Katherine Silva is a special author. She’s one of those unique writers that gives heart and soul amid action, suspense, and fears or horrors. And she writes grief horror with stunning prose. She explores humanity with her writing. I’ve had the honor of editing one of her past books, Where the Soul Goes, and it gutted me, but in the best way.
Check out the cover and info for her new book, Dichotomy, coming spring of 2027. You can even pre-order now, which really helps indie authors! I’m so excited for it!
Title:Dichotomy
Author: Katherine Silva
Publisher: Strange Wilds Press
Release date: March 30th, 2027
Cover Art: A.A. Medina of Fabled Beast Design
Synopsis: On a rainy spring evening on an island in Lake Ontario, a research project erupts in violence. Dichotomy pits those still alive fighting for survival against assimilation in its most sacred, feral, and feminine form.
Comps:Resident Evil x A Dangerous Method x Florence and the Machine’s “Everybody Scream.”
“This book is such an important piece of writing to me as an exploration of asexuality, cultural identity, and feminism. It’s probably my most personal book that I’ve written to date…,” Kat said.
Katherine Silva, Biography –
Katherine Silva is an award-winning ace Maine horror author, a connoisseur of coffee, and victim of cat shenanigans. Her favorite flavors of the genre mix grief and existentialism which she combines with her love of the New England wilderness in her works. She’s a two-time Outwrite Scary Award Winner for her novel, Where The Soul Goes and three-time Maine Literary Award finalist for speculative fiction. Katherine is also editor-in-chief of Strange Wilds Press. You can find out all about her work at katherinesilvaauthor.com.
Hi, Kim! Welcome back to Hook of a Book after all these years. And congratulations on your newest Dark Ages release, Duchess of the New Dawn, about a medieval times woman named Chiltrude. We enjoyed the guest article on her you previously wrote for my site this spring, here.
Thanks for “meeting” me at one of my local coffee shops, Cool Beans. I’ve ordered an iced Carmello Latte with oatmilk and a blueberry muffin. What will you be having?
A: Thank you for having me back. I always enjoy talking to you. I’ll have a cappuccino and a chocolate biscotti.
Erin: Great, they have awesome cappuccinos. Now that we’re virtually settled in on this beautiful but hot day in Ohio (thanks for “heading over” to my nearby state from Illinois), let’s dive in and talk about your book, history, and writing. I really love this beautiful cover of your book. So photogenic!
Q: Since I’ve known you over the last decade, you’ve primarily, or only if I’m correct, written medieval fiction as your niche in historical fiction. I have to admit that when pursuing my history degree, I was always drawn to the medieval ages. Why did you choose that to begin with and what draws you to it each time?
A: I’ve loved fairy tales and legends since I was a little girl, and I’m a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Mary Stewart’s Merlin series. What got me started on writing fiction in early medieval times was a legend about an arch at Rolandsbogen on the Rhine.
Roland’s wife heard false news that her husband had died, took a vow of chastity, and fled to Nonnenwerth, a convent on a nearby Rhine island. Roland came back, and after learning what had happened, he built a castle so that he could catch a glimpse of her coming to and from prayers. It turns out this tale is only a legend, but that sad story would not leave me alone. Why would someone lie to her? Why didn’t he get her out of the convent? I had to explore these questions, even though I knew very little about the Middle Ages, and the days of Charlemagne, at the time.
{Rolandsbogen: An illustration of Rolandsbogen from a 19th century book (Constantin Hölscher, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)}
As I researched the era, I found a history much richer and much more complex than what I had been led to believe— an intersection of religion, politics, and often dysfunctional family dynamics among rulers. A new question would arise and draw me in.
In the case of Duchess of the New Dawn, the inspiration came from a few lines in The Continuation of Fredegar: After the death of her father, the de facto ruler of Francia, in 741, Chiltrude “did what her wicked stepmother told her: with friends’ help, she went secretly over the Rhine to Duke Odilo of the Bavarians, who married her against the wishes and without permission of her brothers.”
I did a double take. This was an age when aristocratic marriages were all about alliances between families. Highborn ladies did not elope. Why did Chiltrude feel compelled to do so?
One word of caution about primary sources: the authors were not objective observers, and they were not always accurate. One scholar has made the plausible argument that The Continuator got it wrong—that Chiltrude and Odilo wed in Francia with her father’s permission. Other academics said Chiltrude and Odilo became lovers before they were wed, and that second possibility works for me.
Q: I think I have always been interested in it for the gaps our own mind or research must fill and how it lends to fantasy and a certain romanticism both in life and in art, and how it was so fantastical and colorful, even the horrors it also could lend to! And I, too, love Mary Stewart – I collect all her vintage books. Arthuriuan legends always fascinated me, also.
Since you had to do research on subjects on which there wasn’t very much historical documentation, how did you begin research and what types of research did you do for Duchess of the New Dawn? What was your favorite clue or identifying markers for characters or plot that you found?
{Photo by Erin of Duchess of the New Dawn in the historic rose garden along Lake Erie}
A: As you noted, the primary sources do not have a whole lot about Chiltrude herself, and no letter or other writing by her survives. However, we have a bit more on the people around her such as her father, brothers, and husband and their forebears and can make some inferences. I am indebted to scholars who study this era and share their knowledge in academic books and papers.
But there is more to historical fiction than events. I often did deep dives into the research rabbit hole on specific locales to find out where a palace or church might have been, what building I could use as a model when nothing was known, how a city or abbey might have been configured, etc.
I found myself doing those story problems I so detested in high school math. You have several travelers going by horse at a walk because one of them is pregnant and only eight hours of daylight. How long does it take to get from Point A to Point B? And how long before their pursuers, sparing no expense, will catch with them? I became acquainted with Roman roads via Orbis and Google Maps.
A not-so-pleasant, but important, find is the concept of raptus, which I learned about in a couple academic papers. Raptus is taking a free woman without the consent of her relatives, equating a woman’s consensual elopement with rape. It explains why the writer of The Continuation was so scandalized and that Chiltrude’s brothers could use raptus as a grievance against her husband.
One of my favorite research finds, however, comes from an academic book. Bavarian law allowed a woman to negotiate their own arrangements with a man. Most of the time the relationship was not a marriage, which was considered a pact between the families, not a church sacrament. Yet the Church saw itself as a defender of marriage, and couples often conducted their nuptials on the church steps where a priest would bless the union. So, it is not too much of a stretch for a churchman, like Odilo’s archchaplain, to insist on a wedding, especially when the bride is already pregnant.
Q: Even though there is not a lot of actual historical documentation from this time period on specific people, I find it interesting that we also know of many strong and pioneering women from this time as well! Can you lend any thoughts as to how that was documented, and also, how they found the courage in those times to rise above?
A: Great question. How Chiltrude found the courage to defy her birth family, the source of her wealth and status, is why I wrote Duchess of the New Dawn.
What we admire today as a woman’s bravery, medieval writers would see as defiance that should be scorned. Many early medieval mentions of women are not flattering, although writers did praise gutsy abbesses who founded and led convents.
{Franks Costume: A 19th century illustration of Frankish costume (by Albert Kretschmer and Carl Rohrbach, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)}
Chiltrude was a woman of her times. Noblewomen were ambitious for their sons and advocated for their children’s interests, and they served as regents if their husbands died before the boys were old enough to rule.
Women had important duties while their husbands lived. A Carolingian queen served as the king’s chief of staff, treasurer, and hostess of important guests, including foreign dignitaries. When the personal and political are melded, it was critical the palace be clean and in good repair, the tables be laden, and the guards and other servants be cared for, so that the guests could report back to their masters. On top of that, the children’s moral upbringing fell to her.
A queen also could be a diplomat, expected to weave peace between her birth family and her husband or even between her own grown sons, often a difficult task.
Q: I love art from the medieval ages as well. Sometimes so bold, vibrant, and brave for such dark times. Do you feel art gives us the most clues to the people, especially women, of that time? If so, what art pieces did you find interesting for Duchess of a New Dawn or otherwise?
A: I’m so glad you brought up the art. Every generation and culture has sought beauty, even in the Dark Ages. Art reveals what is important to a society, and it provides clues for daily life.
Art takes several forms such as jewelry, amulets and saints’ medals, statues, tapestries, and murals. A lot of it is religious in nature. Most people in this era were illiterate, but murals and statues could remind Christians of religious teachings, especially what lay beyond their earthly lives.
And let’s not forget books, which were precious and expensive to produce. My version of Chiltrude is one of the few people of her era who could read and write. Her literacy provided an opportunity to discuss the beauty of the illuminations on the pages. Sometimes the covers were a work of art in themselves. An exquisitely carved ivory cover of a Bible from the ninth century is one example. I can imagine someone gazing at that piece and thinking of Christ’s sacrifice and the faith of the women who visited the tomb on that first Easter.
{Carolingian Book Cover: A ninth century ivory book cover shows the Crucifixion and the women at the tomb (Walters Art Museum, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons}
Q: Why is it important, do you feel, to write of strong women of the past for those of us now or in the future? How important do you feel books are to the preservation of the past and our futures?
A: To know that women faced their problems with courage when they had few rights should inspire us all. It reminds us that women tried to shape the world around them and contributed to their societies, despite major obstacles. If we think of women of the past as damsels in distress awaiting rescue by a man or only as victims, we are missing half of history, and worse, we imply only a certain set of people were contributors, diminishing anyone else.
Books, both fiction and nonfiction, can help us see that women always had important, if not always as visible, parts to play, and women will always serve in important roles.
Q: What was your favorite part of writing about Chiltrude? Without spoilers, what were some of your own favorite parts of your book?
A: One aspect I enjoyed was the speculation. How does Chiltrude relate to her father, knowing that people hate him with just cause? How does she contend with brothers threatening a literal war over the inheritance from their father? How does she come to the decision to flee from her homeland and toward the unknown? How does she contend with Bavarian aristocrats who look down on her as an outsider and a woman?
One of my favorite parts of the book is the moment she decides that her unborn child deserves better than to live a lie as her father’s bastard—a common tactic to preserve a woman’s honor. She must escape from the brothers who will try to imprison her and the baby, despite the danger and the cost.
Q: What do you want readers to know the most about your book and why they should read it?
A: If you like a strong heroine who confronts her problems with bravery, intelligence, and devotion to the people she loves, you will enjoy Duchess of the New Dawn.
This novel is from her perspective as a medieval woman, not a 21st-century character in period clothing, and it has all the complexities of eighth-century European life and politics.
Q: What advice do you give to aspiring historical fiction authors? Any tips on how to begin?
A: I would say to any author, regardless of genre, use the process that fits your distinct needs. If you require an outline to get started and stay on track, use it. If you find yourself getting stuck on the outline and need to start writing the story before knowing the next turn, plunge ahead, even if it means rewriting later.
In historical fiction, you’re going to do a lot of research, and the vast majority of it won’t end up in your book. The priority is telling the story over showing off your knowledge. Yet you still need the research to be able to have readers experience the events with the characters.
Once you take the manuscript as far as you can, find yourself good critique partners who will provide honest feedback and respect what you are trying to do.
Q: What’s next for you with writing?
A: Radegund, a sixth-century Queen of the Franks who leaves the husband she loathes for the God she loves, has caught my attention. The real-life Radegund, a kidnapped Thuringian princess, founded one of the first hospitals for women and one of the first convents in that region of today’s France. The tentative title is Renouncing the Crown.
{Saint Radegund: 11th century image of Saint Radegund (from Bibliothèque municipale de Poitiers, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons}
Q: Lastly, any good plans for the summer?
A: My husband and I are planning some travel to see family and to go on our first-ever cruise to Alaska.
Erin: Thanks for joining me, Kim! I always love your books and how you pour your heart into them with your research and writing. I can’t wait to see what is in store next. I’m loving Duchess of the New Dawn so far. Chiltrude, in your book, is a brave woman with so much heart and dedication to those she loves and what she thinks is right!
A: I appreciate this time and enjoyed our chat. I’m glad to hear you love Duchess of the New Dawn.
Kim Rendfeld, Biography –
Kim Rendfeld grew up in New Jersey and earned her bachelor’s degree from Indiana University. A former journalist, Kim also spent almost twenty years in public relations for universities before her recent retirement. She has also written four novels set in early medieval times, including Duchess of the New Dawn.
Kim, a proud member of the Historical Novel Society, lives in Illinois with her husband and their spoiled cats. The couple has a daughter and four grandchildren.
740: Chiltrude, the daughter of Francia’s most powerful family, aspires to wed her beloved Odilo, the duke of Bavaria, and rule by his side. But her dying father forbids the marriage. As her brothers’ rivalry threatens to shatter the realm, she faces imprisonment in an abbey and fears for the baby in her womb.
Defying her kinsmen, she will risk everything to seize her heart’s desire, protect her child, and preserve Bavaria’s cherished independence. Amid the shifting loyalties of the duchy’s influential clans, she must outmaneuver Odilo’s archrival, her hostile in-laws, and most of all, her own brothers.
In Duchess of the New Dawn, Kim Rendfeld brings to life forgotten historical characters and events from the days of Charles Martel and tells the story of one woman’s determination to choose her own path.
Thanks so much for stopping by! Stay tuned for more!! If you’d like to support my work here, please hire me for editing or refer me or send me a coffee on Ko-fi.
If you’re a Jane Austen fan like me, we can rejoice together! There’s an upcoming sequel to her classic Northanger Abbey and by an author whose books we know and love. I want to share the gorgeous new cover for historical fiction author Nancy Bilyeau’s Gothic Regency fiction The Heiress of Northanger Abbey!
The book cover is by Karen Ann Phillips of Phillips Covers.
From bestselling author Nancy Bilyeau of The Blue comes a sequel to Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Twenty-two years later, Catherine Tilney’s happy life is shattered when her daughter, Phoebe, falls under the influence of the unscrupulous Thorpe family. To protect Phoebe from dangerous fortune hunters, Catherine follows her to an isolated Dartmoor manor. Amidst family secrets and a chillingly familiar Gothic atmosphere, Catherine must separate imagination from reality and learn to trust her powers of perception before it’s too late.
In this psychologically charged sequel to Jane Austen’s classic, award-winning historical novelist Nancy Bilyeau transforms Catherine’s youthful adventures into a mystery with the highest of stakes. The Heiress of Northanger Abbey is a story of mothers and daughters, deception and desire—and of a woman who must learn to trust her power of perception before it’s too late.
For Austen fans who adore a high-spirited Regency tale, savor a hint of the Gothic, and long to be transported to the mist-shrouded moors.
Nancy’s book publishes on September 1, 2026, but pre-orders are now possible and the ebook is even less during this time. Paperbacks will come later on.
“Prepare to be captivated by this brilliant homage to the Gothic genre that will thrill Austen fans and lovers of historical fiction alike. Impossible to put down!”
— Syrie James, bestselling author of The Missing Manuscript of Jane Austen and The Mysteries of Pendowar Hall
“Twenty years after the events of Northanger Abbey, one of Jane Austen’s most gentle and warm-hearted heroines sets out to protect her daughter from the very real dangers of being an heiress. The result is a sparkling tribute to Gothic stories, replete with moors, ruined castles, vampyre stories and forbidden romance. Insightful and charming, this is a novel of which Miss Austen would surely approve.”
—Susan Breen, award-winning author of Merry
PRE-ORDER/ORDER –
Pre-order now from places like Bookshop.org, Amazon, B&N, Apple, and other online places.
A graduate of the University of Michigan, Nancy Bilyeau is the award-winning author of The Crown, The Blue, and seven other historical novels. A former editor at magazines like InStyle and Rolling Stone, she currently writes as a freelance contributor for Town & Country. When she’s not writing and editing, she is gardening, cooking, or going on historical adventures. She lives with her husband and kids in New York.
Thanks for stopping by! A word of disclosure, I am a Bookshop.org affiliate, which means I have a little online shop there and the book links to there can lend me a few dollars down the road … hopefully.
April has been National Poetry Month, and I’m ending the month with a poetry collection review for something completely cool and different. Finding Joy was an inspiring and truly ‘joyful’ experience and journey into the creative soul of artist/poet Anika Toro. When you first hold this poetry book with its vibrant and beautiful cover, which is actually a piece of her mixed media art, in your hands as I did (or maybe view it on your full color screen), you can’t help but be excited for what your eyes might partake in as you open the pages! And my eyes were thrilled. I had to take time to soak it all in and peruse each page while giving myself space to breathe and contemplate.
Firstly, if you don’t know, this book is a collection of pages of full color mixed media art created from/with the pages of another book (making it found poetry – I’ll get into that book more later). It uses the art form of mixed media collage as well as various black out techniques to form poetry, thoughts, and art pieces to make you ponder, think, or simply enjoy. It’s all then, I assume, photographed to make into a book to sell, but of course, the lone original must be such an amazing work of unique art and poetry. And I think some might or would include peek-a-boo flaps and such. As it is presented for us mass consumers, it’s still really unique and beautiful. I love bright colors, and this book was bursting with them from front to back.
Finding Joy is about pieces put together that make us think, laugh, become emotional, fill us with wonder, … and sometimes more questions, but it always keeps us engaged and captivated. At least it did me! It’s unique, original, and the product of a vivid artist’s imagination that makes our soul breathe and want to experience more.
In seeing some of Toro’s work on her website, I can see she likes to also do collage and artwork with generational photos or imagery of people. Put them in bizarre and different arenas, portraying life in a bizarre and yet more fun way. Word bubbles. History. Playing with people’s images to create thoughts and deeds. Creating new characters through art of actual people. She used a lot of that technique here within these pages, too, to create art as well as poetry and blackout poetry. The images are playful and timeless and something that lets us drop our guards and remember that life is absurd at times, in the best ways.
I also really loved her blackout poetry that featured art or collage art to tell the story. I loved page 60 with its short ‘thought poem’ with a woman by the window and pages 156-157 with its poetic thought amid gorgeous space art, for instance – the words and how they made me think and the stunning art or creative collages surrounding them just was so nice. There were many types of blackout poetry done in a way I’d never seen done before – so innovative and inspiring!
Most of the pieces were done with lots of various artistic materials – some of the pages/pieces listed what mediums she used, which was interesting. She incorporates art, photography, and printmaking skills seamlessly, molding things into a cohesive “new” thing. In some instances a title or what it was saying was told, too, as printing of this art is hard and sometimes parts or words don’t come through with dark ink or colors. I’m glad that amount of thought – to define things on some pages – was put into the book for readers.
So to talk about the back story per se of this book, I’ll start by saying I wish (because I’m me) some additional explanation by the author/artist had been included so that we could feel more connected to her process or understanding of it. I did my own research and found out that she, as an artist, found the autobiography Invitation to Joy: A Personal Story by Eleanor Searle Whitney and bought multiple copies of it for source material. If you don’t know, and want to know, Whitney was a singer, and later philanthropist, who was married for a time to Cornelius Vanderbilt in the late 40s and 50s. This or Whitney may have nothing to do with her art, or it may in a way, especially with its satire, we aren’t privy to that information, but as I’m an historian and one of those inquiring minds want to know type, I like to learn about source material as well. As an Ohioan, I was also intrigued to learn that Whitney was born in 1908 just about thirty minutes from where I live. Small world!
It’s interesting to me that Toro chose this book, given what it is, which was published in 1971, to create from given Whitney’s religious and southern life so I’m thinking there must be something behind that. I’m not sure! She’s been doing original and different artwork on several copies of it – or using multiple copies to create, and each artwork is its own piece. A way to bring joy through creation. It would be cool to see all her other artwork. I am unclear if Finding Joy is a culmination of some of her pieces from many books put into one to make a first published book, or a whole book in itself from the found book, then published. That again is where I’d have loved more explanation, even on her website, though you can see a little there about the books and art. But please, that is just me wanting more and the whole story behind the project(s), it’s not to take away from the beautiful book that’s been published!
I can be a bit of a rabbit hole fanatic when it comes to art and literature! So let’s just say, Finding Joy and the art within left me wanting to learn more and discover all the pieces and parts to how it was formed. Its creation is, in fact, such a joy to a mind like mine.
Toro achieves small triumphs in each page she brings to life with her art and poetry in Finding Joy. Her hands are worker bee extensions of her imagination, plotting and pasting and inking, from her own inquisitive and creative mind. Her poetry found in another world of words, drafting thoughts from an array of dimensions, is pure magic. Highly recommend buying this and pulling it out whenever you feel you need to meditate on the surreal joys of life.
Thank you to Meerkat Press for sharing this book with me and to Anika Toro for creating it. It did, indeed, bring me joy and it’s going to be a book I forever treasure. And even more, it’s inspired me to carve out more time for my own media media art and poetry and to try new things! Thank you.
Finding Joy, About –
Discover the magic of serendipity and artistic exploration in Finding Joy! This mixed media art book takes selections from nine different copies of the same book, showcasing Anika’s transformative and playful approach to the original text.
Each page spread uses hand-selected text, left unaltered from its original position. Through a process of erasure and blackout, Anika redacts everything except a newly found message, thought, idea, or poem, without adding any new text. Analog collages, paint, photography, embroidery, and more celebrate unique narratives, exploring creativity, spontaneity, and the profound moments that emerge from reimagining existing ideas.
Above all, Anika believes that creating should be fun! She hopes this book is a testament to the delight in making and that in exploring this book, you too find a bit of inspiration on your own path to joy.
Anika Toro is a mixed media artist with a background in photography and collage. Her current work fuses narrative, serendipity, and playful experimentation into art that transforms familiar texts and images into unexpected expressions of creativity. Her innovative projects have found homes in hotels and private spaces around the world, while her award-winning photography has been seen in magazines, on record covers, and in exhibitions throughout the United States.
You can find it available at most online retailers, or ask your indie bookstore or library to order. But here’s a few beneficial links – from the press direct or Bookshop, which gives back to indie bookstores nationwide.
April has been National Poetry Month, and I didn’t get up the poetry features and reviews I wanted due to work and life things (where did April go?), but I’m ending the month with this poetry review and plan to continue to put up others – we can enjoy things anytime, can’t we? There will be more poetry in May as well as other things. As this site is a labor of love, thanks for your patience!
If you enjoy what I do here, you can choose from my family’s wishlist for our rescue cat situation, send editing work my way, or consider supporting me on Ko-fi, HERE, which could buy me some coffee or tea fuel. Every little bit means the world to me and keeps me going.
Today, I have an excerpt for fantasy and romantasy fans! The Sea Spinner is the second installment in internationally bestselling author Julie Johnson’s Reign of Remnants romantasy series, published April 28 via Ace (Penguin/Random House).
The first book, The Wind Weaver, reached #1 in the Sunday Times and readers all over the world fell in love with it. The covers are so beautiful and the writing captivating and engaging for lovers of this genre. They’re chonky books, but perfect for those who like immersive reads – getting lost in books and other worlds is the perfect stress-relief these days. I’ve always been a fantasy reader so stretching into romantasy hasn’t been a feat for me! And these books keep with my love of strong, female leads pursuing their destinies.
The Sea Spinner, About –
Bursting with reawakened magic, a young woman challenges the tides of fate in this highly anticipated installment of Julie Johnson’s romantasy series.
Rhya Fleetwood is tired of being a pawn in other people’s wargames.
The fledgling wind weaver wants—needs—to master her maegic before anything else is taken from her. She’s already lost her friends, her newfound home…will she lose Penn too? There’s no denying the scorching heat between them but, in the aftermath of battle, the Remnant of Fire burns more than anything to rebuild his kingdom and sate his inextinguishable need for revenge.
And he’s not the only one whispering to Rhya across the wind. From the distant island city of Hylios, another voice calls. Another bond pulls.
King Soren, Remnant of Water, is as different from Penn as sparks are from mist. The more insight he offers into the magic that binds them together, the more confused Rhya feels—about her future as a Remnant, about her deepest desires, and about her role in the coming war.
Torn between fire and sea, between the king who could break her heart and the king who understands her potential, Rhya will have to finally step into her power…or risk losing it altogether.
The Sea Spinner, Excerpt –
The metal handle sears my palm, a withering harbinger.
One I ignore.
I step into the throne room and nearly double over. It’s hot as a furnace, the heat a shock to the system after the chill of the corridor. At my chest, my Remnant mark burns with contradictory cold, stirring awake in response to the maegic shimmering in the air. It is thick as syrup, a vermilion haze that suffuses the entire space.
The doors close behind me with a resolute click. The sound makes me want to bolt straight back the way I came. I don’t want to be here. In truth, I would rather be almost anywhere else, given the fiery reception I am no doubt about to receive, but the memory of Mabon’s deep voice rumbles in my head, imploring me to try.
Maybe this time you can get through to him.
If anyone can make the man see sense, it’s you.
Please, Rhya. You know I would not put you in this position without good reason. You know I would not ask this of you unless . . .
I take a deep breath, struggling to fill my lungs, tasting the distinct tinge of elemental power on my tongue. Flame and ash, pressing in from all sides. My knees threaten to buckle as I make my way down a short flight of stone steps onto the gleaming floor.
Set deep in the earth, the cavernous chamber was spared the wrath of the ice giants that ravaged Caeldera two months ago. While the rest of the city is an unrecognizable ruin of glass and debris-roofs caved in from massive boulders that rained down, storefront windows shattered with axe hilts, facade columns crumbled into dust-the throne room looks just as I remember it. Dark stone of pure, petrified lava, veined with red. Massive columns with bases of caged fire holding up a distant ceiling. Trenches of flame lining the perimeter floors, extending up the back wall.
But no people.
On the night of Fyremas, spectators packed inside, shoulder to shoulder, angling for the best view of the ward-charging ceremony. Now it is even emptier than the once bustling shops on High Street. My boot falls echo loud as cannon fire as I make my way down the polished aisle that halves the room.
On the lofted dais, the steward’s seat Queen Vanora occupied during her reign is vacant. For one who ruled so long, and with such spectacle, her departure from this world was decidedly commonplace. Crushed to pulp in her gilded ballroom like so many others, then reduced to cinders alongside her most common of subjects on the mass pyre erected outside the city walls a week after the battle.
Were she there to witness it, she would have seethed at the indignity of sharing her last rites with the masses. No mournful bugles or waxing eulogies on her behalf. No rare flowers laid or grand portraits commissioned. But these days no one is inclined toward fanfare.
Not even for a dead queen.
My eyes move to the king’s heavy metal throne at the center of the dais. It, too, sits empty. Though I hardly expected to find him there. I doubt Dyved’s new sovereign has spent more than a handful of minutes sitting down these past weeks-and certainly not in a stuffy ceremonial chair.
I skirt the platform and approach the back wall of the cavern. It is even hotter here, so near to the trenches of fire that leap high and hungry, so near to the source of the maegic that thrums unabated. One section of the wall juts slightly outward, concealing an old mine shaft that functions as a lift. I lay my palm against the warm stone where a peculiar pattern of gouges marks the surface-a glyph, carved there by some ancient ancestor. One short pulse of maegic is enough to activate it. A fiery glow filters between my fingers as the floor panel beneath me begins to rise swiftly upward.
I’ve grown somewhat more accustomed to using Caeldera’s network of lifts over the past few months, but it is still never an entirely pleasant sensation. My innate predisposition toward claustrophobia are triggered anytime I find myself ensconced by earth. Even now, as I rise upward through the mine shaft, I’m itching for escape. The craving for fresh air, for sunlight and open sky, claws at my throat with razor-sharp talons.
The lift comes to a halt with a jolt that shakes my bones. I step out into a semi-enclosed chamber that overlooks the throne room far below and feel every hair on my body rise in response. This is a place of potent natural power, where the deep enchantment of Anwyvn’s very core bubbles to the surface. Tears sting at my eyes, an irrepressible reaction to the thick cloud of maegic.
Around me, the curved walls and low-hanging ceiling are carved with countless glyphs. They are aglow, as though lit from within by pure power-the origin of which is crouched at the center of the chamber with his hands pressed flat to the floor of hardened lava, expelling pulse after pulse.
“Pendefyre,” I call softly.
He does not look up.
“Pendefyre,” I say again, louder. His head jerks, but he still does not look at me. In fact, he seems to redouble his focus, pressing even more firmly against the red-veined stone. Every knuckle of his strong, tanned hands is white from lack of circulation. Flames lick out between his fingers, burn twin paths up his arms, ignite a trail down his bare chest to where a dark design of whorls and spirals mars the flesh.
The Fire Remnant.
It is no less mesmerizing in this moment than it was the first time I saw it, furling outward across his right pectoral in a triangular pattern. But my awe is now laced with alarm as I watch Penn giving more and more of himself to the wards that shield his city from harm. For several long seconds I stand there, paralyzed, my vision consumed by the hungry flames that furl across his skin.
How much more can he give before he burns out completely? How much further can he push himself without causing permanent damage?
No wonder Mabon came for me. No wonder the Ember Guild is so concerned about their leader. The previous Fire Remnant, King Vorath, died here in this very room, doing this very thing. He reached for too much power, pushed himself too hard. And he lost his life because of it.
Angry as I may be at Penn for his attitude of late, I cannot stand idly by while he kills himself in his obsessive quest to make Caeldera safe.
Whether my efforts will be successful is another matter entirely. My teeth grit as recollections of the last time I found myself standing at this threshold-the result of Jac’s relentless wheedling to accompany him a fortnight ago-sweep over me. Penn made his position clear that day. Incontrovertibly so, seeing as he bellowed loudly enough to bring what remains of this keep down around our ears about how we should both mind our godsdamned business and keep our noses out of his affairs.
All hail King Pendefyre, the Pigheaded.
Swallowing down the irritation that lingers bitterly on the back of my tongue, I take another faltering step. “Pendefyre. Look at me.”
But Penn is unreachable. He is entirely engrossed by his task, pouring every bit of his power into the wards. My heart pangs as I watch him draining himself dry. His expression is savage-a mix of determination and agonized desperation. His face is white as parchment. An overgrown curl of burnished chestnut hair falls over his forehead, concealing his eyes from view, but I know without seeing that they are alive with maegic, the irises burning like hot coals.
The steadying breath I pull into my lungs has the opposite effect. It shimmies through me with intoxicating provocation. Penn’s maegic is affecting me more than I want to admit. The Remnant at my chest prickles relentlessly, awake and alert, eager to come out and play. I steadfastly ignore it. Adding air maegic to this scenario will likely have the same effect as dashing a cup of spirits on an open flame while attempting to put it out.
Combustion.
A fresh pulse of power rolls through the chamber. I watch it ripple through his body, the muscles of his bare back flexing, the tendons of his arms going taut as raw maegic transfers from him into the stone. The wards around us throb bright as starlight. My legs buckle as it hits me, stealing the breath from my lungs and sending me to my knees. I land with a bruising thud.
Blinking away the pain, I bring Penn back into view. A sharp blade of panic sluices through me. The fire snaking up his arms and coiling around his chest has grown. It now surrounds his entire form in a thick cloak of flames. He crouches there, within a blazing ball of heat, immolating as I watch. Through the white-hot flickers, I see blood beginning to pour from his pointed ears, dripping down the broad column of his throat, pooling in the rigid indentation of his clavicles.
“Penn!” I cry, a ragged plea. “Pendefyre!”
This time, he does not react at all to the sound of my voice. He is lost in the throes of his power.
I have to put a stop to this. Now. Before it’s too late.
Julie Johnsonis the #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of The Wind Weaver. When she’s not writing, Julie can most often be found sitting on the beach near her home in her native Massachusetts, adding stamps to her passport, drinking too much coffee, and avoiding reality by disappearing between the pages of a book. She published her debut novel on a lark, just before her senior year of college, and she’s never looked back. Since, she has written twenty novels, which have been translated into more than a dozen different languages and appeared on bestseller lists all over the world. Author photo credited to the author.
Purchase –
You can find these books in stores and libraries (of course, ask to order if not because they can) but also most places online. Here’s links to both books on Bookshop.org, where proceeds go to independent bookstores nationwide.
Thanks for stopping by! I am behind in the amount of posts I want to do on my website, and with that late on interviews promised and poetry features and reviews, but since this is a labor of love, and work and family and health come first, I’ll continue to give myself grace and hope others do as well. However, there are a few things coming up and I hope to still continue to complete posts as I can. I hope on the meantime, you enjoyed this! Are you a romantasy reader?
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by Author Gwendolyn Kiste & Author and Poet Donna Lynch
As authors and artists, there’s never been a better time to be a woman-in-horror. Also, never a worse time.
Bram Stoker Award-winning and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author Gwendolyn Kiste of The Haunting of Velkwood and Reluctant Immortals and Bram Stoker Award-nominated poet and author Donna Lynch of Choking Back the Devil discuss their favorite sub-genres in horror and how it’s never been more relevant than in our current society.
DONNA LYNCH: Gwendolyn, you and I have had a long-standing love of body horror, having first met when speaking on a panel about it at StokerCon, if I recall correctly.
For me, so many works of horror fall into that genre that it seems strange when people say they’re unfamiliar. Let’s talk for a second about what body horror is before we get into its deeply-rooted connection to women.
For me, the definition is a broad one, although I understand the differences between transformative horror: being turned into something else non-human vs traditional body horror: where the person usually retains (some of) their humanity, but their body turns, or is turned voluntarily or involuntarily against them, many times with erotically-charged or psychologically disturbing subplots. Those themes work well in these kinds of stories, as there isn’t much that’s more profoundly personal than your own body acting as the antagonist.
GWENDOLYN KISTE: First off, it’s always so great to talk with you. And yes, I do think we met discussing body horror back at StokerCon in 2019, so this feels like such a wonderful full circle moment.
I agree that body horror is so ubiquitous that people sometimes fail to recognize it. We don’t usually mention it as horror fans, but even vampire stories and werewolf stories are fundamentally body horror: they explore something or someone invading or exploiting your body and then follow the transformations that happen as a result.
There’s such a rich and varied history with body horror. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is essentially body horror. So much of the work from David Lynch and especially David Cronenberg involves body horror. And of course, now we’re seeing a lot more women put their mark on body horror. The Substance (2024) is a recent example that comes instantly to mind for horror movies, but there are so many of us in horror literature that are exploring it as well.
DL: The Davids, along with the Neil Jordan adaptation of Angela Carter’s story The Company of Wolves(1994), from The Bloody Chamber), were wholly responsible for my obsession with the genre.
Body Horror has always been controversial, especially when it goes beyond the gore aesthetic and deep dives into personal, surreal, and intimate stories, as I mentioned above. But none seem more controversial than those written by femme authors, screenwriters, and directors— something that I think has less to do with the story, rather that women are creating these visceral, sometimes hardcore scenarios.
For me, there was an expansive, barren land between Mary Shelley and the next woman to pull me into the genre: Jennifer Lynch with Boxing Helena (1993). That was shocking at the time. I remember feeling like “I should think this is misogynistic, but I don’t. Is that only because a woman wrote and directed it?” Which of course, doesn’t mean internalized misogyny isn’t an insidious thing that bleeds into all parts of our society, but in this case it didn’t raise my red flags, rather it opened up the door to explore the femme side of body horror on a much deeper level, far beyond “Hey, cool, it’s a woman-in-horror.”
I am thrilled with the number of women—Emilie Blichfeldt, Coralie Fargeat, Julia Ducournau, Jennifer Lynch, you, and the list goes on—who are showing up, who have been showing up, unafraid to be graphic and controversial, moving into a space that I dare say we understand in a very different way than men, in general. Especially now.
We are living in some dark times, where our bodies are threatened daily in our homes, in the streets, and within the legislature of the U.S. And when we turn away, and turn inward, where we should be able find some peace or at least be able to center ourselves, we hear the echoes of reels and memes, telling us how we need to alter our bodies (or in the case of anti-trans rhetoric, not alter) at any and all costs. And so much vitriol and judgment if you do and also if you don’t. It all comes down to women losing control of their bodily autonomy. And what is the medium of horror if not a reflection and commentary of the current state of society?
Speaking of the body turning against you, a Lyme Disease infection several years ago impacted some of my cognitive abilities, damaging huge pieces of my life— including my ability to read, so I focus more on film and television these days. What are you seeing in the literary community?
GK: Lyme Disease. That’s a serious horror story of an illness. So quiet, so insidious. Sending you a ton of healing energy for your recovery journey. That’s a terrifying one.
So I love that you brought up Boxing Helena, because it’s been on my To Find list for years now. So far as I know, it’s never been conventionally available on streaming platforms, and I don’t think it’s ever had a DVD release. I don’t like watching bootlegged versions of movies, so I keep waiting for the day the movie is available on Criterion or the like. In the meantime, I’ve definitely scoured the trailers on YouTube, and I know the whole story from the Wikipedia entry. It sounds exactly up my alley.
I’m also so happy that you mentioned Angela Carter. Her work is absolutely overflowing with body horror, and she does it in a way that’s so beautiful and sumptuous. I think a lot of people believe that body horror has to be super gross (and sometimes, it is, and that’s wonderful!), but Carter really proved that body horror could also be described in such gorgeous, lyrical language as well. Her retellings of fairy tales also explore how much body horror has been with us from the very beginning in these mythic transformations and gory murders like Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood, and Bluebeard.
There’s so much pressure on women to conform, and like you said, depending on who you are, it’s either “change your body immediately” or “don’t you dare change your body at all.” And sadly, our own internal monologues often cause us to perpetuate those narratives even when we’re alone.
With a film like The Substance, I really appreciated that it depicted both the external pressure that Elizabeth was experiencing as well as the internal pressure. One of the things that concerned me before I saw the film was my thought that honestly, Demi Moore is so “conventionally” beautiful in every way and she looks so unbelievably young. She was actually in her sixties playing someone who was only supposed to be fifty while looking even younger than that. I didn’t think the movie would work for that reason. But then when I watched it, I realized that was sort of the point: you can literally adhere to all the so-called standards and even look twenty years younger than you actually are, and you’ll STILL be pushed out and criticized. As the system currently is, we can’t win.
In terms of body horror in literary spaces, there are so many great stories out there right now. Just a few women who are doing incredible work include Sara Tantlinger, Eve Harms, Christa Carmen, Nadia Bulkin, Eden Royce, and Gemma Amor. Just recently, the Preliminary Ballot for the Bram Stoker Awards was released, and the story, “St. Dymphna’s School for Borderland Girls,” by Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece (Weird Horror Magazine #10) is on there. And what a tale that is. Lots of body horror done in such an exquisite way. So glad to have discovered that one.
DL: I am obsessed with St. Dymphna. I wear her medal around my neck and I’m not even Catholic. I have a to-be-released short story about her, and a poem I wrote called Regular Saint for Gabino Iglesias and Andrew Cull’s FOUND: An Anthology of Found Footage Horror Storieswas based on her. I highly recommend anyone unfamiliar look her up. Such a horrific and heartbreaking tale.
I’m in my 50s now and The Substance was such a brilliant punch in the face. Especially as a performer. I was beating myself up for simply aging, because when you do this kind of thing, you’re constantly seeing photos of yourself from 10, 15, 20 years prior, and then I realized the only 25-year-old I’m comparing myself to is 25-year-old me. I was watching that movie and I shed some tears at the scenes where they leave their discarded body in the hidden room, because they need to trust each other—she needs to trust herself—to take care of the other. I cried because I saw how easy it is to abuse what will one day be older you, and then to resent the you that was young. And while a lot of people didn’t care for the ending, I personally loved the Troma-esque finale. I think it was an absurd, bloody palate cleanser after the unexpected emotional journey the rest of the film took me on.
And that’s what I think sets body horror apart from the rest. We expect emotion from ghost stories, and the types of books and films that are deeply rooted in grief (Hereditary, Bring Her Back, The Babadook, etc), but you don’t always imagine you’ll be touched so profoundly by a genre known for its extreme gore and discomfort.
These days, however, I don’t think anything has horrified me as much as the loss of autonomy; the fact that The Handmaid’s Tale now feels like the ultimate body horror. There’s often a sense that when the “transition” is coming from an internal place that you can always turn it around. Of course, we know that for the sake of those stories, the moral is that sometimes you can’t go back, but just the idea that there was a point where you’d not yet reached the event horizon gives you some hope.
But what we are living now, having so little control, if any … I didn’t think we’d see the day when that brand of body horror once again became non-fiction. This is probably the greatest reason we need femme voices telling these stories. We are living them. We are goddamn experts on the genre.
GK: We are the absolute experts on body horror. You’re completely right about that. On a positive note, it’s exciting to me that so many women are getting their voices out there in horror right now. The more we write, the more we scream at the top of our lungs, the better off the world will be. This is such a scary time to be alive in the history of humanity, but I still have hope for the future and for what we can still accomplish. I’m holding onto that hope, clutching it very tightly. And as strange as it might sound to some people, body horror helps to give me that hope. Being open about our fears for our own bodies is one of the most intimate and truthful things we can do. And right now, in horror, we’re talking about it loud and clear. I just hope that more people start listening.
In the meantime, I would encourage everyone to keep reading and watching body horror by women. For book recommendations, please check out To Be Devoured and Cyanide Constellations by Sara Tantlinger, Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soakedby Christa Carmen, Transmutedby Eve Harms, and Who Lost, I Found by Eden Royce, particularly her incredible body horror/possession story, “A Cure for Ghosts.” For films, definitely check out The Substance if you haven’t seen it, and please go back and revisit Jennifer’s Body (2009) if you haven’t watched it in a while (or ever). That’s one of my favorite body horror films of all time.
And for what it’s worth, my upcoming books also feature body horror! My second collection, The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own, is due out on April 14th from Raw Dog Screaming Press. There are a number of body horror stories in there. Then in September, my queer Great Gatsby retelling, In These Gilded, Ghostly Hearts, hits bookshelves from Creature Publishing. If you ever thought, “The Great Gatsby would be so much better with lots of ectoplasm and body horror,” then you’ll have a blast with my novella.
And last but in no way least, my next novel is a sapphic werewolf story, so you can bet there’s plenty of body horror in there! Everything Looks Better in Red is due out in 2027 from Union Square & Co, an imprint of Hachette.
DL: It seems like we are in our werewolf era, with your upcoming book and our contributing stories in the newly Bram Stoker Award nominated Howl: an anthology of werewolves by women-in-horror (Black Spot Books). And what a perfect time for it. We need to start showing our teeth and claws.
My very first novel, Isabel Burning, was my personal foray into the genre. I’ll just say it was a decent first attempt at a novel, haha! I am proud of it, but have learned so much since then. However, twenty years later, I am still extremely pleased with the degree of viscera I achieved. My favorite review was: “This book is disgusting. 5 Stars.”
I want to see people, especially women, find the catharsis and value in the genre, because, like you said, I think it can offer a sense of hope, a shared experience of a transitioning body, something we were taught to fear and be quiet about. Or the threats of violation we face; the very real fear of losing say over our own flesh. Body horror speaks to all of that while still satisfying the love of a good story and—in film and TV—amazing special effects. It feels like the most intimate kind of horror, not for the faint of heart.
Some of my favorite works, either by femme creators or with a female-centric focus are Titane (2021), Raw (2016), The Substance, the Soska Sisters’ remake of David Cronenberg’s Rabid (2019), along with the TV series based on his film Dead Ringers(1988), one of my all-time favorites, with Rachel Weisz playing the dual, gender-swapped role of the “Mantle twins,” The Company of Wolves (also read Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber), Ugly Stepsister (2025), In My Skin (2002), and the gruesome trajectory of the main character “Theres” in John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel Little Star.
Additionally, I love when body horror reveals itself in unlikely places, such as the aforementioned story of Saint Dymphna (and so many other saints and martyrs), or the era of work by Frida Kahlo, centering around symbolic anatomy and her experience with amputation, surgery, and injury.
I could spend hours detailing all of the stories—iconic and obvious, sleepy and subtle—that have disturbed, inspired, and enthralled me, but I wanted to use this space to shine a light on the women who have so much to say about the profound, gory, terrifying, unsettling, painful, and sublime things inside of us. We hold volumes.
Gwendolyn Kiste, Biography –
Gwendolyn Kiste is the four-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens, Reluctant Immortals, Boneset & Feathers,Pretty Marys All in a Row, and The Haunting of Velkwood. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in outlets including Lit Hub, Nightmare, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, CrimeReads, Titan Books, The Lineup, and The Dark.
She’s a Lambda Literary Award winner, and her fiction has also received the This Is Horror Award for Novel of the Year as well as nominations for the Shirley Jackson, PremiosKelvin, Ignotus, and Dragon Awards.
Originally from Ohio, she now resides on an abandoned horse farm outside of Pittsburgh with her husband, their excitable calico cat, and not nearly enough ghosts. Find her online at gwendolynkiste.com.
The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own, About –
Celebrated author Gwendolyn Kiste cordially invites you to explore The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own. Enter a world possessed by recriminations from bygone eras, where the regrets and malice of years past still reverberate and shape our doom. Here, morally complex women and queer antiheroines swim against the current of a social structure that serves as a spectral prison in these layered stories of the weird and the Other.
Known for crafting bold metafictional narratives that grapple with challenging social issues, Kiste’s unwavering voice deftly weaves a siren’s song of resilience and survival. Included among the short stories in this collection are the Bram Stoker Award-winning “The Eight People Who Murdered Me (Excerpt From Lucy Westenra’s Diary),” “The Girls From the Horror Movie,” “The Sea Witch of the World’s Fair,” and other riveting new gothic tales of body horror, the supernatural, and unapologetic resistance.
“What’s going on inside you?” I ask, but the darkness never whispers back.
Stoker winner Gwendolyn Kiste holds up a dark, queer mirror to The Great Gatsby in IN THESE GILDED, GHOSTLY HEARTS, a haunting exploration of the obsession and control at the edges of an American classic.
In 1955, Daisy Buchanan is found dead in an abandoned West Egg mansion, but her daughter Mel knows she’s really been gone for years. No one knows whether Daisy was murdered, or if it was a simpler, slower death: her yearslong spiral of alcohol, abuse, and helplessness. But when Mel enters the estate, she finds Daisy’s ghost, somehow frozen at twenty-five, and a charming, bleeding phantom that used to be Jay Gatsby.
To free her mother, Mel must carve a path through family secrets and decaying revelers: deep into Gatsby’s starving house as it gorges itself on unfulfilled love and grows stronger every night.
Donna Lynch is a horror and dark fiction author, singer, touring spoken word artist, and three-time Bram Stoker Award-nominated poet. Her poems and short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, and her published works include two novels, a novella, and eight poetry collections, including The Ladies of Horror Fiction Award-winning Choking Back the Devil, and Girls From the County.
She and her husband, artist Steven Archer, are the founding members of the dark electro-rock band Ego Likeness. They live in Maryland … also on a horse farm, surrounded by old, crumbling woods and probably at least a couple of ghosts. All of their collective projects can be found at www.egolikenessband.com.
She’s also sending Gwendolyn her ancient copy of Boxing Helena on DVD.
Choking Back the Devil, About –
Finalist for the Bram Stoker Award
Choking Back the Devil by Donna Lynch is an invocation, an ancient invitation that summons the darkness within and channels those lonely spirits looking for a host. It’s a collection that lives in the realm of ghosts and family curses, witchcraft and urban legends, and if you’re brave enough to peek behind the veil, the hauntings that permeate these pages will break seals and open doorways, cut throats and shatter mirrors.
You see, these poems are small drownings, all those subtle suffocations that live in that place between our ribs that swells with panic, incubates fear. Lynch shows her readers that sometimes our shadow selves-our secrets-are our sharpest weapons, the knives that rip through flesh, suture pacts with demons, cut deals with entities looking for more than a homecoming, something better, more intimate than family.
It’s about the masks we wear and the reflections we choose not to look at, and what’s most terrifying about the spells is these incantations show that we are the possessed, that we are our greatest monster, and if we look out of the corner of our eyes, sometimes-if we’ve damned ourselves enough-we can catch a glimpse of our own burnings, what monstrosities and mockeries we’re to become.
So cross yourselves and say your prayers. Because in this world, you are the witch and the hunter, the girl and the wolf.
This book is merely a record of dark events, the kind that you can sometimes move on from, yet can’t help but see in every old house, high school, or crumbling bridge.
In the county, eerie stillness can be mistaken for stagnation. In the county, rumination on pain and guilt can be confused with omens and curses. In the county, feelings of claustrophobia stem from understanding what the encroaching darkness brings with it.
You’ve heard of country girls, and city girls, but what of the forgotten girls from the in-between space of the county? Confronting the things too wild for urban areas, and too methodically malevolent for the countryside, girls from the county are often dismissed by popular narratives, left to solve riddles of grief and rage for themselves.
Known for weaving folk horror with confessional poetry, unflinching true crime approaches with myth and fable, contemporary appetites with gothic literature, award-winning author Donna Lynch has composed a lyrical reconstruction for readers to navigate the lives-and deaths-of girls from the county.
Edited, Formatted, and Graphics by Erin Al-Mehairi
Thank you to Gwendolyn and Donna for this article! This is part of a series on Hook of a Book curated by me, Erin Al-Mehairi, celebrating women in history and horror. You can see the starting post HERE and follow along to read the rest of March’s posts, and then, join us in April as it continues on as well.
Also, note that Bookshop is offering a 20% off select women’s titles HERE for women’s history month in March! Plus, portions or sales from them always go to helping indie bookstores. I am a new affiliate for Bookshop.org so books in articles are linked to my affiliate shop.
This series on Hook of a Book is a labor of love only that takes many hours each week. If you want to give a little to help out, you can choose from my family’s wishlist for our rescue cat situation, send editing work my way (offering 30% off for women scheduling through April 15), or if you enjoy what I do, consider supporting me on Ko-fi, HERE and buy me some coffee fuel. Every little bit means the world to me.
Grief and Generosity: The Multitudes of Katrina Trask (A Gilded Age Gothic Essay)
by Leanna Renee Hieber – Author, Actress, and ghost tour guide
{Content warning: Child Loss, Spousal Loss}
Last fall, I was generously handed an exquisitely crafted item born of staggering loss made 139 years ago by a woman named Katrina Trask in the throes of harrowing grief. Tears instantly limned my eyes. I had just been entrusted with a treasure. All I could do was step up to the podium and explain why being allowed to borrow this antique had me trembling in awe of the enormity I held.
Surges of emotion flowed through me before I stepped up to address an audience at Northshire Books in Saratoga Springs, New York on a rainy, dreary day in early November. I was on book tour for America’s Most Gothic: Haunted History Stranger than Fiction, a book I co-authored with Andrea Janes, founder of Boroughs of the Dead, the NYC ghost tour company where I’m also one of the guides. As has been true in every state I’ve ever been a tour guide, a career now spanning over half my life, any historical tour worth its time deals with all kinds of difficult, complicated subjects. And while I was at Northshire to talk about a resilient woman and her incredible generosity to the great town of Saratoga Springs, I did have to talk about the hell she lived through along the way. Complexities walk side by side.
But if there’s one thing Katrina Trask didn’t want to be remembered for, it was pain. She wanted to be transformative, and so she was.
[Katrina Trask. Photo credit: Wikipedia]
Katrina Nichols, a poet, author and later a pacifist playwright, married Spencer Trask, a Wall Street banker, financier and philanthropist, in 1874. The Trasks lived in New York City and in Saratoga Springs, New York. They had four children, all of whom died in infancy or in their youth. As a salve to the pain of loss, the couple devoted their time to creating and maintaining Yaddo, a Gothic mansion in Saratoga Springs with beautiful, expansive gardens. The Trasks hosted diverse luminaries, artists, writers and leading intellectuals of their day at Yaddo.
Yaddo was named by their daughter Christina while she lived, a sensitive child aware that the Saratoga Springs home was meant to be an escape and an antidote to the loss of the Trask’s first child, Alan. Christina’s inventive name for the place noted it as the opposite of shadow.
When Katrina Trask came down with diphtheria, their attending physician, thinking that she was at death’s door, allowed eleven-year-old Christina and her five-year-old brother Junius (Spencer Junior) to kiss their mother goodbye. Katrina managed to recover. In what feels like an unconscionable cruelty of fate, the children both went on to die of the disease.
The Chronicles of Yaddo was written by Katrina, at her husband’s urging, and was given a small, private printing in December of 1888. She writes, in the first pages of the text: “I thought I could not write the Chronicles; my hand refused to move, my brain to act… But when I began, I wrote on and on without stopping, for pictures crowded faster than I could catch them, and I would still reach out for others, before more days of desolation come between me and them… After the hopeless stupor of the first months have passed, something of the joy of our sorrow, which Christina taught me, is beginning to reach me- and so, I write.”
[Photo Credit: Leanna Renee Hieber]
As those sentiments began her chronicle, Katrina later comes, reluctantly to the “last few months of our joy and brightness. The thing I thought impossible to do, now seems impossible to have left undone.”
And in the next paragraph, she speaks directly to her child, and then to the reader, in lines that summoned tears as I read. “Ah, no, Christina! It is not our sorrow that I chronicle, but your beautiful life, and that could not be left undone. How could I shrink or hesitate, how could any weariness or weakness weigh with me, how could any selfish sorrow make it seem too sacred to give, at least, a glimpse of it to those who will be here when I am gone. I feel, as I write, it is as necessary to try and secure a word-picture of her life- although so all imperfect– as it was to bend every effort to secure a portrait of her radiant face. For she was an unusual child of light and genius; the more I dwell upon the thought of her unfolding, the more I feel this.”
Is this not the power of narrative? To secure “word-pictures” of others, for others? So that they may know and be known?
Spencer Trask spared no expense in this limited run of these chronicles, with lustrous purple fabric interiors and a gorgeous wrought-metal Art Nouveau clasp. And from this crucible, Yaddo’s later mission was born.
At one point during recovery from illness, in the midst of her mourning process, Katrina received a vision of authors and artists wandering, working and creating upon Yaddo’s grounds; creatives inspired by their surroundings and encouraged to make art while their needs were being met. She felt called by her own intense, religious conviction to help manifest this healing reality of art that would persist. Works that could never die.
Spencer would be killed in a railroad accident and Katrina would outlive them all, devoting the rest of her life to that vision she’d had. While she was, through her life, honest about her grief, she never lost sight of the fact that she had been born of privilege, that her and Spencer maintained privilege, and she then sought to offer those benefits to others. Yaddo exists as an Artist Colony and creative retreat to this day. Famous, beloved works have been born of that place. Immortal indeed. A tour through the Yaddo website offers a glimpse into myriad worlds born there.
[Photo credit: Wikipedia, which says the photo is from 2025. On March 11, 2013, it was designated a National Historic Landmark. See more photos of the grounds in 2016 on this travel blog, Saving Time in a Bottle.]
Reading Yaddo: Making American Culture, compiled and edited by Micki McGee, I delighted in the rich portraits painted of the artist colony by attending creators. I thrilled at the loving care with which Katrina’s Chronicles of Yaddo is utilized for context. But sitting so extensively with a physical copy of the source text itself created a more intimate and vulnerable narrative, something I want to discuss quietly over a warm beverage in a cozy, inviting place. When the world chills you, I hope you’ll imagine this text as presented to you with a blanket, in front of a fireplace. We can never feel another’s sorrow exactly, we can only bear witness. We can, hopefully, relate in human, empathetic ways. We can be relational. Because even in Katrina’s pain, I found her radiance, and her inescapable warmth. Katrina’s stunning words “something of the joy of our sorrow” is going to stay with me for the rest of my days. I understand why she’s buried in the center of her family plot and all other graves radiate outwards from hers.
The forward, written by Spencer Trask before his premature death, notes that the book is meant for a private, curated circle, having not undergone any extensive editing or revision. Still, it is beautifully put together by a writer who is elegant and cohesive, even amidst her own illness and disconsolate state. The ending of his preface features Spencer’s own direct signature on each copy, silvered with age, actually signed rather than printed on. Seeing his actual penmanship on that book, not just from various digitized archival sources, felt like I was accepting his handshake and hopes that I would take care with the details inside.
Having read my chapter on Katrina ahead of attending my event, the talented author, historian, Saratoga Springs native and Simply Saratoga columnist Carol Godette brought with her this original copy of The Chronicles of Yaddo, left to her through family friends all in a direct line from the original source. Carol could feel my care for Katrina shining through my chapter and she shared that she felt I was a suitable candidate to be brought into this circle; that I would understand and appreciate the text. That kind of trust is a profound honor. That my chapter proved a doorway to get to know Katrina even better remains such a gift.
[Katrina Trask. She died at Yaddo in 1922. Photo credit: Wikipedia]
Additionally, I’m grateful for this space, this breath here with you on this blog, here in a month where we are not only honoring women’s history but their narratives, to have the chance to chronicle this additional emotional detail. At first glance, The Trasks might appear that they’d been afflicted with some sort of family curse, a trope common in Gothic literature (hence their inclusion in America’s Most Gothic). But as I say in my chapter, every family curse presents the opportunity to break it. To not be defined by it. It is clear in the Trasks’ communications and in the way Katrina described her visions of Yaddo as an artist colony, she was continually aware that they could help provide for others an escape from the logistical struggles that delay and impede so many artistic lives. She hoped for a safe haven during the process of a great work.
Yes, I write about ghosts and the ghost story’s lasting power. And yes, sources gently say that Katrina does haunt her beloved refuge. And there is such persistent, insistent life in how she is referred to that Katrina Trask really does prove one of my own common refrains: the dead can teach us so much about how to live. Thank you, Katrina, for the resilient light that guided me to your story— your generous heart keeps beating as stories you enabled continue to bring us together.
Leanna Renee Hieber, Biography –
Leanna Renee Hieber is a professional actress, playwright, ghost tour guide and an award-winning, bestselling author of fiction and non-fiction for Tor and Kensington Books. A Haunted History of Invisible Women: True Stories of America’s Ghosts, co-authored with Andrea Janes, was a Bram Stoker Award Finalist for Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction, and their follow-up, America’s Most Gothic: Haunted History Stranger than Fiction, was an Instant USA Today Bestseller and is also now a Bram Stoker Award Finalist for Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction.
Her Gothic Young Adult novel Ravenfield Hall is forthcoming from Union Square and Company. A 4-time Prism award winner for her Gothic Strangely Beautiful saga and a Daphne du Maurier finalist for Darker Still, Leanna’s novels have received translations into multiple languages and her short stories have been featured in notable anthologies while her non-fiction essays have appeared in ApexMagazine, The Deadlands, Haunted Magazine and more. Featured in film and television on shows like Mysteries at the Museum and Beyond the Unknown discussing Victorian Spiritualism, she lives in New York and lectures around the country on Gothic and paranormal themes as they intersect with women’s history.
From the Bram Stoker nominated author team who penned A Haunted History of Invisible Women, the first book of its kind to investigate gothic tropes that define American lore. Here is the hidden, dark history of what frightens us – and why.
The Gothic. Brooding, atmospheric, chilling, and not always the outpouring of a feverish imagination. Reality can be even stranger as borne out in this lush and ghostly look at real people who lived–and died—amidst the trappings of the Gothic.
Fog clinging to an isolated mansion. A dangerous patriarch or an overbearing matron. Locked doors and forbidden rooms. Whispers of murder and madness. And a woman shadowed by omnipresent threats. You’ve guessed it. You’ve stumbled into a Gothic tale, and it will haunt you like a ghost.
We often think of the enduring tropes of the Gothic in terms of fiction and film—breath-catching escapes that tap into our fears, anxieties, forbidden desires, and unsettling dreams. But what if some of these chilly vibes are rooted in the experiences of real and tragic people who danced a macabre waltz with love and death? That’s why we’re here. Take the case of teenage Mercy Brown, victim—or was it predator?—of Rhode Island’s vampire hysteria of the 1890s. Marguerite de la Roque, a French noblewoman condemned for “sexual crimes” to Canada’s long-lost Isle of Demons. What happened to her and the barren landscape itself is the stuff of legend. And “Mad Lucy” Ludwell, the decidedly peculiar eighteenth-century high-society hauteur driven mad in the Virginia estate she prowls to this day. President Helen Peabody’s spirit still stringently watches over her Women’s College, now part of Ohio’s Miami University. Ghosts of workers lost in horrific conditions while building the Hoosac Tunnel warn of imminent danger. Settle in. There are more.
Welcome to the phantom ships, haunted academic halls, menacing landscapes, and family curses of America’s Most Gothic—a tour of true spectral sightings and disordered minds. But beware: it’s sure to get under your skin. The haunted—and haunting—figures herein want it that way.
Edited and Graphics by Erin Al-Mehairi Photo credit in captions.
Thank you to Leanna for this article! This is part of a series on Hook of a Book curated by me, Erin Al-Mehairi, celebrating women in history and horror. You can see the starting post HERE and follow along to read the rest of March’s posts, and then, join us in April as it continues on as well.
Also, note that Bookshop is offering a 20% off select women’s titles HERE for women’s history month in March! Plus, portions or sales from them always go to helping indie bookstores. I am a new affiliate for Bookshop.org so books in articles are linked to my affiliate shop.
This series on Hook of a Book is a labor of love only that takes many hours each week. If you want to give a little to help out, you can choose from my family’s wishlist for our rescue cat situation, send editing work my way (offering 30% off for women scheduling through April 15), or if you enjoy what I do, consider supporting me on Ko-fi, HERE and buy me some coffee fuel. Every little bit means the world to me.
Better Out Than In: The Catharsis of Writing Horror by Samantha J Bryant, Author
I’ve got one of those faces. As a child, I was often compared to Laura Ingalls Wilder from the Little House on the Prairie TV show. Roundish, freckled, smiling. Approachable. If you’re deciding which stranger in a crowd to walk up to and ask for directions, you’re going to pick me.
And you’re right. Your instincts are good. I’ll do my best to help you or find someone else who can. I am genuinely a nice person who aspires to make the world better when I can.
That’s probably part of why folks are surprised when they learn that I write horror. “What? A nice girl like you?”
My standard quip is that I might be Laura Ingalls Wilder on the outside, but I’m Wednesday Addams on the inside, but the truth of it is a little more complicated. It’s connected to why I write at all.
I’m a thinker. Probably an overthinker in a lot of ways. I want to understand what’s going on around me, even when I don’t have all the information or there are contradictions or it just plain doesn’t make sense.
The central question of my life is always, “Why?” and that’s a question a lot of people don’t like to dwell on. It’s uncomfortable, and sometimes forces you to confront hard truths that you’d rather deny.
When you’re a child with dark thoughts, even in a family like mine, where that runs rampant in the form of depression and other related mental illnesses, adults worry about you. They try to fix you. They tell you not to worry about such things; to enjoy being a kid while you can. They offer you platitudes at best, and accuse your parents of poor work at worst. They just aren’t comfortable with darkness in a child-sized package, even though it’s just natural to some of us, like brown eyes or crooked teeth.
You quickly learn that it’s easier to put on a sunny smile and keep those kinds of thoughts under wraps. You don’t like making your loved ones worry, after all.
So early on, I turned to writing. I wrote poetry and journaled a lot. I wrote a lot of letters to my parents because I could express myself better on paper than with my speaking voice—if I made myself teary, I could pause, then continue. I could complete the argument rather than dissolving into a blubbery mess that can only mumble.
Writing was then, and still is, my best way to process the world. Somewhere along the way, I discovered the catharsis of turning your pain, worry, and fear into art— capturing the feelings and exploring them in fiction gave me a little separation that I found super useful for finding perspective and being able to analyze and deal with big thoughts or feelings. In some ways, it’s better than journaling. I make more headway in a sideways trajectory than I do barreling in head-on.
Heck, half the time, I don’t even know what’s exactly bothering me right then until I read what I’ve written. Like EM Forster famously said, “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?” I wrote an entire (unpublished) novel and only realized upon completion that part of what I had written was, in part, a gender-swapped version of the dynamics of my first marriage.
Of all the kinds of writing I do—and I’m a multigenre witch who writes superhero, romance, fantasy, women’s fiction, and science fiction, as well as horror—it’s horror that provides the best release valve. Giving my fears and feelings a supernatural explanation allows me that small distance I need to actually process, to get at that underlying “why” that is the truth through a less realistic “why” on the surface.
In my short story, “The Girl in the Pool,” recently reprinted in my Stories from Shadow Hill collection, you get a daylight ghost story, but the underlying “why” is about the death of a child. In “I Should Have Known” coming out soon in a sapphic horror anthology, the main character is worried her partner is turning into something else. In her case, it’s a literal monster, but how many of us have worried that someone we love has changed or that we never really knew who they were in the first place?
Horror gives me a safe place to deal with all of that. Better out than in, y’all.
Whether my characters survive or not, they still give me hope. Horror protagonists are some of the most active characters out there. They *try something* rather than waiting passively.
And even if that something turns out to make things worse instead of better, they persevere right up until that’s not possible anymore.
I love them for that.
Samantha Bryant, Biography –
If you’re looking for Samantha Bryant, check the woods first. She likes to get lost there and she’s probably near the water. Samantha writes about what scares her, and the results are multi-genre, including her beloved Menopausal Superhero series, her GenX romances, and a variety of short fiction that leans dark.
In Shadow Hill, seemingly ordinary events hide extraordinary secrets. The people, the animals,
and the houses themselves are more than they appear on the surface.
In Shadow Hill, even simple summer pleasures like going for a swim or a late-night walk may take a sinister turn. The little girl across the street is not the innocent she appears, and neither is the babysitter.
In Shadow Hill, you may not be able to trust your perceptions, or maybe what you thought you saw was really there.
Stay a while. Meet the neighbors. You may even find you belong here.
Thank you to Samantha for this article! This is part of a series on Hook of a Book curated by me, Erin Al-Mehairi, celebrating women in history and horror. You can see the starting post HERE and follow along to read the rest of March’s posts, and then, join us in April as it continues on as well.
Also, note that Bookshop is offering a 20% off select women’s titles HERE for women’s history month in March! Plus, portions or sales from them always go to helping indie bookstores. I am a new affiliate for Bookshop.org so books in articles books are linked to my affiliate shop.
This series on Hook of a Book is a labor of love only that takes many hours each week. If you want to give a little to help out, you can choose from my family’s wishlist for our rescue cat situation, send editing work my way (offering 30% off for women scheduling through April 15), or if you enjoy what I do, consider supporting me on Ko-fi, HERE and buy me some coffee fuel. Every little bit means the world to me.
Women in Horror: From the Niche to the Mainstream – 35 Books by Women Available or Coming Soon. Get your TBR list ready!
By KC Grifant, Author
Women in Horror Month (#WiHM) is bursting with recommendations this year, for good reason: women are thriving within all the subgenres under the horror umbrella, publishing an impressive variety of spooky tales that span pink horror, body horror, gothic horror, fairytale retellings, cross-genre experiments, and much more.
Whether you’re a die-hard horror fan or just starting to explore new waters, there’s something for every reader, all year long, in this versatile genre. Read on for a curated list of recent and upcoming releases spanning the full gamut of horror subgenres you didn’t know you needed.
Body Horror
The Midnight Muse by Jo Kaplan
When the lead singer of metal band Queen Carrion vanishes in an Oregon forest, her bandmates return a year later to grieve… only find the woods have not let her go. As Brynn’s voice echoes through the trees and a strange fungus grows from the walls of the cabin, they must face whether what haunts them is her ghost, their guilt, or something far more inhuman growing beneath the forest floor.
The Clackamas National Forest has always been a sanctuary for evil—human and alien. The shadows of looming trees and long-abandoned mines shelter poachers and serial killers alike. Then there’s the ruined hotel on the outskirts of picturesque small town Faraday, Oregon, nestled in the foothills of Mt. Hood. The one drowning in mushrooms and fungus not even the local expert can identify. Not to mention the stacks of missing persons cases. Freelance writer Erin Harper arrives in Faraday to find out what happened to her brother, whose disappearance in the forest has haunted her for years. But someone else has gone missing. And when Erin finds her in the creek, the girl vanishes again — this time from the morgue, and days later her fingerprints show up at a murder scene. Maybe it’s a serial killer, or maybe it’s the spores infecting the forest and those lost inside. Erin must find answers quickly, before anyone else goes missing. But she might be next…
Inspired by Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations and Simon Stalenhag’s dystopian tales, Where The Soul Goes explores the abyss of human connection through the culinary arts amidst an alternate 80’s backdrop.
This humorous, heart-pounding, feminist slasher takes on misogynist social pressures with one former scream queen as she is pursued by a serial killer impersonating the antagonist of her films. Former scream queen Barbra Jacobs desperately wants to break out of the box Hollywood has neatly packaged her in. Cast as the star of the Mirror horror franchise films twenty years ago, the breakout role that shaped her career has also destroyed her dreams of being taken seriously as an actress. Now forty, and still seeking the approval of everyone around her, she makes ends meet by signing old photos of herself and doing meet and greets at horror conventions. So when a producer calls asking her host The Monsters We Made, a hot new horror docuseries, she sees it as a step in the right direction. But when fans begin dying around her—and in ways that mimic the kills in her films—Barb is thrust back into a role she can’t seem to walk away The Final Girl. Will she ever break out of the display-box-life she’s been imprisoned in, or will Mirror Man end it all in Barbie’s Scream House?
Mother-Eating by Jess Hagemann A modern retelling of Marie Antoinette’s reign as the queen of France, set in Austin, Texas. Instead of marrying her daughter off to King Louis, Resa Habsburg sells Mary Toni to a pseudo-religious torture-happy sex cult in exchange for a TV contract.
Sample the dark imagination of Donna J. W. Munro as she serves up the awful challenges women experience, the changes and the madness that comes with womanhood, and how every monster must have her day.
Silk & Sinew: A Collection of Folk Horror From the Asian Diaspora, edited by Kristy Park Kulski
From lengths of muscle and vein, ground bones, endless ropes of sinew…it is with our bodies folk horror is woven. Edited by Bram Stoker Award-nominee Kristy Park Kulski, this stunning anthology features contributions from some of the most acclaimed authors of the Asian Diaspora.
The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own by Gwendolyn Kiste
This adult horror collection features sixteen tales that follow morally complex women and queer antiheroines as they contend with shadowy worlds where the regrets and malice of years past still reverberate and shape our doom. Included among the short stories are the Bram Stoker Award-winning “The Eight People Who Murdered Me (Excerpt From Lucy Westenra’s Diary),” “The Girls From the Horror Movie,” “The Sea Witch of the World’s Fair,” and other new gothic tales of body horror, the supernatural, and unapologetic resistance.
A chilling horror anthology of 19 original short stories from a world-class line-up of the masters of horror delves into the histories and traditions of the spookiest season of the year. Presented by Hugo Award winning editor and horror legend Ellen Datlow, it features stories by men as well as women, but it’s featured here on this list for its woman editor. It includes well-loved women in horror such as Lee Murray and Linda Addison.
In 1914, Wendy Darling works by day as a school teacher and by night, she assists soldiers who have returned home from the Western Front. There is one mysterious patient who despite all the care they’ve given him, is in a deep sleep, unable to wake up. One night, when he murmurs the words “Peter Pan,” Wendy is thrown back to a darker time, one that she wishes she could forget.
When one of her students goes missing, it brings back memories of when children went missing and were later found murdered in London many years ago. Wendy believes that Peter Pan, the entity that she believed killed those children, is back. She and her brothers had a close encounter with Peter Pan, after all. But her brothers only remember Peter Pan and Neverland as a fantasy of childhood games. When another child goes missing and signs start to point to Wendy, Scotland Yard digs into old reports, finding that Wendy knew the names of all the children who had been killed. As Wendy tries to prove her innocence, she also has to find a way to stop Peter Pan once and for all.
The Place Where They Buried Your Heart by Christina Henry
On an otherwise ordinary street in Chicago, there is a house. An abandoned house where, once upon a time, terrible things happened. The children who live on this block are told by their parents to stay away from that house. But of course, children don’t listen. Children think it’s fun to be scared, to dare each other to go inside. Jessie Campanelli did what many older sisters do and dared her little brother Paul. But unlike all the other kids who went inside that abandoned house, Paul didn’t return. His two friends, Jake and Richie, said that the house ate Paul. Of course adults didn’t believe that. Adults never believe what kids say. They thought someone kidnapped Paul, or otherwise hurt him. They thought Paul had disappeared in a way that was ordinary, explainable. The disappearance of her little brother broke Jessie’s family apart in ways that would never be repaired. Jessie grew up, had a child of her own, kept living on the same street where the house that ate her brother sat, crouched and waiting. And darkness seemed to spread out from that house, a darkness that was alive— alive and hungry.
Tapeesa is newly out of high school and working in a fish processing plant in the Inupiat village, Chukchi, where she’s lived her whole life. Maybe that’s why people tend to assume she isn’t that bright―or maybe her mama is right and she does have bad blood. Either way, she knows the legend, and she knows the history. Her Ahna told her that the hungry creature―the kushtuka―appears to us in the form of someone we love. It will try to get us to follow it. Follow it where? Those who have gone no longer have throats to tell us. The Kobuk River Valley of remote Alaska draws greedy white men time and time again. But whenever they come, death comes too. This time the white men are here for the long term, to create an open pit, a lead mine just north of the village. When her sister Esther goes missing, Tapeesa will do anything to get her back. Seeking justice, Tapeesa must track down the kidnapper in the darkening Arctic. What awaits beyond the warmth of her village is more horrible than she could imagine and closer to her than she knows.
When Rabbit was ten years old, she was abducted by aliens. Then, it happened again when she was twenty. Now thirty, she’s ready for their next visit. What she isn’t prepared for is her boyfriend callously ending their long-term relationship and ejecting her from their shared home. As her birthday approaches, the aliens still haven’t arrived. Rabbit descends into a spiral of growing paranoia and bizarre bodily transformations, until soon it seems that even her reflection has a mind of its own. With her only refuge being the chaos of strangers who might not have her best interests at heart, Rabbit worries that her ex’s abandonment not only severed her from his life, but also from her own. Struggling to orient herself within a world growing more topsy-turvy by the day, Rabbit must regain control before her aliens at last return.
Dungeon Crawl at the Haunted Mall by Jendia Gammon
Delve into the gnarly guts of a long-dead mall in this gloriously weird and whacked-out romp, where friendship, 80s music, and food court slushies are your weapons of choice against spandexed supernatural creeps.
At its core, the horror genre is an effective vehicle for exploring human behavior. From within its terrifying boundaries, and lack thereof, we can examine monstrosity. We can determine how monsters are labeled, analyze the actions of those deemed monstrous, and prophesy the impacts this labeling and actions have on the world around us. Monsters are personal. Monsters are universal. These facts create an intriguing juxtaposition where the things deemed monstrous or frightening can be shaped by personal experiences, while also representing many aspects of the human condition; our fears are much more similar than dissimilar. This means my monsters are absolutely like yours: they are our collective nightmares. My Monsters Ain’t Like Yours reflects this irony through Black feminist intersectional horror at its rawest.
Tales of the Dark Feminine: Inspirational Stories of the World’s Fiercest Goddesses by V Castro
Dive into a dark, empowering world where folktales, horror and feminist magic collide. This collection features 26 modern retellings of legends and folktales about fierce female deities and spirits from around the world. Perfect for women who own their power.
Cyanide Constellations: And Other Stories by Sara Tantlinger
Enter into a wicked Eden of poisonous plants, radium kisses, and cosmic chaos. In this, her debut fiction collection, Bram Stoker Award-winning author Sara Tantlinger explores the poignant relationship between nature and horror, featuring four brand-new stories, including a Nathaniel Hawthorne-inspired novelette, “The Revenge of Rappaccini’s Daughter.” Just be sure to creep carefully through this garden. The flowers whisper, and the moon holds destructive secrets.
Horror author Jill has just moved to suburban New Jersey, hoping to fit in with the new PTA moms and maybe not weird everyone out with her Final Girl coffee mug. You know. Make some real friends. But then a plastic face-masked serial killer begins slashing their way through town, one overly made-up mom at a time. The police are incredulous. The moms are indignant. And Jill is slowly wrapped into a killer’s murderous spree, until she might just be the last woman standing. A delightfully murderous novel that is equal parts scathing and salacious, Dollface will win you over with its gossip and gore, one body at a time.
Her life is falling apart… like, literally. Being a sugar baby isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. After a failed art career and a failed relationship, Baby has lost her way. She’s adrift in the post-Y2K, pre-Facebook world and stuck in her Florida hometown, selling stolen goods online and working as a sugar baby. Even though she’s hustling hard, there’s still never enough money to pay the bills, and her long-suffering roommate is ready to put her out on the streets. One night after a bad date with her sugar daddy, Baby is assaulted by a mysterious woman in a parking lot. The attack leaves her disoriented and exhausted, so Baby takes to her bed to lie there and rot, like, for real. With every passing day, Baby’s looks and health decline in strange and horrific ways. Soon, it becomes apparent that the strange woman who assaulted her had something to do with her declining state. Baby needs to find her attacker, reclaim her life and her beauty, and get her shit together once and for all. But at what cost?
One thousand lucky celebrities and influencers receive an email invite to an island music festival that no one has ever heard of, with a mere 24 hours to commit to the unknown or refuse what could be the opportunity of a lifetime. Among them are newly sober nepo baby Cassidy and a codependent model named Edie. It’s the party of a lifetime. Until a sudden death turns the festival on its head. Or it would, if anyone knew exactly what happened. Those who saw it firsthand suspect a cover-up, while those who didn’t disregard it as a prank. But shortly thereafter, things on the island start to change. Guests go missing, only to return acting off. Cassidy and Edie remember things that didn’t happen. Soon they realize their social media feeds are warping their surroundings, and the only way they can leave the island alive is by gaming the algorithm and uncovering the secrets behind its otherworldly power.
This is How You Lose the Time War meets Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke in this fast-paced queer horror novel in which an obsessive woman stumbles upon a second-chance romance with her flighty paramour, but it quickly deteriorates into a dark spiral of destruction.
Cold Snap by Angela Sylvaine The sequel to FROST BITE.
It’s 1998, and the town of Demise, North Dakota, is recovering from the Meteor Murders, hundreds of deaths caused by alien worms but blamed on a mass poisoning by a doomsday cult. When a second half of the alien infested meteor is found north of the border in Canada, Realene and Nate will have to face rampant alien worms, a covert military op, and the cold snap of the century.
It’s 1959 in a rural Indiana town, and the local drive-in is hosting their first-ever Dusk Til Dawn Spooktacular! And they’ve got a Percepto surprise in store for the audience, complete with vomit bags, nurses on staff, and a hearse parked just beneath the monsters onscreen. But June has a strange sense about things. Always has. And as the screams spread through the parking lot, reality and theatrics begin to blur for her and her friends. Is it just a gimmick, or is something lurking amongst the moviegoers?
Immortal beloveds Rebekah and Hugh are on vacation! Against a backdrop of ongoing war, this pair of chic emotional vampires from San Francisco sets off on a queer Black Sea Cruise, eager to relax, join an orgy, and feast upon their fellow passengers’ desires and sorrows. When Hugh becomes enchanted by an alluring–and possibly magical–nonbinary social media influencer named Heaven, Rebekah’s reality capsizes, and her true nature is unleashed. A smutty horror-comedy featuring unbridled narcissism, Vampires at Sea is a hilarious snack!
The Spirit Room isn’t a ghost story collection. It’s a celebration of the Southern heart, the pride and persistence that keeps fighting no matter what pain it endures. Here amongst the horror and the history, you’ll find tales of the spirit’s defiance and determination. This is Southern Gothic at its purest and finest. The Spirit Room is a collection you don’t want to miss.
Chance Kirby isn’t new to detective work, but starting over in Hopeful, Texas is a big step. Determined to leave behind her father and stepmother’s shadow and carve out a future of her own, she opens a small PI agency, expecting missing heirlooms and marital disputes. But when the cold case of a murdered teenage girl is dropped on her doorstep, Chance finds herself in the middle of an investigation with no leads. With her adopted sister Tia, her loyal dog Sissy, and the town’s newly arrived police chief Isabella Lopez at her side, Chance soon begins to suspect this murder may be only one piece of a much bigger, and more disturbing, pattern. To stop a predator who, it seems, has managed to evade authorities for decades, Chance must stay one step ahead … or risk becoming the next target.
Reckless, depressed, impulsive and sixteen, Harrow Lane is going to an island that shouldn’t exist to look for answers about the death of her father—the father who accidentally cursed her shortly after she was born. Things immediately go very wrong—beginning with the sinking of the boat that brought them to the island and an ominous chuckle from something that shouldn’t be there—and keep getting worse in ways they couldn’t possibly imagine. Harrow and friends came without being invited and whatever lives there doesn’t like visitors. With no way to reach the outside world and no understanding of the rules of the island, Harrow and her friends are in mortal danger, and knowing who can and can’t be trusted is a thing they left back on shore.
It’s the picture-perfect wedding weekend: The venue is dreamy, the weather is beautiful, love is in the air—and Willa Sullivan is having a bad time. She’s excited to celebrate her best friends’ finally having the big wedding they’ve always wanted, but this is the first time she’s seen her ex-fiancé in months, and he brought a date. Everything feels off, like she stumbled into an alternate universe. But things start to look up when Willa meets Danny, the groom’s charming and single childhood best friend. When they sneak off together, their rendezvous is interrupted by a masked killer terrorizing the reception. Willa and Danny fight to save the ones they love and survive the night, but the killer is unrelenting. A final girl Willa is not. Or is she? She wakes up and it’s the morning of the wedding. She just had the most intense nightmare of her life. Only as the day unfolds, there are some uncanny coincidences that make her question whether it was really a dream, déjà vu, or something more sinister. After a horrifying turn of events, Willa comes to understand that she’s stuck in a loop of carnage and terror that she must learn how to escape or else suffer a fate worse than death—being an eternal wedding guest.
An obsession with a beautiful serial killer entangles a vampire hunter’s daughter in an immortal sapphic romance in this enthralling gothic fantasy from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Lucy Undying.
Prepare the Coffin: Tales of the Macabre by Cassandra O’Sullivan Sachar
Life runs amuck in Blackthorn, Pennsylvania, and residents are rarely safe from the hands—or claws—of nefarious forces. From tragic accidents to revenge slayings to supernatural encounters, trouble is always afoot.
In this bold reimagining of the Old West, dive into haunted canyons, frontier towns hiding cosmic horrors, vast deserts, and far-flung worlds where women take center stage. Women of the Weird West features 25 original speculative poems and short stories set in landscapes both familiar and strange. Gunslingers, outlaws, dreamers, and survivors face overwhelming forces both human and supernatural. Subversive and genre-bending, this anthology captures the wonder, violence, and resilience at the heart of the Old West while featuring women who were all too often left off the page.
When John Stephenson peers out of his window on a Tuesday morning, he sees nothing but clear, gray skies hovering above the houses on his staid suburban street, but the next 48 hours will prove to be a waking nightmare from which John and his neighbors cannot escape. As the first flakes fall, the whispering begins. A woman walking her dog leans into the sidewalk as though something buried beneath speaks to her. As the storm grows in ferocity, each of the residents hear the storm calling. What it says, however, few may survive to repeat. From Shirley Jackson and Bram Stoker Award finalist Rebecca Rowland comes a winter horror novel of cosmic proportions, one in which one neighborhood comes face to face, and ear to ear, with a malevolence as old as the world itself.
Stranger Things: Starcourt Mall Escape by Jennifer Brody
It’s summer vacation, and everyone in Hawkins has plans—everyone except Eleven. She feels trapped by her overprotective father and wants to break out and find a normal teen life like she sees in her magazines. Luckily, Eleven’s not alone. Her friend Max needs to flee a troubling home life and an increasingly dangerous older brother. They decide to escape together, and in Hawkins in the summer of 1985, there is only one place to go: the all-new Starcourt Mall. Will midnight movies and an overnight party in the food court be the solution to their problems? Or will Eleven and Max discover that a little freedom can lead to a lot of trouble, and that the ghosts of the past are never far away? Filled with details from Netflix’s series Stranger Things, this novel explores Hawkins—and Eleven’s place in it—like never before.
When Kristina rises from her violent death, she’s not the same fragile woman her family once abandoned. She’s rageful, powerful, and hungry-for the blood of the ones who were supposed to love her. With a newfound craving to see vengeance and grief served, she launches into a once-in-an-undead-lifetime journey across blood-slicked highways to the scorched Australian bush and her hometown. As her body fails and her mind fractures, she’s left with one final question: Is she here to forgive, or to feed? A transgressive, gory examination of queer identity and found family, Grief Eater sinks its teeth into trauma and what it means to be devoured by grief.
Of course, there are many more books by women coming out this year in an array of subgenres and categories, but I hope this small sampling gets you started.
KC Grifant, Biography –
KC Grifant is an award-winning author, science communicator, and instructor based in Southern California. She writes internationally published horror, fantasy, science fiction, and weird west fiction, including the award-winning Monster Gunslinger series. Dozens of her short stories have appeared on podcasts and in anthologies, games, and magazines.
KC serves as a writing instructor for the University of California – San Diego, an associate editor for Stars & Sabers Press, a mentor for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA), and the co-chair of the San Diego HWA chapter, which she founded in 2016.
Learn more at www.KCGrifant.com or on social media with the handle of @kcgrifant.
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*List Curated (Authors/Books Chosen) by KC Grifant *Editing, Formatting, & Graphics by Erin Al-Mehairi *Covers & Most Links Found by Erin Al-Mehairi (If any covers, links, or dates are wrong, let me know)
Thank you to KC Grifant for curating this women in horror list. This is part of a series on Hook of a Book managed by me, Erin Al-Mehairi, celebrating women in history and horror and all the achievements women earn, creative or otherwise. You can see the starting post HERE and follow along the rest of March and April from the homepage.
Also, note that Bookshop is offering a 20% off select women’s titles HERE for women’s history month in March! Plus, portions or sales from them always go to helping indie bookstores. I am a new affiliate for Bookshop.org so most books in this article are linked to my shop for purchase.
This series on Hook of a Book is a labor of love only that takes many hours. For instance, this post, with all the covers and links, took me over 7 hours to format and complete for publish. If you want to give a little to help me out, you can choose from my family’s wishlist for our rescue cat situation, send editing work my way (offering 30% off for women scheduling through April 15), or if you enjoy what I do, consider supporting me on Ko-fi, HERE and buy me some coffee fuel. Every little bit means the world to me and might keep me doing these.
Chiltrude: A Dark Ages Princess Who Dared to Forge Her Own Fate by Kim Rendfeld, Author
According to the Continuation of Fredegar, after the death of Mayor of the Palace Charles Martel in 741, his daughter, Chiltrude, “did what her wicked stepmother told her: with friends’ help, she went secretly over the Rhine to Duke Odilo of the Bavarians, who married her against the wishes and without permission of her brothers.”
Wait, what? The daughter of Francia’s ruling family eloped? In an age when marriages among aristocrats were all about alliances, this almost never happened. Some unions solidified existing friendships among families and amassed territory for the next generation. Others were in an attempt to make peace between rivals.
Regardless of the goal, the patriarchs made the arrangements, although mothers often had a say in it. The decision was too important to leave up to the bride, who was often a teenager.
Oh, on top of Chiltrude’s choosing her own husband, the couple’s son, Tassilo, was born very soon after the nuptials.
Her story was still a scandal decades later, when the Astronomer refers to it in his biography of her great-nephew Frankish King Louis the Pious.
A word of caution about medieval sources: they are not above exaggeration, distortion, and outright fabrication. But that contemporary source was good enough for my purposes. Chiltrude’s story intrigued me. I had to explore it. The result is my forthcoming novel, Duchess of the New Dawn (June 16).
Few Facts behind the Fiction
We don’t know much about the historical Chiltrude, and unfortunately, no letters from her survive. What I am about to reveal about her life may be spoilers for the novel, so choose to continue on knowing this, but they are needed for this article.
Chiltrude was born sometime before the death date of her mother, Chrodtrude, in 725, and is believed to have lived until 753 or 754. To get an idea of what Chiltrude’s life might have been like, it helps to know her family, the Pippinids, who became the Carolingians when one of them seized the crown.
Chiltrude’s father, Charles Martel, or Charles the Hammer, is best known for his victory over the Arabs at Poitiers in 732. From 717 until his death, Charles ruled the realm in a Merovingian king’s name. He was so powerful that he ruled in the name of a deceased monarch for several years. In essence, he was a king without the title, which is why I refer to Chiltrude as a princess when promoting the book.
{14th century illustration of Charles Martel on his deathbed. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons}
Charles had a complicated personal life. In addition to Chiltrude, Charles’s first wife, Chrodtrude, was mother of his sons Karlomann and Pippin. As with many early medieval women, the information about Chrodtrude is scant, but she must have been important. The Pippinids augmented their power through marriages to high-ranking families, and two of Chrodtrude’s grandsons, Charlemagne and Bavarian Duke Tassilo, named daughters after her.
After Chrodtrude died, Charles invaded Bavaria, teaming up with the King of the Lombards to defend Hugbert’s claims as duke. Charles left Bavaria with Swanahild, who was from the prestigious Agilolfing clan and might (key word) have been Hugbert’s sister, and they married. (Another traveler, Swanahild’s aunt, conveniently disappeared later. That often happened to people who stood in Charles’s way.)
Charles was serving the king’s role by marrying a high-ranking woman from a foreign land. The monarch at the time, Theuderic, was likely a child. Children could be betrothed, but the marriage itself would have to wait. Apparently, Charles and Hugbert didn’t want to wait.
History is silent on whether Swanahild liked the idea of wedding Charles, who was probably a lot older. Nevertheless, she stepped up to her role and sometimes governed on behalf of her husband and witnessed his donations. She bore him another son, Grifo, and like many medieval mothers, expected the boy to have a share of the inheritance.
Charles was not a faithful husband to Chrodtrude or Swanahild. He had a concubine named Ruodhaid and had children by her. We don’t know how many or if there were other mistresses. (To add an element of simplicity to this complex situation, in Duchess, I made Ruodhaid the mother of all three of his sons – that we know of – born out of wedlock.)
A Consequential Visit
We don’t know where and how Chiltrude spent her childhood or whether her father wanted her to be a queen or duchess in a foreign land, a countess in Francia, or an abbess.
But her life was about to change in 740, when her father was in failing health. Bavarian Duke Odilo, Hugbert’s successor, sought refuge in Charles’s court in Quierzy in today’s France. He had been driven out of his duchy by Swidger, Count of the Nordgau (and an antagonist in my novel) and Swidger’s allies in Linden Grove. Apparently, they thought Odilo was Charles’s puppet.
{Circa 1890 illustration by Wilhelm Sohn of Grifo capturing Chiltrude and Tassilo. Photo credit Wikimedia Commons.}
Odilo’s background is murky. A kinsman of Swanahild, he was an Agilolfing through his mother, who was a sister or daughter of Bavarian Duke Theodo. He might have been one of six sons of Gottfried, Duke of neighboring Alamannia. When Gottfried died in 709, the duke’s sons fought among themselves on and off for decades. Charles’s father, Pippin of Herstal, and later Charles himself, were not above meddling in the duchy’s affairs.
By 732, Charles had seized a great deal of territory in Alamannia, leaving Duke Theudebald—who succeeded at least two brothers—with only the Necker Valley and the easternslopes of the Black Forest. Odilo might have owned property in Alamannia, but he became Duke of the Bavarians in 737, with Charles’s permission. Did Swanahild influence whether Odilo succeeded Hugbert?
From an early medieval perspective, Chiltrude and Odilo would have been a good match. The marriage would further solidify an alliance between two ruling families. Although Odilo might swear loyalty to the Frankish king, the Duchy of Bavaria was essentially independent.
One scholar has said the author of the Continuation got it wrong and that Chiltrude and Odilo were married in Francia while Charles was alive and their son was born there. Other scholars have said the two became lovers. I’m going with the second possibility.
How Odilo’s dilemma with the trouble-making Bavarian noblemen got resolved is a mystery. There was no war to restore him. Might it have involved diplomacy on the part of Swanahild, who also had ties to Swidger? Regardless, Odilo likely returned to Bavaria the following spring. And Chiltrude might have been pregnant.
Literally at War with Relatives
When Charles died in 741, succession was complicated. Frankish tradition was to split the realm among the sons born in wedlock rather than have the eldest inherit everything. Charles’s will split the kingdom among Karlomann, Pippin, and Grifo.
Karlomann and Pippin did not like how their father divided the realm and went to war with Grifo. Chiltrude fled to Bavaria. We don’t know the route or the friends who helped her. That one sentence from the Continuation is all we have.
Karlomann and Pippin prevailed over Grifo that December and imprisoned their half-brother at Neufchâteau (in Karlomann’s territory) and his mother at Chelles, a double monastery for communities of religious men and women. The abbess of Chelles had ties to the Merovingians and the Pippinids. We don’t hear about Swanahild again.
The next year, Odilo sent soldiers to Aquitaine to support its duke, Hunoald. Was this a case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend? How did this affect Odilo and Chiltrude’s relationship? If we are to believe the Continuator, Karlomann and Pippin prevailed, leaving destruction in their wake.
In 743, Karlomann apparently decided the Frankish throne could no longer be vacant. Kings provided moral authority to their mayors, and dukes of outlying areas like Bavaria were more likely to swear fealty. Enter Childeric III, who is rarely mentioned (but is a character in my book).
Still, Chiltrude’s husband and brothers were not done fighting, and the pope sent an envoy to try to prevent a war. Might Chiltrude have asked Rome for assistance? The prior pope had unsuccessfully sought an alliance with her father.
Papal diplomacy failed. On the River Lech, the Frankish and Bavarian soldiers taunted each other for two weeks across the swamp. Then, the Franks attacked in the middle of the night. Odilo was lucky to escape with his life.
Both sides suffered heavy losses, and both sides apparently claimed victory. A few months after the battle, the episcopal chancery at Freising bestowed on Odilo the honorific “gloriosissimus,” a title usually reserved for Frankish kings. The sources don’t say what role, if any, Chiltrude had in that development, but since she was a member of Francia’s ruling family, it would not be too much of a stretch to presume she wanted such an honor for her husband. It was as close to equality as she could get with her brothers.
The next spring, Odilo and Karlomann negotiated a separate peace, which ensured Bavaria’s security from both Frankish mayors. Pippin would need to march through Karlomann’s territory to reach Odilo’s lands. Archbishop Boniface, who had ties to both Karlomann and Odilo, might have brokered the pact, but it is possible Chiltrude played a role as well. Women were expected to weave peace between their warring relatives.
The peace between Chiltrude’s eldest brother and husband held, but events took an unexpected turn in 747. Karlomann decided to retire as mayor and become a monk. The father of two sons, he might have been 39. The reason is a mystery. Sources and scholarship conflict over whether his eldest son, Drogo, had reached his majority (about age 15 or 16), but it makes sense for Karlomann to wait until his heir was old enough to rule.
Pippin then freed Grifo or convinced Drogo to do so. Considering what happened next, Chiltrude, Pippin, and Drogo might have come to regret it. Grifo refused to be ruled by his older brother and went to Saxony with a small military household. He apparently had a following among young aristocrats without property.
{A detail from a fresco on the ceiling of Niederaltaich abbey church with Bishop Pirmin, founder of the abbey, planting a new oak together with Bavarian Duke Odilo. Credit: Wolfgang Sauber – Wikimedia Commons}
Tragedy
On January 18, 748, Chiltrude became a widow. All we know is that Odilo died. We don’t know his age or the cause. Their son had just turned 6. He probably was named the duke, with his mother serving as regent until he was old enough to rule, a common practice.
Bavarian politics became volatile. Grifo, an Agilolfing through his mother, had supporters in the duchy, Swidger among them. In the fall, he arrived in Bavaria with warriors and claimed guardianship of Chiltrude and Tassilo.
Pippin invaded with a large army later that fall. After a months-long standoff on the River Inn, Pippin prevailed after threatening to cross the river and destroy the Bavarians. What happened to Grifo is uncertain. It is possible he escaped. One of the annals has Pippin capturing his half-brother and offering him the duchy of Le Mans, comprising 12 counties in strategic location. It could have been a peace offering. However, one scholar who describes Pippin as prudent believes the offer came shortly after Grifo was freed, not after the conflict in Bavaria. I’m inclined to agree with that assessment.
Pippin and Chiltrude resolved their differences, with the restoration of Tassilo. This is the last we hear about her, and I am content to leave it at that happy moment.
Kim Rendfeld, Biography –
Kim Rendfeld is the author of four novels set in early medieval times, including Duchess of the New Dawn.
740: Chiltrude, the daughter of Francia’s most powerful family, aspires to wed her beloved Odilo, the duke of Bavaria, and rule by his side. But her dying father forbids the marriage. As her brothers’ rivalry threatens to shatter the realm, she faces imprisonment in an abbey and fears for the baby in her womb.
Defying her kinsmen, she will risk everything to seize her heart’s desire, protect her child, and preserve Bavaria’s cherished independence. Amid the shifting loyalties of the duchy’s influential clans, she must outmaneuver Odilo’s archrival, her hostile in-laws, and most of all, her own brothers.
In Duchess of the New Dawn, Kim Rendfeld brings to life forgotten historical characters and events from the days of Charles Martel and tells the story of one woman’s determination to choose her own path.
Edited (copy edited) by Erin Al-Mehairi Photos & Captions Via Article Author
Thank you to Kim for this extensive article and visiting Hook of a Book again! This is part of a series on Hook of a Book curated by me, Erin Al-Mehairi, celebrating women in history and horror and all the achievements women earn, creative or otherwise. You can see the starting post HERE and follow along the rest of March and April from the homepage.
Also, note that Bookshop is offering a 20% off select women’s titles HERE for women’s history month in March! Plus, portions or sales from them always go to helping indie bookstores.
This series on Hook of a Book is a labor of love only that takes many hours. If you want to give a little to help out, you can choose from my family’s wishlist for our rescue cat situation, send editing work my way (offering 30% off for women scheduling through April 15), or if you enjoy what I do, consider supporting me on Ko-fi, HERE and buy me some coffee fuel. Every little bit means the world to me.
I am a professional journalist, writer, editor, publicist and marketing and public relations professional, with bachelor's degrees in Journalism, English, and History. I have thirty years of experience in a wide variety of areas in my fields and I’ve currently operated Hook of a Book for fourteen years. I’m also an author and a poet!
I'm the author of Breathe. Breathe., a dark poetry and short fiction collection published by Unnerving 2017, which debuted at #2 on the Amazon best-selling paid charts right behind NYT best-selling poet Rupi Kaur's newest release and in the Amazon paid top five of horror short stories. This was the extended edition, following a sold-out print chapbook special edition. My poems and stories have been in multiple anthologies and print and e-zines.
In addition to publishing Breathe. Breathe., I also have a short story in the anthology Hardened Hearts, called "The Heart of the Orchard." My short story from Breathe. Breathe., "Dandelion Yellow," has also been re-printed in Project Entertainment Network's anthology My Favorite Story, a collection of stories from podcasters on that former network. My poem "Chained by Love," was featured in the February 2018 issue of Enchanted Conversation: a fairy tale magazine. In the anthology Dark Voices, an all-female TOC published in 2018 with proceeds going to breast cancer awareness, I have a poem called "Wrapped in Battle." In 2018, I also spent time as a co-editor on a Gothic anthology of poetry and short stories called Haunted Are These Houses, featuring some of the biggest names in poetry. 2019 saw several poems published in The Siren's Call Magazine, a short story called "Mia" in the print magazine Outpost 28 which published on Halloween 2019, and a long fiction story of mine published alongside six other author stories in the anthology 7 Deadly Sins of the Apocalypse (which debuted at #1 paid on Amazon best-seller list for horror anthologies at the end of Sept. 2019). In late 2020, I had a short story in the anthology We Are Wolves published by Burial Day, which is an anthology raising funds for women of sexual assault. In 2022, I had a short story about Aphrodite in the anthology Musings of the Muses from Brigid's Gate Press.
I have several books, collections, and poems in various genres in writing process, too, and hope to get a lot more of my own writing completed within the next year. I’m looking for publishers and representation.
With Hook of a Book Media, I have specialized in public relations (PR) and marketing for authors in many forms, and as well I work as a writing coach and editor. I’ve been an editor in some form for thirty years, but almost fourteen in fiction. For three years, I was an editor at an indie horror press, where I also performed marketing and publishing duties. I also recently spent five and a half years with Raw Dog Screaming Press doing PR/publicity. I’ve also frequently done work for several other presses and I am a freelance editor for many authors in various genres (kept that afloat while working for publishers). I have worked with hundreds of authors, many award nominees and winners, with both PR and editing work.
I also have always volunteered in my community, spending fifteen continuous years on many various board of directors and trustees, the most recent spentding two years as President of the Board of Directors for a growing mental health center and rape crisis domestic violence safe haven. I've won a Woman of Achievement Award from my community, been featured with my PR business in Success Magazine, and was the Young Careerist of the Year Representative for the State of Ohio to the Business and Professional Women National Conference.
Besides once being a judge for my past town of residence’s holiday parade, more recently I have judged several literary awards. I have been a screener and final fiction judge for three years for the Ohioana Awards, now the Ohio Book Awards, one of the most prestigious state awards for literature in the nation. I also was a guest judge of the Halloween fiction contest for Olive Branch Review online writing community in 2024.
I have three children - ages 25, 21, and 17 - who I love to spend time with, and a menagerie of rescue cats that we care for to try to give them better lives. I love books, reading, writing, art, photography, hiking, travel, and Lake Erie. I really enjoy the outdoors and escape to it whenever I can. I live in rural Ohio nestled in the forest, but am close enough to spend many hours every week enjoying all the wonder the Cleveland area has to offer.
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