The anthology containing my first (hah, and to date only) professional fiction sale came out today and saying I am very excited is an understatement.
The book is called She Walks in Shadows, a women-written, women-edited, women-illustrated and female-character-centric take Lovecraftian horror, put together by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles at Innsmouth Free Press. Here’s what they have to say about the book:
They emerge from the shadows, to claim the night ….
Women from around the world delve into Lovecraftian depths, penning and illustrating a variety of Weird horrors. The pale and secretive Lavinia wanders through the woods, Asenath is a precocious teenager with an attitude, and the Ancient Egyptian pharaoh Nitocris has found a new body in distant America. And do you have time to hear a word from our beloved mother Shub-Niggurath?
Defiant, destructive, terrifying, and harrowing, the women in She Walks in Shadows are monsters and mothers, heroes and devourers. Observe them in all their glory. Iä! Iä!
And me? I want to say that I can’t imagine a cooler project to be part of. I’ve loved IFP ever since my book club read Fungi. This particular collection of stories is amazing. My highlights:
Laura Blackwell, in “Bitter Perfume” took an absolute nobody out of Lovecraft’s work and wrote a beautiful, heartwrenching story about her and her family after the events of
Nadia Bulkin’s “Violet is the Color of Your Energy” is a hard punch in the stomach, when she recasts The Colour Out of Space on a corn farm in the Midwest and adds troubling, relatable family dynamics for an emotional rawness not present in the inspirational source material.
I’m partial to horror that takes place in worlds where weirdness is not something that reveals itself slowly, but instead is an everyday occurance. But, I also love small, character driven pieces. Whoa, well in “Cypress God,” Rodopi Sisamis writes a tight, personal story about a realistic girl in a somewhat bizarre version of our world.
But every single story (plus one excellent poem) has some cool hook that makes me think, “Oh, I’ve never seen the mythos handled that way before.” There’s so much love of horror and so much individuality and I’m so happy to see my work alongside all of this.
I feel I’ve noticed, in general, women writing horror often focus on body horror, more transformations and mutations, more monsters beautiful and awesome in their monstrosity and more characters gleefully complicit in some glorious apocalypse, and this book holds true to that observation. Yay. I love that sort of thing.
Did I mention there’s art? There’s art! Another huge mix of styles. Cute, quirky, terrifying, woodcut, etc.
Later this week I’m going to try to write a little bit more about my story, “Bring the Moon to Me.” I wanted to jot down some of the reasons why I wrote it and some of the beautiful weird shapes computer science has taken throughout history.
Thank you so much, everyone involved.
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