Never in my life have I made grabby hands as ferocious as the ones I made when I saw Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction. This book describes the life and work of women in speculative fiction starting with Margaret Cavendish and ending with Jewelle Gomez (and shorter mentions of many others). This is out just in time for you to make your Halloween reading list and since it mentions some movie adaptations you can get your viewing schedule lined up too. In my opinion we should all get October off and sit around reading and watching scary things under blankies with our cocoa and/or pumpkin spice lattes. I may start a petition. Anyway, this book will get you all set up for many autumns to come.

The book is organized into subgenre sections, more or less chronologically, with titles like “The Women Who Wrote the Pulps” and “Haunting the Home.” Within each section are short (2 – 3 page) chapters about individual author, including a biography, a recommendation of what to read first by said author, and recommendations of other authors to try if you like the work of the chapter’s subject. The writing is clear and conversational, and includes a surprising amount of information in such a small space. There’s also a glossary and a list of suggested reading. The list of women is diverse and covers many different kinds of horror and speculative fiction, so there should be something here for everyone.

I can’t emphasize enough how well this collection hits the sweet spot of fun (Quotes! Illustrations! Anecdotes! Humor!) and informative. I will be using this book as a resource frequently. There are well known authors here (such as Octavia Butler and Mary Shelley) and some less well-known that I have to go find now (such as Pauline E. Hopkins and Everill Worrell).

Breaking everything down by sub-genre is helpful because the book includes historical context for what was “in” at any given time and why. Recent trends involve revisiting old ideas and giving them feminist and racially inclusive perspectives (ie, Lovecraftian stories and serial killers). I especially enjoyed the section on “Paperback Horror,” which refers to all those chapter books that haunted my middle school library. Hello there V.C. Andrews. It’s been a minute.

A warning: This is a short book but it will send you running for Wikipedia so prepare for time suckage. Whatever you do, don’t think to yourself, “You know, I never did read My Sweet Audrina, I’m just going to look up the plot on Wikipedia. You’ll spend the next hour going “Wait, then he slept with who?” and “Why don’t they just get a bannister for crying out loud?” Then at night you’ll be trying to sleep and instead thinking, “Yeah, a bannister would have solved EVERYTHING.”

This is a reference book, but a very light one in tone and also physically (it’s not large). I recommend it for people who have an interest in women’s history, women authors, and the history of genre fiction.

I’d also recommend it to people who “don’t like horror,” only because this book will familiarize the reader with the incredibly wide variety of horror and “weird” fiction out there. For the longest time I said I didn’t read horror and then I realized that I was reading certain types of horror avidly and often but labelling it as something else. In exploring the horror genre, I began to find a kind of feminism that I also found in romance, another female-dominated genre.

For those willing to expand their horizons, this book will show you where to start, and for those who already enjoy horror, this book will add to your to-be-read pile. As the author states in the introduction, which frames horror as “a transgressive genre:”

In any era, women become accustomed to entering unfamiliar spaces, including territory that they’ve been told not to enter. When writing is an off-limits act, writing one’s story becomes a form of rebellion and taking back power.