February is Women in Horror Month and Here Are Protean Depravity's TOP 10 Women in Horror!

Unfortunately, in my various horror book clubs, reading groups and monthly reads it is perpetually difficult to enforce the nomination and selection of books written by women. Yes, we have come a long way already and more and more women authors dare to write horror. But it is a sad truth that women are seriously underrepresented in the genre, as it is the case in speculative fiction in general. To even out this disadvantage each February we celebrate women in horror month and you can read the whole story of the initiative here.

So, for this occasion I have decided to present my top 10 women horror authors here and my favorite book by them. Maybe and hopefully one of these books catches your eye and you may want to try and read it. Happy women in horror month!

Within These Walls - Ania Ahlborn

Ania Ahlborn is one of the undisputed queens of indie horror, of which there are many in this list, but there is no one quite like her really. Ahlborn, who very successfully writes in English as a second language, has an academic and professional background in psychiatry which shows in her writing. She gives weight to extreme horror or psychological horror and has a fascination with serial killers.

In Within These Walls, which is my personal favorite of her so far, we follow a reporter who after his divorce moves with this teenage daughter to the Pacific North West in order to be able to get an exclusive interview with a murderous cult leader and death row inmate, a character reminiscent of Charles Manson. He aims at making a journalistic comeback and is so preoccupied with his career that he doesn't really realize what's happening with his daughter, who hates the move and is looking for some kind of warmth her parents seem to fail to provide her. It is almost too late when the true nature of their new house is unveiled.

This is one of those books where you sit on your sofa and at every turn of event you shout "noooo" because you see the very avoidable ruin coming from a mile but you don't want to and you just want to close your eyes but can't stop reading. Perfect psychological profiles, very gripping story and a  dual storyline between the past and present is what Ahlborn offers in this very gripping read.

We Will All Go Down Together – Gemma Files

Gemma Files is a Canadian indie horror author that I know mainly from her short stories since she is apparently a very welcome contributor to every sorts of anthologies on really interesting themes. You can find her work in almost every themed Datlow anthology as well as anthologies of other small presses.

We Will All Go Down Together is admittedly the only full novel I have read by her. I initially thought this book is a collection of Files' own shorts because it is written in chapters that gave me the impression of eerie little stories closed in themselves. Not much into the book did I realize that the stories are first loosely, later tightly connected with each other, all revolving around the same group of people who have medium qualities and a connection to the supernatural in different ways. They are the progeny of five families - three medieval witches and two families who were involved with these witches but through money and status evaded the torturing and eventual burning the former have to suffer.

We Will All Go Down Together is a very peculiar book and Files has a style that is very much incomparable to anything I read. She is, as an author, on a wholly different level than any other author I know and this book was certainly a challenge to read. But if you trust your Middle English skills and you thrive on seriously unlikeable witches and want to dive into a top-drawer supernatural universe, you shouldn't miss to go down with them. 

The Good House – Tananarive Due

Due is one of those hidden pillars that the genre rests on and who carries a torch for many young authors and editors from the African diaspora. Unfortunately despite this fact not many people know her work. What-a-shame! I have read the first of her African Immortals Series, My Soul to Keep and parts of her short story collection Ghost Summer, and last year I was lucky to participate a buddy read of her probably most (in)famous work, The Good House. All of them highly recommendable as far as I'm concerned.

We follow a single mother who moves into her ancestral house with her son and he finds some enchanted objects from the grandmother the house belonged to, so he plays with a fire he doesn't really understand. You like Voodoo-horror but from the pen of someone who understands and is informed, a very engaging dual/triple- timeline, a great female lead and some genuinely scary scenes and notions? Then wait no more and grab this book. If you're interested in the representation of black people in US horror fiction in general, you may also want to take a look at the Shudder documentary Horror Noire, produced also by Tananarive Due.

The Garden of Bewitchment – Catherine Cavendish

If you are, like me, a sucker for Gothic ghost and haunted house stories, classics as well as twisted ones, I think that Catherine Cavendish will be a good author for you to discover.

I really enjoyed her Garden of Bewitchment, which is a story about a kind of anti-garden of Eden, a parallel universe of a Victorian kind. In 1893 twin sisters Evelyn and Claire Wainwright, who are united through their passion for writing Gothic fiction despite their contrasting characters, move to the moors after the death of their father. Spooky things start happening after their move into their new home and gradually gain on intensity as the novel progresses. Among these things is the emergence of a board game of an enchanted garden which has the power to absorb humans into a kind of hallucinatory nightmare. All this is somewhat connected to their mysterious and good looking neighbor Matthew Dixon, who has a secret or two of his own. Loads of Gothic elements; "double freak" chic of twin siblings; romance meets toys coming alive; the Ancient One; a miasmic atmosphere; a sentient book; demonic cults and foreboding meta stories... There is so much Cavendish is toying with here and it all amounts to an astonishing final oeuvre!

The Return – Rachel Harrison  

Rachel Harrison has only written two novels so far (as far as I know she has an audiobook-only project and a werewolf novel due for spring 2022) but she already has anchored herself a place in my heart as one of my favorites! What Harrison writes can best be described as BFF-horror which focuses on the friendship and companionship between women, exploring the limits and boundaries of such intimacy, in eerie but subliminally comedic ways. Her heroines are usually women on the edge, the everywoman who has financial problems, breakups, drinking problems, but also friends she can (or cannot) rely on.

The Return orbits around a group of four friends from very different backgrounds, one of whom has been missing the past year, just disappearing on a hike in nature, but who has returned out of the blue, without any explanation. To celebrate the titular return, the friends decide to spend a weekend in this incredibly creepy hotel where each of them feels threatened and uneasy in their own way. To add to the uncomfort and suspense, their friend who has returned isn't the same - she is obviously and gradually mutating into something before their eyes: losing a tooth or two during a casual drink, disintegrating before their eyes. So they do their best to try and carry on, have a good time despite their friend who scares them, because that's what friends do!

The best thing about The Return is that the plot is being pushed ahead through the asides of the three friends who want to welcome the returned. Shameless gossiping and puzzled chitchats is what drives this book, while their visibly forced attempts at not talking about her disgusting appearance get more and more absurd and I found myself chuckling more than once at the grotesqueness of certain situations. The Return is an awesome book like nothing else I read before and I'm all excited for Harrrison's upcoming books.

Death in Her Hands – Ottessa Moshfegh

Where to start when talking about Otessa Moshfegh? It's not a secret that I am totally awestruck by her work which I discovered during the first lockdown through her insanely popular My Year of Rest and Relaxation. 

Yet, I decided to mention here Death in Her Hands since it better suits the horror genre. Moshfegh's writing is best characterized by highly self-reliant and lonely female leads, and the loneliest is probably found here, as we follow an aged widow. Vesta Gul moves together with her dog Charlie into a remote cabin in the woods after the death of her husband. Her quiet life consists of "walk, breakfast, garden, lunch, boat, hammock, wine, puzzle, bath, dinner, read, bed". Literally, that's her to-do-list. Charlie is the only distraction in her very lonely life until during one of her walks she finds a note saying "Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body." From this point on Vesta's life first gains pace and color before quickly turning into a bewildered nightmare.

From what I read and as far as I understand most of Moshfegh's work holds certain common features: profound psychological analyses of very fleshed out, very flawed and lonely female characters, extremely well-crafted language and of course the sarcasm, black humor creeping through even the most tragic of circumstances. All of these can be found in Death in Her Hands with the addition of the dread of aging. This book has touched me on a whole different level.

Hell’s Bells – Lisa Quigley

I admit, I haven't completed the whole "Rewind or Die" series yet, but so far my absolute favorite is Lisa Quigley's Hell's Bells!

"The confrontation with my parents had been a bummer, but Hayley's conversion was ruining my post-virginal glow." (BEST QUOTE EVER!)

It's the night that Freddy Mercury died and it's sure not easy being fan girl Sasha right now - not only did she lose her idol, but also her virginity to the boy she loves and her best friend Hayley to fundamentalist Christians. When Hayley smashes all Sasha's and their friends' cassette tapes with a hammer in a wild bid to convert and save them, Sasha loses herself and strikes Hayley, knocking her out. In order to show her what it feels like to be forced into a belief, they decide to summon the devil himself with virgin Hayley's blood. And sure enough, he comes. He's just not the only one joining the party and things will soon take unexpected turns.

I surprised myself by how much I loved reading this. Lisa Quigley packs incredibly deep existential questions, an utterly likable set of characters, a very fun and scary representation of religion and a genuine, humanist ending with a heart-warming message into this little (but big) book. I already bought Quigley's next book The Forest, a folk horror tale.

Queen of Teeth – Hailey Piper

It's no secret at all that I have been fangirling for Hailey Piper for the last year... I think she's one of the most promising horror authors around and she has already achieved so much; novellas, a novel, a short story collection! The most striking one is, of course, her debut novel Queen Of Teeth, where main character Yaya Betancourt needs to deal with a simple case of "vagina dentata" that develops into inconceivable dimensions, leading to the ruin of a city and more.

Piper creates here a very interesting universe in which she criticizes an evil health system, rotten in many ways, a universe with very fleshed out characters with depth, partly touching human and non-human interactions and in which David Fincher retires after Fight Club 2 is a flop at the box office. Humor, captivation, pink tentacles - it's all you ever wanted to read...

Tender is the Flesh – Agustina Bazterrica

It is a struggle to find horror authors from outside the USA and even harder to find women horror authors from all around the world. Little by little I am discovering this niche, where especially authors from South America stand out with their own different take on what is horror and uncanny. One of these is Agustina Bazterrica who, with her first work that was translated into English, landed in the horror realm like a thunder, like a shooting star! Tender is the Flesh grapples with the taboo subject of cannibalism and creates a dystopic universe in which it has become common practice and eventually turned into an industry.

On Goodreads there are people who still talk about how the reading of this book was traumatic to them and it indeed is jarring and convulsive, but it gives you much and is very much worth it. I'm expecting more jarring reads from Bazterrica in the future! 

Ellen Datlow

Last but not least, there is Ellen Datlow, the queen of themed horror anthologies, who has been around for years, editing and offering us high quality short story collections about basically every horror subgenre imaginable. Body horror, scary fairy tales, deep sea horror, vampires, carnivals, apocalypse, villains, nightmares, aliens, ghosts, dolls - everything that ever inspired fear, Datlow has already made a short story anthology of! Of course let's not forget to mention her author-inspired anthologies like Lovecraft and Jackson and finally, the in each September anticipated, THE annual go-to horror source Best Horror of the Year. This invaluable anthology series not only gives you an overview of the year's most important award winners and published works in its introduction, but also allows you to have a taste of and discover the writings of new authors. It is a valuable oeuvre that we horror fans appreciate a lot. Thank you Ellen Datlow for all the wonderful anthologies!