Six female horror authors to try this Halloween
Lauren Beukes
South African novelist Lauren Beukes is an entirely original voice in crime fiction, blending together sci-fi, horror and crime. Her 2013 novel, The Shining Girls, which featured a time-traveling serial killer, was intensely creepy and earned her praise from Stephen King and James Ellroy. In her latest novel, Broken Monsters, Detective Gabriella Versado is stumped when part-human, part-animal corpses start appearing in Detroit.
Octavia Butler
Octavia Butler is best known as a sci-fi author but her books often explore horrifying subjects. In particular, Kindred. The book is the first-person account of a young African-American woman writer, Dana, who finds herself shuttled between her California home in 1976 and a pre-Civil War Maryland plantation.
Emily Carroll
Emily Carroll’s comics are chilling and macabre in the very best kind of way. In Through the Woods, she shares five mysterious, spine-tingling stories that follow journeys into the woods. Hers are fairy tales gone badly wrong and if you’ve ever enjoyed the work of Angela Carter (particularly, her wonderful collection The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories), Carroll is an excellent author to sample next.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
If you haven’t yet read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s unforgettable 1892 short story, ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’, you’re seriously missing out. A semi-autobiographical and chilling depiction of a woman’s mental breakdown, it was essentially a response to the doctor who had tried to cure Gilman of her depression through a 'rest cure’. The woman in the story suffers from mental illness after three months of being closeted in a room by her husband for the sake of her health, and becomes obsessed with the room’s ugly yellow wallpaper.
Shirley Jackson
Shirley Jackson is a must-read if you have any interest in horror whatsoever. Her book The Haunting of Hill House is widely considered one of the finest ghost stories ever written, and her other works are also excellent. Of the former, the Guardian writes, “The horror inherent in the novel does not lie in Hill House (monstrous though it is) or the events that take place within it, but in the unexplored recesses of its characters’ – and its readers’ – minds. This is perhaps why it remains the definitive haunted house story.”
Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates is not always known as a horror author given her diverse and extensive outpouring of work (she’s thrice been nominated for a Pulitzer!) but her writing in this mode is brilliantly unsettling. Start with The Accursed (an eerie, unforgettable story of power, loss, and family curses in early 20th-century Princeton) or Give Me Your Heart (a collection of ten spooky tales).
