As Halloween approaches, it’s time to get weird! Last month, I read Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction, which brought my attention to the many gaps in our understanding of the history of these genres, caused by the tendency of past (and some present) critics to value male authors over their equally inventive and influential female contemporaries. Well, a small press in the UK is looking to fill one of those gaps with the collection Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890–1940, edited by Melissa Edmundson. Appropriately, the book is being released on Halloween day.
Weird fiction is a subgenre of horror that today is generally associated with H. P. Lovecraft and the other writers in his literary circle. But Howard and his bros weren’t the only ones cleverly blending fantasy with supernatural horror and getting published in seminal pulp magazines like Weird Tales. During the time period from the tail-end of the Victorian era to the beginning of World War II, women were extremely active in pushing the boundaries of the traditional Gothic tale or ghost story to create worlds that are uncanny, unfamiliar, and ultimately weird. Unfortunately, Lovecraft seems to get all the attention and reprintings while these women wallow in obscurity. Melissa Edmundson and Handheld Press have set out to change that. Women’s Weird contains thirteen stories from this era along with an extensive introduction about women’s involvement in weird fiction written by the editor.
Edmundson kicks off her introduction with a discussion of how the “weird” (from the Greek wyrd, meaning “fate”) ties in with supernatural fiction, and how both are inextricably linked with women. She analyzes several different attempts at defining Weird fiction, giving the reader a sense of what the genre entails without limiting our understanding to one hard-and-fast definition. In another section, she lays out some of the themes, issues, and anxieties that are specific to Weird fiction written by women. The discussion involves in-depth examples from some of the stories included in the text, so if you’re completely unfamiliar with these works, it might be easier to return to this part of the introduction after having read the stories. Lastly, in a section titled “Establishing a women’s Weird tradition,” Edmundson addresses our society’s general failure “to read and appreciate women’s supernatural writing equally alongside that of men.” By putting together this collection, she hopes to “spotlight women’s involvement in Weird fiction” and inspire readers to seek out more of it. In my case at least, I have to say she was successful in that goal!
There are so many stories I loved in this collection, but the ones that stood out to me as unlike any of the weird fiction I’ve read before were those that located their horror within the mundane. In these stories, anything could be haunted—even the most “boring” and domestic of everyday objects. This concept is epitomized in “The Haunted Saucepan” by Margery Lawrence. Ever since seeing this story mentioned in passing in Monster, She Wrote, I was dying with curiosity. How could it be possible to make a saucepan scary? Well, start with a man living alone in an unfamiliar house, then throw in some ominous bubbling, ghostly figures, and mysterious illnesses, and you’ve got yourselves a recipe for compelling horror. But perhaps even more frightening than the saucepan’s dark history and demonic powers is the suggestion that for women trapped by unhappy marriages and domestic servitude, weaponizing their domesticity to commit murder via saucepan may have been one of the few ways they could escape. There’s something especially subversive about setting the haunting in the kitchen—a room generally associated with women, care-giving, and nourishment—and showing the malicious violence that lurks in the hearts of women who are expected to support the men in their lives. Female-coded domestic objects are also the source of a haunting in Mary Butt’s “With and Without Buttons.” When two sisters become exasperated with their male neighbor’s constant condescending dismissal of their thoughts and beliefs, they seek out some way to gain power over him. To this end, they decide to fabricate a haunting that involves a ghost who leaves behind gloves—women’s kid gloves, which, although out of fashion by the time the story takes place, would have been a common item of clothing worn by women whenever they leave the house throughout the Victorian era. Unfortunately for both the sisters and their neighbor, they seem to have stirred up an actual ghost whose story resembles the legend they’d created.
Along with unusual haunted objects, the stories in this collection also feature non-traditional ghosts that eschew the stereotype of the floating, translucent figure. One example of this comes from the only author in this collection that I had read before—Edith Wharton. While Wharton is best known for her Gilded Age novels, I’ve discussed a few times in this blog how she also wrote a fair amount of ghost stories. “Kerfol” is a hard-hitting story that explores themes of domestic abuse through the use of ghostly dogs. When a young man interested in purchasing a castle goes to scope out the grounds of Kerfol, he finds the property empty of humans but filled with dogs who watch him with wary eyes. He later learns the dark history of the cruel lord who took out his anger and jealousy on his wife’s beloved pets. In several other stories, it is human spirits that return, but in a form quite unlike the one they had in life. Eleanor Scott’s “The Twelve Apostles” adds a slight Lovecraftian touch to a rather traditional Gothic premise. An American man gets more than he bargained for when he seeks out a haunted British home. The manor’s dark history involves a devil-worshiping priest whose lingering presence takes the form of a gooey, tentacled thing that leaves slime trails like a slug. Almost as repulsive is the form of the ghost in D. K. Broster’s “Couching at the Door.” After committing some unnamed sin in Prague involving both lust and dark magic, author Augustine Marchant finds himself haunted by a prostitute’s fur boa. As the physical manifestation of his crime, the boa acts like a sentient creature alternately described as reminiscent of a cat and a snake as it cuddles up to him, unnerving in its imitation of affection. Marchant seeks to rid himself of this unwanted familiar by transferring his sin to a younger, easily corrupted man. “Couching at the Door” was perhaps my favorite story in the collection, and its exploration of the relationship between art and morality as well as the story of a hedonistic older man leading a beautiful young protege into depravity reminded me significantly of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.
I wish I could discuss every amazing story in this collection, but if you want to experience them all you’ll have to buy the book yourself! Women’s Weird will hit the shelves in UK bookstores on Thursday, October 31. For readers outside of the UK, paperback copies can be ordered directly from Handheld Press’s website or using this Bookshop.org affiliate link, and an ebook edition is available on Amazon. Hard copies should become available in U.S. stores some time in 2020. If you read it, be sure to share your thoughts in the comments!