Author Archives: gwendolynkiste

Good for Her: Part Three of Our Favorite Resilient Female Characters in Horror

Welcome back for the final part of our Women in Horror Month feature on resilient female characters! As I mentioned in the previous two installments, I was thrilled to speak with a group of amazing authors as we celebrate Women in Horror Month all throughout the month of March.

So I’ll allow them to tell you all about the characters they love in the genre!

EDEN ROYCE: Jeryline in Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, played by Jada Pinkett-Smith (Jada Pinkett at the time). She’s my favorite resilient character because she survives, which was a rare thing for Black women horror actors at the time. It was honestly so refreshing to even see her as the heroine. Jeryline destroyed a manipulative, homicidal demon who was in search of an ancient key relic that would give it the power of the cosmos, and afterward, she took on the duty of being the key’s caretaker, all while saving her cat.

WENDY DALRYMPLE: Sometimes in horror with femme-focused or final girl type stories there is often an emphasis on a “strong” FMC. For me resilience isn’t always found in strong people, sometimes it develops in a soft character who must learn to be hard. For example, Noa, the FMC in the film FRESH, is your average girl-next-door just looking for love. She’s not hard or strong, but she is resilient and finds her strength, not just for herself, but for her friends too in order to escape and survive.

K.J. BrantleyK.J. BRANTLEY: Eva Galli in Ghost Story by Peter Straub feels resilient to me because, whether villain or victim, she cannot be erased. Across time and identity, she returns again and again, evolving into a force far more powerful than those who tried to control her.

JULIE LEW: It is so hard to choose a favorite, but Megan Bontrager’s Eye of the Ouroboros comes to mind. Park ranger Theodora Buchanan is haunted by her sister’s disappearance in the very woods she now works in. In her relentless search for her sister, Theo’s understanding of reality is subverted and she must battle against the Federal Bureau of Reality, a hostile organization who has taken a sudden interest in her. With so much grit and heart, it’s impossible not to fall for Theo and root for her from the first page to the very last.

MEG RIPLEY: Goody in Laird Hunt’s IN THE HOUSE IN THE DARK OF THE WOODS is someone who I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since I read her. Goody’s journey from victim—abused girl to abused wife—has her staggering away from puritanical society into the woods only to meet more seemingly sinister entities, but what HAPPENS in the woods, the processing of grief and trauma, it’s equal parts terrifying and utterly devastating.

CLAIRE L. SMITH: Margot/Erin from The Menu (2022)! The Menu was easily one of my favourite films of 2022 and Anya Taylor-Joy’s performance as Margo really made the film. I love that in a room full of rich, privileged people, she’s the only one who has the grit and determination to survive. I also really appreciated how she’s never portrayed as needing the approval of any of the male characters to survive. She doesn’t need to prove to Tyler that she’s as ‘cultured’ as him and she doesn’t need to prove to Slowik that she fits his version of ‘one of us’. She maintains a complete sense of self and will not hesitate to stand up for herself, both of which are hard to do when your life is on the line.

ABBY VAIL: My favorite resilient woman in horror is Rosemary from Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby. To be a woman who endures a painful pregnancy, who’s gaslit by most men in her life, manipulated by a cult, and forced to give birth to the spawn of Satan only to look up from the bassinet and demand, “His name is Andrew,” is the definition of resilience. When Rosemary gazes into the face of evil, she believes the half which came from her is so inherently good it deserves nurture. She tickles the belly of darkness and light commands the room in the form of an indestructible mother.

DENISE TAPSCOTT: My favorite resilient female character in horror is Abbie Mills from the tv show Sleepy Hollow. I love that she was a fiesty detective who boldly fought both natural and supernatural characters. She was always direct and yet graceful when dealing with anything that came across her path, whether it was something family-related, or battling demonic entities with Ichabod Crane.

FRANCES LU-PAI IPPOLITO:  When I think of resilient women and female characters, I think of the defining events that make us strong when it matters because acts of survival and courage are often premised on earlier experiences where we were forced to feel powerless and silenced. Train to Busan features the creation of this exact female resilience through the lens of a small girl, Su-An. A child of recently divorced parents and a workaholic father, she has stage fright where she cannot sing “Aloha ‘Oe” at a recital her father has missed. For much of the movie, Su-An is like this. No real agency, serving to implement her father’s redemption arc as he keeps her alive from zombie hordes. She’s a final girl who can’t save herself. But, at the end, when she has lost everything, including her father, it is the simple act of singing that distinguishes her from the zombies and ultimately ensures her survival. Her resilience is a quiet steel. It’s a refusal to let horror and trauma destroy who we are at our core – our minds, our spirits, our capacity to love, and our ability to honor those who sacrificed themselves for our survival.

ASHLEY HUYGE: Immanuelle from Alexis Henderson’s The Year of the Witching is one of my favorite characters! She resists the patriarchal rule of her village’s religious leader, while seeking protection from a curse for the people she loves. Even after her family turns her away, she finds the dedication to keep fighting. She adapts, she grows, and she conquers! She reminds us that we need to be strong, especially in hard times.

SUMIKO SAULSON: My favorite resilient female character in horror is Damali Richards, star of LA Bank’s The Vampire Huntress Legend series, a hip-hop spoken word artist who was slaying demons way before K-Pop Demon Hunters was a gleam in its daddy’s eye. Orphaned at a young age, when she’s 20, she finds out she’s a Neteru, with a divine purpose to become a vampire huntress, but she’s already a major musical powerhouse and a star.  I love her for the African American representation, and she’s definitely resilient and a total badass.

CARLIE ST. GEORGE: Selena from 28 Days Later is one of my favorite resilient female characters in horror. She loses everyone. The world as she knows it completely collapses—but Selena adapts out of necessity to survive, closing herself off and killing quickly when needed, but also rescuing our male protagonist (multiple times, even) and eventually adapting again, relearning what it means to actually live and not to just “fucking cope.”

C.R. LANGILLE: My favorite resilient female character in horror is Ellen Ripley from the Alien franchise. I love how she’s a problem solver in the moment, even when things feel dire, and how she’s willing to fight for the survival of not just herself, but others as well.

NADIA BULKIN: My pick is Sophia from A Dark Song, who hires an occultist to help her conduct a grueling rite following the death of her son. I could justify this choice with the months of physical and psychological torture Sophia endures in order to win an audience with her guardian angel – but anyone who’s lost a loved one knows this is nothing compared to the nonsensical resilience required by grief. Sometimes you defy death because you genuinely want to live; sometimes, like Sophia, you say “not today” purely out of spite.

REI ALYSSA MURRAY: My favorite resilient female character in horror is Rose Da Silva from Christophe Gans’ 2006 film, Silent Hill. She is dropped into a terrifying otherworld in pursuit of her missing adopted daughter while initially being pursued by a police officer, whose history with the town leads her to believe Rose has horrific intentions for Sharon. Rose is tormented by monsters and the town’s manipulative religious cult but still accomplishes her mission with a new understanding of motherhood.

KELLY BROCKLEHURST: I love Lorraine Warren from The Conjuring franchise. She’s a total badass when faced with terrifying situations, but it’s her love for her family that really gets me. She is just as iconic as some of the classic women in horror, like Laurie Strode.

KC GRIFANT: I know this is a common favorite, but Ellen Ripley tops the list. I rewatch the Alien trilogy regularly and her no-nonsense, take-charge attitude in the face of unspeakable horrors and trauma is forever inspiring. Talk about resilience: she faces her worst fear multiple times and never lets it compromise her humanity and compassion. And the scene at the end of Aliens with the exoskeleton? Beyond iconic.

KATHRYN TENNISON: Maggie Greene Rhee (from The Walking Dead comics) evolves from a lost, suicidal young woman into a steadfast leader and a key player in the fight to build a new world. Despite losing almost everyone she loves, Maggie is strong and determined, constantly working toward a better future. In the end, she learns to rely on herself, and that’s enough.

HANA JABR: Horror and resilience gets me thinking about Margaret from The September House by Carissa Orlando. I loved the way Orlando represented denial as a key feature of trauma and domestic violence through Margaret’s acceptance of the horrors haunting her house. I also love Winifred Notty in Victorian Psycho and her stark rejection of oppressive societal/gender norms. 

LEE MURRAY: Not necessarily my favourite, but a heroine who springs to mind from my recent reading is FBI Behavioural Science trainee Clarice Starling from Thomas Harris’s classic horror novel The Silence of the Lambs. What I love about Clarice, at least in this book, is that she represents. After the techs have been and gone, Clarice returns to crime scenes and examines them the way only a woman can. She offers a woman’s corpse the dignity only a woman can. She endures blatant misogyny and harassment that only a woman understands. She’s prepared to relive her own trauma if it will get the job done and stop a serial killer from killing again.

“The victims are all women and there aren’t any women working this. I can walk in a woman’s room and know three times as much about her as a man would know, and you know that’s a fact. Send me.”—Clarice Starling, p. 342.

Clarice Starling is manipulated, maligned, and sidelined by almost all the male characters in the story and a good number of the women. Yet when the inevitable barriers go up, and doors close, when her own future is at risk, Clarice acts anyway. Not yet a fully-fledged member of the agency, she claims her own agency, even while stepping carefully inside the lines. She is the final girl who not only saves herself, but all the other victims who might have been. In Silence of the Lambs, Lector, the philosophising, rhapsodising killer cannibal, gets the big billing, but he’s merely a caricature, while there is something undefinably real about Clarice.

ANDREA BLYTHE: I love the resilience of Jade Daniels from Stephen Graham Jones’ Indian Lake Trilogy (starting with My Heart Is a Chainsaw). To survive the horrors of living in an abusive home, she turns to the horrors films as a kind of comfort, using those lessons as a guide to survive the terrors she believes will come – and they do come. She survives a slew of nightmares across books and learns how to not just survive, but build a life and find family and community for herself.

And that’s part three of our Women in Horror Month spotlight on female characters. Please check out part one and part two of our resilient characters spotlight as well! 

Happy reading, and happy Women in Horror Month! 

Good for Her: Part Two of Our Favorite Resilient Female Characters in Horror

Welcome back to part two of our Women in Horror Month spotlight on resilient female characters in horror! Since our theme for this year’s Women in Horror Month was all about resilience, this seemed like the perfect topic to discuss with other female horror authors.

And with that, our featured authors can take it away!

CYNTHIA PELAYO: Clarice Starling’s resilience is disciplined and intensely internal. She enters spaces designed to intimidate her, but she doesn’t flinch. What moves me is how her vulnerability becomes a part of her superpower, and how ultimately she doesn’t become hardened by her experiences but sharpened.

MADISON MCSWEENEY: In Clive Barker’s Cabal, Lori is introduced as the supportive girlfriend of Aaron Boone, a mental patient and suspected serial killer who is gunned down by police. Visiting the site of his violent death, Lori discovers he’s still half-alive: the newest member of a cult of subterranean, flesh-eating monsters. As a war brews between humanity and the Nightbreed, Lori helps Aaron accept his new identity and ultimately chooses to join the Breed herself, knowing she’ll suffer displacement and persecution along with them. She’s not simply following her lover into the darkness; Barker writes Lori as an independent, self-assured woman who has made her peace with losing Aaron. It’s her strong will and sense of self that allow her to recognize her own kinship to the monsters.

JESS HAGEMANN: My favorite resilient female character in horror is Jenny from The Green Ribbon. She resists pressure from everyone around her until the end, when she takes her fate into her own hands.

GRACE R. REYNOLDS: When I think of resilient female characters in horror, the first that comes to mind is Tess from the film Barbarian. She subverts the trope of the Final Girl by questioning her surroundings and refusing to be a passive victim in the depths of the Mother’s lair. She wields patience and empathy as a weapon, quite literally, to pull herself out of the pits of hell!

L. MARIE WOOD: I’d have to say Nancy from A Nightmare on Elm Street. Specifically the original. She was a teenager doing teenage things who got caught up in a terrible nightmare that could cost her life. After losing her best friend and her boyfriend, Nancy didn’t just wait to die – she fought Freddy Krueger with everything she had, sacrificing her body in the process to pull him into the light. It was badass and that was punctuated by the way she said, “Screw your pass,” when the hall monitor asked for it. Side note, the amount of times I say, “Screw your pass!” when I don’t want to do something is embarrassing.

MAY WALKER: I’m not sure if Jane from The Autopsy of Jane Doe is my favorite, but she’s certainly resilient, surviving torture, time, misogyny, and the stripping of her identity. She deserves her vengeance, and in this dark time in history, this is a feeling that resonates.

MICHELLE RENEE LANE: One of the most resilient female characters I’ve seen in a horror film recently is Hailey Freeman, played by Danielle Deadwyler in 40 Acres (2025). Hailey is a complicated character who takes the trope of the strong Black woman to the extreme end of that spectrum as her blended family’s matriarch. Hailey lives with her partner and their children on an isolated farm in Canada that has passed down to her through multiple generations from her great great grandfather who escaped slavery. A former soldier, she has trained her family like a special ops team to protect them from cannibalistic raiders in a post apocalyptic, near future world ravaged by pandemics, wars, and species extinction. Hailey has high expectations and strict rules in her household and insists on being in control to keep her family safe. A series of unfortunate events leads her to risk her own life to save her loved ones. Reluctantly, she finally yields some of that control enough to trust her family to look after themselves after she nearly dies to rescue them and ends up being saved.

ANN FRAISTAT: Pearl from Ti West’s Pearl. I admit Pearl is a bit of an oddball choice, as her resilience does ultimately fail her, time and time again—but that said, her shattering resilience is precisely what makes for one hell of a villain origin story. Pearl is ravenous for stardom, determined to the point of delusion to escape her austere and lonely life, and when her glittering defiance does crack into bloody rage, it’s a pain I can feel in my bones. Plus, she has a pet alligator named Theda, which obviously gives her bonus points.

ERIN AL-MEHAIRI: Rose Madder, from the Stephen King novel of the same name, has always been a strong example of resistance and resilience to me. In the wake of leaving her abusive husband, scared and alone, she becomes powerful not just with help from the magical world, but by channeling her anger and rage into something far more powerful and life-changing. As a survivor of domestic violence myself, this book and its main character helped me through so much in my escape to a new life and taught me how to be resilient even in confronting extended periods of abuse and harassment before and after leaving and all the obstacles that kept jumping in my way. It’s really the catalyst of why I began to write horror.

KENYA MOSS-DYME: One of my favorite resilient women in horror fiction is Brittany from the story “Armor”. Armor is one of the short stories in the Maleficient Tales (2025) collection by author Mya Lairis. Brittany, a quiet but angry teenager, has experienced deep trauma within her own household and was left unprotected and savaged by those she loved and trusted. In the story, she experiences a brutal and monstrous transformation that allows her to heal from the inside out, so to speak. It’s haunting, ugly and raw, but. I think about Brittany often because she shares a name with my daughter and because I wish every daughter have some sort of armor against the world.

RACHEL BOLTON: My resilient female character in horror is Christine the 58′ Plymouth Fury from the 1983 film.

Christine may be a car but she is coded as female. She is a lady and expects to be treated like one. Her first on screen kill is a man who dared to smoke a cigar in her interior. Sure, she is possessive, a child murderer, and evil, but Christine always gets what she wants. From putting her broken frame back together to driving down the street on fire, Christine is unstoppable.

CHRISTINA SNG: I’ll have to say Carol in The Walking Dead. She’s had such an incredible journey from battered wife to the strongest and smartest survivor in the show. Her resilience and her resourcefulness sets her apart from everyone else. If something goes wrong, it’s Carol who saves the day. I admire her so much and aim to be like her when I grow up!

NICOLE M. WOLVERTON: My favorite resilient female character in horror is the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which I realize is an odd choice–except that she is so single-minded in her pursuit of gaining agency for herself in a world where women are denied the freedom of movement and their own desires. Given the effort in contemporary politics to effect a backslide in freedoms for women, it feels particularly of-the-moment in some ways. I am particularly fascinated by the use of food in the story and the way the narrator opts out of her forced diet of “cod-liver oil and lots of tonics and things, to say nothing of ale and wine and rare meat” as a way to carve out some semblance of decision-making and its place in setting her free, for what it’s worth, by the end of the story.

LISA MORTON: I’m going with Clarice Starling (and yes, dammit, The Silence of the Lambs absolutely IS a horror/mystery!). So many women in horror novels and films exist to be victims – even when they are the protagonist – but Clarice is so great because throughout her life she has worked to raise herself up, and in the story’s finale she firmly catapults herself out of any potential for victimhood.

AGATHA ANDREWS: Lolly Willowes from the book LOLLY WILLOWES by Sylvia Townsend Warner – She was tired of everyone taking advantage of her and making demands on her life, so she became a witch and sold her soul to the devil just so she could get some peace and quiet. Then she tamed the devil.

LYDIA PRIME: My favorite resilient female character in horror is a bit hard to pin down, but I’ll go with Maya from The Butterfly Garden by Dot Hutchison. Imagine being kidnapped, permanently marked, and kept for years; staring your only conceivable twisted end in the face day in and day out. Maya expertly navigates not only her captivity in ‘The Garden’ but several, if not all, of her fellow prisoners to foster some level of comfort… well, what little comfort they can find in this place. To hold on to one’s sanity knowing the clock is ticking for yourself and those around you, I can’t imagine a stronger person.

CATHERINE JORDAN: Noomi Rapace is a favorite character in my favorite drama horror movie, You Won’t Be Alone, and endures her kidnapping by becoming the other, by allowing herself to be shaped by watching and feeling. She stands as a profound yet overlooked resilient woman because she does not want to be saved; she learns and lives within her experience.

TRISH WILSON: I chose Rynn Jacobs from “The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane”, a 1976 horror film starring 13 year old Jodie Foster in one of her first major movie roles. The movie takes place in a conservative small seaside town in Maine. Martin Sheen stars as pedophile Frank Hallet, with Geraldine Page as his nosy, enabling mother, Cora Hallet. Scott Jacoby rounds out the main cast as Rynn’s only friend, disabled teenager Mario Podesta. Only a year earlier, Sheen starred in “Sweet Hostage” opposite a teenaged Linda Blair. The movies are uncomfortably similar. “Sweet Hostage” romanticized Sheen’s charismatic escaped mental patient who seduces Blair, resulting in Blair’s case of Stockholm Syndrome. He quotes Coleridge and devolves into frightening and violent flights of fantasy. The similar characters yet very different and disturbing portrayals offset each other quite well.

While Rynn is only 13 years old, her intelligence and lack of naivete enable her to fend off the lecherous pedophile, Frank, as well as keep nosy neighbors at bay since the townspeople wonder where her poet father is. He is never home when people barge in unannounced or he is writing and can’t be disturbed. Rynn is perfectly capable of taking care of herself, but she trusts Mario enough to let him get close to her and to help her. Frank continues to sexually harass Rynn, who has her own effective ways of dealing with him. I won’t discuss details of the plot so I leave no spoilers. Suffice to say Jodie Foster knocks her performance out of the park – so much so she won a Saturn Award for Best Actress.

AMY GRECH: Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, is my favorite female character. I love her steadfast transformation as she struggles with her identity in a patriarchal, totalitarian state of Republic of Gilead where women’s bodies are owned through political subjugation and complicity is the norm.

Saba Syed RazviSABA RAZVI: The resilient horror heroine is the ultimate final girl of the page: Scheherazade from The 1001 Nights. Even though this is not a typical horror story as seen through the lens of Western narrative structures, it sprawls across all the nightmares and atrocities of the East in an unapologetic and intricately faceted way. And, if you take a step back from the frame tale or the whimsy it contains, you can see how horrific the scenario is. The frame tale is structured around sustained horror and serial murder, and the tales contained within it feature all kinds of adventure and danger and nightmare, which are offset by the whimsy or beauty or ephemeral. You can get lost in the stories, and forget which threads connect to each other. The premise and the atmosphere are a nightmare that suggest that survival is a fragile kind of miracle or a gift for the lucky or the cunning. Scheherazade jumps into the dangerous situation of choosing to marry a serial killer (let’s face it, he is doing exactly that through his revenge agenda of “marry, seduce, and kill” with state power sharpening his sword).

But she sees the haunted palace that he is. And, she refuses to be defeated or annihilated, surviving solely though the force of her imagination. She walks into the nightmare and decides to save herself and Shahryar from his violent plan with nothing but a story that she pauses at just the right time to keep things going. Her resilience is a reminder that time is always running out and the stakes are always life or death when we go all in with our endeavors. Her narratives feature all the darkness of humanity: strangeness and excess, jealousy, cruelty, demons and jinn, sorcery, shipwrecks and false faces…and even the heart of the king’s psychic wound, jealousy, betrayal, and tenderness. She sneaks beauty in to disarm the horror, but it’s always an otherworldly kind. What I love about her resilience is that it reminds us of the power of words and that narrative can be dangerous and risky as well as it can be liberating. It is the poetry of our language that takes us into the darkest parts of ourselves, but leaves us a thread we can use to wind our way back out. Her resilience comes at the risk of herself, but she believes in herself and in the power of her own imagination, her own ability to transform the nightmare. By invoking the horror, she finds a way to turn it into hope. In our world, today, trauma seems to lurk everywhere, and the path to surviving it is connected to faith in the self, fascination with imagination, and indulgence in the lyricism of language. Her resilience reminds me that if you pull the monster into your own story, you can find a way to survive the trauma he imposes, to write yourself free.

And that’s part two of our Women in Horror Month spotlight on female characters. While you’re here, please consider checking out part one and part three of our resilient characters spotlight! 

Happy reading, and happy Women in Horror Month! 

Good for Her: Part One of Our Favorite Resilient Female Characters in Horror

Welcome back, and happy Women in Horror Month! For my final feature for March, I asked a group of incredible authors about their favorite resilient female characters in horror. I received lots of amazing answers. So many in fact that this is only the first of three different posts about it!

So without further ado, here’s part one of our Women in Horror favorite resilient characters in horror!

AI JIANG: One of my favourite resilient female characters in horror is Amanda from Umma (2022) who is able to overcome her generational trauma and reconcile with the her daughter. Amanda comes to recognize the suppressed pain and insecurities that she is projecting onto others and is able to find peace in her present by facing her past rather than continuing to avoid it. Amanda undertakes the difficult task of untangling her identity from own mothers so she can heal from both her emotional and physical wounds.

CHLOE SPENCER: One of my favorite characters in horror is Erin from the 2011 film, You’re Next. Growing up in a survivalist cult gave Erin trauma, but she’s able to navigate that trauma and utilize her skillset in order to take down a series of bloodthirsty killers that are attacking her boyfriend’s family home. She is compelled to survive by any means necessary, even at one point jumping out a window to evade the killer. In the end, when she discovers that she’s been horribly betrayed, she does what she needs to do in order to deliver justice.

TAMIKA THOMPSON: My favorite resilient female character is Jessica Jacobs-Wolde, a journalist, wife, and mother in Tananarive Due’s African Immortals Series (My Soul to Keep, The Living Blood, Blood Colony, and My Soul to Take). In Book One alone, Jessica discovers an earth-shattering truth about the love of her life, David, who is her husband and the father of her child, and she faces so much unspeakable loss over the course of the book. I love her because despite this she still fights to uncover the truth, embodies bravery, asks tough questions, and allows herself to remain open to love.

KATHERINE SILVA: My favorite female character in horror is Buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Her entire journey as the slayer is fraught with mistakes, with grief, with non-stop betrayal, but most importantly, empowerment. She’s young, she’s human, and she’s stumbling through potential apocalypse after potential apocalypse, kicking ass and taking names. At the end of the day, you are always rooting for her no matter the odds or who she’s up against.

G.G. SILVERMAN: My favorite resilient female character in horror is Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. She endured the brutality of slavery and made difficult choices in the name of survival. Her forging ahead with life, despite all she’s lost, is a testament to the strength of Black women.

JACQUELINE WEST: One of my recent faves is Cora Zeng, from Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker. When the book begins, Cora is only a vague outline of a person, someone with no real identity except in relation to her older sister. But when her fragile life gets shredded by a serial killer, Cora builds a new one, even while surviving a global pandemic, malignant anti-Asian racism, and several hungry ghosts. It’s an amazing book—gruesome and layered and funny and smart—and Cora Zeng is the persistently beating heart of it.

DONNA TAYLOR: Deena Johnson from the Fear Street trilogy really sticks in my head as a girl who won’t give up. No matter how deeply her girlfriend spirals or how many people she loses, she won’t stop searching for the truth and putting an end to all the Shadyside killings because that’ll mean she can still save the people she has left. And putting the bad people in their rightful places is the cherry on top of the bloody sundae.

JESSICA GLEASON: Laurie Strode. The last three Halloween movies came up against some harsh criticism for not being what people expected, but I loved them because I viewed them as Laurie’s story. In that, you see such powerful transformation. This character spans decades. She is your quintessential “final girl” but as she ages and struggles with alcoholism and PTSD, she is reborn. She is messy and human, and she loses everything in the name of survival, and she never really moves on from her trauma, remaining vigilant in her self-preservation. Her final confrontation with Michael transcends survival; it’s about letting go and becoming more than just a survivor.

LINDA D. ADDISON: One of my favorite resilient female characters I often think about is the character Rebecca “Tank Girl” Buck from a 1995 post-apocalyptic film (Tank Girl). In the film the character “Tank Girl” sees her boyfriend killed and children abducted as well as being captured herself, but throughout she shows no fear against the head bad guy who tries to intimidate/torture her, always throwing snarky responses to him. Tank Girl doesn’t respond as a nice “girl” when pushed, and I find her attitude inspiring when I need energy in a tough/confrontational situation.

VIGGY PARR HAMPTON: When I think of resilience, Maggie O’Shaughnessy from Maria Tureaud’s haunting This House Will Feed springs to mind. Not only has Maggie survived Ireland’s Great Famine, but she’s also suffered the unimaginable losses of the man she loves and her child. Despite that avalanche of mental, emotional, and physical suffering, Maggie continues to strive to survive. Just when she thinks she’s escaped the torment of her past, new terrors unfold, which she meets with the same resilient attitude and strength of spirit that have thus far ensured her survival. Maggie bears trauma after trauma with grit, determination, and the belief that good still exists in the world.

MADELEINE SWANN: The main character of Sister Midnight (directed and written by Karan Kandhari) first has to find a way to cope in an arranged marriage before muddling through, and then thriving, in her new ruthless, blood sucking form. Also the scene of her on the beach wearing sunglasses and holding a black umbrella, surrounded by colourful saris and happy people, is iconic

SAMANTHA BRYANT: I love Noemí Taboada from Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic. She doesn’t seem like a heroine starting out, but she faces down terrifying truths and secrets to save herself and others. The epitome of “underestimate me at your own peril.”

LEANNA RENEE HIEBER: Edith Cushing from Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak is the definition of a Gothic Victorian Final Girl and I love her because despite everything she endures, she manages to keep her head and her humanity through it all. I particularly love Edith’s interactions with the house’s ghosts, all of which are grotesque and terrifying at first, but they’re actually trying to help Edith survive. As my own Gothic, Gaslamp Fantasy novels are full of helpful ghosts and that sentiment crosses into my non-fiction work about ghosts such as America’s Most Gothic, a setting where a heroine can heed a good spectral warning makes Edith all the more special.

DIANA RODRIGUEZ WALLACH: We currently live in a country where Roe-v-Wade has been overturned and politicians are threatening to take away “no fault divorce,” this is why lately I’m admiring the resilience of a famous female horror character who lived before these women’s rights were ever available—Rosemary Woodhouse.

I’m talking about the horror novel, not the movie, because screw Roman Polanski. Rosemary’s Baby, written by Ira Levin, was published in 1967. We follow Rosemary as her abusive, mediocre, narcissistic husband sells her body to a Satanic cult. Abortion was not an option for Rosemary at this time. Neither was divorce, unless she could prove her husband was a devil-worshipper in a court of law.

Rosemary endures a ritualistic rape, then finds the strength to stand up to the controlling husband who had chosen her doctor, her pre-natal vitamins, and her friends. She realizes the evil around her isn’t just demonic, it’s cuddled in the bed beside her. So when Rosemary reaches into that black bassinet at the end of the story, she’s making a choice for herself. One her husband will not like. Rosemary is literally choosing a demonic baby over the vile man she married, and that is giant F You worth celebrating.

JENNIFER LEWIS: I chose the unnamed child/woman narrator of Jacqeline Harpman’s I WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MEN, translated by Ros Schwartz.

Women are vastly and unsurprisingly resilient, as the expectation has always been that we simply tuck away our pain, contain our anger, and smile even in the face of grief and horror. But I think Harpman wrote something that not only allows women to forgo the “grin and bear it” standard we’ve evolutionally assumed, but also encourages us to linger in its disquietude, settle into the building rage, and feel it as we see fit.

It’s not difficult to see ourselves in the unnamed child/woman who challenges not just what it means to be a woman, but what it means to be human. She is disconnected yet seeks connection. She is naive yet welcomes knowledge, often desperate for it. She is unknown to herself and her emotions yet still learns what it means to grieve and love despite existing in such inhospitable environs. And beyond logic and reason and in the face of such horrific despair, she clings to the hope that there is something else, something more, just over that next hill—even after years of journeying without answers. Even after all the other women are dead and gone.

She endures. She survives.

ISEULT MURPHY: Faith, from ‘The Ungodly Duology’ by S.H. Cooper. I love to read realistic women going up against impossible odds. Not superheroes, just ordinary women trying to do their best against evil interdimensional beings. I could read about them all day.

Faith is aptly named. She’s the plaything of an ungodly monster and she’s having none of it. Yes, the odds seem stacked against her. Yes, she suffers and sacrifices. No, she won’t stop. Ever.

I wish I was more like Faith. Not in the sense of being hunted by creatures from my worst nightmares. More in her resilience, her fortitude, and her perseverance.

LCW ALLINGHAM: I know Sarah Conner is sort of Sci-Fi Horror, but when I was a child she offered a range that went far beyond what I saw in typical female characters. She started out soft and pretty but found the well of resilience in her to fight on. Then she was so hard and tough yet still kept her heart, still cried when she had a safe moment. I think I love Sarah most because although she’s unique to film and genre, she is not a unique woman, but an example of the resilience innate to women who, when faced with all terrible choices, keep going until they can fight their way out.

AMANDA WITTMAN: Sophie from American Rapture by CJ Leede is my favorite example of a resilient female in horror. Driven by a quest to find her brother, she navigates the apocalypse and teenage hormones while confronting her own religious trauma. Throughout the novel Sophie must contend with large scale societal collapse while the foundation of her faith also begins to crumble. Yet, in a tumultuous time of turmoil she finds her own direction and moral compass to guide her path.

TABITHA THOMPSON: If I had to pick a resilient woman in horror, it would be Sarah from 2005’s The Descent.

I like Sarah because despite what she had gone through by losing her husband and child in an unfortunate accident, she decided to not dwell on grief and face her fear of not being held back by going on a caving adventure with her friends.

Throughout their adventure, I loved the fact that Sarah was becoming more and more resilient with the challenges that she was facing; whether it was dealing with the fact that her husband had an affair with one of her “friends”, or dealing with the possibility that her and her friends would meet an untimely demise due to the cave dwellers, Sarah’s mode became less of a ‘flight’ and more of a ‘fight’.

At the end of the film (U.S. version), although Sarah lost her friends with plenty of nightmare fuel, she managed to survive the cave, showing her fearlessness, resilience, and determination to stay alive, no matter the cost. To have those traits despite everything going
against her was pretty inspiring to me in the sense of not allowing fear to hold you back in any endeavor.

PAMELA WEIS: As for a favorite resilient female character, it’s so hard to decide! But I’m going with Dr. Linda Farmer from A Better World by Sarah Langan: Dr. Linda Farmer is an ordinary, imperfect, middle-aged mom and pediatrician who cares deeply about her patients and her family. She and her family move to a strange corporate town where things are not as perfect as they appear at first. She digs, trying to find out what’s behind the veneer. Townspeople try to divert her. She keeps digging. And ultimately uncovers a bizarre and horrific truth.

MEL HAMMOND: Gloria Stephens from Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory! She’s 16 years old and a badass big sister who relentlessly works to free her little brother from a deadly reformatory run by a racist psychopath. What I love most about her character arc is that she must learn that following the rules doesn’t work when you’re fighting from within a racist political structure.

NICOLE GIVENS KURTZ: Until fairly recently, thanks in part to Black Women in Horror project and Women in Horror Month, there hasn’t been Black characters in horror that didn’t die off in the first few pages of a novel or series. When they weren’t killed for fodder, they were turned into the magical negro, giving all of themselves for the white protagonist to level up and survive. Rarely are Black female characters the final girl.

Growing up with such little choice left me with one of the most flawed, grossly misused, but redeemed character in horror—Susannah Deane of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower.

I’ve written about the problematic aspects of Susannah’s character.

How problematic? Very. A note here that a middle-aged Stephen King, perhaps still firmly planted in the bottle, wrote her. She makes her appearance in The Drawing of the Three, which is probably my favorite in the series.

For starters, she’s disabled, having both her legs cut off below the knee due to a racist incident before she arrived in MidWorld. She doesn’t arrive in the otherworld alone. She has a split personality—Detta. And Detta is a vicious, mean, and caricature of what King probably thought white people think Black people think of them.  She’s also heavily sexualized as Detta, and she sleeps with white boys to steal from them in our world in the Jim Crow Era. King even has Susannah engage sexually with a demon, to occupy it while Jake is brought over into their world.  I’m still upset about this use of Susannah, and while she consents to it, it is horrible optics considering how many Black women were assaulted by a menacing presence during slavery.

I did mention the character was a mess. Right?

Why choose this character if King got it so wrong?

Because she is messy, like me, like a real human being, and as a teenage girl growing up, I knew people who hated the way Detta hated. I knew Black women who’d been hurt the way Susannah had been, both physically and emotionally by racism.

What I do love about Susannah is that out of all of Roland’s ka-tet, Susannah grows the most. She becomes a fierce warrior, and she learns to love all the aspects of herself, the scary hateful Detta. How many of us have qualities or have done actions that both shame us and make us feel worthless? Not only does Susannah embrace those aspects of her personality, but she also forgives herself. She leaves the past where it is, in another world.

It is through the rest of the series, but especially in Songs of Susannah, where she shines and King, I would like to think, having grown in his knowledge and experience, attempted to redeem himself from his previous depictions of her. She is strong, even in the face of loss.  She remains one of the last of Roland’s ka-tet in the end, and unlike the others, she chooses her end.

Those aspects of Susannah Dean is the reason I adore her as a character.  Despite the numerous hardships, she continued moving forward, adapting, learning, elevating, just like Black people have been doing for 200+ years in this country, taking adversity and making it love, joy, and culture.

And that’s part one of our feature on resilient female characters! While you’re at it, consider checking out part two and part three of our resilient characters spotlight! 

Happy reading, and happy Women in Horror Month! 

The New Blood, Part Two: Roundtable with Seton Hill’s Up-and-Coming Horror Writers

Welcome back! Today, I’m thrilled to share part two in our roundtable featuring Seton Hill University’s female horror students. As I mentioned in Part One earlier this week, all of these writers are part of the Writing Popular Fiction program at the university, and they’re some of the most promising up-and-coming authors you’ll find in the genre.

So once again, I’ll let them take it away!

This year’s theme for Women in Horror Month is Horror and Resilience. Do you have a favorite resilient female character in horror?

JENNIFER VILLALOBOS: A female character who has always stayed with me is Carrie White from Stephen King’s Carrie. Carrie endures relentless bullying at school and suffocating religious abuse at home from her fanatical mother. I think many of us can relate to the cruelty of the high school experience. Along with the isolation, there’s the realization that we may never truly fit in, yet most of us have a support system somewhere; Carrie does not. What I think makes Carrie so compelling is not just her suffering but her breaking point. She’s pushed beyond what anyone should have to bear until she finally claims her power. But it’s only claimed in a way that destroys those who hurt her and herself. For me, she’s a reminder that resilience has its limits because, frankly, there’s only so much shit we should have to put up with. I just wish that Carrie had survived in the end.

BETHANY NEAL: I think Grace in Ready or Not is the epitome of resilience. She’s thrown into a murderous game with a family (that she was about to marry into!) full of psychopaths, and she doesn’t hesitate or give up on surviving. For her, survival is the only option. That’s admirable…and a little funny.

JEMMA K. DRAPER: My favorite resilient female character in horror is Rosemary from Rosemary’s Baby. I have always loved the complicated resolution to her story. For all its angst, Rosemary is a character who made the best of her situation, willing to smile in the face of the literal devil.

BUFFY NESBITT: It’d be remiss to talk about resilience without mentioning my nickname’s namesake, Buffy Summers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. My dad showed me the series as a kid to introduce me to what a strong, modern woman could look like. It kind of worked; I definitely didn’t get physically tough, but I’ve used lessons from the series in some of the roughest patches of my life. Buffy hit a lot of stereotypes of nineties girls–she was fashionable, wore heels and makeup, liked her pretty bad boys in leather jackets–but she never failed to kick ass and save the day, no matter what she was going through, and damn, did she go through a lot. And she was written with great nuance, more than many of other female leads on TV at the time. She did fail sometimes; she made mistakes, had regrets, and even was held back by them sometimes, though her friends were always there to carry her through. The series is definitely a relic of its time (and I won’t speak kindly now of Joss Whedon) but it was formative for me in many ways!

ALEX BELANGER: This may be a hot take, because I know a lot of people do not like this genre of revenge movies, sometimes they do feel exploitative, but I would say that the female character that stands out to me the most, even years after watching the movie, is Mary Mason from American Mary, due to the lengths to which she is willing to go to, to rise above a rigged system which protected her abuser. She finds an alternative (though illegal) career that leverages her underappreciated skills and knowledge and empowers herself—making good money and demanding respect— as an underground bodymod surgeon. She then uses her power to avenge herself against the man who abused her when she was at her most vulnerable. To the very end (spoiler) she fights to maintain her reclaimed autonomy, performing surgery on herself, while bleeding to death, as the cops rush in to arrest her. It’s a very moving closing scene, and I feel Mary’s story is one of the most visceral depictions of the female struggle that I’ve seen within the horror genre. She is without a doubt in my mind a feminist icon.

GRACE MCKAY: I adore Deena Johnson in the Fear Street Trilogy. While the movies themselves were exciting, the reason I was invested was because of Deena as a character. As a queer woman myself, it was refreshing to see a queer lead fight to save the woman she loves—a tale we have seen countless times from a heterosexual perspective. Despite the seemingly endless obstacles Deena faces, she remains relentless and focused on her goal to save Sam from the witch’s curse. As the leader of the group in this series, Deena shows resilience in how fast she jumps back into action following tragedy.  She is messy and imperfect, which, to me, makes her feel more human. If she made all the right choices, the story wouldn’t be as interesting. I hope to see more characters like her in horror going forward. Women deserve complicated and resilient heroines.

A.N. MILLER: It’s so hard to narrow down to a particular character given that horror has so many resilient female characters, but if I had to choose just one, I’d say Denver from Beloved by Toni Morrison. Her growth from a sheltered agoraphobe to a strong woman dealing with impossible circumstances in an unforgiving environment is a perfect foil to Sethe’s downward spiral, culminating in her rallying the community to save her mother and home at the climax of the novel. Denver’s journey is both moving and deeply satisfying.

ZOE FALK: My favorite resilient female character in the horror genre is Selene from the Underworld series. Though the franchise is not considered horrific by critics, Selene’s intelligence and determination make her a fabulous protagonist. For me, she’s on the same level as Sarah Connor and Laurie Strode

KARI J. WOLFE: There are two that I will mention:

Ellen Ripley of Alien and, sure, the second movie too. She’s intelligent and she keeps her head while dealing with an indestructible xenomorph.

The Biologist/Ghost Bird of The Southern Reach Series. She stays steady and collected while everyone else starts to go to pieces.

TERI HAWK: If I had to choose the female character that stands out the most for me, it would be Ripley from the Alien films. Ellen Ripley was originally written as male, but when they decided they wanted a female lead, the writers didn’t rewrite the script. They just replaced “he” with “she” and left the rest as-is. And so, we have Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley, a strong female protagonist portrayed the same way a strong male protagonist would have been. I think this is striking for me personally as a retired member of the Navy. They talk about resilience a lot in the military. And, while the official materials never singled out women, it was not uncommon to hear mutterings about how much less resilient women were than men. How women shouldn’t be going on deployments because they supposedly couldn’t handle it like men could. That kind of thinking infuriated me. So, seeing Ripley on the screen, going through hell while being just as tough as the next guy, meant a lot to me.

VICTORIA HUGHES: Though usually considered to be a psychological thriller, The Collector by John Fowles features a woman named Miranda who is held captive by an obsessive man named Frederick Clegg. I won’t say much more on the plot of the novel, as it is one I think everyone should read, but throughout the book it becomes clear that Miranda is certainly deserving of the term “resilient.” Kim White from Full Brutal was also resilient, though in a very different way. I won’t spoil this book either, but she just… kept going.

What are your hopes for the future of women in horror? Likewise, what are your hopes for your own future in the genre?

JENNIFER VILLALOBOS: For one, I’m thrilled to see so many more women writing in horror. It feels like we’re seeing more characters with real agency, women who make proactive choices and fight patriarchal norms rather than being beaten down by them. I also love the growing intersectionality in the genre, with more BIPOC and LGBTQ+ authors becoming true standouts. I say that as an older straight white lady, but I love it. I love seeing new perspectives, new fears, and new forms of resilience represented. Horror has always been about more than just instilling fear. For me, it’s a way to say something about society, about how the very things we are taught to fear often hold us back. It’s a space to fight injustice and challenge the powers that be, all while creating cool monsters and letting our imaginations go wild. For myself, I hope to keep writing, get published, and be part of the community and the conversation.

BETHANY NEAL: I hope the future of horror embraces female rage. For so long, in basically every other genre, female rage has been deemed “unlikeable” and “unsellable”. I think horror is primed to embrace that coming of rage moment in female-driven horror stories.

As a female writer filled with pent up rage (who isn’t?!), I hope my future holds an outlet to share my writing not only for entertainment, but to also offer a rage release. Working on a Bloody Mary retelling has been quite cathartic for me. Hopefully, I can share that experience with readers when that novel is published.

JEMMA K. DRAPER: My hope for the future of women in horror is to have more women in horror. Of the women that write in the horror genre, few seem to make it to a bookshelf in a Barnes & Noble, so we simply need more of them. My hope for my own future is to be the author of a book that made someone a new fan of horror. I want to bring someone from perusing the horror section to being a devout follower of the genre.

BUFFY NESBITT: Women have always been a driving force in horror, even if their contributions have been overlooked or ignored! And womanhood/girlhood/the entire concept of gender in a socioculturally enforced binary system are themes that are horrific in real life as well as in fiction. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is, in so many ways, a horror story. Oddly, I don’t consider myself a woman so much as the rest of the world does–if anything, I’m a dedicated femme, and I’ll commit to a joke before I ever commit to a gender–which comes with its own fascinating elements of horror that plague my life and the lives of many nonbinary queer individuals in the modern world. The relationship between me and my body is a complicated mess of codependent loathing, and that’s before ever bringing chronic disability into it. I guess it shouldn’t surprise anyone that body horror is one of my favorite subgenres. Still, horror is all about challenging the status quo, recontextualizing the world around us, and exploring fears, and there are few people better poised in the world’s societies today than minorities (even if women are ~50% of the population… there’s horror in that, as well).

ALEX BELANGER: I would love to see more women writing horror, directing horror, and starring in it. I would also like to see more diversity in terms of the women telling the stories, how they’re told, and how the women in these stories are portrayed. I would say that I still often struggle to identify with female characters in the mainstream, as someone who does not identify with gendered expectations or stereotypes, so I’d like to see more female characters that challenge the mainstream’s idea of what a woman can be. As for myself, I hope that my work too, someday contributes to making more readers feel seen within the horror genre.

GRACE MCKAY: A lot of the horror I was exposed to while growing up used women and other minorities as objects to drive the story forward. Although we are seeing a shift, there is still much work to be done. I hope that the presence of women in horror will grow as we continue to expand and innovate the genre, providing fresh ways to shock and horrify readers from a new perspective. We deserve to have our voices heard. As for my future in the genre, I expect I will return to horror often. It has provided me with a place to process and work through my anxieties in a way no other genre has. I would like to write more short horror stories to sharpen my craft and build upon what I learned while writing my first novel.

A.N. MILLER: Women are marginalized across the arts in general, but horror definitely has a reputation for being more of a “boy’s club” with its dearth of slashers chasing scantily clad women and scream queens. My hope is that horror will continue to evolve past the cliches of ‘70s and ‘80s franchises to better represent the lived experience of women from all backgrounds, particularly women of color and the queer community. The world is a scary place, and being able to exorcise some of the anxieties and fears of modern life through fiction can make it easier to face them. My hopes are to publish my most recent novel in the next one to two years and find a home for some of the short stories rattling around my hard drive. Long term, I’d love to be able to quit my day-job and write full-time.

ZOE FALK: I predict women taking over horror in the future, and I cannot be more excited. I encourage women to give the genre a try. I never thought my work would be considered dark fantasy, but the more I kept writing, the more my work felt alive. There is beauty in horror, and anyone can create from it. They need only a pen and paper.

KARI J. WOLFE: I think the more women authors there are, the more changes we’re going to see in how women are seen in horror. Personally, I would like to see more women whose bodies age and whose stories don’t just evaporate because of it. Our culture tends to sidelines women after youth — I don’t want my horror to do that.

I would like to see more actual women in horror, rather than final girls. There is something to be said about a middle-aged housewife who mocks the demon in her attic by playing it Hank Williams Sr. albums all day, right? Right?!

I want a world where the girls who weren’t chosen are still powerful.

My own future is in writing these types of stories.

TERI HAWK: I think it’s very interesting that women are one of the most underrepresented groups in horror writers, running around 45% lower than in literature overall. Yet female protagonists account for nearly half of protagonists in horror. I’d love to see more women telling their own stories. When people write from a place of experience, telling their own lived horror, they can paint it in a way that paves the way for universal understanding. An example that comes to mind is the recent film Nightbitch based on the novel by Rachel Yoder. I remember an abundance of talk around the film festivals when it was released, from men being made deeply uncomfortable to women feeling like they were seeing a part of themselves on the screen that society always made them feel the need to hide away. But what stood out the most for me was hearing men express that the film provided them insight into their partners’ lives like never before. I’d love to see more women telling stories like that, and I hope my work does the same for someone else someday.

VICTORIA HUGHES: In the future, I hope to read more from women in Splatterpunk and extreme horror. I think a few new, ambitious voices could absolutely dominate in those subgenres. And while there is already such great stuff written by women in the “transgressive” side of horror fiction, I firmly believe there is great potential for more, so hopefully (and very likely) in the future we’ll get more of that. In a similar vein, I think it would be great to be one of those authors. That is the dream, anyway, but for the near future, I hope to start getting some of my short stories published before I publish my debut novel in the next couple of years.

Thank you so much to the Seton Hill MFA students for being part of this roundtable! Be sure to keep an eye out for their work in the years to come!

Happy reading! 

Book Tour for THE HAUNTED HOUSES SHE CALLS HER OWN

We’re now less a month away from the release of The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own, and I seriously couldn’t be more thrilled! This is my first new book in just over two years, and it’s my first collection in nine years, so I can’t believe this is real.

*insert screams of maniacal horror joy*

What’s even more exciting is that I’ll be hitting the road for this book. That’s right: I’m going on a book tour!

And just where will I be appearing? All over! NYC, San Diego, Doylestown, Atlanta, Pittsburgh (of course!), and a couple virtual events too!

First up, my release party for the collection will be on Tuesday, April 14th at 7pm ET at Riverstone Books in Pittsburgh. I’ll be in conversation with the fabulous Sara Tantlinger, and we’ll be talking all about horror, fiction collections, and plenty more. This is the third book launch I’ve done at Riverstone Books, and I’m beyond thrilled to be returning! The store has been such a true supporter of my work over the years, and that means the world to me!

Then, on Wednesday, April 15th at 10pm ET (7pm PT), Sara and I will be teaming up once again, this time as the guests on Story Hour. You can tune in from anywhere as we each read our short fiction. I’ll definitely be reading from my new collection, and I’m secretly hoping Sara will be reading from her collection, Cyanide Constellations, which is a recent Bram Stoker Award nominee!

The following week, on Monday, April 20th at 7pm ET, I will be back on Night Time Logic with host Daniel Braum. Daniel has been such a huge supporter of my writing for years now, and it’s always such a joy to talk to him about the horror genre, especially since I’m such a fan of his work too. So please join us for this virtual event wherever you might roam!

Later that week, I’ll be traveling to Doylestown Bookshop in Doylestown, PA for an event on Wednesday, April 22nd at 6:30pm. I’ll be in conversation with the fantastic A.C. Wise, which is so exciting. I’m such a huge fan of A.C. and her work, so it’s always wonderful to talk with her. I also got a chance to stop into Doylestown Bookshop last fall, and it’s such a lovely bookstore. I’m just pinching myself that I get to do an event there!

Then, the next evening, I’ll be in Atlanta at Charis Books on Thursday, April 23rd at 7:30pm ET where I’ll be in conversation with E.R. Anderson. This is the only one of my events that will be both in person and virtual, so I’m absolutely thrilled that people outside of Atlanta can tune in! Charis Books has been such a tremendous supporter of my work, and this will be my third event with them since 2022 when Reluctant Immortals was released! Definitely stoked to be returning there next month!

At the end of the month, on Wednesday, April 29th, I’ll be making my very first appearance at The Twisted Spine in NYC. I’ll be in conversation with M. Jane Worma, and that event will start at 6pm ET. The Twisted Spine is such a fabulous horror bookstore, and I’ve been admiring their events from afar here in Pennsylvania, so I’m very happy to finally be heading to New York to visit!

And finally, I’ll be returning to the West Coast on Wednesday, May 13th at 7pm PT for an event at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego. I’ll be in conversation with the awesome KC Grifant, and I’m looking so forward to our conversation. I’ve done two virtual events with Mysterious Galaxy before, but this will be my first time appearing at an in-store event!

So that’s my book tour for The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own! Needless to say, I’m beyond excited to be doing so many events and visiting so many cities over the next couple months! In the meantime, please consider pre-ordering the collection either direct from my publisher or as part of the pre-order campaign through Riverstone Books! You can also order it from any of the bookstores listed above!

Happy reading!

The New Blood, Part One: Roundtable with Seton Hill’s Up-and-Coming Horror Writers

Welcome back! Today I’ve got a special treat here on my blog. I’m a mentor and instructor at Seton Hill University in their Writing Popular Fiction MFA program. Each semester, I get to work with so many incredibly talented up-and-coming authors, and it’s so inspiring to see all the amazing work they’re doing. For this Women in Horror Month, I invited ten of our current horror students to discuss their writing as well as what draws them to the genre.

So I’m thrilled to let them take it from here!

Tell us a little about yourself. What kind of horror do you write, and what projects are you currently working on?

JENNIFER VILLALOBOS: I’m a student in Seton Hill University’s Writing Popular Fiction program. I prefer my horror to be supernatural. Give me ghosts, demons, vampires, and witches, then throw in a haunted house or a cult, and I’m all in. Currently, I’m finishing the revision of my thesis, which I originally intended as a mystery, but it turned into a horror/mystery. My mentor writes cozy mysteries (sorry, Valerie). My story takes place in 1984 and the present, tracing a rock band’s unnatural rise to fame after a woman who uncovered the dark force behind their success dies under mysterious circumstances. Decades later, her niece, Claire, inherits her house and discovers the evil, a modern cult, and a lot of bodies tied to the band.

ALEX BELANGER: I write Gothic horror, cosmic/Lovecraftian horror, and weird fiction, but Gothic horror is definitely my favorite. Right now, I’m working on my first novel as part of the program while also trying to polish up some short stories, so I have something to send out to journals and magazines after graduation. I also have a few ideas for a comic which I’ve had floating around for years, and which friends keep asking about, so I’d like to do something with that too maybe. Perhaps a webcomic or graphic novel. We’ll see what happens.

JEMMA K. DRAPER: My name is Jemma K. Draper, and I write Domestic Horror. I am currently working on a project inspired by Rosemary’s Baby and a YA Horror series idea.

BETHANY NEAL: I write female-driven horror with psychological elements. I’m currently working on a modern retelling of the Bloody Mary urban legend set on a college campus. Think Promising Young Woman meets Candyman.

BUFFY NESBITT: I’m Elizabeth “Buffy” Nesbitt, I’m a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan, and I am a longtime fan of horror. While what I’ve written of it is limited–I’ve been meaning to assemble a collection of short horror stories, but I’m a little intimidated to put them out for publication–but all of my projects, from sci-fi to high fantasy, have at least some element of horror to them. I can’t imagine a world without it, and certainly not a story. Right now, my main project (my TWP) is a dark fantasy about a demon-slayer possessed by another person, werewolf-style.

GRACE MCKAY: My name is Grace McKay and I am currently in my final semester of Seton Hill University’s MFA in Writing Popular Fiction. My interests lie in horror that centers queer themes or discussions of autonomy. My thesis project is a horror novel that follows a genderqueer teenager juggling a gender identity crisis and demonic possession. However, I am also interested in other areas of speculative fiction and would like to write fantasy or science fiction in the future.

A.N. MILLER: I enjoy a wide variety of subgenres of horror, with my favorites being super-natural and psychological horror. I think one of the unique perks of horror is its ability to turn a mirror on societal issues, so using the monster as a metaphor to examine something more closely is one of the reasons horror is my favorite genre to write. I particularly enjoy using first-person and unreliable narrators in general to further unsettle the reader and add an element of disquiet to the story beyond the plot itself. Currently, I’m wrapping up a science fiction-horror novel about an alien wreaking havoc on a small town in upstate New York and the repercussions for the town decades later.  I’m also toying with an idea about doppelgangers in rural Maryland; I definitely seem to fear small towns more than anything!

ZOE FALK: Hello, my lovelies! My name is Zoe Falk, and I am a dark fantasy writer. I specialize in
surrealism, liminal spaces, and dissecting humanity’s moral compass. My interests involve
painting, video games, and Ballet. I am currently working on my debut novel, Habitable Zone,
and am in the midst of having a short story, Millie, read on Maxwell Vagus’s podcast, The Atomic
Voodoo Lounge.

KARI J. WOLFE: I am a horror author transplanted from Appalachia to the Front Range of the Colorado Rockies almost 20 years ago. After proving to myself I could do the “hard stuff” with a degree in physics and mathematics, I’m now doing what I always wanted to do when I grew up.

I am fascinated with weird horror and stories that stick with you because they grab a part of you that you may or may not have known about and don’t let go. A bit of Appalachian folk horror sprinkled in there every now and then for good measure, a bit of spice.

My current novel (my WPF thesis novel) deals with themes of systemic decay, moral fracture, and more subtle horror. Grief from loss, grief from denied expectations, and dealing with public exposure of private matters.

My brain is always working on something — I have a critique group of friends who get together once or twice a month. I have another 4-month workshop where I have a monthly submission. I’m also part of Larks & Katydids with the Horror Writers Association, a group within HWA’s Mental Health Initiative reaching out to our members for a monthly social chat.

TERI HAWK: I struggle sometimes to put my writing into a single genre because I’m influenced by so many things. In a bookstore, my work would mostly be shelved under fantasy, and I lean toward grimdark. My current project is a novel about life after trauma that opens with a heavy gothic horror influence and then turns into a monster/body horror, but in a fantasy setting. Someone once told me that authors revisit one tale repeatedly through varied expressions, and my narratives consistently involve forging a fulfilling existence within a world that presents constant opposition. I think that’s why I’m naturally drawn to horror—it’s the perfect genre to explore the hard parts of being human while highlighting the most beautiful parts.

VICTORIA HUGHES: My name is Victoria Hughes. I live in Salt Lake City, Utah. I am currently a student at Seton Hill University’s Writing Popular Fiction MFA program. In addition to writing, I enjoy taxidermy, collecting weird things, and playing the piano. I usually write psychological horror and “crime” horror, but I often write dark fantasy and erotic horror, as well. Also, I occasionally experiment with horror set in historical and especially post-apocalyptic settings. I am currently working on my MFA thesis novel, and I am also starting to work on two other ideas that I feel are potentially suitable for novel-length projects.

What brought you to the horror genre? How long have you been a fan, and what are some of your favorite horror books and films?

JENNIFER VILLALOBOS: I entered my MFA program as a mystery writer, but I soon realized horror is my true love. I think I just wanted to challenge myself by writing a mystery. I was lucky to have a mom who would never deny me a book. Once I got past the usual chapter books that were “age appropriate” (Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys), I stole her books. She had a library of Agatha Christie, Norah Lofts, and Mary Stewart. I read The Little Wax Doll by Norah Lofts and discovered witchcraft! From there, I bought mass-market paperbacks (RIP) at garage sales. I still have my copies of The Shining and The Exorcist. I was definitely not old enough to read The Exorcist, but I did. I was terrified, and I was hooked. As far as favorites go, I’m old school. I love The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Haunting of Hill House, the books and the original films. I also have a soft spot for Stephen King’s IT (despite some glaring issues) because I read it while visiting my grandmother in a very small town in Iowa, and I had a very hard time walking past the storm drains. Still. Do.

BETHANY NEAL: My love for horror began when I accidentally watched a VHS of Poltergeist when I was six years old. There was a little girl on the cover, so I figured it was a kids’ movie. Ever since, my love for horror can be summed up in a Wes Craven quote: “Horror films don’t create fear. They release it. I like to address the fears of my culture. I believe it’s good to face the enemy, for the enemy is fear.”

As a woman, there’s a lot for me to fear in society. Horror offers me a release and shows it’s possible to stand up to that fear and fight back.

JEMMA K. DRAPER: I came into the genre gradually. I was a fan of Tim Burton animated movies and then of Edgar Allen Poe. My favorite horror book was Hyde by Daniel Levine which is a re-telling of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

BUFFY NESBITT: My introduction to horror came from my dad, who used to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer with me when I was but a kindergartener. He kept me from getting too scared by reminding me that all the scary demon guys were just wearing makeup–I was afraid of wearing any for years, until I learned that my mom (who is certainly not a monster) wears mascara! But I didn’t get really into the genre until I was in high school and dealing with a severe anxiety disorder. I was constantly afraid and having self-destructive panic attacks on the regular. Around that time, I first read the work of H.P. Lovecraft, and was immediately interested in a new game that was largely based on his work, Frictional Games’ Amnesia: The Dark Descent. It was so beautifully written, so deep and clever, and wildly frightening! And amazingly, my anxiety always felt better after playing it–weird, considering how stressful it was to get through any level!

But I found that horror was a great outlet for my anxiety. When I read, played, and watched horror media, I was the one in control of my fear, choosing to feel this way and choosing when to stop it, and experiencing amazing stories with a world of depth and meaning that I’d never known before. I’ve been hooked ever since. I especially enjoy metaphorical horror, especially psychologically challenging themes. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is not just my favorite horror novel, it’s one of my favorite books of all time, as is Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. I’m a big fan of classic short-form horror, especially sci-fi horror–Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Ray Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains, Joyce Carol Oates Where are You Going, Where Have You Been–perhaps I’m just a fan of long titles. I’m a diehard fan of horror games, too! Silent Hill 2 (the others, too, but 2 in particular!), SOMA, Homebody, Darkwood, and, of course, the Amnesia and Penumbra series; video games are an oft-overlooked medium in which horror thrives!

ALEX BELANGER: As someone raised under the strict watch of Christianity, I struggled a lot with self-image as a teenager. I think that’s why I came to sympathize with many monsters in horror and the Gothic heroes & antiheroes who often existed in some sort of opposition to the cultural establishment—or as misunderstood outsiders. I also saw myself in the female characters who were, in these stories, often forced to confront patriarchal systems of oppression for survival. Basically, horror offered an escape to interesting places where the dangers were, at the very least, more exciting than in my own life.

Discovering Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat and Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart” in middle school really got me into reading and inspired me to want to write too. Among my other favorite works of literature are Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Rebecca, The Woman in Black, and The Ballad of Black Tom. Some of my favorite horror movies are Evil Dead II, Event Horizon, The Ring, The Wolfman (2010), Sweeney Todd, Dracula Untold, Pan’s Labyrinth, and The Devil’s Backbone.

GRACE MCKAY: I started reading and writing horror very recently, but I have watched horror movies since I was a young teenager. The first horror movie I ever watched was Paranormal Activity (2007). A friend showed it to me during my freshman year of high school. I remember loving the rush I felt when Katie got dragged out of the bed. Years later, I began writing horror because I wanted to challenge myself. Most of my experience prior to my thesis project was in fantasy. Horror has won me over.

Some of my favorite books include My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix and Where He Can’t Find You by Darcy Coates. A few of my favorite horror films include The Fear Street Trilogy (2021), The Menu (2022), Paranormal Activity (2007), and The Substance (2024).

A.N. MILLER: I’ve loved folk tales and myths and legends and grew up reading and hearing them, and my love of ghost stories and creepy tales grew out of that naturally. I loved Goosebumps and Mary Downing Hahn’s ghost stories as a young reader and my tastes evolved from there—I guess you could say I’ve always been a horror fan. Some of my favorite horror novels include Beloved, Negative Space, the Area X novels, The Cipher, Our Share of Night, The Red Tree, the works of Flannery O’Conner, and anything by Shirley Jackson, particularly We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Some of my favorite horror films are The Black Coat’s Daughter, Hereditary, The Vvitch, The Wind, Alien, and The Silence of the Lambs.

ZOE FALK: I have always been fascinated with the horror and fantasy genres. Growing up in a Catholic family in Texas, I was introduced to the supernatural and spiritualism at an early age. Everything had a purpose, and nothing was coincidental. This propelled my curiosity, thus fueling my writing style. My favorite horror novels and films are Sleepy Hollow, The Birds, and Lapvona. I also have a deep love of analog horror, such as The Blair Witch Project.

KARI J. WOLFE: Growing up, I was always drawn to mysteries. Encyclopedia Brown was my jam. Nancy Drew (the classic version). Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators. At some point, I stumbled across Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Gold Bug.” The Newberry Award winners. And, around 12 years old, I found Pet Sematary by Stephen King. I was sold.

I grew up wanting to watch all the slasher movies. Friday the 13th which was more gore. And Nightmare on Elm Street which was just a dark comedy in the later movies. In the 90s, when Freddy vs Jason was released, I rooted for them both 🙂

A few favorites include:
Last Days by Brian Evenson is an extremely strong contender for my favorite horror novel.
I love The Southern Reach Series by Jeff VanderMeer. And I love that he continues to write more books.
The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward
IT by Stephen King is by far my favorite of his novels. The runner-up? 11/22/63.

More than novels, though, I keep coming back to short stories such as “Father, Son, and Holy Rabbit” by Stephen Graham Jones. Authors like Laird Barron, Brian Evenson, Richard Thomas as well as Kelly Link, Shirley Jackson, Joyce Carol Oates, and Flannery O’Connor. I always pick up The Best Horror of the Year by Ellen Datlow when it’s been released.

TERI HAWK: I came to horror somewhat late in my reading practice. For a long time, I thought horror was simply supernatural or hack-and-slash stories. However, when I read “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman for an undergraduate American literature class, my perspective shifted. I realized that horror was nuanced and varied. Horror possesses the power to reveal harsh realities, offering solace and comprehension for those who have endured terrible events. I began taking classes that looked at various parts of the genre, such as the uncanny and symbolism in horror. That’s where I fell in love with Shirley Jackson’s work, especially We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I often look to her work for inspiration or just for pure enjoyment. I also love the television show Severance, which is a notable example of uncanny horror.

VICTORIA HUGHES: I suppose it was my early fascinations with death, bugs, and criminal behavior that brought me to horror. I started reading Goosebumps and stuff like that when I was quite young, and from there I quickly escalated into watching any horror film I could find. It was a bit later when I got more into horror fiction. I’ve been a horror fan for most of my life, since I was about seven years old or so. Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates is definitely one of my favorite horror novels, as are Exquisite Corpse by William J. Martin and Full Brutal by Kristopher Triana. Additionally, Dracula by Bram Stoker and Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu remain beloved novels. In terms of films, I really loved watching May (2002), Excision (2012), and Nosferatu: Phantom Der Nacht (1979). I also loved the Saw series, and The Golden Glove (2019).

That’s it for part one of our roundtable! Join us later this week as I talk with these up-and-coming horror authors about their favorite resilient female characters in horror! 

Happy reading! 

Roundup of Events for Women in Horror Month 2026

Happy Women in Horror Month!

This is always such an exciting time of year. And fortunately for 2026, we have so much amazing content in the horror community!

An important reminder: I’m helping to spearhead this again for 2026, but I’m not some kind of gatekeeper in any way. Everyone is free to celebrate Women in Horror Month whenever and however they want! The more voices we have, the better!

And with that, let’s unveil all of the places where you can find Women in Horror Month features, interviews, events, and more!

INTERVIEWS, FEATURES, BOOK CHALLENGES, AND MORE

Sara Tantlinger and The Literary Hooker are hosting a Women in Horror Month book challenge on Instagram!

Andrea Blythe is running Women in Horror Month content for all of March on her site. 

Timber Ghost Press is hosting Women in Horror Month features on their site. 

Angela Sylvaine is featuring Women in Horror on her social media all month.

Speculation Publications is featuring a Women in Horror Month roundtable. 

J.G. Writes will be spotlighting women in horror content on her Instagram.

K.C. Grifant is highlighting Women Writing Weird West Horror at Weird West Fiction. 

Jessica Gleason is hosting a #WeWriteHorror challenge for Women in Horror Month.

What Sleeps Beneath is featuring work by women in horror in March.

Carlie St. George is highlighting recent horror novels by women at My Geek Blasphemy.

Debra Castaneda is highlighting Women in Horror Month content at her Instagram and Facebook pages.

Christi Nogle is doing an interview series at her Substack.

Tanya Pell is highlighting female authors in middle-grade and young adult horror.

The Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference is accepting proposals for their annual conference.

The George A. Romero Foundation is spotlighting Women in Horror Month through their Scream Like a Girl initiative.

C.M. Rosens is highlighting Women in Horror Month content on her site.

Lily Chang will be featuring a giveaway and a Women in Horror Month feature. 

Tales to Terrify is spotlighting stories by female horror authors all month.

Jamie Lackey is running a Kickstarter campaign for her upcoming horror collection. 

Wendy Dalrymple is featuring Women in Horror Month spotlights throughout March.

Uncomfortably Dark Horror is spotlighting Women in Horror all month long.

Candace Nola is featuring female authors on her blog.

Katherine Silva is featuring female horror authors in her Winterviews.

Claire L. Smith is hosting Women in Horror content at her blog.

Azzurra Nox is highlighting women in horror at The Ink Blotters. 

Eliza Broadbent is highlighting interviews with female horror authors on her Substack.

Pamela Weis is spotlighting Women in Horror content on her Instagram.

Don Anelli is spotlighting Women in Horror at Don’s Horror World and Don’s Horror Reads.

Paula Cappa is highlighting women in horror at her blog.

Hook of a Book is featuring Women in Horror Month content for March.

Also, Erin of Hook of a Book has offered to host any interviews with female authors, so please get in touch with her if you’re interested!

ONLINE AND IN-PERSON EVENTS IN MARCH

March 11th: Fantastic Fiction with Kristina Ten and C.S.E. Cooney in NYC

March 14th: Emily Ruth Verona will be at The Twisted Spine in NYC

March 15th: A Women in Horror reading at A Novel Idea in Philadelphia featuring Christina Rosso, Nicole M. Wolverton, Sami Ellis, and Stephanie Feldman

March 15th: Ashley Dioses will be at the Los Angeles Vintage Paperback Collectors Show

March 17th: Brooklyn Books and Booze featuring Kristina Ten, Daphne Fama, and Kelly Robson

March 21st: G.G. Silverman is hosting a Women in Horror online reading event

March 26th: Leanna Renee Hieber will be at Evening House Books in Buffalo, NY

March 26th: Wake County Public Library is sponsoring a Women in Horror Month panel

March 27th and 29th: K.C. Grifant will be appearing at WonderCon in Anaheim

March 28th: K.C. Grifant will be at San Diego Writers Festival

March 28th: The SoCo Women in Horror Fest featuring Wendy Dalrymple, C.J. Leede, Erika T. Wurth, and more

March 28th: Victoria Dalpe and Christa Carmen will be part of Dark Reads 2026

April 7th: CJ Dotson will be appearing at The Twisted Spine in NYC

April 11th: Kenya Moss-Dyme is one of the featured authors at Black Girls Who Read Book Summit in Dallas

April 14th: For a bit of self-promotion, the launch party for my collection, The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own, will be held at Riverstone Books in Pittsburgh. I’ll be in conversation with Sara Tantlinger, whose latest book, Cyanide Constellations and Other Stories, is a recent Stoker nominee!

April 15th: The launch party for CJ Dotson’s new book, These Familiar Walls, will be held at the Barnes & Noble in Akron, Ohio

Happy reading, and happy Women in Horror Month!

Creepshow, Horror Joy, and Women in Horror: December Updates from My Writing World

Welcome back, and seriously, can you believe it’s already December? 2025 feels like such a blur in ways both good and bad. Because truly, what a year it’s been.

In my little corner of the world, there have definitely been some ups and downs, but I’m ending the year with a lot to be grateful for. I’ve had four book deals announced since April, which I assume will be a personal record for the rest of my career. I’ve had a wonderful time working with my amazing agent Elizabeth Copps. In terms of publications, I’ve had more than two dozen nonfiction articles through The Lineup as well as three published short stories. And last but in no way least, The Haunting of Velkwood won the Bram Stoker Award and was nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award and an Ohio Book Award. So truly, it’s been quite a year.

That being said, before 2025 takes its final bow, I have a few more announcements to share with everyone. And yeah, most of these have already been posted on social media, but I still have a blog, so why not put it to good use?

I’ll have a new story in the forthcoming Creepshow anthology!

This anthology was recently announced at Fangoria, which means I’ve been spreading the word ever since: I’m going to have a brand-new story in an official Creepshow anthology!

Seriously! This is real! As a longtime fan of Creepshow, this is obviously a huge deal for me. It seems a little like a dream to be part of the Creepshow canon, so I’m just going to continue floating on horror cloud nine. The anthology is due out in May 2026, and in the meantime, you can pre-order at the Monstrous Books page.

My story, “The Mouthless Body in the Lake,” from The Darkest Night is nominated for a SOVAS Award!

Here’s something I never thought I’d get to say: one of my stories is a SOVAS nominee! The SOVAS (Society of Voice Arts and Sciences) Awards are among the premier voice acting awards out there, sometimes likened to the Oscars of voice acting. As such, since this is a voice award, that means the main nominee is the incredible Stephanie Nemeth-Parker, who narrated my story, and truly, what a fantastic job she did. She’s beyond talented, and I feel so fortunate that she was the one to bring my story to life for The Darkest Night audiobook.

Each year, the award ceremony is held at the Beverly Hilton International Ballroom, the same place where the Golden Globes are hosted, so suffice it to say, I am pretty excited for this!

My tale, “A Mina for All Seasons,” is now available in the new issue of Dracula Beyond Stoker

As I mentioned above, I’ve had three new short stories released this year, and two of them just happened to be themed around Dracula. First, there was my Van Helsing re-imagining “All the Devils at Once,” released in the Vampire Hunters anthology from Speculation Publications back in the summer. Now my story, “A Mina for All Seasons,” has released from Dracula Beyond Stoker in their Mina issue. I’ve been a big fan of Dracula Beyond Stoker since they started, so it’s absolutely wonderful to be part of this latest issue. While I’m of course a major Lucy devotee, I’ve also always loved the character of Mina, so it was fun to explore her story from a very different perspective.

The Howl anthology has been unleashed on the world!

Howl: An Anthology of Werewolves from Women-in-Horror has officially hit bookshelves! I had so much fun doing a roundtable for the anthology earlier this fall, so it’s wonderful to see the book out in the world! In addition to stories from Christina Henry, Ai Jiang, and Delilah S. Dawson, the table of contents includes my tale, “Our Howls like Dirges, Our Eyes like the Moon,” which is an apocalyptic take on lycanthropy. Writing this one was a really great experience, and I can’t wait to hear what readers think of it!

The cover reveal for Dim Shores’ latest anthology

Dim Shores has recently unveiled the cover for their forthcoming anthology, Suffering the Other, and all the proceeds from the book will benefit the Transgender Law Center and RAICES. I’m so happy to say that my story, “My Sister, the Abyss,” will appear in the table of contents! It’s an honor to be in another Dim Shores anthology, and it’s so fantastic to see the proceeds from this book going to such worthy causes.

The Hotel Macabre Table of Contents reveal! Plus, ARCs!

The second volume of Hotel Macabre is due out in January from Crystal Lake Publishing, and I’m thrilled to be part of it. My story, “Ask Me About My Crypt, Now On Sale for Half Price!” is one of the weirdest things I’ve written over the past year, and I’m so excited about seeing it out in the world very soon. The ARCs for this one have already started going out, so I’m looking forward to what reviewers say about this anthology.

Appearance on Horror Joy Podcast

I was the guest on the recent episode of Horror Joy podcast. We talk all about the importance of joy and catharsis in the horror genre, and in the process, we also discuss The Haunting of Velkwood. This will probably be the last ever interview with me that focuses specifically on Velkwood, which is such a weird sentence to type. I’ve spent the last two years promoting that book, which is such a huge chunk of a person’s life. Needless to say, I’m very happy to be moving forward with my upcoming releases, but it was so nice to focus on Velkwood one last time with Horror Joy!

A Women in Horror Month Update

Women in Horror Month commences in just under three months, and once again, I’ll be celebrating here on this blog and on social media! If you’re interested in being included in any of our horror shenanigans, please send me a message on social media or via my Contact page. I want to include as many awesome female horror writers as possible!

So those are a few updates from my world at the moment. With 2026 truly only days away at this point, expect plenty more news from me, especially as I start promoting my second fiction collection, The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own. So much horror, so little time!

Happy reading!

Cover and Pre-Order for My Second Fiction Collection, THE HAUNTED HOUSES SHE CALLS HER OWN

Welcome back! So you might have already heard—either on this very blog or on social media—but it bears repeating: I’m absolutely over the moon that my second fiction collection, The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own, is due out on April 14th, 2026 from Raw Dog Screaming Press! It will be released exactly nine years to the day after my first collection, which seems like such lovely symmetry.

Last month, we unveiled the cover art for the collection, so just in case you haven’t seen it yet, here it is once again in all its haunted house glory!

The cover art is by Scott Cole of 13 Visions, and I’m absolutely in awe of it. This is truly such a cool cover, and it captures the spooky spirit of the collection so well.

*screams with horror joy*

The pre-orders for the collection are already up for both the paperback and the ebook. And FYI: if you order the paperback edition directly from my publisher, Raw Dog Screaming Press, it will be autographed by yours truly.

Pre-order THE HAUNTED HOUSES SHE CALLS HER OWN from the publisher

Pre-order THE HAUNTED HOUSES SHE CALLS HER OWN from Amazon

There should also be a pre-order page coming soon from Riverstone Books in Pittsburgh, which is where we’re planning to host the launch party for the book, so I will be sure to share that link far and wide once it’s available.

I included the description of the book in my previous post announcing the collection, so if you’re inclined, please feel free to read that over here. But what I didn’t do in my last post about The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own was discuss the specific tales that will be included. The collection features sixteen stories, three of which are brand-new. In terms of the reprints, that includes my Bram Stoker Award winning tale that re-frames the story of Dracula through the perspective of the ill-fated Lucy, which was the forerunner of course to my novel, Reluctant Immortals.

So without further ado, here are those sixteen aforementioned stories that will appear in the collection!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

“A New Mother’s Guide to Raising an Abomination”
“The Girls from the Horror Movie”
“The Sea Witch of the World’s Fair”
“The Eight People Who Murdered Me (Excerpt from Lucy Westenra’s Diary)”
“Melting Point”
“Her Skin a Grim Canvas”
“The Last Video Store on the Left”
“Ides”
“In the Belly of the Wolf”
“Sister Glitter Blood”
“The Mad Monk of the Motor City”
“Best Friends Forever”
“The Eleven Films of Oona Cashford”
“All the Hippies Are Dying”
“Lost in Darkness and Distance”
“The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own”

We’re only five months away from the official release, and while that might sound like a while, it’s always so surprising to me how fast time goes. That means the book will be here before you know it. In the meantime, I’ll be talking more about the collection and the inspirations behind all of the stories. So expect a lot more joyous horror screaming from my direction as we count down the days until my haunted houses are unleashed upon the world!

Happy reading, and happy haunting!

Barking at the Moon: Part Two of the Howl Roundtable

Welcome back for part two of our Howl roundtable! Last week, we met our eleven featured authors and learned about their stories in the anthology. Today, we’ll talk all about the relationship between werewolves and femininity as well as what these amazing writers are working on next.

And with that, let’s take it away!

This is specifically a Women in Horror anthology. For you, what’s the connection between werewolves and the feminine? Do you feel they’re a natural fit?

A.C. WiseA.C. WISE: I do think there’s a natural fit between women and werewolves. There’s a lot of mythology connecting both women and werewolves with the moon, there are menstrual cycles and lunar cycles, but I think it goes beyond that as well. Puberty for people of any gender feels like a natural fit for a werewolf story, where your body suddenly changes in ways beyond your control and you almost become a stranger to yourself in some ways. There are links to be made between sexuality and werewolves as well, the idea of animal urges and hunger, or between family and werewolves with the idea of pack behavior. Werewolves are very versatile creatures when it comes to storytelling, as are many so-called monsters when you really think about it. One of my initial ideas for a story for Howl was around a werewolf who no longer transforms after going through menopause, but that story didn’t quite pan out. I might still go back to the idea someday.

AI JIANG: It’s funny because the first thing that came to mind when I thought of werewolves and the feminine is our monthly cycles—the way our emotions and bodies change and how (sometimes, depending on the person) become someone very different, somewhat different, only a little different than we are other days of the month. But I also think of the way the feminine is suppressed, is allowed to flourish, and the overall constraints on the feminine and how it fosters conditions of transformation, of pent up frustration and rage.

LINDY RYAN: For me, werewolves and the feminine are a perfect pairing. So much of being a woman is about cycles, transformation (body horror), and the constant pressure to be tame, polite, palatable. But under the surface, there’s rage, hunger, and wildness. When co-editor Stephanie M. Wytovich and I built this anthology, we did so around the idea of shedding our sheep’s clothing, embracing our monstrosity, and howling at the moon together—and as a pack, alongside some of our favorite women in horror to howl alongside us, to explore what it means to claim the beast inside rather than be shamed—or hunted—for it. For women, the werewolf isn’t just a monster—it’s a metaphor for survival, sisterhood, and liberation. It’s freedom. And that’s something we all need to be reminded of right now.

KAILEY TEDESCO: Sabrina Orah Mark wrote a fantastic essay in her Paris Review column called “The Postmenopausal Fairy Tale” about the presence of the big bad wolf archetype in fairy tales. The essay is so memorable, for me, because it highlights the ways that society scrutinizes, problematizes, and objectifies changing femme bodies. Werewolves seem to exist as an exploration of the somatic self. There also seems to be a recurring element of spectacle in most werewolf narratives where the transformation itself is examined through a specific and often dissective gaze. The very real horrors femme bodies are subjected to and have been subjected to since the beginning of time feels like a perfect analog for this human to animal transformation.

Stephanie M. WytovichSTEPHANIE M. WYTOVICH: When I look at the world and everything that’s happening right now, I can’t think of a better monster than the werewolf for women to turn to. Werewolves are creatures that live by cycles, embrace/fight transformation, and who seek power from within, often through exploring and accepting monstrosity and the fractured self; they’re also a metaphor for sexual violence, for hormonal disruption/pregnancy, and absolute, unfiltered rage.

CHRISTA CARMEN: So, again, with the lack of passion for werewolves that I suffered for a while, I only really personally explored their connection to the feminine with this story, “The Clearing.” However, like I mentioned above, as soon as Lindy and Stephanie mentioned this would be a werewolf-themed project, I made the immediate connection to the idea that I’d been working away at in my head for a year and a half, an idea that was very much connected to a very feminine experience.

Of course, I’ve always been aware that the connection between werewolves and the feminine was a strong one, explored by myriad artists, filmmakers, and writers. There’s the obvious connection between women’s menstrual cycles and the phases of the moon, as well as the idea that werewolf narratives serve as allegories for the fears and anxieties surrounding female sexuality. From a more empowering standpoint, werewolves are about reclamation, women embracing their wildness, strength, and independence.

My favorite connection, though, and the one on which I based my story, is the idea of werewolves as a stand-in for female rage. What the hell could be better, as a woman or person who identifies with the feminine, than having the ability to shed one’s skin and tear your enemies apart, to lose oneself in the dark of the forest, to howl at the goddamn moon while you know, in your bones, bones capable of shifting and reforming, that you and only you are in charge of your fate.

As long as you stay away from the silver bullets, that is.

WENDY WAGNER: Werewolf stories are always playing around with the hidden aspects of ourselves, the parts of us we hide away from polite society. I feel like Western society has a lot of opinions about what women are supposed to be like, and many of our earthier needs and urges are considered unfeminine. We often can only be our full selves in the dark.

SHANNON KEARNS: I absolutely believe the werewolf is connected to the feminine.  We transform with the moon cycles, not just the full moon. As I was healing my body after giving birth to my son, my intention was to align my bodily cycles with the moon phases. There is an intimate connection between the moon’s pull and our bodies’ response. The new moon is a time of release and shedding, calling in our shadow and revealing our inner darkness to be held with care and tenderness. The full moon, typically the time of the werewolf’s transformation, is a connection to power and illumination. There is nothing not feminine about this! I am so in love with the fact that this anthology will cast full moonlight on a rewriting of the werewolf archetype.

KATRINA MONROE: Moon cycles and monthly blood aside, the werewolf, to me, represents a barely-controlled rage, a simmering under the surface hidden behind a pretty façade. If that doesn’t speak to the feminine, I don’t know what does.

It feels right to claim the werewolf for the feminine, too, because, (unlike the vampire) the werewolf is harder to sexualize. She is protected by her fur and rage and animalistic instinct. She isn’t polite. She doesn’t assume the best intentions of the men around her. She is no longer prey, but the predator.

Donna LynchDONNA LYNCH: Certainly the bloody and painful transitions women go through make for an incredibly strong connection.

Women have also been conditioned to bottle up extreme feelings like rage lest we be harshly judged and stereotyped far more than men for our “outbursts”. When a woman expresses extreme emotions she is “crazy”. When a man does it it’s often because “he just couldn’t take it anymore”.

One part of my story that I struggled with was the inclusion of a violence-against-women trope, which I know is not only triggering but also overused. However, it was loosely based on something I know well and was my way of concluding a scenario wherein justice is done. And I think it’s an acceptable way, in this case, to cause the character to release her rage. It was going to take something horrific to make that happen, and as a woman, there are few things more horrific than the threat of violation.

JESSICA MCHUGH: I do. I think from the first time I read “Lila the Werewolf” when I was a kid, I’ve identified werewolves as feminine creatures. I saw The Howling pretty young too, so that probably had an influence. Now that I think of it, maybe that’s why I had a distaste for so many of the werewolf movies I grew up with. Not enough female werewolves! When Ginger Snaps came out, I was like, “This is more like it.”

What’s next for you? What projects do you have coming up? And where can we find you online?

A.C. WISE: The next thing coming up from me is my new novel Ballad of the Bone Road, which comes out in January 2026 from Titan Books. Looking backward a bit, I do actually have another werewolfish kind of story titled Wolf Moon, Antler Moon that was published at Reactor earlier this year (https://reactormag.com/wolf-moon-antler-moon-a-c-wise/). As for what I’m working on, I’m drafting a new novel, a maybe-novella, and a handful of short stories that are in various states of completion. You can find me online at www.acwise.net. I’m on BlueSky as @acwise.bsky.social and on Instagram as @a.c.wise.

AI JIANG: The second book in the Natural Engines duology, A River From the Sky, is forthcoming April 2026, and my debut science fantasy novel, An Empire Above Opera, is forthcoming September 2026. I have a few projects on deck that I’m working on at the moment or out on submission, so I excited to see the direction they take and where they land!

LINDY RYAN: My new novel, DOLLFACE, a suburban slasher pitched as Barbie meets Scream releases February 24th, 2026 from Minotaur Books! Till then, find me on IG @lindyryanwrites, as well as my monthly newsletter, and on Substack.

Kailey TedescoKAILEY TEDESCO: At the moment, I’m still in promotion mode for MOTHERDEVIL which can be found at White Stag Publishing or Asterism Books. I’m on a fall tour where I will be teaching workshops at several libraries across PA and NJ. I’ll also be reading and selling books at several performances of The Devil and Daisy Dirt across multiple cities in NJ. My newest project (currently untitled) is very slowly in the works, but a three-poem suite from this in-progress collection will be published in F(r)iction‘s fairytale themed issue later this year.

STEPHANIE M. WYTOVICH: I just finished a short story collection that I’m about to go on submission with (fingers crossed!), and I have my hands in some other projects that are just starting to get off the ground, but that I’m really excited about. Lots to look forward to!

Readers can follow me at https://www.stephaniemwytovich.com/ and on Twitter, Threads, and Instagram @SWytovich and @thehauntedbookshelf. You can also sign up for my newsletter at https://stephaniemwytovich.substack.com/.

CHRISTA CARMEN: My next novel, How to Fake a Haunting (sort of a ‘Lake Mungo meets Malevolent’ mashup…I know those are both horror film comp titles rather than novels, but they work!), is out Oct. 7th from Thomas & Mercer. I also have a story, “Comeback Kid,” in The Rack II: More Stories Inspired by Vintage Horror Paperbacks, edited by Tom Deady, and another anthology (or three) that can’t be announced yet.

Online, I’m at Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/christaqua/), Instagram (@christaqua), and Bluesky (‪@christaqua.bsky.social), as well as on my website, www.christacarmen.com.

WENDY WAGNER: I am always working on the newest issue of Nightmare Magazine, where we publish a wide variety of short horror fiction and poetry. I’ve got some books out on submission, and I’m scribbling away at another one. My online home is winniewoohoo.com.http://winniewoohoo.com

SHANNON KEARNS: After releasing my poetry collection just this past August, I would like to say I’m giving myself a short break from writing, but I’m not! I’m knee deep in a novel, a sapphic retelling of The Tempest, as well as beginning to compile and dream up new ideas for my next poetry collection. I am also an abstract painter and have two gallery openings this month! You can connect with me at shannonmkearns.com and on Instagram @shannon_mk_writer for more of my journey through writing and art!

KATRINA MONROE: As for writing, I am dabbling! Being between book contracts is scary, but it also is a bit exhilarating, being allowed to poke at several things to see which one bites back. Otherwise, I am working with a fabulous individual on an exciting women-in-horror project we hope to announce soon.

I’ve limited my social media of late, so can be found almost exclusively on Instagram (@katrinamonroeauthor).

Jessica McHughJESSICA MCHUGH: I’m currently writing an erotic horror blackout poetry collection / 3 Act Play called “FEAST,” created from the pages of “Wuthering Heights,” so I hope to have that out next year. Also, “Witches in the Warren,” the 3rd and final novel in my cross-generational horror trilogy, “The Gardening Guidebooks Trilogy” will be out from Ghoulish Books in 2026. It’s been wild saying goodbye to characters I’ve been writing since 2007, but I also feel incredibly grateful for the opportunity to bring this saga to a close. You can find me basically everywhere under @thejessmchugh, as well as mchughniverse.com. I look forward to wolfin’ out with you all!

DONNA LYNCH: As mentioned, writing is a laborious and sometimes unpleasant process for me (yet I’m compelled!) so I am SLOWLY working on another poetry collection. I thought I knew what it was about, but I don’t, so I have some things to figure out.

Also, we’re getting into the studio to work on a new album, which is also difficult, but necessary for me to do.

I have a lot of travel coming up with my various bands, so that eats up the year with a quickness. The road is my place of peace.

And that’s our roundtable! Please pick up a copy of Howl, which is out today, and enjoy all the werewolf transformations and bloody rage!

Happy reading, and happy howling!