Monster, She Wrote
The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction
Hardcover | Kindle | Audiobook
By Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson
Publisher: Quirk Books
Release date: September 17, 2019

They’re the queens of horror fiction — gothic horror’s founding mother Mary Shelley, haunted house maven Shirley Jackson, and vampire queen of the damned Anne Rice. But did you know that there have been and still are many other women writers like them contributing to the genre for centuries, most of whom wrote under repressive circumstances? Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction, a new non-fiction book from Quirk Books, gives these women and their works a spotlight.

In this 352-page compendium, authors Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson dig deep into the feminine roots of the gothic horror genre, beginning with its precursors Margaret Cavendish and Ann Radcliffe before moving on to the creator herself, Mary Shelley, author of the early 19th century classic Frankenstein.

Paperbacks From Hell
The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction
Paperback | Kindle
By Grady Hendrix
Publisher: Quirk Books
Release date: September 19, 2017

By the time I was 12, I had exhausted the entire catalogue of Nancy Drew mysteries, Judy Blume’s tales of adolescence, Tolkien’s Middle-earth, C.S. Lewis’s world of Narnia, and much more at my local library and had moved on to Stephen King horror novels and was on the lookout for more of the same. This was back in the 80s, aka pre-Internet, so I had to do a lot of judging books by their covers to figure out what my next selection would be. Thankfully, there were a lot of seriously eye-catching covers in horror fiction back then, and Paperbacks From Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction, a new offering from Quirk Books, is shining a spotlight on those long-forgotten gems.