Women in Horror Month: Part Four.
Here we are on our fourth installment of Women in Horror Month!
Today we have the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Semi-Finalist…J Lincoln Fenn whose novel Poe has wowed readers everywhere. Fenn lends her humorous & quirky manner to an insightful post of one of WiHM’s leading ladies, Mary Shelley.
MARY SHELLEY, GENRE-BENDER
It’s the summer of 1816, Switzerland, although it doesn’t feel like it—the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora has cast the world into a long volcanic winter. What’s a bored girl to do?
If you’re 19-year old Mary Shelley, you decide you’re going to win a bet about who can come up with the scariest tale, this although you’re up against Percy Shelley (you’re not married to him yet) and Lord Byron.
And a classic novel that bent, blended, and invented genres, is born.
Although Frankenstein most obviously checks the horror genre box, it carries romantic and gothic elements and is considered by many to be one of the earliest examples of science fiction too. That genre mix was popular with readers, not so much with critics. The Quarterly Review called Frankenstein, “a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity”.
Apparently they hadn’t read the Monsanto prospectus.
As if mixing horror, gothic, romance, and sci-fi wasn’t enough of a feat, Frankenstein also sprinkles in some Greek mythology. Five second quiz for all you horror aficionados—what was Frankenstein’s alternate title?
A) Not so Warm Bodies
B) Dawn of the Newly Re-Assembled Dead
C) The Modern Prometheus
You’re right, it’s C (can’t fool you none).
Prometheus was more than a bad prequel to Aliens. In the Western psyche, Prometheus serves as the epitome of bad things that happen when you pursue science without understanding its dangerous consequences, interesting because at the time Shelley wrote Frankenstein, experiments were being performed on dead flesh. These experiments included the electro-stimulation of executed prisoner George Forster’s limbs at Newgate in London. “On the first application of the process to the face, the jaws of the deceased criminal began to quiver, and the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye was actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion.”
Don’t even ask me about the frogs.
So now we have horror, gothic, romance, sci-fi, Greek mythology and the moral implications of contemporary issues.
Let’s add some personal experience, shall we?
Shelley did what any good writer of her, or any time, would do, which was to mix bits of her own life, her experienced horror, into the story. Frankenstein, (the scientist, not the monster who had no name), loses his mother to scarlet fever, then his brother and wife are murdered by the creature. Shelley’s own mother died eleven days after giving birth to her, leaving an epic void in her life. She lost one of her children shortly after giving birth, and lived through the suicide of her stepmother and stepsister. Not exactly a stranger to death’s sting. And it’s quite probable that the emotional impact of her personal experience is what gives Frankenstein its longevity and contemporary relevance.
Do audiences still want that kind of genre blend?
When I first started to shop my novel POE, everyone loved the writing but no one knew where to sell it. And they told me that if, miraculously, they did find a publisher, where the heck would the bookstores shelve it? All would be better if POE colored inside some genre lines. It couldn’t be horror and new adult and dark urban fantasy and literary. It couldn’t span Russian occult practices in the early 20th century, the séance craze during America’s gilded age, a contemporary and economically depressed New England town, magic squares, ghosts, angels/demons, my own horrific hospital experience plus my parents’ deaths, and, for god’s sake, be irreverent too.
I tried, but I just couldn’t write it any other way. It wouldn’t let me.
Through sheer, dumb luck, I finally entered POE into the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest where it placed first in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror category. Then, through an even bigger stroke of dumb luck, Amazon’s 47North was publishing the winner because they were looking for genre-bending work.
I’d finally found the island of misfit toys where I belonged, in a cadre of other authors who don’t fit into boxes neatly either. Maybe Shelley should be our patron saint.
Because if Frankenstein is any example, one should be careful about underestimating the market for books that defy easy categorization.
Here’s to new latitudes, odd genre blends, and virtual shelves you can call whatever the hell you want.
J. Lincoln Fenn grew up in New England and graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of New Hampshire, studying with poet laureate Charles Simic, and author John Yount, a mentor to John Irving. She is distantly related to three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Archibald MacLeish (her biological grandmother was MacLeish’s first cousin).
She is currently the Director of Marketing for an academic institution, and she lives with her family in Hawaii.
Some reviews for Poe, the new novel by J Lincoln Fenn.
“A delightful, bravura piece of gothic pop…fans of Neil Gaiman and the aforementioned Buffy will be immediately taken, but there’s a literate edge to the pyrotechnics that makes for an unlikely and welcome marriage between the spook story and literature of altogether less ectoplasmic substance.” —Publisher’s Weekly
“Hitting the high notes of multiple genres, her talent is wicked raw and proudly untamed. This is Fenn’s first novel—I can’t wait to see what comes next.” —Bloody-Disgusting.com
Here’s an excerpt from her novel Poe…
CLINK. IT SOUNDS LIKE someone just put a penny in a jar. Unfamiliar voices in the distance, fuzzy and hard to pinpoint. My ears are ringing. Damn, why is it so cold? There’s something else too, a putrid stench, like shit and rotten pizza mixed together.
Focus.
I was breathing water—it was cool and felt good in my lungs. I was drowning, dying, and strangely I didn’t seem to mind. And there was a woman in the water—ice blue skin, blond hair floating like tendrils of seaweed. She wanted to tell me something, and I can see a solitary word bubbling from her frigid lips, my name—Dimitri. Then something else, something important, but I can’t pull the memory to the surface and it is so cold, so very, very cold.
Gradually the ringing in my ears stops. My hearing starts to clear. There’s a whoosh of something like a fan, and a refrigerator hum. I try to open my eyes, and they refuse.
Clink, clank, clunk. Someone is humming. Humming?
Then a low voice. “So my wife is like, you need to take a shower before you come home from work, you smell like cadavers, and I said, you don’t seem to mind cashing the checks.”
A lighter voice, feminine. “Um humm.” Obviously not listening.
“She can’t say anything then ’cause she’s got a new Gucci purse she doesn’t want to tell me about. Like I don’t read the credit card statements—hey do you mind turning that thing off while we’re working?”
A sigh, then a click. “It keeps me focused.”
“Can’t believe your iPod still works after it fell in that guy’s stomach. You’d think the acid would have shorted the battery.”
“Waterproof case. I did have to get new earbuds though.”
Deep voice guy snorts with laughter. Then a sudden intake of breath. “Damn, have you ever seen a stab wound this deep before? The knife punctured her rib.”
Thumpity, thump thump. My heart starts to beat. It’s cautious, like it’s not sure whether there’s much point, but methodically plods along anyways; each throb pushes more of the fizzy darkness aside with a familiar, staccato rhythm that’s reassuring. Suddenly every nerve in my body kicks in, tingling with a fiery determination—it’s a rush. I’m naked. I’m lying on something cold, metallic, and decidedly uncomfortable. I try a breath and the air burns my lungs, but they seem functional.
“What kind of knife would do that?”
“A very sharp one.”
“Ha, ha, very funny.
Pause.
“Check out the spleen. It looks like something was eating it.”
“Maybe she had cats. Cats are heartless.”
“Cats are not heartless,” replies the feminine voice.
“When’s the last time you heard about a dog eating its dead owner? Never.”
Snap, crack, clink.
My eyelids finally flutter—a fuzzy light glows behind something white and cottony. I gather my jangling neurons, point them at my right arm—move arm, move—and manage to jerk at the sheet that’s covering me. A new chemical stink wafts by, formaldehyde, and above me a bright, round, fluorescent light nearly blinds me. I slowly turn my head, feeling my brain slosh inside my skull, and it takes a moment for the dizziness to clear. For me to see.
A man and a woman in surgical scrubs stand in front of a gray naked body; bright red blood spatters their sleeves and gloves. The man holds a large pair of shears, also covered in blood, and the woman has a white dangling earbud that trails from beneath her surgical cap to a bulge in her right front pocket. They both stare, perplexed, into the abdomen of what appears to be the corpse of a fifty-ish woman; her frizzy gray hair is badly permed and she stares at me with the glossy eyes of a dead fish. A flap of yellowed, thick, and fatty flesh hangs from her waist, and I can see blue veins crisscrossing the tissue, while some kind of white, viscous liquid oozes onto the linoleum floor. A bloody heap that looks like raw hamburger rests on a hanging metal scale. Ten pounds.
I’m in a morgue. My stomach heaves, but there’s nothing to throw up. My body is completely drained. Empty.
“Hey did you do that?”
“What?” Something squishes.
“Drowning dude’s sheet is off.”
“Well why don’t you go fix that, my hands are a little tied if you know what I mean.”
The woman mutters, “I’m not some kind of first year resident…”
A scream builds in the back of my throat and dies there.
Footsteps softly pad across the linoleum floor. I can feel the rough sheet being pulled back up and over my feet, my legs, my chest. I need to move—I need to move now. Somehow I turn my head, look at the woman in scrubs directly in her eyes. Blink. I open my mouth, and a small rush of water pours out.
“HOLY SHIT!” She jumps back, knocking the scale; it swings like a pendulum, and the hand on the dial swerves wildly as the bloody heap slides to the floor with a wet plop.
My eyes roll towards the back of my head and I reach one hand out, grasping nothing. Suddenly I remember what the woman with the ice blue skin said in her strange, watery voice.
Dimitri. He’s coming. He’s coming for you.
Then the darkness wells up, envelopes me, and I’m gone again.
Join us next time where we have author Rachel Aukes…see you there!
