Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of non-fiction books, Bram Stoker Award-winning prose writer, and Halloween expert whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” She has published four novels, 150 short stories, and three books on the history of Halloween. Her most recent releases include the anthologies Haunted Nights, co-edited with Ellen Datlow, and Ghost Stories: Classic Tales of Horror and Suspense, co-edited with Leslie Klinger. She lives in the San Fernando Valley.
Leslie S. Klinger is the editor of the highly-acclaimed New Annotated Dracula, New Annotated Frankenstein, and the two-volume New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft. He also edited the anthologies In the Shadow of Dracula and In the Shadow of Edgar Allen Poe, featuring 19th-century supernatural fiction. Klinger’s annotated editions include the four-volume Annotated Sandman, with Neil Gaiman, Watchmen Annotated, with Dave Gibbons, and Annotated American Gods, again with Neil Gaiman. He serves as Treasurer of the Horror Writers Association and lives in Malibu with his wife Sharon, dog Jenny Calendar, and cat Rupert Giles.
Together, Morton & Klinger have edited the new anthology Weird Women: Classic Supernatural Fiction by Groundbreaking Female Writers: 1852-1923, and they recently talked about it with Daryl Maxwell for the LAPL Blog.
What was your inspiration for Weird Women?
Les: When I was in Bloomington, Indiana, for an exhibition of the Lilly Library on Frankenstein, I saw a wonderful display put on by the curator Rebecca Baumann on “Weird Women”—contemporaries or successors to Mary Shelley—and I conceived the idea for the anthology. I realized we already had a start on this with Ghost Stories and so sprung the idea on Lisa!
Lisa: After Les and I did Ghost Stories: Classic Tales of Horror and Suspense, we wanted to do another book together. We realized that several of our favorite pieces from Ghost Stories were by female authors who we thought deserved wider recognition, so when Les proposed a book of such stories, I enthusiastically agreed!
How familiar were you with the Horror literature from 1852-1923 prior to this project? How long did it take you to do the necessary research and then collect the stories for Weird Women?
Lisa: I was already fairly well acquainted with it, and yet it was surprising how few female authors I could name from that time. Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Riddell, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman were already familiar to me, and from Ghost Stories, I’d discovered Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Olivia Howard Dunbar, but I ended up being pleasantly shocked by just how many women were writing horror during this period. We spent probably six months researching and collecting stories for the book; we were reading everything from critical studies to old magazines to collections found only in research libraries. We ended up with a shortlist of about 50 stories, which we had to winnow down to just 21. Some of the choices we had to make were just agonizing!
Les: I was already well aware that there were many, many talented women writing in the 19th century, at a time when “genres” were not prisons—one could write a mystery today, a romantic story tomorrow, and a supernatural tale the next. I’d already done an anthology of women’s crime fiction, In the Shadow of Agatha Christie: Classic Crime Fiction by Forgotten Female Writers 1850-1917. Yes, the “research” was a painful process of cutting stories, not because of quality but sheerly for quantity! I hope we get the chance to do a second volume!
Was there an author who had written a Horror story that particularly surprised you (because of the types of stories they are more closely identified with writing)?
Lisa: Well, Louisa May Alcott is the obvious choice here, but I think the one I find most interesting is Mary Austin, who is best known for her collection of desert essays, The Land of Little Rain. It astonished me to discover that Austin had written several supernatural stories, including the one we chose, “The Pocket-Hunter’s Story”, which is really a weird western…something I never expected to find a woman writing in 1909.
In the introduction to the book, you mention that you surveyed more than 50 stories for Weird Women, which ultimately includes 21 stories. If you could each pick one more author/story to include, what would they be?
Lisa: I think the one that I really hated to lose was “Good Lady Ducayne” by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. First published in 1869, it’s an amazing mix of mad scientist, vampire, and search for immortality themes, but it’s very long, so in the end, we pulled it only because of its length.
Les: I loved Vernon Lee's “Marsyas in Flanders,” a strange story about an artifact with a supernatural history. Lee (really, Violet Paget) was a great favorite of Montague Summers, who called her the “greatest…of modern exponents of the supernatural in fiction.”
Do you have an idea or theory regarding why/how some of these authors have faded into obscurity while some of their contemporaries are still known and read? Clearly, it’s not their work. Is it just luck or something else?
Lisa: Although it’s tempting to just label it sexism, I think one reason some of these women were unjustly overlooked is that they wrote in so many different genres. Very few of the authors in Weird Women wrote primarily horror or supernatural fiction; most also wrote dramas, historical romances, novels of social commentary, and even non-fiction...and some of them wrote very few works at all because they were too busy raising families or doing other jobs. What this means is that it’s very hard to publish collections of their genre work, because they rarely had enough to fill an entire book. Would we still know the work of, for example, M. R. James had he written only two or three ghost stories?
Les: I think many of the great 19th-century writers have vanished from view. We’re working hard to bring them back into the light!
What’s currently on your nightstand?
Lisa: I’m currently working on an interview with the wonderful Alma Katsu, so my nightstand now holds The Hunger, The Deep and her first novel The Taker, as well as the anthology Miscreations, for which she provided the foreword.
Les: I’m working on an annotated edition of Strange Adventure of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, so a lot of related reading!
What was your favorite book when you were a child?
Lisa: I started reading more adult works when I was very young, and I think my first favorite book was probably Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Les: I was a big science-fiction reader when I was young. One of my favorites was Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, which many years later I learned was a retelling of Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo.
Was there a book you felt you needed to hide from your parents?
Lisa: Fortunately, no! My mom encouraged me to read everything. I remember being the envy of all my classmates when I read The Exorcist at 14.
Les: Compulsion by Meyer Levin. It had naughty bits that were real—one of the first great true-crime books. It was very popular among adults when I was young—not exactly on my recommended reading list.
Can you name your top five favorite or most influential authors?
Lisa: Oooh, let’s see…I’ll start with Dennis Etchison, an L.A.-based writer of mainly short stories who passed away just last year, and who I was fortunate enough to call something of a mentor. Philip K. Dick has been a favorite for over thirty years. Theodore Sturgeon and Ursula K. Le Guin were certainly influences on younger me. Lastly, I’ll mention Alan Moore, whose graphic novels are on a par with the best literature in the world as far as I’m concerned.
Les: My faves are easy:
Arthur Conan Doyle
Neil Gaiman
Michael Connelly
Robert Crais, and of course…
H. P. Lovecraft.
What is a book you've faked reading?
Lisa: I’m not sure I’ve ever really faked reading anything, but…well, I’ve only made it through parts of Joyce’s Ulysses.
Les: Dante’s poetry—powerful images, but awfully slow going—right up there with Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Can you name a book you've bought for the cover?
Lisa: Not necessarily one that I bought, but in the 70s a cousin gifted me with a boxed paperback set of H. P. Lovecraft, and I’m sure the covers on those paperbacks were a large part of the reason I devoured those books (oddly enough, I was recently chatting with Victor LaValle for an upcoming project, and he named one of those same covers as something that had an impact on his early love of weird fiction).
Les: The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov. The advertising showed a woman in a diaphanous gown recumbent on a chaise; the book was a big disappointment!
Is there a book that changed your life?
Lisa: I’m sure there’ve been a number of them, but the one I go to most immediately is Dennis Etchison’s collection The Dark Country, which I read about 1983. At the time I was young and still trying to find my voice as a writer, and reading that book made me realize that I could write horror fiction because Dennis was articulating some of the ideas I’d had floating in my head but that I didn’t think anyone would want to read.
Les: Lord of the Rings by Tolkien. I’d read a lot of science-fiction before that, but I’d never before come across fantasy. Dracula was equally life-changing, and I read them both in my freshman year of college.
Can you name a book for which you are an evangelist (and you think everyone should read)?
Lisa: Any collection of Etchison’s that includes “The Dog Park”, which may just be my all-time favorite short story.
Les: John Crowley’s Little, Big. I’ll cheat, however, and name two more: Frankenstein and Dracula. Many, many people think they know the stories and so never read the books. There’s a reason why we’re still reading them 200+ years later, a mere 125 years later for Stoker.
Is there a book you would most want to read again for the first time?
Lisa: I’ve probably revisited Frank Herbert’s Dune more than any other book, so it’d likely be that classic.
Les: Definitely, the Sherlock Holmes Canon. A friend once told me that she planned to be hypnotized to erase her memories of the stories just so she could read them again for the first time.
What is your idea of THE perfect day (where you could go anywhere/meet with anyone)?
Lisa: I’ve always regretted that I never got to meet Phil Dick, who (circa 1980) I wasn’t even living that far from. Dennis (Etchison again) knew Phil, and once told me he would’ve been happy to have taken me to meet him. My perfect day, then, would be the one that I just barely missed: Dennis Etchison and I heading down to Fullerton to spend the day with Phil Dick.
Les: I think I’d enjoy a conversation with Arthur Conan Doyle, to talk about how he so misunderstood the appeal of Holmes. Perhaps we’d have this conversation at the “Houdini Séance” at the Magic Castle, so we could also talk about his delusions about mediums and Spiritualism.
What is the question that you’re always hoping you’ll be asked, but never have been? What is your answer?
Lisa: The question: “Why is so much of your work set in L.A.?” The answer: “Because L.A. is older and darker and stranger than most people realize, and it’s not used nearly enough in horror fiction.”
Les: “Why do you like writing footnotes so much?” Because I love trivia and learning something new and cool almost daily—and then telling somebody else about it!
What are you working on now?
Lisa: As a Halloween expert, autumn is always my busiest time of the year, so I’m just working on keeping up with interview requests (this year I also have a new non-fiction book, Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances, out, which makes for even more interviews and promotion). Once I’m past the Halloween madness, it’ll be back to trying to keep up with short story deadlines. One of these days I hope to get to my fifth novel, but it’s historical and will involve a huge amount of research, so the actual writing is still a ways off.
Les: At the moment, I’m consumed with editing the Haunted Library of Horror Classics with Eric Guignard and the Library of Congress Crime Classics, but I plan to buckle down and get to work on New Annotated Jekyll & Hyde, as well as another anthology with Lisa!
