Mocha Memoirs Celebrates Women in Horror Month-Carole Ann Moleti

Mocha Memoirs Press has long since celebrated and embraced diversity in speculative fiction. Join us as we spotlight our talented female horror authors throughout the month of February. Follow us on twitter @mochamemoirs to get daily tweets and more.

I never considered myself a horror writer, but one day found that Aramis, the main character in The Ultimate Test, had decided that she didn't want to star in an urban fantasy. She wanted to plunge deep into dark magic and take everyone else with her. As I wrote, I struggled to 
understand where were all this was coming from. 

My nonfiction themes often parallel my fiction writing--and The Ultimate Test was no exception. 

Many of the events in the story are based on real experiences. When I started to scare myself at the intensity of the story, I turned to my fellow horror writer friends for advice and support. 

Writing teacher Michaeala Roessner encouraged me to keep going, to not hold back--that to write compelling fiction an author has to push the limits or their characters won't be interesting and the story will fall flat. My longtime critique partner Andrew Richardson, who writes  supernatural horror, echoed her advice urging me to stay true to the character. Rayne Hall, an 
editor and writer, whose tag line is dark* dangerous* disturbing is an expert on making stories scarier and thus more compelling. Rayne "invites readers to think, to probe their own consciences, to ask themselves what they would have done in this situation, to explore what is right and what’s wrong. The dark corners of the human psyche are far scarier – and more interesting – than chainsaw massacres." 

The Ultimate Test took many years to find a home at Mocha Memoirs Press, likely due to the dark, disturbing, and dangerous protagonist's actions. In my work in progress, a very gritty urban fantasy, I'm finding it easier to turn off my conscience and separate myself from the character—which any writer will tell you is hard to do. Like doting parents, we may give life to them, but inevitably they must make the choices of what to do with it. Mark Cassell, a cross-genre writer like myself sums it up. " There's a darkness everywhere, and as writers we have the tools at hand to show it in its rawest form. We can scare -- indeed, we can horrify -- our readers at whatever level we choose. As long as we're honest."

Thanks to my friends for sharing their insights and their talents with me on a regular basis. Thanks to Nicole Kurtz for giving The Ultimate Test a fine home. Thanks to all of you for celebrating Women in Horror Month with Mocha Memoirs Press. I invite you to share our stories and let us know what you think.

MMP Celebrates Women in Horror Month: Carrie Martin

Mocha Memoirs Press has long since celebrated and embraced diversity in speculative fiction. Join us as we spotlight our talented female horror authors throughout the month of February. Follow us on twitter @mochamemoirs to get daily tweets and more.

Carrie Martin (@CarrieBoo33) is a new author to Mocha Memoirs Press, but it a talent in her own right.

When asked how horror influenced her growing up, she replies, "I grew up watching horror movies that crept into my dreams and lured me into dark fictional places. Turns out, life is a horror story, and now the darkness has crept into my writing, too."

You can find Carrie's story and 21 other female horror authors' works in The Grotesquerie, a collection of 22 horror stories, all by women.

We Don't Need Saving-Marcia Colette

Mocha Memoirs Press has long since celebrated and embraced diversity in speculative fiction. Join us as we spotlight our talented female horror authors throughout the month of February. Follow us on twitter @mochamemoirs to get daily tweets and more.

I've been watching horror movies for as long as I can remember. I've seen everything from black and white movies (i.e. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) to those filled with gore (i.e. Let the Right One In). One of the biggest differences between then and now is who does the saving. Thankfully, it has become more of the norm for a woman to save herself. Even better, to save the day for everyone.

In the days of B&W movies, women were always the ones who either faint, fall, or have the nervous breakdowns. That was our role. We act weak to make the men look stronger. Braver. It was almost like a rule that we aren't allowed to save ourselves. We always had to fall in the arms of a savior in order to survive.

When reality hits, there's no time for that foolishness, which is why the best horror movies today are the ones that chuck those rules. Alien is the best example of that. We have a strong female character who takes charge of the situation and tries her best to ensure everyone's survival. If everyone had listened to what Lt. Ripley said and not deviate from the plan, they might have actually survived. But, that wasn't the case and not her fault. Poltergeist, the Scream franchise, Let the Right One In, etc. All of these movies have strong female characters who broke the rules when it came to us saving ourselves or others. We do what we have to do in order to survive. That's reality.  

Another eyeopening movies for me was Alien vs. Predator. My first inclination was the woman would die. She had two things going against her. She was female and African American. It's a well-known fact that minorities (African American or otherwise) are always the first to go. After all, someone has to sacrificed to show the heinousness of the monster, right? Anyway, seeing an African American woman come out on top (and she did because unlike the alien, she didn't die) was a huge awakening for me. That's why it will also go down as a turning point for me in horror films. 

Also, don't underestimate women as the villains as I've seen most recently in a movie called Bloodwork. Now, it's not the best horror movie out there, but shockingly enough, it kept me watching because of the evil female doctor. This chick could've been on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. Seriously, she was thatgorgeous. But she was also a monster in her own right because she violated every rule known in drug trials for the sake of her experiment. A pretty face with a heart of volcanic ash. IN the B&W film days, not only was it rare to see a woman so malevolent, but she usually looked like Cruella Deville. You automatically knew she was the bad "guy". Not the case with Bloodwork.

So what does this mean for movies going forward? What changes do I hope to see in future movies? I would like to see more female directors and writers doing horror. If Mary Shelley could do it with such success, I don't see why the next Mary Shelley can't be found in the movies. Not only that, but more diverse females as the heroes wouldn't hurt either.  

MMP Celebrates Women in Horror Month: Sumiko Saulson

Mocha Memoirs Press has long since celebrated and embraced diversity in speculative fiction. Join us as we spotlight our talented female horror authors throughout the month of February. Follow us on twitter @mochamemoirs to get daily tweets and more.

Sumiko Saulson's otherworld grittiness and real world horror fiction cuts deep into the reader and bleeds them out in slow, steady storytelling that won't clot or crumble.

"As a disabled woman of color, I find often, the themes commonly found in horror resonate deeply with me. Horror fiction tells the stories of ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances, tales striving, perseverance, and bravery in the face of difficulty. " -Sumiko Saulson

Read Sumiko's work in Death's Cafe: Ashes and Coffee, available from Mocha Memoirs Press.
Blurb: Death is stalking Berkeley, California in a sleek new jacket and snazzy checkered fedora. Insects and animals collapse in his wake. When the indigent begin to mysteriously die in the streets, the rest of the town is indifferent. Red Montgomery, a nineteen year old black homeless woman, is the only one who can see him. She feels powerless to intervene. But is she?

MMP Celebrates Women in Horror Month: Amy Braun

Mocha Memoirs Press has long since celebrated and embraced diversity in speculative fiction. Join us as we spotlight our talented female horror authors throughout the month of February. Follow us on twitter @mochamemoirs to get daily tweets and more.

Amy Braun (@amybraunauthor) brings fresh, fantastic horror to the table at MMP. We love her works so much, we've published her twice, with a third story coming in Avast, Ye Airships!

Whenever I tell someone I write horror, they give me funny looks. “Really?” they say, “you don’t look like you’d be into that kind of thing.” Vampires, witches, werewolves, zombies, demons, blood, guts, and brain matter– Not everyone’s cup of tea to be sure. But I love it. I have since I was a kid, reading the Goosebump books by R. L. Stine and Choose Your Fate stories, reading fast paced adventures where the main character (or you) would be chased by all kinds of nasties. How could I not love something that made my blood pound and roused my curiosity about what bumps in the night?

But when people look at me, they see a short brunette with innocent eyes and a welcoming smile. I’m one of the last women you might expect to write horror fanatically, and yet when people read my award winning short story Dark Intentions And Blood, they’re stunned at the madness I can unleash. That’s why I’m so proud to be a female horror author. No one suspects us, because it’s not a genre women typically favor. I don’t know why­– horror is simply so much fun to write. Building the suspense as your character enters the haunted house and knowing they won’t escape unscathed. Creating a demon straight from the pits of Hell and unleashing it on the fools who summoned it. Or, in the case of my Mocha Memoir short stories, resurrecting the ghost of a crazed assassin and struggling to contain him again, or searching desperately for your missing fiancée only to find a hotel with more secrets than answers.

Another reason I chose to write horror was because there are so many ways to do it. Call From The Grave was a story I wrote that holds a fairly quick pace near the end, focusing on the main character’s burdens as she endures servitude she didn’t want. Fast paced horror is the kind I do best, since I tend to enjoy horror stories with an explosive ending. That being said, there’s nothing quite like subtle horror. With my second Mocha Memoir short story, Hotel Hell, I aimed for a less life-or-death battles and concentrated on unnerving the reader. I wanted to place them in that hotel, and send shivers up their spine. Granted things got a little insane at the end (I have to be me), but there were no exploding body parts or decapitations or anything truly abrupt or disgusting. The idea was to disturb, and I must have done something right, because I even creeped myself out.

Many of my role models in horror are male. Everyone from Stephen King and Scott Sigler to lesser-known names like David Moody and Alexander Gordon Smith has given me inspiration to continue writing horror. But one can’t forget that a woman created Frankenstein’s monster, one of the most infamous monsters of all time. I have the feeling that no one suspected she was capable of creating such an iconic creature, or that the story would stick with us almost a century after it was written. That’s why I love coming across horror written by women. They surprise you when you least expect it, and aren’t afraid to push the boundaries of their beloved genre. There are women out there like me, who prefer their vampires bloodthirsty and ravenous instead of whiny and disco-balled. We want our werewolves to be savage creatures that lose control at the slightest provocation. We like our haunted houses to be filled with corpses, ghosts, and death-traps.

No one will ever suspect me for writing a violent, twisted genre. That’s why when they tell me so, I smile and simply say, “I know. That’s why I do it.” 

MMP Celebrates Women in Horror Month: Rie Sheridan Rose

Mocha Memoirs Press has long since celebrated and embraced diversity in speculative fiction. Join us as we spotlight our talented female horror authors throughout the month of February. Follow us on twitter @mochamemoirs to get daily tweets and more.

Rie Sheridan Rose (@RieSheridanRose) is MMP's Editor-in-Chief. Here are her thoughts on the importance of horror and the women who write it.

It always amazes me that people seem to feel that horror is the province of the male. After all, one of the first great classics was Mary Shelley'sFrankenstein, first published in 1818. 

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a psychological horror story that never fails to make me shudder...and it was written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892.

Shirley Jackson has been cited as an inspiration by Neal Gaiman, Richard Matheson, and Stephen King--who considers The Haunting of Hill House one of the most important horror novels of the twentieth century. My personal favorite is We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which I first discovered as a girl.

Women have just as vivid imaginations as their male counterparts. Why shouldn't we write horror? If you think that women are too sensitive to face the darkness, you've never read Charlee Jacob, or Angeline Hawkes, or Mira Grant, or...you get the idea.

We've got a lot of good stories to get you started here at Mocha Memoirs! From short stories like "Bloody Rain" to series like Death's Cafe or Toil, Trouble and Temptation to anthologies like The Grotesquerie--written by some of those women in horror.

MMP Celebrates Women in Horror Month: Selah Janel

Mocha Memoirs Press has long since celebrated and embraced diversity in speculative fiction. Join us as we spotlight our talented female horror authors throughout the month of February. Follow us on twitter @mochamemoirs to get daily tweets and more.

I really never thought too much about women who write horror—admittedly, I fell into reading horror genre a little late, and then it was the typical Stephen King, Anne Rice, and whatever best of anthology fell into my lap. Even then, I wasn’t making it a point to really keep track of who wrote what. I just knew I liked certain stories. Even when I fell in love with the genre, I always felt somewhat separated from it, because I didn’t know if I could fully go to a place that was either frightening enough or hardcore enough to be part of the genre. Like a lot of other things, I blamed it on my gender rather than the fact that I needed to get my ass in a chair, start writing, and let myself fail a few times.

Really, I think that’s part of the beauty of Women in Horror Month. Suddenly, there’s a way to look around and say “hey, there are ladies playing in this genre, just like how I want to do.”

Some are authors and filmmakers and the like who already have a lot of stuff out there, and some are newer, which is fabulous. We should be getting the word out, because yes, it’s hard to find the women horror writers at times, but I also think that people forget to look for them. At the very least, if you want to not focus on the gender thing, it also gives a bit of variety by providing lists of titles you may not know about, and discovering new horror titles is always a good thing.

For me, the discovery of two specific horror authors blew my mind right open. I’d been fussing
with a half-attempt at vampire fiction, and while my own story was long and aimless, a friend of
mine who’d been reading what I sent her saw some things that reminded her of Nancy A. Collins. I’d never heard of this author to save my life until one day I received a package in the mail from my friend that contained the first three books in the Sonja Blue series. This was not only my first introduction to Sonja Blue and to what could probably be called an early-ish take on dark urban fantasy, but it was also my first exposure to splatterpunk.

I was stunned. Floored. My jaw was on the ground. Up until that point, I admittedly avoided anything too gory (unless I was writing it), but Sonja was such a great character that I plowed through those books. It was amazing to me the visceral reactions those stories gave me—to this day, Sunglasses After Dark is the only book that’s ever made me vomit. What was even better was that those books were written by a woman, so now I had no excuse to play safe with my own attempts in the genre. In a lot of ways, her presence was there to egg me on, to keep whispering more, more! in the back of my mind when I found myself holding back.

Years later, I was looking for a spooky read one October, and happened to grab Shirley Jackson’s The House on Haunted Hill from a library display table. The newest version of the movie was one I had done design work to in college, though it didn’t really do much for me and I had a hard time seeing Eleanor as any kind of great protagonist.

Two nights later, I was hooked on the book. Eleanor’s emotional state was delicate and ever-changing, and the way Jackson uses ambience and interaction to create tension had me enthralled. What made it better/worse was that the song lyrics used in the books are from a tune I’d performed when I’d studied voice, and their use in the book was just so unbelievably creepy that I really found myself getting freaked out. It’s a slow burn, a real lesson in how to build tension and play with psychological horror. When I got to the ending, I sat there in shock for a good five minutes, before I frantically paged back, trying to figure out what the hell had exactly happened. I love how the book version is much more open-ended, and although Eleanor still isn’t a badass, she’s much more of a grey area than her mousey, do-good, remake equivalent. In a lot of ways, her psychological state is just as chilling as the house. It also made me think back to reading The Lottery in school and how disturbed that story had always left me. There’s something to be said for taking the feminine emotional state and the classic female roles and turning them on their heads, and Shirley Jackson does it beautifully.

For me, that’s what this month is all about. Taking a chance, picking up a new title, and really letting myself be surprised, delighted, and hopefully severely creeped out. It’s not just about celebrating female horror authors—it’s about celebrating really good horror authors.

MMP Celebrates Women in Horror Month: Alexandra Christian

Mocha Memoirs Press has long since celebrated and embraced diversity in speculative fiction. Join us as we spotlight our talented female horror authors throughout the month of February. Follow us on twitter @mochamemoirs to get daily tweets and more.

Alexandra Christian (@LexxxChristian), the Southern Belle from Hell, has been a writer for as long as she can remember. 

Here are her thoughts on horror and its importance to her.

"When I began writing horror, I'd never really considered the fact that I was a woman.  I'd been reading Anne Rice and Poppy Z. Brite for so long that it never occurred to me how special it was for a woman to be writing in this genre.  '

As an author, I’d rather be seen as a person who writes great stories, not necessarily a WOMAN who writes great stories.  

My hope for the future is that someday there won't be consideration of whether the writer is male or female, but whether the writer is producing great work.

Check out Alexandra Christian's amazing paranormal, horror romance series, STRANGE BEDFELLOWS. 

Welcome to The Oubliette.

Cali Barrows has had it with love. After wasting three years with the man she thought was the love of her life, she finds out that he’s been sleeping with his boss. Broken-hearted and bored, Cali’s life had become a string of TV dinners and tawdry romance novels. She wondered where her life was going until she followed the mysterious stranger through the red door and enters a world that few would ever know existed.

The Oubliette is a safe haven for all those creatures that go bump in the night. They cater to a very particular clientele and only those who seek it out may find the red door leading into a dark paradise of otherworldly delights. Together with her vampire hosts, André and Leo, Cali becomes a matchmaker for the undead and unwittingly gets herself into all sorts of mischief, all the while slipping into a decadent world where every sensual desire is fulfilled.

Includes the following STRANGE BEDFELLOWS stories: THREE TO TANGO, HIS PHANTOM CARESS, and DEAD SEXY. Get all three stories in one collection: BEHIND THE RED DOOR in ebook or print.