The stories in this collection persisted in ripping out my heart and then putting it back strangely, feeling a little less full of pain and holes than it did before it was ripped out. In some of the stories this veneer of horror is graphic and violent, but it’s deeply rooted in how women feel at different times, and ages, in their lives.Īnd so it continued. Because most every one of these stories is about what it is to be a woman, and the horror is simply a vehicle to illustrate how I/we feel at different times in our lives. And that’s what made me feel not so alone in this confusing time and space that I’m dealing with right now. It was haunting because I know what it’s like to be a Sweetie, and it was comforting, because someone else knows what it’s like to live in a situation like that. I was instantly drawn into that paradoxical experience by the opening story, “Welcome Home” by Donna J. And that made the stories both haunting and comforting. These stories accomplished that, even though they are fictional, by managing to capture experiences of what it is to be a woman in reality. (I’m fast becoming a fan of Michelle Renee Lane, as you may have guessed from my earlier review here on Madness Heart Press of her book Invisible Chains.)īut, just for a little while, I had the chance to not feel the lonely part of outsider-aloneness while reading these stories by my fellow women horror/speculative fiction writers. Of course, I’m an introvert, so I’ll just quietly sign up for these authors’ newsletters and read their words at a distance. Like Anne Shirley when she finally found the “kindred spirit” she’d been longing for (who else was a little sad when she “grew up”?). In reading this book, I suddenly felt that I was handed not just the one sister I have always wished for, but fourteen of them. And why I am compelled to write horror, myself. The Monstrous Feminine is the perfect example of why I love horror. The Monstrous Feminine: Dark Tales of Dangerous Women edited by Cin Ferguson and Broos Campbell
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