Writing, Horror
Horror’s Real-Life Final Girls
Women In Horror on Surviving Publishing
“Given that the odds are against us, how exactly do we become that ‘final girl’ who survives to tell her story, to borrow film scholar Carol J. Clover’s iconic term? What strategies will help women writers prevail and thrive in their writing careers?”
More than once, I’ve considered giving up writing. I wouldn’t be the first woman to fall by the wayside. Writing is a tough gig, as brutal as any slasher movie, full of sinister villains hellbent on eviscerating you and leaving you to bleed out while they move on to their next victim. The assault is relentless. There are new platforms, publishing models, and literary trends to follow. Writing techniques to learn. Deadlines to meet. So you achieve your daily word count? You still need to write a blog, update your website, and maintain your subscriber list. It’s exhausting.
Even when we succeed and get our work out into the world, women writers typically receive less media coverage and lower earnings on average than our male counterparts. “The difficulties [women] face in receiving review coverage within the flood of fiction hitting the market makes it harder for them to sustain an income, and ultimately a career, as a professional writer,” writes Danuta Kean, author of The Emilia Report, a British study examining the gender gap in literature. Inspired by a stage play on the life and work of England’s first published female poet, Emilia Bassano, the report found that four hundred years on, “women still aren’t provided with an equal platform to men upon which their work can be judged.” However, the study’s author rejects the myth of the “pram in the hallway being the enemy of promise.” Instead, Kean says, “It’s about structures being created in a way that militates against women being able to be recognized for their creativity.”
It’s enough to make anyone throw up their hands and surrender. So given that the odds are against us, how exactly do we become that ‘final girl’ who survives to tell her story, to borrow film scholar Carol J. Clover’s iconic term? What strategies will help women writers prevail and thrive in their writing careers?
One answer might be to write horror. As a genre, horror is transgressive: subversive even. Horror demands that we ignore our better judgment and tread those dark alleys. Swallow your fears, it tells us. Step off the path and into the woods. It’s a route we know well and the reason women have formed the backbone of the genre from its very inception. In their introduction to Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction, Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson explain: “Women are accustomed to entering unfamiliar spaces, including territory they have 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.”
Taking back power. Could it be that the genre itself lends strength to women writers? I asked some colleagues for their views.
Angela Yuriko Smith, double Bram Stoker Award® winner, author of Bitter Suites, and the publisher of Space & Time Magazine, leads by telling me she shouldn’t be writing. “I was once told girls shouldn’t write horror. ‘Girls are for getting scared, not scaring,’ a man said. I didn’t believe it, but I did little to disprove it at the time.
“Up until my late thirties, I was often afraid. There were the usual fears — spiders, ghosts, serial killers, crowds — but I was also afraid of being an author. Since my first ghost story in second grade, I wanted to make a career of writing. If I failed, I was certain I failed as a person.
“I have been told all my life why being an author is a terrible idea. I think people meant well, but the advice was based on fear. Fear can be a healthy thing. It freezes us, hides us, and keeps us safe. I didn’t want to be safe. I wanted to be published, but fear kept me immobilized.
“Everything changed when I learned that fear makes great fuel. It keeps us wide awake on watch, running long past our limits, and inspires hyper-awareness. I learned to convert my fear of failing into action. It drives me to hone my craft, produce more, and explore new ideas,” Smith says.
Australian Shadows Award-winner and editor of Bram Stoker Award®-nominated essay collection A Vindication of Monsters, Claire Fitzpatrick maintains that writing body horror gives her the strength to “kick down the door” after a lifetime of rejection.
“Ever since I was diagnosed with epilepsy at twelve, I’ve been told I can’t do things,” she writes. “No going to Grade 8 camp. No going to discos. No playing sports. No getting a learner’s license. No having baths. No using the iron if I’m in the house alone. No eating grapefruit. No being a pilot or joining the army. No. No. No. No. No.
“Epilepsy isn’t just having seizures, it’s being constantly rejected by your friends, rejected by your peers, rejected by society. Thankfully, the one area in which I’m not often rejected in is my writing. I grew up with so many doors shut in my face I knew I had to kick down the door myself and throw myself in the deep end, otherwise, I’d end up failing, and failing in my writing career has never been an option for me.
“My tip for women — if it is a tip — is to use your struggles, your doors in faces, your fears, and turn them into strengths, and just write. Don’t be afraid to do something just because the world thinks you can’t. Life’s too short. Just flippin’ write.”
Kröger and Anderson are clearly on to something when they say writing horror is an act of rebellion: Smith and Fitzpatrick not only brandish their fears as weapons to cut through what they’ve been told they can’t but also to write themselves out of a place of unease, to take back their power.
“For me,” says Fitzpatrick, “body horror is where it’s at because it’s how I deal with my epilepsy and the depression that comes along with it.”
Smith agrees. “There are a million and one reasons to let fear freeze us,” she says. “Here’s my advice: give your muse a flamethrower and let her light up your fears. Create with those ashes. Repeat daily.”
A slow learner, I came late to the horror genre myself. Drawn in by that “write what you know” adage, and having previously completed twenty-two marathons, I cut my writing teeth on a chick-lit novel incorporating running, romance, and reality TV. It was pure light-hearted escapism, the book’s plot events involving wardrobe malfunctions, muddy tumbles, and cupcake deprivation. The book also served as an invaluable learning tool, teaching me about the craft, markets, how to botch a book cover. Most importantly, I learned I wasn’t destined to be a chick-lit writer, and not out of any disdain for the genre, but because I didn’t want to write escapist stories.
I realized that at my core I wanted to address the things that terrified me, to confront those issues head on. Subjects like racism and post-colonialism, the impact of climate change, economic and technological uncertainty. Earthquakes. Ageism. Otherness. Anxiety. It’s a long list. And in order to explore these complex themes, it made sense to me to turn to horror, a genre which my Australian colleague Deborah Sheldon, the award-winning author of Perfect Little Stitches and Other Stories, describes in a Kendall Reviews blogpost as “the most authentic type of fiction. It mirrors life as it really is — unfair, unjust, unpredictable, ultimately lethal — rather than the way we wish it could be… Horror fiction reminds us that, yes, we’re all in this together, the only way this is going to end is in death, and it’s okay to be frightened.”
“Writing horror is a wonderful platform to elevate these problems and decimate them with words,” says Fitzpatrick.
HWA Lifetime Achievement Award winner, the legendary Linda D. Addison agrees that to succeed, we need to feel that our work is relevant and authentic. “It’s important to write from what speaks to you,” insists the award-winning author of How to Recognize a Demon has Become Your Friend. “Don’t feel driven by being a woman to avoid harsh storylines, be a human writing the story/poem that needs to be told.”
Addison also offers advice about writing your best work and owning it. “Many years ago, I spoke with a well-known science fiction woman writer about using a pen name (L.D. Addison) instead of my full name (Linda D. Addison) because I was concerned that editors would assume my main character was female because of my first name. Her answer to me was to write well enough so that wouldn’t be an issue. I took that answer to heart and have since concentrated on making sure my final manuscript is written as well as possible. This means increasing my edit skills, editing myself as much as I can, and then getting second editing eyes on my work before sending it out.”
A five-time Bram Stoker Awards® winner, Addison needn’t worry her work isn’t up to scratch, and she isn’t alone in that, as my compatriot, author Marty Young, observes: “There are a hell of a lot of female novelists out there writing kick-ass horror stories, the equal to anything a male has ever written. Anyone who thinks that women are not capable of writing horror with as much style and punch (both visceral and emotional) as male writers is sadly ignorant of the truth.”
“It often feels like the rest of the world doesn’t see us,” says Fitzpatrick.
Acclaimed UK writer-editor Marie O’Regan agrees. “I think the most important thing for a woman in the horror genre is to make your voice heard, and not to let yourself get discouraged.”
It’s not so much that we’re not heard, it’s that when there are men in the vicinity, we’re often erased from the conversation. I write a supernatural crime-noir series called The Path of Ra with my long-time friend and colleague Dan Rabarts. Equal partners in all our collaborations, Dan’s name appears first on the book covers, a conscious decision on our part because the name Rabarts is more distinctive than Murray and therefore, we hope, easier for readers to remember. We also share the promotional tasks. However, when I am the one sending out emails, if a response comes from someone who doesn’t know me personally, it is invariably addressed ‘Dear Dan’ even when my name is listed first as the correspondent, and my obviously female avatar appears at the top of the page. Since Lee is more commonly a man’s name, it’s as if they see my photo and decide they’ll speak to the man instead. Dan does what he can to redress this within the bounds of politeness, but I’m no damsel in distress, and it isn’t his role to defend me. Still, O’Regan is right: it’s hard not to be discouraged.
I recently discovered an online site called worldometers.info, which provides real-time statistics based on UNESCO data. The figures for book titles published in just the first few weeks of 2024 are fascinating: 435,300 new titles when I accessed it on 26 February 2024. In the few minutes I was online, the number increased by a dozen titles. If making ourselves heard in this deluge of new books isn’t daunting enough, there is a gender disparity in the media coverage received for those works. In the Emilie Report, for example, Kean notes that new books by men garnered 56% of review coverage — 12% more than their female counterparts.
Moreover, Kean reports that “assumptions that an increase in the number of women reviewers would result in an increase in the number of women reviewed are based on a false correlation. Which means this bias is inherent and systematic. Does that same inequality apply to conference and panel invitations, and anthology invites? Selection panels for awards and stipends? What about the “best of” lists?
On Halloween 2019, bestselling author Jeff VanderMeer made the following post on his social media: “Annihilation made another top 10 horror books of the decade list. But the list is all men, so I’m not going to link to it. The idea that no women wrote anything good enough to crack a top 10 of the decade is ridiculous.”
A small gesture perhaps, but the response was resounding. Women especially were grateful for his solidarity. In our ‘final girl’ analogy, perhaps VanderMeer’s stance is akin to a character not revealing the heroine’s hiding place when the killer enters the room. While surrounding ourselves with people who acknowledge and support women’s writing — sometimes at their own expense — doesn’t fix the problem, it’s a start. It makes us feel less alone.
A more effective strategy is to celebrate and showcase women’s horror writing, as O’Regan attests: “When I edited The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women, it was because I kept seeing articles saying there were no female horror writers — and of course there were, there are, and there always have been. I wanted to address that and showcase what I thought were great examples in my favorite subgenre of ghost stories. There’s a tendency for women to be quieter about their accomplishments, I think, although I have to believe it’s improving, if slowly. We’re brought up to ‘be nice’, to be supportive — where a man is determined and ‘go-getting’, those qualities haven’t, historically, been encouraged in women or in young girls.
“As a woman, you have to keep putting your work out there, keep waving your hand to show you’re there. Persist, in other words.”
O’Regan’s comment about the ghost stories subgenre is interesting. I wonder if it is easier to persist when we stick to the fringes where fewer writers dare to tread?
In Kean’s study, when discussing the reviews, Susan Hill, author of the gothic thriller The Woman in Black, says, “My crime novels are only ever reviewed under genre, which is normal. But very often [they’re] banded together with other women crime writers. The ghost stories are different as not so many people write them and they seem to be treated separately, reviewed by both men and women.”
Kröger and Anderson make the point that “society doesn’t always pay attention to what’s happening on the edges.”
In an example from my own work, before writing Into the Mist, there were few, if any, horror thrillers set in the New Zealand context. There was no local kaiju fiction and nothing incorporating our Māori mythology and culture. As a result, I was able to create a space for myself before anyone else moved in. The same applies in my Path of Ra collaboration with Dan Rabarts, where I write the rigorous Chinese scientific consult Penny Yee, and Dan writes her broody and impetuous little-brother-by-whangai with Māori and otherworldly parentage. As far as we could tell, nothing of its kind had been written before, so we were the first to the bleachers. In fact, in a letter written on our behalf, publisher Jennifer Barnes said: “The characters are loosely based on the cultural and work experience of the authors themselves. These are unique perspectives, and they are probably the only such writing team in existence.” It seems that by writing in the fringes of what is already a transgressive genre, not only is there space for new subgenres and forms of writing, but we also open the door to a diversity of perspectives.
Larissa Glasser is the author of F4, a novella that stretches the realms of bizarro horror and which one reviewer claims “seamlessly integrate[s] a story about gender politics and a story about giant monsters and evil corporations into one damn impressive book.” I asked her for her views.
Glasser replied: “The final girl triumphs at the end, bloodied and harried, but she stands alone. Her friends and family have all been iced. But she still triumphs. As a visible queer and trans woman facing a universe of bigotry, I write horror and its creative/destructive impulse as a coping mechanism, to channel trauma and embarrassments of my life into something I can try to understand. But I don’t want to stand alone — I deal with exclusion and isolation enough in real life that I need other trans women like me to fight for and with. I don’t want to be ahead of any of them, but I don’t want to be left behind, either. Although writing is a solitary activity, it explodes into the world when we put ourselves out there, and we have to try and keep a balance between vulnerability and assertiveness. Fighting for the mere right to exist is a horrific concept in and of itself, but I really look to history rather than politics. I look to other trans writers who also put themselves out there, and that helps keep me alive and hold my own work to a higher standard. Sure, we write for an audience, but we start with ourselves. That impulse keeps us alive and fighting.”
Glasser’s comments about “not wanting to stand alone” and needing others “to fight for and with” are insightful since they highlight a problem I have with the ‘final girl’ concept where a plucky protagonist survives through her own resourcefulness but at the expense of all the other characters. In my experience, women like to work together, and in doing so, we amplify each other’s voices.
In a Forbes article by Shelley Zilas, Sider CEO Jocelyn Greenky says: “Now that so many more women are entering the workplace, we’re finding our voice. We’re also building circles of trust with one another because we may be experiencing similar hurdles and have each other’s backs.”
This same phenomenon is apparent in the horror community. “Once you find yourself within the inner circle, you discover a horde of wonderful women writing terrifying things,” says Fitzpatrick.
Author and screenwriter, Rena Mason, arguably one of the most hardworking and connected women in horror, recommends going a step further and rolling up our sleeves. “As a woman in any community, including the workplace, I’ve always felt that if I’m dissatisfied with discrepancies and want to see changes occur, I’m going to have to do what I can to make those changes happen,” says the three-time Bram Stoker Award® winner. “One of the ways I’ve found that gives me a voice within a community is volunteering. Over the years, I’ve participated in, and have spearheaded several committees. In a couple of cases I was the ‘final girl’ in the sense that I was the only woman and/or the only minority among the chairs. It was difficult putting myself forward, but I felt so strongly about having that voice and seeing changes made, I overcame my fear and anxieties and spoke up. It hasn’t been easy and there have been many controversies, but seeing some positive end results of all the hard work and time spent have made my efforts worthwhile.
“One of the quotes that keeps me going when I’m feeling defeated in my tasks is: ‘When you are laboring for others, let it be with the same zeal as if it were for yourself.’ — Confucius.”
Whether by accident or design, all of the women I contacted while writing this essay are actively working to improve the situation for other women writers. Addison makes a point of telling me how proud she is to have devoted a large amount of her writing time to co-editing a horror anthology of fiction and poetry by thirty-three African American women titled Sycorax’s Daughters with Kinitra Brooks PhD and Susana Morris PhD, a book which went on to become a Bram Stoker Award® finalist. “I needed the world to see that there were more than just a couple of Black women in horror,” she says.” In fact, all the women I spoke to have curated anthology projects in support of women authors. They’ve mentored emerging writers. They review, blurb, and signal boost work written by female colleagues. They invite other women to join them on panels (and do their best to let them get a word in edgewise). Several have convened major national and international conventions. Those who are publishers and editors actively advocate for representation of women at all levels. Writers like Kröger and Anderson have focussed their attention on celebrating the contribution of women to the horror genre, also pointing out contemporary horror writers we should be reading. And it is exactly the right approach, according to Zalis: “Raising each other up and channelling the power of collaboration is truly how we’ll change the equation.”
This collaborative model comes with a caveat to women to protect themselves from collaboration overload, since to save others, a ‘final girl’ must first save herself.
We need survivors.
“When it feels like the world is going to hell in a handbasket, there’s catharsis to be found in a horror film where the final girl fights off the bogeyman,” says film critic Katie Walsh.
Yes, there will be days when surviving to tell the story is enough, because as Maya Angelou reminds us, “Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for all women.”
Interstellar Flight Magazine publishes essays on what’s new in the world of speculative genres. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, we need “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.” Visit our Patreon to join our fan community on Discord. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
