I was very kindly invited to speak at an International Women's Day event at Douglas Library this week, along with several other waaaay more qualified people. I figured I'd use the opportunity to blather about the history of horror and the women who've helped build it.
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I was attracted to writing horror because I always loved the visceral, visual nature of it. The best horror has a kind of exuberance. And people love to be scared in a safe, controlled way. It’s reassuring that you can hide the book in the freezer if it all gets too much.
I also love how horror shines a light on human nature. It exposes our fears, our neuroses, the rotten interiors we'd rather people didn't see. It does this sometimes to highlight how awful the world is and why we should be scared or angry, but at other times it shows how these things can be confronted and overcome. Books show us the inevitable terror of the world, then invite us to believe that hope, bravery, and humanity can help us fight these things (even if we won’t always win).
Like the phrase goes, fairy stories are important not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.
Fairy stories are perhaps the original horror stories. How many people get eaten, beaten, mutilated, kidnapped or cursed in our favourite children's stories? The original tellings were terrifying. They used horrifying aspects to grab the attention, but also to reinforce the lessons they preached - bad things happen to bad people. Evil actions can be defeated by good deeds.
Back in the day, these stories were passed generation to generation by word of mouth, mothers telling children. So in a sense, the very roots of horror came from women telling stories. And it's interesting to see how that continued through the centuries. Early gothic horror, originating in the 18th Century, by pioneers like Ann Radcliffe and Clara Reeve, was written for a mostly female audience. It was considered frivolous; not proper literature. Jane Austen herself referenced this fact in Northanger Abbey - her main character is a young woman who’s filled her head with gothic fiction and subsequently developed an overactive imagination. She says:
“Such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss — ?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda” […] Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, […] how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name.”
Into the 19th Century we got Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, one of the cornerstones of our genre. However, it's worth noting that, even then people argued that women's writing shouldn't be taken seriously. Frankenstein was published anonymously for many years. And the theory persists that Mary Shelley didn't actually write the story - it was all the work of her husband, Percy. As recently as three days ago there was an article in the Guardian that suggested Mary Shelley couldn't possibly have come up with such a story, despite, y’know, having a fascination with science in general and galvanism in particular.
So the 20th Century brought a new wave of female horror writers. The perspective they brought, of domestic, psychological horror, resonated in particular with readers at this time: the sense of something terrifying at the heart of the ordinary and everyday. Authors like Shirley Jackson and Susan Hill set the bar here. Angela Carter used the oldest fairytales weaved with social and feminist issues, to teach us that external monsters are rarely scarier than what lurks in people’s souls. The worst wolves are indeed hairy on the inside.
So, for a time, horror was a more-or-less equal opportunities genre, written and consumed by both genders.
Something appears to have shifted in the latter half of the twentieth century. The idea’s come about that horror is something of a boys’ club, and the best writers are male. The other day, an acquaintance remarked - not to me, but to someone else in this room - that women cannot write horror unless it's about sparkly vampires. Obviously I beg to differ. So how have we come to this?
Personally, I blame the 80s. The market for horror movies exploded in the late 70s into 80s. A new kind of visceral horror, slasher movies, video nasties, the infamous banned list. Certain misogynistic tropes became standard - not in all movies, obviously (hastag not all movies), but enough to call a broad trend. If I say slasher movie, we all picture the same sort of trope. Now, there's a fair overlap between those of us who love horror movies and those who read horror novels. People who watched the gore-busters of the 80s looked for literature in the same vein, and found pulp horror.
The authors writing for the pulp market were predominately male. We'll name drop Guy N Smith, Shaun Hutson, James Herbert et al. And Stephen King, of course, but you can't really include Stephen King in any statistics, because he's such an outlier he drags all your arguments askew, like a super-dark star. Neil Gaiman's the same. Anyway, around about this time, male authors have adopted the frivolous gothic novel and turned it around so now people suggest women don't have the heart or stomach for such things.
I have to say at this point, I've never found the horror community to be anything other than delightful and welcoming. No one there has ever told me I shouldn't be here, shouldn't be writing this stuff, or should be writing something more suitable to girls. The only people who’ve ever suggested that were those who dismiss the horror genre in general – I was once accused of bringing down the institution of family and marriage by writing about such grisly subjects.
But when I was growing up, about 99 percent of the authors I read were male. It made me assume horror was a boy’s game. Which suited me fine, I was a tomboy, but it was only as I grew up and learned to read more widely that I realised how skewed my worldview was. I worry at how other young women would fare if they wanted to follow the same path. Wouldn’t it just be easier to write about sparkly vampires?
As to the present day, in my opinion some of the best horror writing out there is currently happening in Young Adult. Those authors have the visceral exuberance that made me fall in love with the genre in the first place. Blending genres is very en vogue at the moment, with horror seguing into sci-fi or thriller or dystopia, as in Naomi Alderman’s recent feminist novel The Power.
People do sometimes wrinkle their nose at horror – it’s viewed as commercial, unsophisticated; entertainment not art. You’ll rarely see a horror novel shortlisted for a major prize. The same critics often wrinkle noses at YA as well – it’s for kids, it has nothing to say, it’s not proper literature. Even fans will sometimes say, oh, it’s my guilty pleasure.
Let me stop the bus there for a moment. People feel guilty way too often about stuff they love. Oh, I love Eurovision, it’s my guilty pleasure. I love the Twilight books, it’s my guilty pleasure. Like you should feel bad for the things that bring you joy. You should only consume them under a blanket, in the dark, when no one’s watching. That’s what we’re taught. We feel like people will judge us.
If we can do one thing for each other and for the upcoming generation, it’s to learn to embrace the things we love. Never feel guilty about something that genuinely makes you happy. And never make others feel bad for the things they care about. We need to support and validate other people and their (questionable) tastes in literature.
I love reading horror books, and I love writing horror books. And I’m exceptionally proud of the women who’ve paved the way for me to do this thing I love.
Thank you, please buy my book.
