The Wonderfully Weird Women Writers You Should be Reading this Halloween
The nights are drawing in, Netflix is featuring its creepiest shows, and Halloween in all of its gothic glory is very nearly upon us. While the gothic tradition has more than its fair share of virginal, swooning women designed to be rescued by men, that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of women writers out there making weird fiction into something powerful. Here’s just a small selection of some of the women you should be reading, if you like your horror with a healthy dose of feminism.
Charlotte Dacre
In a time when most female characters were virginal objects of a hero’s affection, Charlotte Dacre’s 1806 novel, Zofloya, broke from tradition spectacularly. Featuring a woman who’s refreshingly open about her sexuality, Victoria defends her lovers from assassins, kills her husband, and is ultimately hood-winked by Satan himself. Although written under a pen-name when it was first released, the book was deemed so shocking, that one critic at the time wrote that its author was ‘afflicted with the dismal malady of maggots in the brain.’ Sounds like a ringing endorsement, to me!
