As previously noted, I’m under some serious deadlines this month, and as a result, content has been sporadic around here. Yesterday, anticipating a lull in new announcements until The Cage and The Last Zombie: Neverland #2 go on sale, I posted this list of my 25 Favorite Writers of All Time. This led to a discussion on Twitter between myself, author Sarah Pinborough, and CONvergence’s Charlotte Nickerson. Sarah and Charlotte found it curious that there were no women on my list. And after they called it to my attention, I found it curious, too.
There are a lot of fine writers who were left off that list. Some readers questioned the absence of Bentley Little, Robert R. McCammon, Richard Matheson, and others. All of them are fine writers who have written some of my very favorite books. Little’s The Store is the crown jewel in satiric social commentary horror, McCammon’s Boy’s Life is a coming-of-age watermark, and if there was an American Library collection focusing solely on horror, Matheson’s I Am Legend would be the centerpiece. I enjoy reading all three (and many of the others who were mentioned) but they aren’t among my absolute desert-island favorites. That’s not a slight against them. That’s the inherent problem with lists — no matter how expansive, somebody is always going to get left off.
But even so, I did find it curious that there wasn’t one female writer on my list, so I spent much of yesterday pondering the significance of that, and what it meant. Here are my conclusions, offered as the kicking off point for a discussion amongst yourselves. As always, be polite and respectful of others.
1. That list is primarily compiled of genre novelists and comic book writers. More than half of them are people I grew up reading. As I’ve written elsewhere, it was a Steve Gerber-penned issue of The Defenders (along with a Jack Kirby- penned and illustrated issue of Captain America) that first gave me the writing bug at age six. J.M. DeMatteis, Stephen King, etc. were a huge part of my teenage years. Ditto Joe Lansdale, Skipp & Spector, etc. when I was still too young to buy a beer but old enough to know that I needed to figure out what I was going to do with my life.
But when I consider that time-period — the mid-70′s to the late-80′s — it occurs to me that there simply weren’t as many female writers working in either the genre or in comics as there are now. I didn’t discover Shirley Jackson until high school. And for whatever reason (probably the fact that my reading choices were limited to the Spring Grove Public Library — which was located in an old farmhouse — and whatever was on sale at the newsstand) I didn’t discover Chelsea Quinn Yarbro or Andre Norton until then, either. In truth, the first female writers I really remember being aware of for their gender are (in prose) Poppy Z. Brite, Anne Rice, Melanie Tem, and Yvonne Navarro and (in comics) Ann Nocenti and Louise Simonson. And I had graduated high school and joined the Navy by that point.
Fact is, I simply wasn’t exposed to a lot of female writers during my formative years, because work by female writers wasn’t as commercially available. That’s a big reason why there weren’t any on my list. But that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy books written by women, which brings me to thought number two.
2. I suspect that, to some extent, gender might influence which characters a reader identifies with, and which plot points move a reader. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy a story written from a female perspective or can’t identify with a female protagonist. On the contrary. Some fine examples of this are Kelli Owen’s Six Days, Stephen King’s Lisey’s Story, or Lucy Taylor’s Dancing With Demons. And I certainly enjoy books written by women (Yvonne Navarro’s After Age and Sarah’s own Breeding Ground are among my Top 25 Favorite Books).
But reading is something one does primarily for enjoyment, and I think that enjoyment is increased when we identify strongly with a character or situation. Sometimes, our gender determines that. As I said on Twitter, a story about the special bond between a mother and a daughter is going to have much more of an emotional impact on a female reader than it will a male reader. The reverse is also true. I know I’m not the only male to sob uncontrollably after watching Big Fish or The Wrestler, and I also know that the female partners I watched them with were perplexed by my reaction. Unless you’re a father or a son, it’s hard to understand the depth of the visceral reaction many men have to Big Fish.
Men and women view some things differently. Read a sex scene written by a woman versus one written by a man. Most of the time, the female-written one will make use of all the human senses while the male-written one will predominantly focus only on the visual elements. It’s the difference between Gone With the Wind and and The English Patient versus Braveheart and The Crow. All four are romances. Two appeal more to women. Two appeal more to men.
The issue of gender and characterization is an important one, too. In the college class I used to teach, I liked using The Sopranos’ Tony Soprano and The Shield’s Vic Mackey as examples of great characterization. Despite some of the heinous, repugnant things they’ve done, we can’t help rooting for them week after week. That’s because the writers have created characters we can identify with on some emotional, primal level, no matter what our surface qualms about them. I identify with Tony — in enough ways that it would take me an entire Blog entry to go into with the depth required — but those reasons are certainly from a core, male perspective. I like the character of his wife, Carmella. I find her tragic and appealing and fascinating, but she’s not what hooked me on the show. What drew me in week after week was seeing Tony deal with fictionalized, metaphoric versions of the very same things I was dealing with at the time (being torn between job and family, maintaining a reluctant alpha dog status and wondering where the next betrayal or challenge would come from, etc.)
So, yeah… after pondering things, that’s my guess as to why there weren’t any female authors on my list of all-time favorites. It does make me wonder what my list would have looked like if I was coming of age now, in an era when women have a much more prominent role in both comics and horror fiction. And that makes me simultaneously happy for how far we’ve progressed in our field — and impatient for how far we still have to go.
It would be great, for example, if we could get to a point where transgendered writers’ books were discussed by fans online more than their sexuality is, or we didn’t have to collectively groan each week about The Walking Dead‘s treatment of T-Dog (absolutely zero characterization other than very tired racial stereotypes that should have gone out of play after Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.
But I digress. Those are conversations for another day. It’s 12:30am and I’ve been up since 5:00am yesterday and chased around after my toddler all day and am tired and need to get to work. But I thought Sarah and Charlotte’s question was something worth examining and discussing. So now it’s your turn.
Discuss.
Well that’s an interesting perspective. Personally, my “favorite authors” are generally dependent upon my mood and run the gamut from Wayne Simmons to Maya Angelou. I honestly never bothered to wonder what effect the addition of so many female authors to genre writing would mean to kids growing up now.
I am generally just thankful and joyous that it’s becoming more and and more common to see a woman’s name on the cover of a good horror yarn.
But, truth be told, I DO identify with female protagonists (usually) a bit better than male. And I really am generally baffled by the male thought process.
BUT, all that aside, for a good author, gender shouldn’t matter. A good author can make any character come to life for a reader. But good authors hands are often tied. Publishers print what (and who) they think will sell.
And up until recently mainstream media had a very narrow view of the types of things women would read and enjoy. So most everything that wasn’t romance was quite deliberately written and marketed with a predominately male demographic in mind.
I think, for the generations to come, that with the advent of e-publishing (and the sudden deluge of outstanding talent available) that ours is the last generation where most peoples ‘favorite author’ lists will have such a huge gender bias.
And that is a wondrous thing indeed.
(and my god…I’ve developed runonsentenceitis!)
That is interesting regarding the character issue, because as young’un, I remember several times returning a book to the shelf simply because the main character was female. Just didn’t seem to feel like reading about a girl, I guess.
That changed after having a daughter and getting married, for some reason. Now, it’s all the same to me, and I’m just as likely to enjoy a work with a female lead as enjoy anything else.
Wow. You made me stop and think about the female writers I have enjoyed recently. I like Poppy Z. Brite but have not read anything she has done recently. I did enjoy joy Kelli Owen’s Six Days and Mary SanGiovanni’s Thrall and Baby Teeth. But I think I am partial to those two because I follow them on tweet and they seem to be down to earth individuals that I can relate to. And I can’t forget J.K. Rowling. Yeah I read that series of books too and they really weren’t bad, much better than the movies. But besides them I cannot think of any other female writers I have read and enjoyed. I will need to go through my books when I get home from work because now I am perplexed.
JS
I have more thoughts on this than I can sufficiently put into words before 7am on a Friday morning. To be honest, I did immediately notice that your top 25 was lacking anything feminine, but I didn’t say anything because who am I to tell you who you should enjoy reading, especially since if I compiled a list of my own there would be more men than women. It’s a fact of life.
In regards to my own writing, it scares me. Many of the women writers that I read tend to choose male protagonist. The market is accustomed to it. I tend to write female protagonist. Does that mean that you won’t be able to connect with my writing? Does that mean that “horror fans” won’t connect with it? I don’t know, but it is scary to think about. I can almost hear you telling me that there are women horror fans out there, and I know that there are because I am one, but it doesn’t change the fact that in my experience men tend to read more horror than women. When you’ve been told over and over again by your female friends that they like the way you write, but what you write scares the shit out of them, and the men are telling you that they can’t connect with the story because the main character is a mom you start to wonder if you shouldn’t start writing more like Jodi Picoult, rather than Stephen King. That’s something too scary for me to consider. Instead, I keep my head down and I write my stories. If they an audience, awesome, if not, well, I’ll still keep my head down and write.
You know, I hadn’t given it a whole lot of thought before… but now that I’m looking at it, I have to say that a lot of my favorite books are from a female perspective… Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived In The Castle, Ed Greenwood’s Shandril Series, Kate Novak & Jeff Grubbs’ Azure Bonds… all told from a female perspective. I must say, I was coming of age during a very transitional time as far as gender is concerned, women like Poppy Z Brite and Anne McCaffery were in the forefront of literature in their respective genres, enough so that the fact that they were female was a big deal. I’m thrilled that the genres have opened up so much in recent years, not only as a female reader, but as a female horror writer as well.
You’re definitely right in that there seemed to be fewer female horror authors available to readers in the 70s. Anne Rice and Tanith Lee spring to mind, but only Rice was readily available in school and public libraries in the US. Of course, Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN was, too, but that always seemed like homework, not reading for enjoyment, at least to me at that age.
Regarding character identification following readers into adulthood, though, I’m not entirely convinced. While it may be true of some readers, it’s most definitely not universal. After all, THE EXORCIST and ROSEMARY’S BABY remain two of the best-selling horror novels of all time. Certainly not many people put down CARRIE because the protagonist was female. (Although what, if anything, it means that these books were written by male authors is probably a topic for another time.)
Sometimes I even write MALE protagonists!!!! muahahahaha!
– C.
I always loved the older stuff by Julian May, Sherri S. Tepper and definitely check out Barbara Hambly’s “Darwath Trilogy”!
Fantastic Stuff!!!
I’ve been reading horror since I was a little girl, and my top twenty-five are all male authors too. It’s just what has been available; ask me again in ten years and I’m sure there will be a few females on that list.
It’s a fair question to be asked, especially by women. I’m a little older than you, Brian, and it did not occur to me there weren’t any women on your list. Part of this is my own fault in not being more aware, and part of it is the culture that’s influenced me as a young and now middle-aged male.
I don’t think I’ve ever consciously NOT read a book because it was written by a woman. But SUBconsciously? Almost certain of it.
Books I choose to read this days depend upon their interest to me, subject-matter wise. It could be something I’ve seen online, or something on the book’s jacket, or hell, something about the cover grabs me (yeah, I can be shallow that way, too, at times). I also tend to follow authors I like, be they male or female.
The reason this question is even raised, obviously, is because women haven’t had their fair share of work not only published, but PUBLICIZED, the way men have. There ARE fewer women writers than men to choose from in the horror genre. That’s not right, but it HAS influenced my reading. And it’s discussions like this that raise my awareness, and I’m grateful for them.
Thanks for sharing this and bringing it to light.
My thoughts on lack of female writers is perhaps, men write from a man’s POV and women, a woman’s. Thoughout my life, I have had my favorite writers (novel/screenplay) never giving it a thought of gender. But normally, the writers I liked were men, writing the male main character. Each of my favorites had at least one attempt at a female lead, but sometimes they seemed kind of, unreal, but not always. As a reader, don’t we want to identify with the lead character?
One of my favorite writers is Mary Johnston, who wrote To Have and to Hold in about 1900. The main character is male, and it’s swashbuckling AND romantic (and didn’t feel unreal). As a teen, I remember looking at the illustrations and seeing the swordfighting and don’t recall even looking at the author’s name. Do I still do that? I think so. When I am recommended a book, at say Amazon, I look at the author’s name for familiarity, then the book description, and if it interests me, I go for it.
I (again) go back to my favorite Brian Keene book, The Conqueror Worms. I bought it because I enjoy Brian’s books, the cover looked cheesy cool, but never for the main character. For Pete’s sake, the main character was in his 80′s. Hard to think I could identify with the main character. Keene did, I did, and Teddy is still the man.
Would I like the Keene books if they were written by Brianne instead of Brian? Why wouldn’t I, or anyone else? Perhaps it is in the marketing. I just don’t have the experience on my end to really know that side.
@ Lesley, I tend to get the same reactions from my friends. They find out the main character is not only female, but a young girl with an infant and immediately question my sanity.
I’m constantly getting that “are you out of your mind” look when someone finds out the lead in my zombie series isn’t a military MAN.
Wow. What a good discussion. I honestly wouldn’t have a single female writer in my top 25 either. Like Brian, mine would be a list for dependable writers that I trust, rarely letting me down. However, I will give credit where credit is due. Charlee Jacob is probably a better writer than 95% of anyone ever published but the shit she writes, notice I used the word shit, is not enjoyable, except to read the poetic insaneness of her prose. Poppy Brite is also a great female writer but I really don’t like the homosexual aspect of her work. I’m not homophobic, just don’t feel all that comfortable with it. That’s because females tend to give gay characters a “realness” that most male authors don’t. Lucy Taylors Nailed is one of my favorite books though. Sadly, that’s the only thing I’ve read by her. Just discovered Kelli Owen and love her so far. Thanks for turning me on to her Brian! Good topic.
“That’s because females tend to give gay characters a “realness” that most male authors don’t.”
I don’t know that I’d agree with that. Joe Lansdale’s Leonard certainly seems “real” enough. And I’d like to think Lamar from DEAD SEA or Charlie from TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME are real enough.
“That’s because females tend to give gay characters a “realness” that most male authors don’t.”
Maybe you should pick up Stephen Dobyns’ THE CHURCH OF DEAD GIRLS, as I believe it portrays a “realness” in a gay character that is very hard to match–and this without using the character’s sexuality as a integral part of the plot, as well.
Thanks Brian and JW. I probably didn’t word that the right way. The Hap & Leonard books are some of my all time favorites. I love Lansdale. I haven’t read The Church of Dead Girls but I’ll check it out. For some reason, with the exception of Clive Barker, male authors can write gay characters that don’t make me squirmy. I know that’s a lame word to use but I can’t describe it any other way. Hopefully, I didn’t offend anyone because that was not my goal. Peace!
Dear Brian and gang –
I immediately noticed there were no women on the list. Only then did I notice I was on it. (WOOO!!!)
I’m not sure how many female writers are at the top of my All-Time Faves list (Katherine Dunn and Kathe Koja leap to mind). But as a guy who actively seeks out fiction by women, I can tell you that if I had to pick my 25 Favorite NEW Writers, there’d be a shitload of women on that list: Amelia Beamer, Laura Lee Bahr, Violet LeVoit, Sarah Langan, and Mercedes M. Yardley, just for starters.
And if you’re interested, the following Bizarro Central essay from last year lists the 38 female authors whose fiction I’d published at the time. (The list now includes Joan Aiken, Mikita Brottman, Jan Kozlowski, bringing me up to 41.
http://bizarrocentral.com/2011/07/13/on-working-with-excellent-women-cuz-why-the-hell-wouldnt-you/
I think the best of the new female fiction is hugely important, bringing new voices and insights looooong overdue. And Brian, I’m really glad you wrote this essay. Great conversation, y’all!
Yer pal in the trenches,
Skipp
I’m a big fan of Mira Grant (Seanan McGuire). FEED & DEADLINE are so well written. I love the scrappy female protag in FEED and, interestingly, didn’t care for DEADLINE as much as written from the brother’s perspective.
But check them both out, because even though they are terribly commercial, the books are good and the characters well developed.
It may interest you to know that Poppy Z. Brite has come out as a trans man and now goes by the name Billy Martin (though I believe his former name will stay on his books). Does that affect your perception of his writing?
Rose: Not sure if that question was for me, or not, but my answer would be no, it doesn’t affect my enjoyment of his books.
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Really well-written essay, Brian, and like many others I have very few female horror authors in my ever-growing library…and like stated previously, I do have Brite, Shirley Jackson, Mary Sangiovanni, Sarah Pinborough, Charlee Jacob, Yvonne Navarro and some others…but the library is definitely weighted more towards the male authors. Having said that, though, I don’t think I pay more attention to whether it is a male or female author…if the plot intrigues me I buy the book. Incidentally, and not afraid to say this, but I was turned on to a few Jodi Picoult novels by my then girlfriend and one of her more popular bestsellers was an amazingly written, heartbreakingly poignant, and terrifying in a very real way, especially if you’re a parent. I’m still a diehard horror reader but always try to broaden my horizons every now and again, and that helps me grow as a writer.