Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (53 page)

Marly Youmans
writes in a number of forms, small and large. She writes poems. She once was mad enough to write an epic poem. She writes novels, though people say (sometimes disapprovingly!) that she never does the same thing twice. And she writes Southern fantasy novels for children veering toward adulthood; she hadn't planned on that one, but unexpected things happen after children are born.
Her collaborations with artists include work with painters Makoto Fujimura, Clive Hicks-Jenkins (Wales), Graham Ward (England), Lynn Digby (Ohio, US), and composer Paul Digby (UK-born but now an Ohioan).

Sonya Taaffe
's short fiction and poetry can be found in the collections
Ghost Signs
(Aqueduct Press),
A Mayse-Bikhl
(Papaveria Press),
Postcards from the Province of Hyphens
(Prime Books), and
Singing Innocence and Experience
(Prime Books), as well as in various anthologies including
The Humanity of Monsters
and
Genius Loci: Tales of the Spirit of Place
. She is currently senior poetry editor at
Strange Horizons
; she holds master's degrees in Classics from Brandeis and Yale and once named a Kuiper belt object. She lives in Somerville with her husband and two cats.

Gemma Files
is a former film critic and teacher turned award-winning horror author, best-known for her Hexslinger Series of Weird Westerns (
A Book of Tongues
,
A Rope of Thorns
and
A Tree of Bones
, all from ChiZine Publications). She has also published two collections of short fiction, two chapbooks of speculative poetry and a story cycle (
We Will All Go Down Together: Stories of the Five-Family Coven
, CZP). Her new novel,
Experimental Film
, will be available as of November, 2015. To learn more, check up on her at http://musicatmidnight-gfiles.blogspot.ca, or follow Gemma on Twitter, Tumblr or Livejournal.

Molly Tanzer
is the British Fantasy and Wonderland Book Award-nominated author of two collections:
A Pretty Mouth
(Lazy Fascist, 2012) and
Rumbullion and Other Liminal Libations
(Egaeus, 2013). Her debut novel,
Vermilion
(Word Horde) is now available, and her second novel,
The Pleasure Merchant
, will be published by Lazy Fascist in November of 2015. She is also the editor of the forthcoming
Swords v. Cthulhu
(Stone Skin Press). Her Lovecraftian fiction has appeared in venues such as
The Book of Cthulhu
(I and II) (Night Shade),
The Book of the Dead
(Jurassic London) and
The Starry Wisdom Library
(PS Publishing). She has had additional short fiction appear in
Schemers
(Stone Skin Press),
Running with the Pack
(Prime Books) and
The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction
, among others. She lives in Boulder, Colorado with her husband and a very bad cat. She blogs—infrequently—about hiking, vegan cooking, movies, and other stuff at http://mollytanzer.com, and tweets as @molly_the_tanz.

Kelda Crich
is a new-born entity. She's been lurking in her creator's mind for a few years. Now she's out in the open. Find her in London looking at strange things in medical museums. Her work has appeared in the
Lovecraft E-zine
,
Journal of Unlikely Acceptances
,
The Mad Scientist Journal
and in the Bram Stoker Award-winning
After Death
anthology.

Karen Heuler
’s stories have appeared in over eighty literary and speculative journals and anthologies, including several “Best of” collections. She has published two short-story collections and four novels, and won an O. Henry award in 1998. She lives in New York with her dog, Philip K. Dick, and her cats, Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte.

Lois H. Gresh
is a six-time
New York Times
best-selling author and USA Today best-selling author of 29 books and 65 short stories. Look for her trilogy of Lovecraftian Sherlock Holmes thrillers coming soon from Titan Books. Her books have been published in 22 languages. Current titles are
Cult of The Dead and Other Weird and Lovecraftian Tales
(Hippocampus, 2015),
Innsmouth Nightmares
(Editor, PS Publishing, 2015), and
Dark Fusions: Where Monsters Lurk!
(Editor, PS Publishing, 2013).

Nancy Kilpatrick
is an award-winning author who has published 18 novels, over 200 short stories, and has edited 15 anthologies, including the 2015 works
Expiration Date
, and
nEvermore! Tales of Murder, Mystery & the Macabre
. Her most recent short fiction can be found in the anthologies
Searchers After Horror
,
The Darke Phantastique
,
Zombie Apocalypse: Endgame!
,
Blood Sisters: Vampire Stories by Women
,
The Madness of Cthulhu 2
,
Innsmouth Nightmares
,
Gothic Lovecraft
and non-fiction in
Stone Skin Bestiary
. Join her on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/nancy.kilpatrick.31

and on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/nancykwriter

E.R. Knightsbridge
hails from London, England, and enjoys such things as peeling stickers off fruit and binging on TV box sets. Her stories have been published online at
Camroc Press Review
and in a print anthology of dystopian tales,
Small Town Futures
. Another flash fiction piece will appear in the Shade Mountain Press
Female Complaint
anthology in November 2015.

Amanda Downum
may or may not be a barrel of crabs piloting a cunning human disguise. She is the author of the Necromancer Chronicles, published by Orbit Books, and
Dreams of Shreds & Tatters
, from Solaris. Her short fiction has appeared in
Strange Horizons
and
Weird Tales
, as well as
Lovecraft Unbound
and
The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu
. She lives in Austin, Texas, but will one day return to the sea. With or without the human disguise.

Christine Morgan
works the overnight shift in a psychiatric facility, which plays havoc with her sleep schedule but allows her a lot of writing time. A lifelong reader, she also reviews, beta-reads, occasionally edits and dabbles in self-publishing. Her other interests include gaming, history, superheroes, crafts, cheesy disaster movies and training to be a crazy cat lady. She can be found online at https://www.facebook.com/christinemorganauthor and https://christinemariemorgan.wordpress.com/

Elizabeth Bear
was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. This, coupled with a childhood tendency to read the dictionary for fun, led her inevitably to penury, intransigence, the mispronunciation of common English words, and the writing of speculative fiction.

She lives in Massachusetts with a Giant Ridiculous Dog. Her partner, acclaimed fantasy author Scott Lynch, lives in Wisconsin.

Sarah Monette
was born and raised in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the secret cities of the Manhattan Project. She studied English and Classics in college, and have gone on to complete an M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature. Her novels are published by Ace Books. She has also collaborated with Elizabeth Bear on
A Companion to Wolves
(Tor). Her short stories have appeared in many different places, including
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet
,
Alchemy
,
Weird Tales
, and
Strange Horizons
. She collects books, and her husband collects computer parts, so their living space is the constantly contested border between these two imperial ambitions.

Storm Constantine
has written 35 books, both fiction and non-fiction, and well over 50 short stories. Her novels span several genres, from literary fantasy, to science fiction, to dark fantasy. She is most well known for her Wraeththu trilogy (omnibus edition published by Immanion Press). Storm is the founder of the independent publishing house Immanion Press, created with the aim of getting classic titles from established writers back into print and introduce innovative new authors to a reading audience. She’s currently working on several ideas for new books, as well as short stories. She lives in the Midlands of England, with her husband, Jim, and four cats.

R.A. Kaelin
is a short story writer from Lubbock, Texas. She graduated from the University of North Texas with a BA in English literature. This is her first published work. You can visit her at www.RAKaelin.net.

Lynne Jamneck
is a fiction writer and editor. She has been nominated for the Sir Julius Vogel and Lambda awards, and holds an MA in English Literature from Auckland University, New Zealand. Her fiction has appeared in
Jabberwocky
,
H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror
,
Something Wicked Magazine, Fantastique Unfettered
and the collections
So Fey: Queer Fairy Fiction
,
Tales from the Bell Club, Unconventional Fantasy: A Celebration of Forty Years of the World Fantasy Convention
and
Black Wings of Cthulhu 6
(forthcoming). She is the editor of
Periphery: Erotic Lesbian Futures
(2008) and with S.T. Joshi, she co-edited
Gothic Lovecraft
(Cycatrix Press, 2015).

She blogs at:
http://lynnejamneckdiaries.blogspot.co.nz/

Shadows of the Evening
by Joyce Carol Oates

As I reread this dreamlike story, written some years ago, I am struck by figures of speech and repetitions that resonate deeply with me.

"Magdelena" is imagined as my mother Carolina Bush, who was known as Lena; she too had been born in the Black Rock neighborhood of Buffalo, to a large family of Hungarian immigrants; she too was "given away"—but not at the age of sixteen, at the age of less than a year. My mother's remarks as an elderly woman were poignant to me—"My mother didn't want me. My mother gave me away." Through many decades she remembered this wound of childhood.

The Lovecraftian aura is that of Lovecraft in his more benign, dreamlike and entranced state. Here is not the raw, overwrought horror of the more famous (or infamous) of Lovecraft's stories like “The Rats in the Walls,” “The Dunwich Horror,” or anything involving monstrous creatures; here is a more subtle Lovecraftian accursedness, embodied not in the innocent young girl-witness but in the singer with a beautiful voice who cannot stop singing, whose fate is to sing. Obviously, the singer is an emblem of the artist; the girl suggests normalcy, though she is very much attracted to the singer as a young man, and would have sacrificed herself for him if he had allowed her. (Instead, another presumably innocent young woman has taken her place.) Magdalena will marry a well-to-do young man, whom we've just glimpsed in her aunt's parlor; she will be happily fulfilled as a wife and mother; she will not be coupled with the accursed singer/ artist.

There is some fable here of the doomed artist and his appeal to others who can be haunted by him, though they can never understand him.

It's clear that I was reading Lovecraft's short, sketch-like story "The Music of Erich Zann"—not a typical Lovecraft story, but one which lingers in the memory like a fading dream.

The Genesis Mausoleum
by Colleen Douglas

When I was a young teen, I went to visit my grandmother, who lived in a village on the East Coast of the Demerara River. She lived in an old-style house, built on stilts near the main road which ran through the village. On late afternoons I would sit on the stairs after my chores. It was one such afternoon that I spotted the flashes of red against the verdant green of the parapet on the opposite side of the road. I was fascinated and tried to discern the source, which turned out to be a green frog tied in a red bow. It proceeded to make its way up the stairs of a neighbour’s house and as it reached the top stair it disappeared. Almost instantly, there was awful screaming from within that house. I ran inside to tell my gran what I had seen. She told me to say nothing. That memory stayed with me. Later, I learned the woman in that house was an outsider who came to teach the children and had started an affair with the son of a “spiritualist” (I use the term exceedingly loosely). At the time, I had no context, but in later years when I thought of what I’d seen, William Blake came to mind… "There are things known, and things unknown, and in between are the Doors." It seemed to me that like the neighbor in my grandmother’s village, the characters in “The Genesis Mausoleum” had met such a “door”.