58. Monster, She Wrote with Melanie R. Anderson and Lisa Kröger

KIM ASKEW: Hi everyone. Welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I'm Kim Askew.

AMY HELMES: And I'm Amy Helmes, and Kim, can you believe Halloween is right around the corner? 

KIM: No. 

AMY: I know, it's like, "Oh, I've got to get ready for this." Okay. So we always have a fun time with it in my neighborhood. It's always a big to-do as you know, Kim, but trick-or-treating was canceled last year, so we had to come up with a Plan B. A friend and I wound up creating this very elaborate scavenger hunt for our kids centered around the theme of a Victorian era undead wedding. 

KIM: Oh, my gosh. She is not exaggerating when she says elaborate. I was actually trying to convince Amy to start some sort of scavenger hunt business after she did this. 

AMY: We wrote it all in rhyming poem, all the clues. There were just three kids that participated in it, but, they all said it was their favorite Halloween ever, which given what an S-show last year was, that really made me feel good that they enjoyed it.

KIM: Absolutely. So what are you doing this year? Do you have costumes in mind?

AMY: I mean, at the time we recorded this, we still don't even know what's going to be on the docket for Halloween, but the kids will still dress up regardless. So, at the time of recording this, my daughter wanted to be Lucille Ball, because she got really obsessed with "I Love Lucy" this year so maybe I'll be her Ethel Mertz to go along with that, who knows? But in past years I have dressed as Lady Mary from "Downton Abbey" and also a zombie suffragette.

KIM: Oh, my gosh. You are so cool! That's why I love you. So we have to post those photos of you on our Instagram. So we'll do that. 

AMY: Yes. 

KIM: Cleo, my daughter, we didn't have Halloween last year and we didn't really do anything. because there wasn't a point in making a big deal out of it since she didn't really know what it was. Actually, I just brought it up to her this morning on our walk to school and she didn't seem that interested. I think maybe she wants to be Margaret from "Daniel Tiger," but you know, that can change so much in the next few weeks.

AMY: What’s Margaret? 

KIM: Margaret's the little sister on "Daniel Tiger."

AMY: Oh, I didn't know he had a sister!

 KIM: Yeah, there's a sister. Yeah. We've watched it a lot, the one episode with the sister anyway. Um, so yeah, so we'll see.

AMY: Well, depending on how much trick-or-treating actually happens, it might be the first year she kind of gets it.

KIM: I think so. Yeah. So we'll see what happens.

AMY: And you know, with a kid that young, you're not really getting into any of the scary stuff, right? 

KIM: No, no, no. Right. 

AMY: But we are going to be discussing some scary things in this episode, though. Some scary lost ladies of lit, right?

KIM: I am totally here for it.

AMY: So I was wondering about this, because I didn't know how you felt about scary stuff in general. Can you do horror movies and scary books and things like that? 

KIM: Yeah, it's so funny because you know, we have certain types of books that we both love together, but weirdly, on the side, I also read a lot of science fiction and I also am a huge fan of Stephen King. (Not necessarily the newer stuff, which might be good, I just haven't read it, but the stuff from the seventies and eighties I love.) So, you know, It, The Stand, all that kind of stuff. So I love that, and then I love like "Gothic" scary and "ghost story" scary and "detective" scary. So I like certain genres of horror. I'm not so into horror movies. In fact, when I was a kid, once my sister and I, my mom and dad were out to dinner and we started watching the beginning of one of the "Friday, the 13th" sequels, and when they came home, we hadn't made it past the opening music, but I was asleep with a huge carving knife on my chest.

AMY: Which is dangerous!

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. So we watched the movie the next day with my dad, and it wasn't even that scary. It was just the music that was scary, but yeah, not into the super scary horror. Anyway... 

AMY: Okay. So that's what Mike is like. He cannot watch anything that's scary, so that is completely off-limits in our house. But when it comes to spooky fiction, I like it, but I like it to be throwback kind of stuff. Like, another time period in another era.

KIM: Yeah, yeah. I like that stuff too. That's right up my alley, as well. Well, in that case, you're going to love some of the women authors we'll be referencing today, creators of terror tales, and mistresses of the macabre.

AMY: Somebody queue the oppressive organ music, right?

KIM: That's right. And we've got some special guests — another pair of women authors, in fact — who are going to walk us through some of their favorites. I'm so excited and scared!

AMY: Ooh! They are also podcasters, and I can't wait to dish with them on some blood- curdling books by forgotten women writers.

KIM: So today's guests are Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson. They're the authors of Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction. It came out in 2019 from Quirk books. It's a reader's guide that also offers biographical info on the women who were and are vanguards of frightening fiction. The book includes more than a hundred female authors in this vein, and it's a really informative read, but also really fun too. Lisa and Mel have a wicked sense of humor, pun intended, and that shines through in this book. It won a Bram Stoker Award in 2019 for best nonfiction and a Locus Award from the Locus Science Fiction Foundation in 2020.

AMY: So now my imagination is running wild trying to decide what a Bram Stoker Award might look like.

KIM: I know! 

AMY: We'll get into that later. Last year, Lisa and Melanie also launched the “Monster, She Wrote” podcast, where they focus even more on this particular genre, and incidentally, they're also two of the hosts of the “Know Fear” podcast. That's K-N-O-W Fear, which also delves into all things horror-related. And I have been eyeing them as guests for our show ever since we launched our podcast last fall. And I'm really glad they accepted our invitation because I had penciled them into this Halloween episode a long time ago, long before I actually reached out to them because I'm just aspirational like that.

KIM: It's true. 

AMY: So Melanie and Lisa, thank you for saying yes, first of all, and welcome to the show.

LISA KROGER: Thank you so much for having us! We're so excited! 

MELANIE R. ANDERSON: Thanks for having us!

KIM: I think we should mention, first off, that, in addition to being authors and podcasters, you are both PhDs. Melanie, you're a professor at Delta State University in Mississippi, where you teach research and write about American Gothic and supernatural literature. Lisa meanwhile is one of the founders of the Nix Horror Collective. Did I say that right? 

LISA: Yep. Nix.

KIM: Okay.... whose mission is to develop, celebrate and elevate women-led horror content in film, TV, and new media. So cool. Their "13 Minutes of Horror" film festival features 60-second horror films that showcase their talent. 

AMY: How scary can a minute be? I bet it can be pretty darn scary. 

KIM: Mm-hmm. 

AMY: So I'm curious: how did each of you guys first develop an interest in this particular genre, and also, how did the two of you meet?

LISA: Well, I'll start with how I got interested in horror. It has been something that I have been interested in since I was a little kid. I grew up in the South, so, you know, I had a mom who dressed me up like I was her porcelain doll with these big dresses that twirled around and shoes you couldn't get dirty. And like, my hair was always curled and... so very, very like proper Southern girl. And then I would go and stay with my grandmother when I was really young, and she would show me old Vincent Price movies. So my favorite movie as a child was House of Wax, which I think my mother was horrified because she tried so hard to raise this perfect little child and then all I wanted to do was horror stuff. I have a picture of me when I was really little where I took her red lipstick and colored my entire face red because I wanted to do bloody makeup. So it's always been with me. I don't know if that's the same for Mel, exactly, but I'll let her answer. 

MELANIE: So I did not really think of myself as a horror fan when I met Lisa, because I was under this misapprehension that horror meant slashers and really gory movies, which was something that I was never really into. So I just always felt like I wasn't, you know, a part of that, or I couldn't necessarily say I'm a horror fan, but looking back on my interests  — and Lisa helped me see this — I was actually interested in horror, I just didn't realize I was into horror, basically. So the first couple of books I can remember reading... my mom read to me There's a Monster at the End of This Book, like forever. I was always constantly asking her to read me this book. 

AMY: For anybody that doesn't know, that's a Sesame Street book. 

MELANIE: It is a Sesame Street book. It has Grover, and I see so much in my interest now that possibly come from that. And then I was a huge fan of the Bunnicula series when I was a kid, which is probably more of a mystery, but it has the idea of vampires in it. And my mom loved Vincent Price and she also loved creature features and things like Godzilla. And so I would watch these movies with her, especially The Creature From the Black Lagoon, which she loved. And I enjoyed those, but I just, I wasn't thinking of myself as the type of person who wanted to watch these more violent movies or more contemporary movies. And I also got into reading ghost stories. I liked haunted house stuff. I like creepy, weird, kind of uncanny things. And so when Lisa and I met in graduate school, we got to talking about our interests, and I realized that the stuff that I enjoyed were basically just sub-genres of horror and that slashers and these things that I was kind of not drawn to were just other sub-genres. I think I probably always was kind of a horror fan, but just didn't realize it.

AMY: Interesting. And I also feel like Lisa, your childhood, somehow there's a horror movie just there in that story alone. Like I'm picturing the big bow… 

LISA: Oh, 

KIM: And then the red lipstick. 

AMY: I have a visual, yes.

LISA: Absolutely. My other grandmother also had an entire room that was just porcelain dolls, and that's the room I would sleep in. 

KIM: Your origin story is right there. 

LISA: My horror villain origin story.

KIM: And you're dressed as the doll too. Ooh. Um, so speaking of inspiration, do you want to talk a little bit about the inspiration behind your book, Monster, She Wrote? Why did you want to write it?

MELANIE: Well, I think the inspiration for the book is kind of tied to when we met in graduate school, when we were working on our dissertations, I was writing about how ghosts and the supernatural were in Toni Morrison's novels. And Lisa was writing about the traditional Gothic women writers of the 18th century. And so we got to talking to each other about our topics and we realized that they had a lot in common. I started reading more Gothicy things and I was reading a lot of ghost stories and kind of branching out and got really interested in women writing ghost stories in the 19th century. And we were very interested in Shirley Jackson. I had just read a bunch of Shirley Jackson before I came to grad school and I told Lisa about her. And so we were reading a lot of Jackson, and we did a couple academic projects together: one on ghosts in literature and film, and one on Shirley Jackson, where we wrote the introduction to a collection of essays together. And, you know, not a lot of people read academic things. If you publish something in an academic journal, you're not going to get a huge readership. And we wanted to try to write for a broader audience, and we were just fascinated by all these women writers that we kind of seemed to know about or could find out about through our research that other people may not have been reading. Like, people who are really into horror may not know about some of these older figures in particular. And so we bounced around different ideas as to how we could get this out there. We started the "Know Fear" podcast at the time, and we really decided we wanted to write a book that would have some of these women in them. And we happened to kind of luck out, I guess. There was a Stoker Con happening. I believe it was in Providence Rhode Island at the time. And we went and we got 10 minutes with a Quirk editor, and we basically just kind of vomited out all these ideas we had about these women we wanted to write about. And he was like, “Let's work up a proposal on something and try to figure out how we could make this work." 

AMY: Yes, Monster, She Wrote is not at all like an academic text. It's really fun. I will say when I read the book, I couldn't believe how many writers in this genre were completely unknown to me, you know? You definitely know Mary Shelley. You know Daphne DuMaurier and Shirley Jackson. Those are kind of the big ones, but then Kim and I read a lot and there were a lot of women in this book that I hadn't heard of — I didn't know anything about. Were these writers who you were pretty familiar with on the whole, given your love of this genre? Or did it require some digging on your part to unearth any of these women?

LISA: Between the two of us, because Mel and I have very different focuses with our academic stuff. So I am more of like the earlier Gothics and she's more 20th century. So we already kind of had a pretty wide net of people we were familiar with. So like the Gothic sections, you know, those were people I was already reading and I wanted to talk about because you know... a lot of people know Mary Shelley but I mean, unless you've taken like a higher level university class, you probably haven't read Ann Radcliffe. Or unless you're a Jane Austen fan, because Jane Austen lists several of them in Northanger Abbey. But, um, yeah, a lot of people hadn't read those, but I'd read those. And then of course, you know, Mel had Toni Morrison and a lot of writers around that time period covered, but there were some that we really had to dig. One in particular was, um, the women writing in the pulp magazines. So we knew Margaret St. Clair, but when we were talking about Margaret St. Clair, we were talking about women writing in the weird tales. And that is always a time period that I have associated with HP Lovecraft. We started talking, and we were like, “There's got to be more women who were publishing around this time.” And that was really fun to dig into, because we uncovered a lot of names we had never heard of, a lot of stories we hadn't heard. So that did take quite a bit of research, and that was difficult to find because I don't know why, but people have not kept a great history of those pulp magazines, like those weird tales. Unless it has something to do with Lovecraft, people just don't care, apparently. So those haven't been kept. And then I think some of the ghost story writers too, because for instance, I knew Edith Wharton, of course, being an English person, but I hadn't read many of her ghost stories. So there were a lot of surprises that we found. 

KIM: It's interesting because as we said, there are many women horror writers, but that almost flies in the face of the idea of what women were supposed to be throughout history. And I know you kind of talk about this a little in the introduction to your book, but how shocking was it for these women to be writing the things they did at the time they did?

MELANIE: Oh, that's a good question. I don't know. Lisa might be able to speak to this more with the Gothics than I can. Lisa were readers shocked that women were writing horrifying things? I feel like readers would be more shocked sometimes at what horror at the time was doing, rather than that women were writing, because it was a popular genre, right? 

LISA: Yeah. I mean, it depends on the time period you're in too, because the Gothics… there were presses that were solely there to publish these Gothic stories written by women. So I don't think that was a big shock. And then even in, like, the ghost story, when you look at the Victorian/Edwardian period, I think women were almost publishing as much as men during that time period, if not more. That may be tied to Spiritualism, you know, because that was kind of a philosophy/religion/pseudoscience that women could participate in. So I don't think it was as surprising. But for some reason, the closer you get to, like, our current times, I feel like there was some pushback maybe around the Seventies or Eighties with this idea that women don't write horror. I don't know why that would be, honestly, but that's when I started to see people being more shocked because even in the Sixties, you had more women writing these kind of weird … like, I mean Daphne DuMaurier was still publishing by then. And her stories are terrifying. 

KIM: True. 

MELANIE: She also was kind of labeled as a 'Gothic romance' writer, too. And I think there is a kind of mix between like the supernatural and sentimental lit that sometimes, you know, causes it maybe to be more acceptable. I was just thinking about, wasn't it Hawthorne...? Yeah, it was Hawthorne, who was really mad about all the women's books who were selling as much or more than his. And he called them the "damned mob of scribbling women." Like, I feel like it was more just competition for being popular and selling books, and not necessarily like you shouldn't be writing about this horrifying thing, but I don't know. It is interesting that you're saying, Lisa, it's like the Seventies and the Eighties when kind of the gender aspect picks up. Or maybe it just becomes more visible or more audible at that time.

AMY: Lisa, you brought up Jane Austen and how she kind of rags on Gothic novels in Northanger Abbey. First of all, I'm wondering if maybe she just secretly loved these types of books and it was just like, "she doth protest too much" sort of thing. Um, but yeah were these books kind of considered the trashy paperbacks of their day and not seen as very literary at the time? So it was okay for women to be doing it kind of thing?

LISA: I think that's a hundred percent true. The way some people looked at them was like, "Oh, well they're just writing ghost stories," or "They're just writing Gothic novels. So we're not worried. It's not true literature.” I think that's also why we don't know their names, a lot of them, because nobody thought to keep them, you know? Nobody protected them. Like scholars... I mean, the reason we have classics is because scholars have worked over a decade to put together canonical texts, and these women were not on those lists. But that's also kind of a horror problem in general, because the genre, I think for a long time, has not gotten the scholarly attention and respect that it needs. So, I think we were "allowed" -- women writers were "allowed" to write, I'm using air quotes. When I say allowed, "allowed" to write these stories because they weren't considered high literature. But that was kind of a double-edged sword, too. 

AMY: Okay. 

MELANIE: That's what happened with Edith Wharton, too, because I mean, we know Edith Wharton way more because of things like Ethan Frome, and The Age of Innocence, than we do her ghost stories. I had read a lot of her realism before I even knew she wrote ghost stories, and I love her ghost stories. And yes, they're published, you know, because she's Edith Wharton, but like the thing that we teach, right, and the thing that's the most important, is her realist writing. And that happened a little bit with Henry James, too. I mean, Henry James's realist writing was way more prized than his supernatural writing, and so I think if you have someone like Edith Wharton, who's kind of punching above her weight, I guess, in what's accepted in the Academy, then maybe her supernatural stuff would be published. So like you're saying, Lisa, if you're a woman who was publishing something that was seen at the time as super popular, the Academy's not into that. They're probably not going to keep it or teach it or it's not gonna stay and be anthologized like other writings are.

KIM: That's a great point. 

AMY: And I will confess: I haven't read any of the Edith Wharton ghost stories. I wasn't even really aware of it that much until you guys. So that's on my to-do list now. and I can't wait, because that sounds amazing!

KIM: I have some that I can loan you, Amy 

AMY: Okay, Perfect. 

KIM: So I'm really excited for this next part, where we're going to cede the mic to you guys, the resident experts on darker tales by women authors. For Halloween, we thought you could share some of your favorites with us. 

LISA: Sure. Well, I'll start with some of my favorite Gothic novels. So I'm probably going to get my Gothic card revoked for saying that Ann Radcliffe is not my favorite Gothic writer. I really enjoyed Clermont, by Regina Maria Roche. I think she has a little bit more fun with the Gothic trope. Sometimes Ann Radcliffe can be just a little stuffy, and she definitely had ideas on what you should and shouldn't do when you're telling one of these scary tales. But I also want to give a mention to Manfroné: the One-Handed Monk by Mary Anne Radcliffe, which I wrote part of my dissertation on Manfroné. So Manfroné's been in my world for a long time. It is just absolutely bonkers, the story. It's not what you would expect from an 18th-century book. It starts with a bang and doesn't let up. I mean, you know, you've got your heroine, you've got a crumbling castle. There's the one-handed monk. Uh, he loses his hand in the first chapter, so that tells you how the book starts. It's just a great, super fun read. And, Valancourt Books has done an edition on it. They recently reissued it as part of our Monster, She Wrote collection that they've put out, which is reissuing some of these texts. So I always suggest if anybody is at all interested in what 18th-century women were writing about and what the early horror story looked like, I think that's a great example because it predates Frankenstein, you know, probably by a good two decades, so... 

KIM: I'm so excited to read that. You totally have me, and I have never... I didn't even know that her sister wrote a book, so... 

LISA: Well, it's not her sister. We don't really know who it is. For all we know she stole her name to publish and, you know, she saw that Ann Radcliffe had a readership. So she just, you know, was like, "Oh, I'm Mary Radclifffe." 

KIM: Wow. Okay. 

LISA: But we don't know for sure. There's a bit of mystery. There's like three women we think might be writing behind that, but...

KIM: She sounds like a whole episode.

LISA: Yeah. She's fascinating. 

AMY: Also I want to point out, I loved at the beginning of your chapter on the Gothic novels that you have a little "Spotting the Gothic" checklist in your book. So the monk occurs a lot in Gothic novels. Then you have "a virtuous young woman who's prone to quoting poetry and, or singing music while deep in the woods." If you see that, you're likely in a Gothic novel. "A handsome man with a mysterious background who shares the heroine's love of poetry and/or music and/or the forest." "A sinister-looking villain, usually foreign and gasp Catholic." "Some sort of crumbling castle or abbey or convent." And "a supernatural being," of course. I love that little "helpful tools for spotting a Gothic novel."

KIM: That's very cute. 

AMY: So what else do you got for us?

MELANIE: All right. I'll jump in here. My contribution is Pauline E. Hopkins who lived from the 1800s up to, I think it was around 1930. One critic has said she was probably the single most productive black woman writer at the turn of the century. And she's probably best known for her book Contending Forces, which I think is usually taught in graduate classes. But she also had a book... well, she had a few different books. But the book that we talk about in Monster, She Wrote the most is her book Of One Blood. I think the subtitle was Or the Hidden Self. And this book, which is actually recently back in print, it's got all sorts of stuff in it. So she uses kind of sentimental romance of the time. I believe there's Spiritualism in it. Uh, there's like a haunted house investigation at one point, and there's mesmerism. There are people getting hypnotized. And then the main character, I can't remember why, but he wants to get out of the country. And so he joins this archeological dig, as you do, and they go to Africa and they're trying to find this particular African nation that people claim exists, but isn't on any maps or anything. And he stumbles upon it. And basically there's this nation in Africa that has been completely untouched by colonialism. They're pretty advanced. The implication is that they're also technologically advanced. And so, you know, when I've mentioned this to my students before, they're like, "Wow, that's like Wakanda before Wakanda." It's a really fun book, and the stuff that she was doing was really interesting, so I recommend her stuff. And she also is most likely the first black woman to write a detective story. Um, she had a locked room mystery, Talma Gordon, which is really good. 

AMY: Wow. Okay. So Pauline Hopkins. Yeah. Okay. Good. 

LISA: I'm going to recommend for my next one. And we've mentioned her already, Margaret St. Clair. Because, just kind of like a little personal note. So I have two little boys, and they are both very much into anything with fantasy. If there's a dragon or magic or anything even remotely like that, they just want to consume it. So they're Harry Potter-obsessed. My youngest is really into that movie Labyrinth from the Eighties. Anything, if it has a mention of like goblins or magic, they're into it. So a while back, I was like, "Oh, I need something that I can do with them." So I bought Dungeons and Dragons. We're probably not even playing it right, but we play that game and, you know, we go and fight goblins and do our magic and stuff. I always love it because this is one of the things we discovered in our book when we were doing research was that we knew who Margaret St Clair was but I didn't realize that when the first Dungeon Master's Guide was published in the Seventies, there's actually a mention of Margaret St. Clair, because a lot of the lore came from Margaret St. Clair stories. So she was a science fiction writer who published in a lot of the pulp magazines. She also has some really great stories. One of her books, The Sign of the Labyrinth -- Mel was the one. who told me about it actually. Um, it is a story that deals with, um, actually it deals with a pandemic, now that I think about it. It's a pandemic story where people have had to stay so far apart from each other for so long that society has fundamentally changed in how we can interact with each other. But that all changes through magic and it's based in St. Clair's research. She knew practicing Wiccans, and so she actually went to really research and kind of live that religion. And that was what informed her lore. So I think that's pretty fascinating. She also has another story, Horror House. And then my personal favorite of hers is The Man Who Sold Rope To the Gnoles. That is the one that really stands out to me because it is, it's so fun. It's about this salesman who all he wants to do is make a sale and make his boss proud. And he wants to get an award at a dinner. That's all he wants. And so he's trying to think out of the box, and so he decides to go into the forest to sell to these things, which are kind of like trolls. They're the gnoles. And they're these really disgusting creatures who live in the woods. And it's just such a wonderful story because it's just so bizarre that she would take this mundane world of the traveling salesperson and mix it with this really high fantasy. It's funny and it's dark and gross at times and I love it. So...

KIM: Great! 

AMY: I mean, so many women, their imaginations are just so elevated beyond sort of the other authors typically read. I love it. Okay. Who else do we have? 

MELANIE: I got one. I'm going to talk just a little bit about L.T. Meade. So her full name was Elizabeth Thomasina Mead Smith. I wrote that down, so I wouldn't forget. And she was prolific, and she was very much into writing, like what we call in the book "girls fiction." So this would have been books about, basically girls going to school, dealing with family issues. How do you make friends? And so she was very popular for that, but then she also liked to write mysteries. And I am a big fan of the sub-genre of occult detective fiction and horror, which is basically where you take something supernatural and you mix it with mystery. And so she would write these mysteries and sometimes have kind of weird things mixed into it. When she would write her mysteries, she would work with a doctor. So his pen name was Robert Eustace. He also at one point, I think for one book he wrote with Dorothy Sayers when she required some medical knowledge. And so L.T Meade and this doctor would write these mysteries, one of which was occult detective fiction. And that is A Master of Mysteries. And it was about this guy named John Bell, who is alternately called the Ghost Exposer or the Ghost Breaker. I'm not sure why it's Ghost Breaker, but that was his nickname, I guess. And he's basically this guy with a lot of money and a laboratory and people come to him and say, "This supernatural thing happened. You have to explain it or, you know, tell me how this is going on, or how do we get rid of these ghosts?" and it's very kind of "Scooby-Doo"-lite because every single story he debunks the supernatural thing and tells him how someone was actually taking advantage of them or there's a murderer or something. 

AMY: “You pesky kids,” like ripping the mask off.

MELANIE: Exactly. Yeah. And then she had two collections of stories, one of which was a series in The Strand that had female villains, these women who were basically Moriarities in her stories. And so you have Madame Sara (and she has a series of stories) and Madame Koluchy, which has a series of stories. I believe that Madame Koluchy's is The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings. So basically, she runs this Italian cult and when things get hot, she goes to England and starts, you know, committing crimes and ripping off people there. And so it's really interesting because, I mean, her first women villain would have appeared just a few years after Moriarity, but quite close to him. So it was kind of interesting to think about how you know, we really remember Sherlock Holmes, but we don't necessarily remember her stories, which were also being published in the Strand. And she also had a woman detective in one series of her stories, which is really cool. 

AMY: I hope some Netflix development people are paying attention to all this because this all sounds like great TV, right? 

MELANIE: I would tune in to something like that, yeah.

LISA: I'm waiting for "Ghost Breakers" personally. I mean, that sounds like a ready-made show.

KIM: Absolutely. 

AMY: So this is amazing. I definitely can't wait to check out some of these that you mentioned. Definitely the Edith Wharton ghost stories. And needless to say, what we heard here today is really only a drop in the bucket. And I'm kind of guessing even the ladies that you've listed in the book, even though you've got over a hundred, I think that's probably only a drop in the bucket in terms of what's out there, would you say?

MELANIE: Oh, yeah. Lisa and I say this a lot, that this is a collection of women to get people started. We have people tell us all the time “you missed so and so,” or “you need to add so and so to your list” or I find more stuff as I’m reading. Or, we even had a longer list at one point that we cut back just a little bit. So it’s definitely a starting point.

AMY: So everybody, I would encourage you: A, go get a copy of Monster, She Wrote. it's one of those things that you will be referencing back to all the time. Just keep it on your bookshelf, you will get a lot of great recommendations. And it's also just a lot of fun to read. You guys have a great sense of humor. Also, B: go check out their podcast. They're talking about a lot of these authors, but also a lot of other stuff like horror flicks, and even just stuff that's in culture today, like, you know, current events kind of stuff. 

KIM: So circling back to the Bram Stoker award. Tell us all about it. And what does it look like? 

LISA: So the actual award itself is shaped like a haunted house and it has a little door in the front. And when you open the door, it has your book and the name. I actually have mine on a bookshelf next to my St. Shirley Jackson candle.

AMY: Oh, 

KIM: I love it! 

AMY: Do you guys both have very high thresholds for being scared? I mean, you're reading all these books and watching all these horror movies. 

MELANIE: Yeah, I’m a complete scaredy cat. I’m very easily scared. I’m very easily jumpy. I think even when we did T. Kingfisher’s book, The Twisted Ones on the Monster, She Wrote Podcast, I think I talked pretty openly in the podcast about where it scared me and I couldn’t sleep anymore. My threshold is not as high as Lisa’s, I’m sure.

LISA: Okay, it’s funny. When you talk about the threshold of what we will watch or read, I will probably expose myself to a lot more. Like I like almost every subgenre of horror. I like everything from like the quiet, creepy kind of supernatural mystery, all the way up to , you know, really bloody, gory extreme… I really do like a lot of it. There are very few things I will not watch. But I am a scaredy cat. Totally. I am the type of person that, growing up, for as much as I like spooky things, I could not walk through Blockbuster video without shielding my eyes going past the VHS tapes of all the Eighties horror movies.

KIM: Those were the scariest, right?

LISA: It took me forever to actually watch Hellraiser because just the art on the cover of it terrified me as a child. So, yeah, I'm a big scaredy cat and I'm still the type of person that if I read a spooky story, like at night, I'm sitting in bed, I'm reading a scary story and then I have to get up for whatever reason, I have to do that thing where you jump off your bed and run, just in case there’s something underneath.So it's probably not very good for my mental health, but… 

AMY: I thought you guys were going to answer that nothing fazed you at this point, but I think that connection is why you like the genre, because I think if you read things without that emotion, you wouldn’t … you have to have that for the enjoyment factor. People like being scared. 

LISA: I mean, the day it stops being scary is the day I move onto something else. Because it’s kind of like, why would you watch a comedy if you didn’t want to laugh?

KIM: Oh, that's a great point. Yep. 

KIM: Do you, uh, do you have any other projects in the works either together or separately that you want to talk about? 

LISA: Mel and I decided to pitch another book just right smack in the middle of the pandemic. So we’ve been working on our second non-academic book together. We’re still kind of in the midst of writing and revising that right now, so hopefully it will be out by the fall of 2022. I don’t have the exact date on it right now. But it’s called Toil and Trouble and it’s about a women’s history of the occult in America. So we’re kind of looking at how women have engaged in occult activities as a form of rebellion. So there's a little bit of witchcraft and, um, astrology and Satanism and feminism. It’s just, it's just kind of a look at how women's relationship to the occult has changed over time. So that's what we're in the middle of working on right now. And then I'm still working on my Nix Horror Collective. We had our first film festival and the 13 films, we put them together called “13 Minutes of Horror Folklore” which is running on Shudder right now. And then we’re gearing up … we’re going to do the same thing in August of next year where women can submit one-minute horror films. This year’s theme is “Sci-Fi Horror.” I’m really excited about that.

KIM: That sounds great. 

AMY: Good luck with everything. Let us know when the next book comes out, we can't wait. 

KIM: It was so fun getting to talk to you, Melanie and Lisa. Thank you so much for dropping by and having this conversation. What a blast.

MELANIE: Well, thanks for having us!

LISA: Yeah, thanks so much. This was fun!

KIM: Bye.

AMY: So that's all for today's podcast. Hope we didn't scare you too much. And I hope you check out some of these books and authors we've talked about. If you are loving the podcast, please don't forget to give us a rating and review wherever you listen to it. And thanks for listening. 

KIM: Happy Halloween, everybody!

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit was written and produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.