10/19/26
The first of what they hope to be an annual Fright Writer Festival at 2nd & Charles in York last Saturday went very well. We had a steady flow of people all day long, and a lot of books were sold. I did notice that people were buying less overall, however. In previous years at events like this, you’d see folks purchase at least one book from each author, or walk out with literal armloads of signed books. This year, it was maybe one or two books from a few of the authors. Some friends of mine who signed at the Merrimack Halloween Book Festival (which also took place Saturday) report the same thing happening there.
Bottom line — people are still reading books and buying books, but they have less money to spend and are being more selective and conservative about how many they buy, and where they buy them. This is exactly how things played out back during the last horror crash at the start of the Great Recession.
I’ll write a lengthier piece about this — and what authors should do when things get like this — for my Patreon later today.
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A reminder that if you are enjoying Women In Horror Year, a complete index of all my entries can be found here.
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Women In Horror Year: Day 132
I’m Sorry If I Scared You by Mae Murray
Thanksgiving 2010. The world prepares for the first lunar eclipse to take place on the winter solstice since the year 1638. Crop circles, strange animals, disappearances, and UFOs permeate the empty countryside of the American South.
Odette "Odie" Tucker is a first-generation college student, returning home from Boston to rural Arkansas for the holidays. On the drive home, she endures a pill-induced abortion in a gas station bathroom, the product of a recent rape she has told no one about. On a whim, she 'rescues' the clump of expelled cells in a plastic water bottle.
At home, Odie faces the suppressed feelings of abandonment from her family and lifelong best friend Dale, an out butch lesbian Odie is too afraid to admit she's in love with. When Odie's abortion becomes sentient and possesses her, she begins to live vicariously through its complete embrace of life, love, sex, violence, and vengeance.
Folks who have been reading me for 20 or 30 years are familiar with what I’m talking about when I reference an author “bleeding on the page”. Hell, it’s even referenced in the title of one of my short story collections. I have always been a proponent of authors using real life to inform their fiction. And I’m not necessarily talking about going full-on Hunter S. Thompson. It can be as smaller and subtler with that — an author fighting their way through recovery perhaps using some of their observations to imbue a character in a novel going through the same thing. I have bled on the page many times. Often, it is just a drop or two. Sometimes, such as in the case of GHOUL, DARK HOLLOW, or THE GIRL ON THE GLIDER it has been a hemorrhage. It has been my experience that it is the latter that readers connect the most with on an emotional level. They don’t know I bled on the page. They only know I made them feel something real.
I don’t know Mae Murray very well. Most of our interactions have been limited to social media and saying hello at conventions and events. But given the absolutely visceral emotional reaction I had when reading this book earlier this year, I’d bet my comic book collection that she bled on the page for this one. I don’t know if it was a conscious or subconscious part of the art, but I’ll bet it is there. And if I am right about this, then I hope that the act of creating this art was as healing to her as it was moving and rewarding to this reader. It is in that emotional level where this book shines, elevating it above the standard surreal fare or weird fiction. This isn’t extreme horror or quiet horror. It’s not quite bizarro. I think it would cheapen it to only label it as grief horror. And yet, it has elements of all these things. I’m Sorry if I Scared You transcends all the subgenre labels and categories and truly stands on its own — a definitive work that ruthlessly and effortlessly evokes a range of emotions in the reader. The best kind of books are the ones that stick with you after you’ve finished them. The ones when, two weeks later and you’re halfway through a different book, you find yourself returning to in your mind, and mulling over. It’s the type of book you’ll need to sit with for a bit, after you’ve finished. If I’m not mistaken, this is Murray’s first published novel. If so, then I expect great things to come.
I’m Sorry If I Scared You is available in hardcover, paperback, and eBook from Medusa Publishing Haus.
