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Articles / Blog Tour / Interviews

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WiHM 12: Quick Six Questions With Catherine Lundoff

Welcome to The Horror Tree, and thank you for participating in Women In Horror Month. First, tell us a bit about yourself and your interest in horror.
Hi there! Thanks for including me! I write a fair amount of horror and horror-adjacent work, including a lot of ghost stories and classic tale retellings, often seen through a queer lens. You can find my collected horror and dark fantasy in a collection called Unfinished Business: Tales of the Dark Fantastic (Queen of Swords Press, 2019). You can also find my work in publications like American Monsters Part 2 and Fireside Magazine and in media tie-in anthologies for World of Darkness games such as Vampire the Masquerade and Wraith. In addition, I write “horror-adjacent” work such as my Wolves of Wolf’s Point menopausal werewolf books and vampire erotica as Emily L. Byrne.

Apart from that, I’ve always loved certain kinds of horror – ghost stories, the kind of monster stories that hum along just below the surface of fairy tales and thoughtful smart horror like Ginger Snaps and Shirley Jackson and Angela Carter. I like the snark and diverse representation of new shows like The Dead Lands (2020) as well as Victorian-style horror books and films like Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black and Del Toro’s Crimson Peak. I like a good scare, but am not big on gore.

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Articles / Interviews

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WiHM 12: Quick Six Questions with Selah Janel

Welcome to The Horror Tree, and thank you for participating in Women In Horror Month. First, tell us a bit about yourself and your interest in horror.

Thanks so much for having me! I write in a few genres, but horror and dark fantasy hold a special place in my heart. There’s just so much possibility in horror, so many what-ifs, that it really opens itself as a genre to unlimited opportunity for ideas. There’s something really interesting about exploring visceral, terrifying situations (that may or may not be possible) and the emotions they provoke in a relatively safe way. My background is in theater, and I’ve built and designed costumes for about twenty years, so creativity and the love of story has always been part of me. Growing up, I was the biggest scaredy cat, but there was still something about horror that fascinated me. I’d sneak books here and there or read the back of video boxes in the rental places when my parents weren’t looking. It all bothered me, but a lot of the concepts fascinated me, and that dual reaction really made me wonder what was going on. Later on, as I grew up and really started reading and watching more, I was impressed by just how many subgenres there are and how they play on your mind in different ways. Everyday life can be scary, especially now, but there’s something cathartic about taking that same fear and putting it into a different situation that you either won’t go through, or you at least know/hope that things may work out, Even if a story doesn’t end happily, there’s still that release, that catharsis, that I think we don’t always get in our own lives.

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Articles / Interviews

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WiHM 12: Quick Six Questions With Kala Godin

Welcome to The Horror Tree, and thank you for participating in Women In Horror Month. First, tell us a bit about yourself and your interest in horror.

I’m 23, physically disabled,and I typically write poetry. I didn’t know that I was interested in writing horror until I worked on Teeth. Which was a short, multi-authored story. To be honest though, I didn’t think I would be publishing poetry either. I knew I wanted to be an author, but I thought that I would be publishing YA fantasy.

 
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Articles / Interviews

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WiHM 12: Quick Six Questions With A. F. Stewart

Welcome to The Horror Tree, and thank you for participating in Women In Horror Month. First, tell us a bit about yourself and your interest in horror.

I’m from Nova Scotia Canada, and I write under the name A. F. Stewart. Most of my horror writing so far has been in short fiction, although I do have a novella out, with another in the works, and some darker fantasy novels as well. I prefer writing in the mythological, supernatural, or psychological side of horror, although I’m not shy about the body count or the gore if need be. I love exploring the darker side of human nature and mixing with things that go bump in the night. I also never set out to write horror, but I tried it one day and enjoyed it and I’m still creating mayhem.

Why is Women In Horror Month important, and what do you say to someone who says ‘Oh, I don’t care if it’s by a man, a woman, etc., as long as it’s a good story’?”

I think Women in Horror month is important because of the prevalent dismissive attitudes towards female writers. Personally, I hesitate to call my stuff paranormal in part because I’m female and the possible assumption about “oh, she must write romance”. There’s still this viewpoint that women cannot write dark and gritty, that we’ve all must pen fluffy love stories. As to what I’d say to ‘Oh, I don’t care if it’s by a man, a woman, etc., as long as it’s a good story’, I’d reply, ‘Good for you, I wish everyone felt that way.’

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Articles

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WiHM 12: My Fiction Hints to My Reality

My Fiction Hints to My Reality

 

For Women in Horror Month, I wanted to have the chance to discuss how my fiction hints to my reality. While not all writers, or horror writers, do this, I do. 

 

My fiction in recent years has become much more personal, writing about true crime – mainly because I have been impacted directly by crime. For example, in my poetry collection Into the Forest and All the Way Through, about missing and murdered women, I wrote about how easy it is to be killed. To disappear. I too was nearly kidnapped years ago, standing on the corner, waiting for a bus, and a man pulled up his car, threw open his car door and told me to get in. He eventually left, but drove back around, opened his door and approached me, directing me to get into the car. I ran into incoming traffic to avoid him. He left. I was fine. But during the daytime hours, in front of a busy street, horror happened to me. Yet, the bus came. I went to work, and it was just another day. 

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Reviews

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Epeolatry Book Review: It Will Just Be Us by Jo Kaplan

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Title: It Will Just Be Us
Author: Jo Kaplan
Genre: Vampire Thriller
Publisher: Crooked Lane Books
Release Date: 8th Sept, 2020

Synopsis: A terrifying new gothic horror novel about two sisters and a haunted house that never sleeps, perfect for fans of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

They say there’s a door in Wakefield that never opens…

Sam Wakefield’s ancestral home, a decaying mansion built on the edge of a swamp, isn’t a place for children. Its labyrinthine halls, built by her mad ancestors, are filled with echoes of the past: ghosts and memories knotted together as one. In the presence of phantoms, it’s all Sam can do to disentangle past from present in her daily life.

I love Shirley Jackson. I love haunted house stories. Most of all, I love a great ending. Kaplan’s novel delivers all three. This is a gothic tale about an eyesore of a mansion on the edge of a swamp. Wakefield Manor is inhabited by ghostly memories, literally. There’s a twisted spine of a staircase and broken furniture covered in white sheets. Her book centers around a family of women and their conflicts. But this is not about the past. A new appearance—the future—takes center stage, and it’s in the form of a creepy kid.

This is Samantha Wakefield’s narrative, written in first person point of view. Sam, her pregnant sister Elizabeth, and their mother Agnes, reside in the home. They are unafraid, yet unhappy. Kaplan writes that the house is webbed in shadows of the distant past. “I have seen memories here that are too old for me to remember, older even then my mother and my grandmother…”

Sam is privy to apparitions of her younger self and of her ancestors. Sam’s visions are harmless and untouchable… Until the futuristic child enters the picture, a faceless boy, her sister’s unborn baby.

It’s easy to recognize the unapologetic inspiration from Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. In fact, Kaplan’s story invokes many recognizable character names: Julian, Agnes, Jonah, Clementine, Constance, and Meriday. But don’t be mistaken—this is not a retelling of Jackson’s classic. Kaplan’s fresh prose includes an entity in the swamp, a dark hallway, and a secret locked room. This slow burner lingered in my imagination long after I put it down.

5/5 stars

Available from Bookshop and Amazon.

Trembling With Fear

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Serial Killers: The Banquet Chef (Part 3) by Robb White

  1. Serial Killers: The Banquet Chef (Part 1) by Robb White
  2. Serial Killers: The Banquet Chef (Part 2) by Robb White
  3. Serial Killers: The Banquet Chef (Part 3) by Robb White

Serial Killers are part of our Trembling With Fear line and are serialized stories which we’ll be publishing on an ongoing basis.

Part 3: The Banquet Chef

She ordered the mushroom ragout and polenta, the chicken and sausage casseroles to be brought out in a synchronized order. Sheer luck had prevailed because the only thing the class officers could agree on were Doritos and salsa dips; they’d compromised with a buffet style meal and deferred to her for the dishes. Single-plate entrées would have undone her. During the bustle of supervising dishes heading into the dining hall, she often added extra spices for color and, in the case of the beef and rice casserole—made with some ingredients that would have made even the most exotic chef blanch unless that chef happened to reside in a certain island in the Indian Ocean where cannibalism is practiced—a spice to mask the pungent aroma of gamier organs cooked flambeau and to assist the appetite. 

Lupe made eye contact with her from the kitchen window but didn’t acknowledge her, which suited Adoncia fine. 

When all the guests were served and the caterers reassigned to table duties, she began to breathe again. Her heart was a trapped bird, trying to batter itself out of its cage. She felt calm enough to venture out of the kitchen. As she assumed, no one but the women at one table remembered her.

“Adoncia, que onda, hey, girl,” Lupe said when she saw Adoncia approach their table. “What’s happening?’

“Ni modo,” Adoncia replied with a shrug. “Nothing much.” Her high-school slang came back like a remembered sadness. When she first met Lupe, a brash girl from the suburbs, she didn’t talk much, which led to Lupe calling her fresa, “stuck-up.” 

“I didn’t care for them ham hocks and red beans in that soup, Adoncia,” Lupe said. “I still got bits stuck in my teeth.”

“Sorry.”

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Articles / Interviews

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WiHM 12: Quick Six Questions With Lori Michelle

Welcome to The Horror Tree, and thank you for participating in Women In Horror Month. First, tell us a bit about yourself and your interest in horror. 

Thank you for having me! My name is Lori Michelle. I am the co-owner of Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing and the Editor-in-Chief of Dark Moon Digest. In addition, I am the formatter for several small horror presses, so chances are, you have seen my work.

Not sure when my actual interest in horror began. I always thought Halloween was a great time of year (I like dressing up), and the Haunted Mansion was always one of my favorite spots at Disneyland, but I wasn’t the type to go after horror movies. I think horror became more important to me when my son was diagnosed with Leukemia. I was in the hospital and started reading short horror fiction. Maybe because I could escape the horror of reality by reading a horror that I knew didn’t exist?

Why is Women In Horror Month important, and what do you say to someone who says ‘Oh, I don’t care if it’s by a man, a woman, etc., as long as it’s a good story’?” 

Women seem to get the short end of the stick in everything. We get less wages, less promotions, and more work. Even today, women writers still have to fight to get noticed. We need to help promote the strong women who help the horror community move forward. Not to shut out the guys, but to show the world there are others. Plus, I think a woman can actually capture the nuance of some horrors better than a guy can. Most of us experience severe pain once a month (along with some lovely hormone swings) and several of us have experienced life. I know that no guy will ever capture the fear I have of something happening to the child I carried for 9 months. So when someone says something like that, I let them know they need to look for nuances in writing from women, from minorities, from other voices. They will get a perspective they may not have thought of before.
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