 The female horror creator that most inspired me has to be Mary Danby. I hated school and pretty much the only highlight of the year for me was when the book fair came. My parents had given me five pounds to spend on whatever books I wanted, and as I scanned the shelves one jumped out at me The Green Ghost and other stories: Edited by Mary Danby. I grabbed it and skipped to the desk to buy it, I was nine and this would be the first horror anthology I ever bought; sure I’d snuck out and read my parent’s Pan books of horror, but there was a completeness to this anthology, it wouldn’t be peeked at story by story in the early hours of the morning or when my parents were safely ensconced downstairs, no stolen moments and rushed readings. This book was mine and as such I could take my time, savour the stories within, it was also huge, over 500 pages of horror. I couldn’t wait. “Sorry. It’s got a red sticker on it.” “I know, it’s fine. See I have enough money.” I pushed my five pound note across the desk. “You’ll have to put it back.” “Why?” “It has a red sticker on it.” Finally after many attempts at me trying to complete, what to my mind should have been a simple transaction, the cashier called my teacher over. Apparently the red sticker meant the book was aimed at secondary school students and they weren’t allowed to sell it to a 9 year old. Thankfully the book fair was there for two days, and after a sleepless night worrying that someone else would buy the book (because why wouldn’t you it’s a thing of beauty) my disgruntled mother came down and bought the book herself and handed it over to me, whilst handing the cashier some serious side-eye. For reasons outside my control I lost that copy of the book when I was 13. But I searched high and low for another copy, trawling through second hand book shops and car boot sales, before finally being told about Amazon and finding a copy on their site. My new copy is the exact same print run as the one I had when I was 9, and whether it is nostalgia for the woman who properly introduced me to the horror anthology, or because there is such a mix of styles within those stories. The Green Ghost and other stories still delights me as an adult, and cements Mary Danby’s place as my Queen of Horror. Looking at my copy of The Green Ghost, what stands out to me is how many of the authors are women; of the seventeen authors included, nine of them are female, and I wonder if reading so much short fiction by female authors at such a young age has shaped my taste in short horror fiction. Authors who I am drawn to in short fiction, tend to be female and luckily there are a lot of excellent female writers out there. But for this article I’m supposed to choose only one. A difficult choice. Each writer brings a fresh voice, a different nuance to the horror genre, and my choice of whose book I will pick up and read can change on a whim. But for me I think my favourite contemporary female author would have to be Cate Gardner. There is a nightmarish quality to her stories, a discordant harmony that leaves you unsure of what is happening, disorientated and fearful without being able to really pinpoint why. Her characters are often guileless, not innocent as such, there often appears to be a deeper awareness to their cruelty. But their lack of deception endears you to them, no matter what atrocities they may perform within the pages of her stories. Cate Gardner paints a beautiful picture within her tales, but if you look closely you will notice that there is death and madness hidden within those brushstrokes, and if I was you I wouldn’t wonder too much about what is mixed in with that paint. Cate Gardner is a British horror and fantastical author with over a hundred short stories published. Several of those stories appear in her collection Strange Men in Pinstripe Suits (Strange Publications 2010). She is also the author of two novellas: Theatre of Curious Acts (Hadley Rille Books, 2011) and Barbed Wire Hearts (Delirium Books, 2011). Her chapbooks Nowhere Hall (Spectral Press 2011) and The Sour Aftertaste of Olive Lemon (Bucket 'O' Guts Press 2009) have now sold out, and she is currently working on a novel. Her favourite authors are Robert Shearman, Joe Hill, Neil Gaiman, Gina Ranalli, John Wyndham and Lemony Snicket. "...a rising purveyor of high literary strangeness..." Publishers Weekly http://www.categardner.net  Penny Jones knew she was a writer when she started to talk about herself in the third person (her family knew when Santa bought her a typewriter for Christmas when she was three). Penny’s debut collection “Suffer Little Children” published by Black Shuck Books was shortlisted for the 2020 British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer, and her short story “Dendrochronology” published by Hersham Horror was shortlisted for the 2020 British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story. https://www.penny-jones.com   Comments are closed.
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