It’s March and Women in Horror Month so maybe you’re looking for horror fiction written by women. Maybe you want to read some horror that grabs you by the throat [complimentary]? Well, then you’ve come to the right place.
Right now, as I’m writing this, I’m in the middle of Sundown in San Ojuela by M.M. Olivas a book that grabbed me by the throat in the best possible way right in the prologue, titled “The Boy in the Black Serape.”
“A voice in Oliver’s head told him, Turn back! But with each step deeper into La Casa, a darkness pulsed through him that left his head fuzzy, as wild and exciting as the desert wind.”
If you don’t like prologues, a) you’re wrong, and b) this particular prologue is exquisite and filled with a sense of oncoming, inescapable darkness and dread. It sets the stage perfectly for what’s to come as we follow (clairvoyant) Liz Remolina and her (mouthy) sister Mary as they head back to the town of San Ojuela after the death of their aunt. Described as a “gothic spaghetti western” set in a place where “monsters and ancient gods stalk the night,” Olivas’s book weaves together childhood tragedy, supernatural dangers, and menacing, bloodthirsty creatures, into a viscerally unsettling and thoroughly gripping story. For a short fic taste of Olivas’s prose, you can read her story “The Other Side of Mictlān” in Uncanny Magazine.
Another recent horror fave of mine is The Reformatory by Tananarive Due. This novel won the 2024 Bram Stoker Award and the 2024 World Fantasy Award, and it’s a masterful blend of horror and historical fiction. The story is set in a small Florida town in 1950 (the Jim Crow era) and follows the fate of a twelve-year-old black boy named Robbie Stephens Jr. and his sister, Gloria. After an altercation with the son of a wealthy and powerful local white man who is harassing Gloria, Robbie is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory with a forbidding history. The storyline is split between Robbie’s harrowing tenure in the Reformatory where he must fight to survive the brutal institution, and Gloria’s desperate fight to get her brother out of there.
Robbie can see haints, the lingering spirits of the dead, and there are a lot of them haunting the Reformatory, but while there are supernatural horrors aplenty in the book, and while the ghosts Robbie encounters are not exactly kindly and benign, it’s the living, breathing people who bring on the worst horrors. Due makes you feel the massive, oppressive weight and strangling grip of the ever-present racism in Gloria and Robbie’s lives, the way it curtails their choices and punishes them without mercy whenever they try to get justice or stand up for themselves. I also highly recommend Due’s novelette “A Stranger Knocks,” a story that riffs on the well-known maxim that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
I love horror stories where the narrator is unreliable, falling apart, or, maybe, changing into something other than you (or they) thought they were at the beginning of the tale. A great example of this is The Night Guest, by Hildur Knútsdóttir. The book is set in Reykjavik and the story is firmly anchored in the seemingly mundane, everyday life of Iðunn. Iðunn has trouble sleeping and is feeling out of sorts, and no remedies, doctor’s visits, or blood tests seem to help or explain her condition. Her anxiety increases when she wakes up with injuries she cannot explain, and when her brand-new step-counting watch shows that she walked over 40,000 steps in one night, she knows something is wrong. As Iðunn tries to solve the mystery of her night-time exploits, the story twists and turns into darker and more terrifying territory where the past (and a whole lot of poor little cats) play a prominent role.
Monika Kim’s The Eyes Are the Best Part is another great example of a horror novel where the narrator undergoes a fundamental, and in this case profoundly unsettling, transformation. This is one of my favorite books from 2024, and it’s an intimate, painful, masterfully executed tale of psychological horror and revenge. Kim takes you deep inside the everyday trials and tribulations of a Korean-American immigrant family, and then documents its unraveling. More specifically, she documents the unraveling (and eventual transformation) of the oldest daughter, Ji-won. Ji-won is a typical firstborn daughter: sharp, intelligent, competent, responsible, but after the family’s finances take a turn for the worse, cracks begin to show, and after her parents’ divorce, those cracks multiply and deepen. Ji-won and her younger sister stay with their mother who is increasingly depressed and distraught after the divorce, and who eventually strikes up a new relationship with George, a white man who, as it turns out, is not a very good man at all.
Kim captures the internal and external pressures on Ji-won with visceral precision. Her family is falling apart. Her mother is a mess. The family’s financial situation limits all Ji-won’s options, and the pressures of college are crushing her. On top of all that, Ji-won carries the generational trauma from her immigrant parents, their haunting memories of poverty and starvation, and then there’s the world outside her home, with all its racist and misogynistic micro- and macro-aggressions. As her life cracks and crumbles, Ji-won’s anger grows, and her dreams of succulent eyeballs intensify.
There’s a deep and dark sense of humor layered into the horror of this book and that sense of humor comes out most hilariously in Ji-won’s friend/not-boyfriend at college. The depiction of a certain kind of young man who uses the lingo and catchphrases of feminism and anti-racism to create a certain kind of persona, is only too familiar from current news and events.
If it’s ghost stories you crave, Gwendolyn Kiste’s The Haunting of Velkwood fits the bill, though this is most definitely a ghost story with a difference. The book follows Talitha who has lived the last twenty years of her life in the wake and shadow of a supernatural tragedy. She was a teenager when her neighborhood suddenly and inexplicably disappeared behind a mysterious, impenetrable veil, turning it into a literal ghost town and claiming the lives of her sister and mother and untold others in the process. Only three people got out: Talitha and her friends Brett and Grace. As it turns out, they are not just the only people who escaped, they are also the only people who are able to go back inside the area, through the veil. A young researcher (who might have been a bit obsessive in his Velkwood studies) asks Talitha to go back and enter the area for science and for herself. She initially refuses but finally agrees to go back with a secret mission of her own.
Kiste’s story deals with two interconnected puzzles: what happened to Talitha’s neighborhood that caused it to become stranded outside reality? And what happened to Talitha and her friends back then, what tore them apart and what still binds them together? This is horror wrapped around a layered story about adolescence, love and friendship, about living your life haunted by the specters of your childhood, and how to maybe find a way to set your ghosts, and yourself, free.
Friendship in all its fractured, difficult glory is also at the heart of The Drowning House, a chilling and suspenseful novel by Cherie Priest. After a violent storm, an old house that disappeared into the sea years ago, reappears on the beach of a small, isolated island in the Pacific Northwest. An old woman in a house near the beach dies the same night and her grandson, Simon, disappears. Two of Simon’s childhood friends, Melissa and Leo, return to the island in the aftermath of this tragedy. Together, they try to find their way past their old gripes and grudges as they look for Simon and also try to figure out what the hell is going on with the strange house that washed up on the beach.
As a resident of the Canadian part of the Pacific Northwest, I love to read stories set in our neck of the woods, and I also love how Priest weaves together past and present as the lives of the three friends are tied together with the mysteries of the old house, old magic, and wicked, terrible deeds.
Dark fantasy twines together perfectly with horror and, oh yes, vampires, in The Crimson Road by A.G. Slatter. I’m a huge fan of Slatter’s writing, whether it’s razor-sharp horror like her short story “Home and Hearth”) or dark, lush, fantasy like “Bearskin” (one of my all-time favorite short stories.)
The Crimson Road is set in Slatter’s Sourdough universe, a world full of magic and mystery, and women with sharp claws and sharper minds. In this book our narrator and heroine is the young Violet Zennor, assassin-in-training and recently bereaved after the death of her (insufferable) father. Violet is a wonderfully bold and brassy protagonist with a penchant for sharp knives and hand to hand combat, and she’s been trained her entire life to undertake a dangerous mission that involves the mysterious and terrifying Leech Lords. After her father’s death, Violet tries to ignore the path he forced her to take, but when several deaths occur in her hometown, she soon realizes the danger is greater, and hits closer to home, than she imagined. She sets out to face down the Leech Lords, and the darkest most terrible secret from her family’s past.
One of the many things I loved about this book is the way it connects several of Slatter’s recent novels, including All the Murmuring Bones, The Path of Thorns, and The Briar Book of The Dead. I also love how it puts a decidedly Slatter-esque twist on vampire lore.
Finally, if you want to read an utterly devastating and crushingly bleak horror novel, I recommend Where I End by Sophie White. Where I End won the 2022 Shirley Jackson Award, it’s described as “modern Irish gothic”, and after I read it, I felt like I needed to wrap myself in a cozy blanket and watch nothing but kind and colorful cartoons to restore my equilibrium. Yes, this book is bleak, harsh, and dark in a way that makes it feel as if reading taints your soul.
The narrator is Aoileann, a young Irish woman who lives in a tiny community on a craggy isle off the coast of Ireland. Everyone on the island seem to shun, fear, and even hate Aoileann and her family. She has grown up friendless, without even going to school, and no one seems to have ever truly loved or cared for her. Aoileann shares a house with her mother and grandmother. Her grandmother is harsh and domineering, and her mother, whom Aoileann calls “the bed-thing”, is bedridden and might also, somehow, be the cause of whatever curse has befallen the family.
Aoileann’s mother has to be fed and changed and cared for like a baby, and Aoileann hates every minute of it, just like she hates her monotonous, isolated existence. Things seem to change when a young woman, an artist, comes to the island with her newborn baby. Aoileann becomes absolutely smitten with her and what follows once these two women meet is a dark and sharply twisted story of desire, want, and nameless, pitiless darkness. It’s an unflinching story that is sharp as flint.
Three bonus picks for Women in Horror Month:
Ghostroots by ‘Pemi Aguda – a brilliant collection of unsettling, surreal, beautifully crafted horror stories. You can read her story “Things Boys Do” in Nightmare.
It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken – a litfic zombie novel that won the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. Read Will McMahon’s review right here at Psychopomp.
From These Dark Abodes by Lyndsie Manusos – I know Psychopomp published this novella so obviously we’re all biased here, but a book about “immortal creatures who unzip from their skin each night and party as skeletons” has to be included on this Women in Horror reading list.
