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) for preservation in the National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” In 2018, Rebecca (1940) was also added to the registry. Yet, du Maurier’s novels remain categorized as Gothic romance and rarely make lists of works written by history’s leading ladies in horror. Even so, du Maurier gained a loyal following, cementing her place in the Gothic canon even after her death. The same cannot be said for many of the other women writing the strange and uncanny in the early decades of the 1900s.
In the introduction to The Women of Weird Tales: Stories by Everil Worrell, Eli Carter, Mary Elizabeth Counselman, and Greye La Spina (2020), scholar Melanie R. Anderson discusses the fate of women publishing during the rise of Weird Tales, an American fantasy and horror fiction pulp magazine founded in 1922. “The work of these and other women writers in the pulps has been missing for many reasons, including the dismissal of genre writing in the twentieth century by the academy and some parts of the reading public and the temporary nature of the pulps,” writes Anderson. (The Women of Weird Tales). The additional pressure of gender discrimination and the common use of initials and pen names added to the obscurity of many female voices. Their presence faded like the cheap ink used to print their stories, while the work of their male counterparts—Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith—became canon.
“The women writing in the pulp magazines don’t get remembered because they weren’t valued by the literary milieu,” says Anderson8. “It’s the nature of the pulps themselves, but also what people were willing to teach in the academy, what people were willing to publish.”
However, this has been changing in recent years with the revival of women’s literature, which can be seen in such collections as Weird Women: Classic Supernatural Fiction by Groundbreaking Female Writers: 1852-1923 (Morton and Klinger) and Weird Women: Classic Supernatural Fiction by Groundbreaking Female Writers: 1840-1925 (Morton and Klinger). These two tomes push beyond Weird Tales in both scope and setting. “A good story doesn’t have an expiration date. It’s a snapshot of history, and if it’s an accurate depiction, it reveals our past and reminds us of those elements that have endured into the present” (Morton and Klinger, Weird Women: 1840-1925). These books, and others like them, stand as a testimony to the fact that women have been writing horror all along. In a conversation about her research for the Weird Women collections, award-winning author Lisa Morton reflects on the ways the past has shaped the future, especially when it comes to women. “One of the things about this scholarship is that it gives a sense of grounding,” says Morton9. “We actually come from a history that we didn’t even know we had.”
Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson echo that sentiment in their award-winning book Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror & Speculative Fiction (2019). This homage to women writers of the dark ranges from the Gothic sensibilities of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley to the feminist fairy tales of Angela Carter and Helen Oyeyemi. And, although the pioneers from the past are given their due, Kröger and Anderson also highlight contemporary authors working in the field including Toni Morrison’s historical hauntings, Kathe Koja’s edgy exploration of the Weird, and Jewelle Gomez’s Afrofuturist horror.
“Horror is in our experience,” says Lisa Kröger10. “It’s in the way we view the world. We see a lot of frightening things, and it’s going to infect our work.”
Horror is currently enjoying a healthy renaissance thanks in part to the current sociopolitical climate. After all, horror offers strategies for survival. It offers a safe place for discourse on impactful issues such as gender inequities, women’s rights, racial discrimination, global warming, and economic instability. It is not a coincidence that a similar response occurred with the horror boom in the 1980s.
Despite the win of the landmark case Roe v. Wade (1973) and the swearing in of the U.S. Supreme Court’s first female judge, Sandra Day O’Connor (1981), the seventies and eighties were dominated by conservative politics, corporate greed, economic inequality, sanctioned homophobia, and white supremacy. In response, horror hit its stride. Despite the domination of white male writers at the time, their female contemporaries refused to be silenced. Some of the names became familiar staples; others have fallen out of print. A few of the notable women writers of the time include Anne Rice (Interview with the Vampire, 1976), V.C. Andrews (Flowers in the Attic, 1979), Angela Carter (The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, 1979), Lisa Tuttle (Familiar Spirit, 1983), Kathryn Ptacek (Kachina, 1986), and Tanith Lee (The Book of the Damned, 1988).
As with all booms, there was eventually a bust. By the end of the 1980s, tawdry thrills and the glut of gore led to an oversaturation of the market and a major downtrend in horror consumption. That’s when editor extraordinaire Jeanne Cavelos stepped in with the creation of Abyss, a Dell Books imprint. “To be a part of the horror genre, all that’s required is that the story evokes strong, dark emotions—anything from apprehension, fear, terror, horror, disgust, anger, despair, numbness, loss, morbid fascination, and disturbing thrills, to awe,” says Cavelos (Ridler, “Maestro of Shadows”). “But I believe that horror should provide ‘vision and revelation,’… and it can do neither if it is predictable.” In an intentional move away from the trends and tropes of eighties bestsellers, Abyss focused on hip, young visionaries creating a new type of horror spun from psychological and phantasmagorical elements. Kathe Koja’s The Cipher was launched by Abyss to critical acclaim, winning both the Locus11 and Bram Stoker12 awards for first novel. A new age had begun, and with it the women who would build a bridge from one century to the next.
Koja and other young writers in the 1990s were representative of a displaced and disaffected generation reacting against mainstream culture—a trend that has curious parallels with the current growth in horror, especially for women and other marginalized voices. Rereleased in 2020 by Meerkat Press, The Cipher is gaining new audiences with a message just as compelling and relevant as it was when the novel was first published three decades ago. Considered a classic staple in the genre, The Cipher combines body and cosmic horror in an existential exploration of the outer edges of the unknown. “There is something very authentic about this feeling of a place of complete negation, a place of complete nothingness,” says Koja13. “There is something in all of us that wants to confront this great emptiness. We should be running the other way, but we’re not. We’re running toward it.”
After shifting her focus to young adult novels and immersive theater, Koja recently stepped back into the horror scene with the acquisition announcement of Catherine the Ghost, a novel scheduled for publication by Clash Books in 2024. This new contribution to Koja’s oeuvre meditates on the concepts of “spirit and eternity,” described as a “love letter” to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). It will be in good company, as the trend in the reclamation of female narratives continues to be strong in both literary and genre circles. A few of the more recent horror and dark fantasy retellings include Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (2022), an examination of eugenics and scientific responsibility set in 19th-century Mexico; Gwendolyn Kiste’s Reluctant Immortals (2022), a 1960s tale of hope and redemption for the abused and discarded women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and T. Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead (2022), a scientific take on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) retold by a non-binary protagonist as a reflection of identity politics presented under the guise of body horror.
“In some ways, people think of horror as kind of a monochrome; it’s all this one thing, whereas other genres are seen as being more expansive. I don’t think that’s so at all, especially with the group of writers who are writing now,” says Koja.
This hasn’t always been the case.
With a career spanning three decades, Nancy Holder has seen it all. Her work ranges from romance to splatterpunk14, but she’s most known for her tie-in books based on the hit television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003). More recently, Holder won a Bram Stoker award for the graphic novel Mary Shelley Presents: Tales of the Supernatural (2020) and a Lifetime Achievement Award15 (2021) from the Horror Writers Association (HWA). In conversation, Holder16 recalls a time when women writers “were like the specialty act.” At a conference in the 1990s, Holder found herself with two other female writers on a panel about women in horror; it was the sole nod to female creators included in the convention’s programming: “We debated if we were going to boycott our own panel because it was the only one we were on.” Yet Holder has noticed the shifting landscapes in these male-dominated spaces, especially in the last few years. “There are more and more examples of including women or using women first,” says Holder, who pins social media as one of the primary tools responsible for this change in programming and publishing. “Today, people are being called on the carpet for not including women or other voices.”
When looking at representation, one of the best gauges of the socio-political, literary landscape can be found by examining specialty organizations. This is especially true in genre fiction. When it comes to science fiction and fantasy, the most coveted annual honors include the Hugo awards (1953-), presented at the World Science Fiction Convention; the Nebula awards (1966-), announced by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA); and the World Fantasy awards (1975-), organized and conferred by the World Fantasy Convention. However, in the world of horror, the most prominent honors are conferred by the Bram Stoker awards (1987-), presented by the HWA, and the Shirley Jackson awards (2017-).
The dominance of male writers in horror became dramatically clear at the first Bram Stoker awards ceremony in 1988, which honored works published the previous year in six categories17. Of the twenty-seven nominees, only two were women. On the bright side, both female nominees took awards in their respective categories: Lisa W. Cantrell’s The Manse (1987) garnered honors in the category of first novel and Muriel Spark’s Mary Shelley: A Biography (1987) earned acclaim for “superior achievement” in nonfiction. However, representation by women remained sparse at the awards and on bookshelves in the eighties and nineties.
As difficult as it was for women to be seen, it was even worse for women coming from marginalized groups. It wasn’t until Tananarive Due published her first novel, The Between (1995), that a woman of color woman appeared on the list as a finalist for a Bram Stoker Award. It took another six years before a Black woman would win the accolade, and that honor went to Linda D. Addison for her collection Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes (2001)18. It took another decade before Caitlín R. Kiernan19 was recognized for defying the constraints of traditional gender norms with their semi-autobiographical novel The Drowning Girl (2012). And a year later, Rena Mason become the first Asian woman to take home a Bram Stoker Award for her debut novel, The Evolutionist (2013). In recognition of the imbalance and the “unseen, but real, barriers” women horror writers face, the HWA established the Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Scholarship in 2014, and with this additional support, the movement towards gender parity continued to creep forward.
“All along there have been women out there writing and publishing,” says Linda D. Addison20. “There are so many wonderful stories being told that we still need to be exposed to. More diverse voices. More communities. Is it balanced yet? No. There’s still work that needs to be done.”
In a conversation with Tananarive Due21, the award-winning author, screenwriter, and producer compares the current state of horror to the revival of the genre in the mid-nineties when she first started publishing. “I would consider this to be an even greater renaissance that we’re living through right now in terms of inclusivity, not only in publishing, but in film and television, which has long been such a difficult barrier for so many of us,” says Due, who teaches Black horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA. “This idea that it matters to include the author’s voice in adaptations is fairly new and exciting. I’m glad the industry is starting to realize that.”
Due inherited her appreciation of horror movies from her mother, the late civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due22. But it wasn’t until Due started working on the documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror (2019) that she began to question her mother’s fascination with a genre that historically misrepresented and exploited Black culture. “We’ve always loved horror, it’s just that horror, unfortunately, hasn’t always loved us” (Due, Horror Noire).
As part of her research for Horror Noire, Due discovered parallels with other Black creators who’d been introduced to horror by their own mothers and grandmothers, many whom had been subjected the real-life horrors of segregation, discrimination, and racially motivated violence during the civil rights movement. Some experiences were more visceral and traumatic than others, but all left their mark. In the 1960s, during a non-violent protest, Due’s mother Patricia was attacked by a Tallahassee police officer who threw a tear gas canister directly in her face. Patricia was temporarily blinded by the assault; she never fully recovered. As a result, she was forced to wear dark glasses, even indoors, for the rest of her life.
“I was exposed to this very visual and literal impact of violence on my mother,” says Due on her contemplations of the past while working on Horror Noire. “And then I finally got it. It’s a way to process trauma. Of course, the population that has been exposed to generational trauma due to racism would cling to horror movies as an escape, and I think that’s exactly what my mother was doing. It’s a way to process trauma. A monster, a demon, there is somewhere you can focus the fear, and you have the satisfaction of watching characters either vanquish that monster, which is especially exciting, but even if they don’t, you get the joy of watching them try. And I think trying is the point. It’s the struggle. That is, to me, the point of a horror story.”
At the 2019 Bram Stoker awards ceremony (for works written in 2018), the scales finally tipped in women’s favor and, for the first time since the inception of the Stokers, women took the lead, winning seven of the eleven categories: first novel, young adult novel, long fiction, short fiction, screenplay, anthology, and poetry collection. “In specific reference to the horror genre, women are everywhere: [they are] writers, publishers, podcast producers, screenwriters, directors,” says Marge Simon23, a Grand Master poet24 and past member of the HWA Board of Trustees. “Men are no longer taking for granted that they are the main voices of horror.” By the 2020 awards, women and nonbinary authors advanced even more, outnumbering their male counterparts and winning nine of the twelve judged categories25. This shift became even more prevalent with the announcement of the 2022 final ballot. For the first time in the history of the awards, female finalists outnumber men two to one. In fact, the category for the best anthology published in 2022 is populated solely by women.
When it comes to horror and dark fantasy, there are several other award systems that have been in place over the years including the International Horror Guild awards (1995-2007) and the newly instated Splatterpunk awards (2017-). When the International Horror Guild came to an abrupt end in 2007, the Shirley Jackson awards took their place. Unlike the Bram Stoker awards, the Shirley Jackson awards do not consider the popular vote. Instead, these honors are granted by a jury of professional writers, editors, critics, and academics, which may explain the general lack of overlap between the two organizations. When comparing the two awards, the differences become immediately apparent. In fact, there are several winners of the coveted Shirley Jackson awards that didn’t earn mentions on the Bram Stoker final ballots: Experimental Film (2014) by Gemma Files, The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales (2016) edited by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe, All the Fabulous Beasts (2018) and the novella Ormeshadow (2019) by Priya Sharma, Her Body and Other Parties (2017) by Carmen Maria Machado, Little Eve (2018) by Catriona Ward, and Flowers for the Sea(2021) by Zin E. Rocklyn.
In addition to garnering recognition with a Shirley Jackson Award, Experimental Film earned the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic; Ormeshadow took a British Fantasy Award; Little Eve won the August Derleth Prize for best horror novel; and Flowers for the Sea won the inaugural Joseph S. Pulver Weird Fiction Award. A closer look at past winners of the Shirley Jackson awards reveals an extraordinary list of writers whose work often straddles or even defies trends in mainstream horror. A few examples include Emma Cline, Karen Joy Fowler, Carmen Maria Machado, Karen Russell, and Kelly Link, authors who are as familiar in literary circles as they are within the realm of genre fiction. It’s noteworthy to mention that these “horror” writers have gone on to garner numerous accolades winning such awards as the O. Henry Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, along with claiming finalist credentials for the National Book Award for Fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Like the acclaimed author Shirley Jackson, these women refuse to be classified by what they write.
“Women form the biggest reading audience; we read everything,” says Angela Slatter, an author known for breaking boundaries in an impressive body of work ranging from dark fairy tales to supernatural crime. “Writers are real magpies. We’re in a constant state of borrowing and experimenting.”
As more and more women enter the field, this defiance against constraints has become more commonplace. After all, when it comes to writing, women have always stretched beyond traditional boundaries: “In addition to ghost stories and tales of mad scientists and monsters, women were also crafting weird westerns, dark metaphorical fables, and those delicious, dread-inducing gems that are simply unclassifiable” (Morton and Klinger, Weird Women: 1840-1925). Not only does this apply to women writing in the margins of history, but it is also true today, even more so when looking at the representation of marginalized voices.
Take for instance, the slipstream26 surrealism in the collection The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories (2020) by the award-winning African-Australian author Eugen Bacon or the cultural representation of the Gullah-Geechee nation in Eden Royce’s children’s novel Root Magic (2021). Examples of women writers from disenfranchised groups abound: Cynthia Pelayo’s Children of Chicago (2021), winner of the International Latino Book Award for Best Mystery, retells “The Pied Piper” through the lens of a crime scene; Alma Katsu’s The Hunger27 (2018), winner of the Western Heritage Award, offers a supernatural take on the terrible tragedy that befell the Donner party; Filipino writer Isabel Yap’s debut collection Never Have I Ever (2021), winner of the British Fantasy Award for best collection, dances in the interstitial spaces with stories drawing from folklore and myth; and New Zealand author Tamsyn Muir’s debut, Gideon the Ninth (2019), seamlessly blends Lovecraftian Gothic and romantic comedy in a fantasy story about necromancy in space.
Literary, science fiction, magical realism, historical fiction, Southern Gothic, mystery, thriller, Western, folklore, fantasy, romance, and black comedy—yet still, all these stories have one thing in common. They are all bound together by horror.
Despite the incredible list of female authors currently producing diverse and powerful works, no discussion on the place of women in horror would be complete without also looking at the role female editors and publishers have played in bringing attention to these marginalized writers in the first place. In addition to the early work done in the 1980s and 1990s by Kathryn Ptacek (Women of Darkness and Women of Darkness II) and Jeanne Cavelos (Abyss), Ellen Datlow emerged as a prominent editor of horror with the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series (1988-2008)28. Co-edited with Terri Windling, Datlow opens the introduction of The Year’s Best Fantasy: First Annual Collection (1988) with an overview of the horror scene in 1987, the same year the Horror Writers of America (HWA) incorporated. Prior to the formation of the HWA, horror and fantasy competed for the highly coveted World Fantasy awards in the “field of the fantastic,” which led to dissention among authors, editors, and publishers in both genres.
Including her earlier dedication editing science fiction, fantasy, and horror for Omni, Datlow has worked on more than one hundred anthologies over the course of her career and is renowned as one of the most influential editors in the history of speculative fiction. She has garnered multiple honors (World Fantasy, Hugo, Locus, Stoker, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, and Splatterpunk awards) and has been recognized for her contributions to genre literature with Life Achievement awards from both the Horror Writers Association (2010) and the World Fantasy Convention (2014).
Although Datlow is well-known for her work in championing horror and the women who write in the genre, she is not the first to do so. The rise of women working as editors in genre fiction can especially be seen in the era of pulp fiction when Dorothy McIlwraith became the editor of Weird Tales in 1940. Later, in 2007, Ann VanderMeer followed in McIlwraith’s footsteps as the second female editor of the magazine until 2011. VanderMeer also co-edited two seminal works in the genre with her husband Jeff VanderMeer: The Weird (2012) and The New Weird (2007). “The rise of female writers outside of genres like Gothic fiction (including the traditional ghost story) starting in the 1970s … influenced The Weird, as did many other forms of fantastical fiction,” write VanderMeer and VanderMeer. “Their diversity of approaches, taking in every possible influence, would enrich non-realistic literature for decades to come” (The Weird).
Over the course of her career, Ann VanderMeer has had an inside view on the pressures female authors so often face. “There have been so many women who stopped writing mid-career, or early in their career, because of lack of support from the people around them, and/or competing obligations,” says VanderMeer29.
In addition to her work as an editor, VanderMeer also brings insight in the ways this affects emerging writers as well. “I’ve taught at the Clarion Writers Workshop (and other workshops) many times. And I have to tell you, when we have our one-on-one meetings with each student, it is the women that ask me how to balance their lives so that they have time to write,” says VanderMeer. “I never once got this question from a male writer. Not once.”
Along with Datlow and VanderMeer, another well-respected editor of note in the field of horror and dark fantasy is Paula Guran. Guran’s roots in the genre reach back into the 1990s, when she wrote the weekly email newsletter DarkEcho (1994-2001). She also produced horror content for OMNI Online (1996) and worked as the literature editor of Universal Studios’ HorrorOnline (starting in 1998). Over the years, Guran has written reviews and nonfiction for numerous publications including Cemetery Dance, Cinemafantastique, Fantasy Magazine, Locus Magazine, and Weird Tales, among others. In addition to her work as an editor of the Prime Books annual anthology The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (2010-2019) and Pyr’s The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (2020-), Guran is known for her contributions to the Mammoth Book series: The Mammoth Book of Angels and Demons (2013), The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction (2016), and The Mammoth Book of the Mummy (2017). With more than fifty anthologies under her belt, Guran continues to bring a wide range of fiction to the attention of modern readers.
“Horror by whatever name defies strict classification,” says Guran30. “Women, like all good writers, write based on what affects them, on what has shaped them, on what interests them. Writers who have been traditionally marginalized do so as well. Is that pushing boundaries? Maybe societal boundaries, but not personal ones. Horror is often subversive, so it naturally defies limits.”
As the twenty-first century progressed, the presence of women working as editors and publishers increased the range and diversity of marginalized and underrepresented voices. By the year 2000, UK publisher Tartarus Press31, managed by Rosalie Parker and R. B. Russell, had a full decade of supernatural and strange fiction publications to their credit. Among their most notable titles today are the World Fantasy award-winning collections Strange Tales I (2003), edited by Rosalie Parker, and The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings (2014), written by Angela Slatter.
In 1999, Rose O’Keefe founded Eraserhead Press32, an independent publisher of bizarro fiction and cutting-edge horror that now has a backlist exceeding 400 titles by more than 150 authors to its credit. A few years later, Raw Dog Screaming Press (RDSP) opened under the direction of Jennifer Barnes and John Edward Lawson in 2003. Over the next two decades, RDSP published more than one hundred books including ten Stoker award-winning works, nine of which were written by women: Soft Apocalypses by Lucy A. Snyder (2014), Mr. Wicker by Maria Alexander (2014), While the Black Stars Burn by Lucy A. Snyder (2015), Snowed by Maria Alexander (2016), Brothel by Stephanie M. Wytovich (2016), A Collection of Nightmares by Christina Sng (2017), A Collection of Dreamscapes by Christina Sng (2020), The Fourth Whore by EV Knight (2020), and “Permanent Damage” by Lee Murray, published in Attack from the ’80s (2021). In acknowledgement of the publisher’s conscious effort to promote diversity, Raw Dog Screaming Press received the Specialty Press Award from the HWA in 2018.
“With everything going on politically—and I do mean everything—readers and publishers alike are demanding and seeking out new writers and voices who have been silenced and/or looked over, which is expanding the market and heralding support not only in larger publishing circles but in indie communities as well,” says award-winning poet Stephanie M. Wytovich33, who also works as an editor, essayist, and novelist. “In fact, I’d argue that indie publishers are really at the helm here for breaking down barriers and lifting up authors.”
In 2009, Kate Jonez started Omnium Gatherum34 as a venue for unique dark fantasy, weird fiction, and horror. In 2011, Cynthia “Cina” and Gerardo Porcayo opened Burial Day books with the publication of the first volume of their Gothic Blue Book series, named after popular eighteenth-century publications known in the day as “Shilling Shockers” or “Sixpenny Shockers.” In that same year, sisters Alex and B.E. Scully opened Firbolg Publishing, a specialty, micro-press known for its eclectic grimoire series: Birthing Monsters: Frankenstein’s Cabinet of Curiosities and Cruelties (2018) and What Remains (2022).
In 2012, Jennifer and Robert S. Wilson (along with Mark C. Scioneaux) opened Nightscape Press, which has published several notable female authors including Lisa Morton, Rena Mason, Lisa Mannetti, and Amelia Mangan. And in 2015, publisher Tricia Reeks began operations of Meerkat Press, which has featured Australian authors J.S. Bruekelaar (Collision: Stories, 2019) and Kaaron Warren (Into Bones like Oil, 2019).
More recent newcomers to the small press scene include Black Spot Books, founded in 2017 by award-winning author, editor, director Lindy Ryan and acquired as an independent imprint of Vesuvian Media Group in 2019; Crone Girls Press, which published its first title in 2019 under the direction of editor and writing coach Rachel A. Brune; Weird Little Worlds, which opened under the direction of CEO Willow Becker in 2020; Ghost Orchid Press, a UK independent publishing house established by Antonia Rachel Ward in 2021; and Brigids Gate Press, an indie press (also established in 2021) owned and operated by Heather, Clyde, and S.D. Ventura-Vassallo.
And then, in 2022, Julie C. Day created the imprint Essential Dreams Press under the nonprofit umbrella of Reckoning Press. Her mission? To fight for social justice, which she does through the intentional blurring of boundaries between genre and class. Weird Dream Society (2020), the first book in the series, brought together twenty-four acclaimed authors to support RAICES (The Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services). The second book, Dreams for a Broken World (2022), co-edited Ellen Meeropol, benefits the Rosenberg Fund for Children (RFC). “Passivity and silence equal implicit support to people who are doing harm. You have to take action. If you don’t take a stand, people with a broken moral compass won’t make different choices,” says Day35. “I have the advantage of being white and middle class, but it is exponentially more difficult for people who come from a different class, people of color, people from non-dominant groups. I can share my concerns and the perspective of the press in a way that is different from the fiction I write, share my resources with those who deserve a far greater platform than they currently have. It’s as simple as that.”
Day is not alone in her efforts to raise awareness of societal, political, and ecological issues by publishing anthologies designed to benefit select charities. These small presses are supporting a whole host of causes including those related to helping victims of domestic violence, providing access to reproductive health care, and engaging in the fight for civil liberties.
In addition to women editors and publishers raising awareness through charity anthologies, another intriguing trend in publishing has been the increasing presence of books dedicated to raising awareness of underrepresented voices.
Kathryn Ptacek was the first editor to break ground with an all-female lineup of contemporary author in the 1988 anthology Women of Darkness. “I wanted the anthology to be a showcase for the women horror and dark fantasy writers of today,” Ptacek states in the foreword. “The range is fairly wide, from very quiet dark fantasy to some that are definitely not that. No matter the subject, the stories all bear one common characteristic. They are chilling” (Women of Darkness).
In 1990, Ptacek followed up this women’s showcase with Women of Darkness II. But then the horror boom went bust and women horror writers slipped back into the shadows until 2015 when three new anthologies dedicated solely to women writers entered the scene: She Walks in Darkness (2015), edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles; The Lineup: 20 Provocative Women Writers (2015), edited by Richard Thomas; and Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (2015), edited by Lynne Jamneck. “We know [Lovecraft] rarely included female characters in his stories, and even when he did, they were at best underdeveloped, serving mostly as catalysts for the horrific elements that would come to bear themselves out on the male psyche,” Jamneck writes. “The cultists have moved into the 21st century where new horrors await. The grimoires need updating, or we face the prospect of fighting horrors that we may have been able to defeat, were it not for a case of short-sightedness” (Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror). Two years later, co-editors Dr. Kinitra Brooks, Linda D. Addison, and Dr. Susana Morris collected twenty-eight dark stories and fourteen poems written by African American women writers in the acclaimed anthology Sycorax’s Daughters (2017). “I feel like a big part of balancing what comes out for women is that a lot of these anthologies are being put together by people who have an old way of looking at things,” says Addison. “They have to reach out to find those voices.”
When it comes to diversity, there is often one brave soul who paves the way for others. When it comes to representation of Asian women in horror, this person is Rena Mason. And so, seven years after Mason won her first Stoker in 2013, Lee Murray and Geneve Flynn followed in Mason’s footsteps, taking the horror scene by storm with the ground-breaking anthology Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women (2020). This gorgeous collection of fourteen stories features ten writers exploring the various identities of Asian women. Black Cranes went on to receive the Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson awards for best anthology, but this was just the beginning. “We had so much more to say,” says Murray. “Particularly with Asian women, we’re told not to speak. We’re told to be quiet. But to be heard, you have to be loud. Woman have always been outspoken in horror because we’ve had to be.”
Murray and Flynn followed up their success with the Bram Stoker award-winning poetry collection Tortured Willows: Bent. Bowed. Unbroken. (2021) co-written with Christina Sang and Angela Yuriko Smith. This year, Murray and Yuriko Smith broke down boundaries again with Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror (2023), a contemplative look at the roles of Asian women through a supernatural lens. “The intersection of culture, the intersection of genre, offers new types of narratives that we haven’t seen before. And women are working in the new, in the unheard; that’s why it’s so fresh.”
In 2020, award-winning poet and author Sara Tantlinger started her own mission to showcase women horror writers with Not All Monsters. “Anyone who claims diversity is bad for the writing industry in any shape or form are not people we wish to be associated with,” Tantlinger writes about her collaborative effort with Nicholas Day to create the first Strangehouse anthology dedicated to exclusively publishing women writers (Not All Monsters). Tantlinger followed up the success of Not All Monsters with a second all-female lineup in Chromophobia: A Strangehouse Anthology by Women in Horror (2022). For the first time in the history of the Bram Stoker awards, the 2022 anthology category is dominated exclusively by female finalists, including Tantlinger’s Chromophobia. “We’re so much stronger when we’re supporting each other,” says Tantlinger36. “In fact, I think we can be pretty unstoppable when we truly come together and uplift women of all backgrounds, ages, and experiences.”
Publisher and editor Lindy Ryan took a similar approach with the anthology Into the Forest: Tales of the Baba Yaga (2022), another finalist in the 2022 Bram Stoker anthology category. Not content with a focus solely on fiction, Ryan has also expanded into poetry with Under Her Skin: A Women in Horror Poetry Collection, Vol. 1 (2022) and Under Her Eye: A Women in Horror Poetry Collection, Vol. 2 (2023).
“In today’s horror renaissance, we see two trends happening,” says Lindy Ryan37. “First, bookstores are dedicating more shelf space for horror titles—a luxury previously given to household names, the vast majority of which were male—and welcoming established and emerging authors. And second, publishers from the Big 5 to other large, mid-size, and small publishers, imprints, and niche micro-presses are opening their catalogs not just to scary stories, but to genre-bending and crossover tales—and, more importantly, those written by women, people of color, and diverse voices historically and systemically muted in the larger literary landscape. While we can’t yet say that horror is totally equitable and inclusive, many determined and passionate people are working hard to make it so, both behind the pen and in other roles.”
With the return to the conservatism so prevalent in the 1980s, women horror writers have come together to take a stand. “It’s very hard to be able to advocate when you already don’t have as much power, but it really is up to us,” says award-winning author Gwendolyn Kiste38. “I hope that we have allies in that, in making sure that women don’t fade away again, but only time will tell.”
In response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade on June 24, 2022, social media channels lit up. Charity anthologies sprang up overnight. Support networks stretched from coast to coast. No longer content to code dissention to make their words more “palatable” for mainstream audiences, women horror writers and their allies demanded to be heard. Publishers, editors, and the related organizations joined the call for justice.
On July 20, 2022, the jurors, advisory board, and board of directors of the Shirley Jackson awards issued a statement of solidarity: “Sadly, the prejudices that were part of Shirley Jackson’s world have not left us. Indeed, in recent times, they have shown themselves as powerful as ever. Faced with so much evidence of continuing evil, it is tempting to succumb to hopelessness, to fatalism. Yet such moments are exactly when it is most important to lift our voices against the injustice that kills young people of color in the street and in their beds, that sees members of the LGBTQ community brutalized and brutally murdered, that forces the economically vulnerable to have to choose between poverty-level wages and their health, that continues to refuse women the dignity of their own health choices.”
Many organizations affiliated with the horror genre added their voices in support, and those who stayed silent were called to task.
“As an entity, we have probably spent more time closer to the edge than men have by definition; we have spent more time on the defensive; we have spent more time afraid; we have spent more time having to look out for ourselves,” says Kathe Koja.
“We as women, we as marginalized communities—trans women, people of color—we have lived with a kernel of known fear our entire life,” says EV Knight. “We live with fear of what could happen every minute of our lives. It gives our writing an edge, and that has to be a threat.”
Political and social commentary is familiar ground in the realm of horror, especially horror written by women. Over the centuries, we have spoken out against injustice, matters of marriage and maternity, mental illness, gender inequities, sexual assault and abuse, and the persistence of misogyny. We have also used our voices to fight against systemic racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, classism, xenophobia, and elitism.
Timing is everything, and women are more prepared to fight these battles than ever before. More importantly, we are not doing it alone.
“We’ve learned from the past. Letting any marginalized group ‘wait their turn’ is flawed framing used by far too many, for far too long,” says Day. “It can never be one group at a time. That perpetuates the hierarchal structures on which patriarchy relies.”
This fierce generation of women horror writers refuses to be pushed back in the shadows. They will not remain anonymous. They will not subscribe to the “rest cure.” They will not hide their identities, their sexuality, or their beliefs. They will not be erased or dominated by patriarchal conventions. Those times are relics of the past.
“There is a reason certain segments of our current culture are acting out,” says Koja. “They feel threatened, and in a lot of ways, they are threatened.”
There is no rolling back the clocks. There is no return to the “idyllic,” patriarchal past.
The future is progress, and women in horror are determined to pave the way.
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Footnotes
1 Also known as the “millennium bug,” refers to a potential error in computers and their ability to differentiate between the year 2000 and 1900. Fears of the downfall of technology and the impact it might have on key infrastructures swept the globe.
2 Latin for “toothed vagina,” instances of vagina dentata occur in folktales and world myths as cautionary tales to discourage rape.
3 Work on DSM–III began in 1974 and was published in 1980.
4 EV Knight in discussion with the author, March 2023.
5 Angela Slatter in discussion with the author, March 2023.
6 Western feminism is often divided into four “waves” including women’s suffrage in the 19th and early-20th centuries, women’s liberation in the 1960s and 70s, the post-structuralist subculture in the 1990s, and the technology-center call for social justice in the 2010s.
7 Mary Shelley received attribution as the author in the French translation, Frankenstein: ou le Prométhée Moderne (1821).
8 Melanie R. Anderson in discussion with the author, March 2023.
9 Lisa Morton in discussion with the author, July 2022.
10 Lisa Kröger in discussion with the author, March 2023.
11 Based on readers’ votes, the Locus Awards are granted annually by the science fiction and fantasy magazine Locus.
12 The Horror Writers Association (HWA) recognizes “superior achievement” in horror with the annual Bram Stoker awards, which are named in honor of after Bram Stoker, author of the classic vampire novel Dracula.
13 Kathe Koja in discussion with the author, July 2022.
14 Coined by David J. Schow in 1986, splatterpunk is a subgenre of horror distinguished by the depiction of graphic violence and transgressive acts.
15 The Lifetime Achievement Award is presented by the HWA to honor creatives who have substantially influenced the horror genre with their work.
16 Nancy Holder in discussion with the author, July 2022.
17 The categories in the first annual Bram Stoker awards were novel, first novel, long fiction, short fiction, fiction collection, and nonfiction.
18 The category for “superior achievement” in a poetry collection was added in 2000.
19 In 2020, Kiernan made a statement on their online journal, Dear Sweet Filthy World, that they no longer identify as transgender but as gender fluid: “I no longer consider myself transgender (or transsexual). I would say that I'm gender fluid, if I had to say anything.” Retrieved 01 Aug. 2021, https://greygirlbeast.livejournal.com/1544222.html.
20 Linda D. Addison in discussion with the author, July 2022.
21 Tananarive Due in discussion with the author, July 2022.
22 A leading civil rights activist, Patricia Stephens Due chronicled her struggles against segregation in Freedom in the Family: a Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights (2003), co-written with her daughter Tananarive Due.
23 Marge Simon in discussion with the author, August 2022.
24 Marge Simon was awarded the title of Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA). She also garnered a Lifetime Achievement Award from the HWA in 2020.
25 The HWA added short nonfiction as a category separate from long-form nonfiction in 2019.
26 Coined by Richard Dorsett, slipstream is sub-genre that crosses conventional genre boundaries between literary and speculative fiction.
27 The Hunger was reprinted in 2019 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
28 Datlow co-edited the first seventeen volumes with Terri Windling and subsequent volumes with Kelly Link and Gavin Grant.
29 Ann VanderMeer in discussion with the author, March 2023.
30 Paula Guran in discussion with the author, March 2023.
31 Tartarus Press won the Specialty Press Award from the HWA in 2009.
32 Eraserhead Press won the Specialty Press Award from the HWA in 2017.
33 Stephanie M. Wytovich in discussion with the author, August 2022.
34 Omnium Gatherum won the Specialty Press Award from the HWA in 2016.
35 Julie C. Day in discussion with the author, August 2022.
36 Sara Tantlinger in discussion with the author, March 2023.
37 Lindy Ryan in discussion with the author, August 2022.
38 Gwendolyn Kiste in discussion with the author, July 2022.
