 Today we are honoured to kick off the the blog tour for The Dead Girls Club by Damien Angelica Walters. Damien Angelica Walters is the author of Sing Me Your Scars, winner of This is Horror's Short Story Collection of the Year, Paper Tigers, and the forthcoming Cry Your Way Home. Her short fiction has been nominated twice for a Bram Stoker Award, reprinted in The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror and The Year's Best Weird Fiction, and published in various anthologies and magazines, including the Shirley Jackson Award Finalists Autumn Cthulhu and The Madness of Dr. Caligari, World Fantasy Award Finalist Cassilda's Song, Nightmare Magazine, and Black Static. Until the magazine's closing in 2013, she was an Associate Editor of the Hugo Award-winning Electric Velocipede. Find her on Twitter @DamienAWalters or on the web at http://damienangelicawalters.com. Could you tell the readers a little bit about yourself? I’m Damien Angelica Walters, the author of The Dead Girls Club, Cry Your Way Home, Paper Tigers, and Sing Me Your Scars. My short fiction has been nominated twice for a Bram Stoker Award, reprinted in Best Horror of the Year, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, and The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and published in various anthologies and magazines, including the Shirley Jackson Award Finalists Autumn Cthulhu and The Madness of Dr. Caligari, World Fantasy Award Finalist Cassilda's Song, Nightmare Magazine, and Black Static. I live in Maryland with my husband and two rescued pit bulls and a to-read pile the size of Texas. Other than the horror genre, what else has been a major influence on your writing? Definitely Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Hoffman, and Agatha Christie. The characters the first three authors create are always so vivid, so real, and the latter was a genius when it comes to twists and surprises and hiding clues so well you don’t even realize what they are. She definitely set the stage for every novel with a twist you don’t see coming. Given the dark, violent and at times grotesque nature of the horror genre why do you think so many people enjoy reading it? Because it’s controlled fear. The world is a terrifying place with monsters that can tear you and your life apart. And by monsters, I mean things like overdue bills, health insurance woes, medical problems, active shooter drills in our schools, all the things we can’t seem to escape from. Reading about fictional monsters and evil characters allows you to leave the everyday horrors behind for a time. What, if anything, is currently missing from the horror genre? Stronger visibility for women and writers of color. Even in 2019, it’s not where it should be. I still see lists of favorite books/stories that contain only work written by white men and what’s upsetting is when no one seems bothered by it at all or even seems to notice at all. Is there one subject you would never write about as an author? Gratuitous animal or child abuse. I don’t feel that writing about cruelty to the small and powerless for cruelty’s sake is interesting or edgy. With that being said, I also feel there are ways to write about both subjects that aren’t gratuitous, with the trauma happening off-stage. What is the best piece of advice you ever received with regards to your writing? There will be negative reviews, there will be plenty of readers who don’t like your work, but stressing over what you can’t control is pointless. It’s wonderful advice I try to follow, try being the operative word because of course I’m only human. Sometimes harsh reviews hurt, but all you can do is move forward and keep writing. For those who haven’t read any of your books, which of your books do you think best represents your work and why? I suspect Cry Your Way Home showcases my range as a storyteller well because it spans several genres. But I know there are people who don’t care for short stories, so perhaps they’d enjoy The Dead Girls Club which is a suspense/horror/mystery hybrid. Do you have a favorite line or passage from your work, and would you like to share it with us? There are always darlings in any story or novel. Some end up on the cutting board, others get to stay. But there are also sentences that seem simple or even lackluster but they stick out in my memory because it’s where part of the story fell into place or something about a character became clear while I was writing it. One of my favorite lines from The Dead Girls Club is the chant the girls say: “Red Lady, Red Lady, show us your face” because that simple phrase is what birthed the story of the Red Lady in my head. The Dead Girls Club has a dual timeline for its narrative, what’s the hardest part of writing a book that covers distinct timelines? The hardest part was creating and keeping the two voices distinct. I didn’t want young Heather to sound like adult Heather. Also, there’s a call and response between the narratives in many places and keeping those in order was sometimes tricky, especially in the editing phase, when I moved a few scenes from one chapter to another. The Dead Girls club is a group of girls obsessed with the dark stuff, do any of the members of the club represent you in any way, or are they all splinters of you in some way? I remember being drawn to darker things – movies, books, television shows – at that age, so in that respect, yes, they represent me. But once on the page, they took on their own personalities and became their own people. And honestly, I think most young girls all go through a stage where darkness holds a fascination so they represent all of us, not just me. Heather has been described in a couple of reviews as being unlikeable, why do you think we still have a hang up about protagonists being likeable? It’s interesting because I don’t see the same complaints when a male character is unlikeable. That’s curious, don’t you think? What it says to me is that we still expect women, even fictional women, to smile and be nice, so to speak. We don’t want difficult women. We don’t want unpleasant women. We want women who fit a narrow definition of femininity. But I don’t think we need to like characters in books. Joe from You by Caroline Kepnes is horrid. So, too, are Nick and Amy in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, and plenty of readers despise Eva Khatchadourian from We Need to Talk About Kevin. I think it’s possible to not like a main character and still enjoy the story. What's the one question you wish you would get asked but never do? And what would be the answer? What’s your favorite dinosaur? I think everyone should have a favorite. As an adult, my favorite is Deinonychus. As a child, it was Ankylosaurus. When I was small, I had a whole slew of plastic dinosaurs that I played with and treasured for years and years. Now, I have several larger ones that sit on a bookcase shelf and they make me smile. That was more fun than something writing related, wasn’t it? To find out more about Damien and to follow her on social media please follow the links below www.damienangelicawalters.com Twitter @dawalters Instagram @dawalters Facebook @DamienAngelicaWalters Amazon Links: https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Girls-Club-Novel/dp/1643851632/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dead-Girls-Damien-Angelica-Walters/dp/1643851632/ The Dead Girls Club by Damien Angelica Walters A supernatural thriller in the vein of A Head Full of Ghosts about two young girls, a scary story that becomes far too real, and the tragic--and terrifying--consequences that follow one of them into adulthood.Red Lady, Red Lady, show us your face... In 1991, Heather Cole and her friends were members of the Dead Girls Club. Obsessed with the macabre, the girls exchanged stories about serial killers and imaginary monsters, like the Red Lady, the spirit of a vengeful witch killed centuries before. Heather knew the stories were just that, until her best friend Becca began insisting the Red Lady was real--and she could prove it. That belief got Becca killed. It's been nearly thirty years, but Heather has never told anyone what really happened that night--that Becca was right and the Red Lady was real. She's done her best to put that fateful summer, Becca, and the Red Lady, behind her. Until a familiar necklace arrives in the mail, a necklace Heather hasn't seen since the night Becca died. The night Heather killed her. Now, someone else knows what she did...and they're determined to make Heather pay.   Comments are closed.
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