Meet the women writers who defied convention to craft some of literature’s strangest tales, from Frankenstein to The Haunting of Hill House and beyond. Frankenstein was just the beginning: horror stories and other weird fiction wouldn’t exist without the women who created it. From Gothic ghost stories to psychological horror to science fiction, women have been primary architects of speculative … have been primary architects of speculative literature of all sorts. And their own life stories are as intriguing as their fiction. Everyone knows about Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein, who was rumored to keep her late husband’s heart in her desk drawer. But have you heard of Margaret “Mad Madge” Cavendish, who wrote a science-fiction epic 150 years earlier (and liked to wear topless gowns to the theater)? If you know the astounding work of Shirley Jackson, whose novel The Haunting of Hill House was reinvented as a Netflix series, then try the psychological hauntings of Violet Paget, who was openly involved in long-term romantic relationships with women in the Victorian era. You’ll meet celebrated icons (Ann Radcliffe, V. C. Andrews), forgotten wordsmiths (Eli Colter, Ruby Jean Jensen), and today’s vanguard (Helen Oyeyemi). Curated reading lists point you to their most spine-chilling tales.
Part biography, part reader’s guide, the engaging write-ups and detailed reading lists will introduce you to more than a hundred authors and over two hundred of their mysterious and spooky novels, novellas, and stories.
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I absolutely loved this book. It was original, sassy, fun and very informational. It was also written fairly recently, referencing many pop-culturally relevant characters, tv shows, and movies. However, it also goes back several hundred years for certain authors, too. Each featured female horror author is organized by subgenre, gets a brief life history, their better known works (With brief descriptions), recommended reads and a quote. I sat updating my ‘to read’ list as I went through each author, picking up almost 30 new books to check out! I never knew the in-depth history of female horror authors, but am now even more appreciative than before, for what they’ve contributed to the literary world. Thank you!! So needless to say, this book was just thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish!
I’m not the biggest nonfiction fan in the world but this has everything I love! Awesome info about horror and speculative fiction women writers, cool and creepy drawings, and all around interesting! Plus it had me by having the word monster in the title!
4 stars – It was really good
This was a fascinating look at the women who have pioneered horror fiction. I hadn’t heard of very many of these women or their books before this. I am not a huge horror fan but I want to read more in the future so I will be adding some of these authors to my TBR. Also I loved that at the end of each chapter the authors provided a list of recommended reading if you were interested. I am going to have to get the eBook version of this book now just so I can reference those lists.
If you are interested in horror history, book history, or pioneering women, I highly suggest picking up this book.
I love the description of this book as being ”part biography, part reader’s guide” because that is very accurate for this title. It takes you through the decades of horror and speculative fiction and the women who contributed to the popularity of what are now iconic genres. Each chapter introduces you to an author, details notable aspects of their life and career, describes the significance of their individual impact on the living history of the genre(s), and finally provides several options for suggested reading based on:
-Fundamentals (i.e. “if you read nothing else from this author, read X”)
-Additional reading (i.e. “if you want more from this author, read Y”)
-Anthologies the author is featured in
-Other authors you might enjoy if you enjoyed a particular name or title
-Any notes on the obscurity of any aforementioned titles (LOVED THIS)
With short chapters that cover an extensive list of female authors, this book is a fast read that will hopefully give you many excellent suggestions with all the context you need to understand their significance!
I will admit… I was initially hoping for a bit of a deeper conversation about these writers and their literary impact, but once I started reading, this just didn’t feel like that type of book. It’s more of a coffee table book—meant to be read and enjoyed casually and displayed for everyone to see! It’s not overly complex or long winded but is still well researched, well organized, and visually so fun!
On that note, I would suggest you buy the hardcover if you are interested in purchasing. Because it is more of a quick and easy read, I feel the fun is really in the presentation/paratext!
What’s great about this book–it’s good for people just dipping their toe into reading horror/thrillers/spooky books, and for people who have read a lot in the genre. Each author gets a short biography, followed by a suggested reading list (often a recommendation for the one book you need to read if you want to sample that author) as well as books or movies that were inspired by the author’s work. The layout is creepily adorable and Lisa Kroger approaches the material with humor. I think it would make a great gift book for horror lovers on your list.
First up, if you don’t want your TBR list to expand, you’d be better off avoiding this book.
This is a wonderful, engaging, inspiring book detailing women writers who have taken the lead in horror and/or speculative fiction from the very earliest of days.
Each woman is portrayed beautifully as an amazing and intriguing person, with details added about where to start reading their works and why their writing is important to the genre and literature as a whole. Flowing on from that are suggestions for further, similar books by other authors, as well as movies and TV shows.
The enthusiasm for all the works mentioned is obvious and it creates a compulsion to track down and devour everything, hence why you shouldn’t read it if you’re not looking to expand your TBR list.
Some of these writers I had read, others I knew of, but many were new names to me. I have a very long list of works to track down, now, but I am utterly grateful that a resource such as this has been created.
This book is a treasure!
With its eye-catching cover and compellingly strange sketches and drawings, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction attracts attention from its opening pages. From there, the authors Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson proceed to thoroughly entertain and inform those curious enough continue reading about this underexplored topic. Providing historical context, fascinating biographical background and a plethora of reader’s advisory information, Monster She Wrote is mandatory for anyone who seeks a deeper understanding of these genres that are typically assumed as dominated by their male authors. Kröger and Anderson’s chronology starts with Margaret Cavendish in the 17th century and the advent of speculative fiction and gothic tales, culminating with recent releases—many of which that have sought to revive, expand and modernize some recurring feminist themes over the centuries. The book is divided into eight sections, each with an introduction to a time period or emerging trend accompanied by defining characteristics; a quick bio of its most relevant female writers with recommended reading lists; and suggested supplemental materials related to each. Also sprinkled within are quotes and asides that discuss how women’s voices, changing roles and male counterparts contributed to each moment in the genre’s history. With their witty and colloquial tone, it is obvious that the authors are both well-informed and passionate about the subject matter. Monster, She Wrote can be enjoyed sequentially or browsed in any order for those seeking to explore the origins of some exceptional horror/speculative fiction or add substantially to their TBR list.
Thanks to the authors, Quirk Books and NetGalley for an advance copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review.
Almost immediately, I had to come to grips with what Monster, She Wrote is versus what I had hoped and wanted it to be. Without knowing much about the book beyond the awesome illustrated cover art and the premise as revealed in the title (The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction), I had expected a more thorough study exploring the various authors and a deep-dive into their eras, their work and legacies, and how they shaped an entire genre.
Instead, Monster, She Wrote is more of a reference guide to the hundreds of women authors working in the horror and speculative fiction genres. We’re introduced to these writers, given a very brief biographical sketch and an overview of their most relevant works, followed by a short reading list naming a singular must-read title from their bibliography, a second book to try, and some related works by other authors exploring similar themes and topics. Because of the large number of authors Kröger and Anderson are compiling here, each of the women featured here are only given a few pages worth of space to touch upon their biography, influences and interests, and their most relevant titles to the genre at hand (some of these women wrote romance, young girls fiction, and nonfiction titles, as well, which obviously fall outside of the scope of Kröger and Anderson ‘s examinations).
The book itself is arranged into eight parts, starting with The Founding Mothers and the modern horror genre’s roots in Gothic literature of the late 1700s — 1800s, sparked by Ann Radcliff, who helped popularize the genre. She and the writers that followed wrote in the Gothic style that had begun with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, claiming the genre for their own and making it a literary force to be reckoned with and one that explored their own gruesome nightmares. Without these women, Kröger and Anderson argue, we wouldn’t have films like Suspiria or the domestic horrors explored by Shirley Jackson. It was these women that made Gothic horror so popular that enabled and influenced enormous swathes of horror and spec fic authors to come, including Stephen King. From there, Kröger and Anderson move into the various subgenres that grew naturally from their Gothic origins, moving into stories dealing more directly with the supernatural, like ghosts and hauntings, and the occult as society, science, and philosophers of the late 19th Century began to explore the question of what happens after death, as well as attempted to scientifically explore psychic phenomena. Although male authors like Charles Dickens used ghosts in their fiction, it was, again, the women authors that really led the forefront and used their writings to explore societal and political issues of the time, cementing the horror genre into a form that would become more recognizable for 21st Century readers, paving the way for the paperback horrors of the 1980s from VC Andrews, Kathe Koja, Ruby Jean Jensen, and The New Goths, like Anne Rice and Susan Hill.
While I certainly appreciate Kröger and Anderson’s work here, and believe that it will help readers (myself included — and rest assured, I’ve made note of a number of titles mentioned throughout this book) discover a number of strong, and perhaps overlooked, voices in the genre, it was the prefaces that began each section that I found most interesting. When Monster, She Wrote dug into discussions of the Spiritualist movement and occult societies that help inspire the women writers of that era, I was supremely fascinated and wanted to know about that history and how those works fed off each other. I wanted a deeper exploration of how these women used their writings to further civil rights and support abolition movements. Although some readers decry politics in their fiction (primarily, I’ve come to note, politics they disagree with), the simple fact is that art and politics are inextricably intertwined and always have been and always will be. I would have loved to have read a deeper examination of this topic in regards to women in horror and how their (counter-culture) attitudes fueled the genre in its earliest stages. Monster, She Wrote gets close to these topics, but never steps into the muck to get its hands dirty. It’s not the central focus of this work at all, but it is at its most interesting during these instances and if Kröger and Anderson ever opt to take a deep dive into these issues I’ll be sure to read the hell out of it. That said, you can at least explore these topics and issues through the women and their stories that Kröger and Anderson have selected to highlight as most relevant. Also of interest, and again something I wish were explored more deeply and thoroughly, were the later discussions of the lost women writers of the pulp era, who influenced other creatives like HP Lovecraft and the creator of Dungeons & Dragons, and the paperback horror boom of the 80s, which saw many works disappear entirely following the horror market’s collapse as publishers went out of business and various titles went out of print.
Where Monster, She Wrote is most successful, though, is in showcasing the women of horror themselves, and in this regard it’s very much an indispensable reference guide. Every February, the horror genre celebrates Women In Horror Month, and readers devote the shortest month of the year to discovering strong new voices or overlooked classics. There’s more than enough horror stories by women to fill an entire calendar year and then some, and Monster, She Wrote is a solid starting point to discovering these authors and enriching your library with their voices. Beyond the central handful of figures that Kröger and Anderson have selected to best represent each era of horror fiction, you’ll find plenty of leads toward other women authors of the time, as well as more recent 21st Century examples that were inspired by those earlier writers and best recapture the spirit of those themes or genre hallmarks. Monster, She Wrote is also a handy book to have on hand just in case you run into some especially dimwitted man who foolishly thinks women don’t, can’t, or shouldn’t write horror, so you can throw the book at them or crack them over the head with it. Maybe you’ll luck out and knock some sense into them!