The Monster She Wrote Podcast

With fangs, fake bats, and lots of spooky organ music, The Brides of Dracula seemed a natural choice following our Women of Hammer Horror episode. Set in Transylvania--and no actual Dracula in sight--this 1960 Hammer classic tells the story of Marianne, a young student teacher, who finds herself in a mysterious castle, and unwittingly releases the vampiric baron on the local village. In typical Hammer fashion, there are lots of beautiful women in nightgowns, dangerous but handsome villains who lurk in the shadows, and Technicolor blood. 

Recommended in this episode: Behind Her Eyes and the fiction of L. T. Meade

Next episode: THE GORGON

Please rate and review us, or better yet, tell a friend. 

Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is [email protected]. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission. 

So much has been written about the final girl that the term has become shorthand for the feminine role in horror. But the trope of the final girl, which rose to fame in the 1970s and 80s, doesn’t represent all women in horror. The final girl is a fighter, who uses her intellect and cunning to survive the movie villain’s massacre. The problem, though, is that the final girl is so named because she is the only one left standing; the rest of the women fall to the murderer’s knife, or weapon of choice. But, if we rewind horror history just a decade or two, we see a broader range of female characters. Hammer Horror was famous for its actresses, most of them fitting a certain image: wide-eyed, buxom, often blonde. Beyond the “look,” these women played a wide range of characters. From conniving villains to sharp-toothed monsters to fierce fighters, the women of Hammer Horror were a bright spot in Horror History. 

Recommended in this episode: 12 Hour Shift 

Please rate and review us, or better yet, tell a friend. 

Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is [email protected]. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission. 

In The Twisted Ones, T. Kingfisher turns a hoarder’s home into a cosmic nightmare. Part haunted house story and part folk horror, The Twisted Ones tells the story of a woman who goes by the nickname “Mouse,” who goes to her grandmother’s house to clean it out after her death. However, nothing could prepare her for what she finds. There’s piles of junk to clear, including a room full of lifelike baby dolls. And there’s a strange journal from Mouse’s step-grandfather, who wrote a series of strange entries about the twisted ones. “I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones, and I lay down flat on the ground like the dead ones…”

Recommended in this episode: Women Make Horror, edited by Alison Pierse

Please rate and review us, or better yet, tell a friend. 

Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is [email protected]. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission. 

Greye La Spina’s short story “Antimacassar” first appeared in Weird Tales in 1949, and since then, has been anthologized many times. The tale is a vampire story at heart, but what sets it apart from other vampire tales is its setting. La Spina trades traditional Transylvania castles for a cozy home atmosphere, in this case an old Pennsylvania Dutch farmhouse. Don’t be fooled, though; the vampire in this story is not a cozy creature. Rather, the tale is one of cold-blooded murder. 

Recommended in this episode: The Return by Rachel Harrison

Please rate and review us, or better yet, tell a friend. 

Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is [email protected]. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.

We will start with the simple sentence: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”

This is officially our first episode of Season 2 (as well as the first episode of 2021), so we thought we would visit the 2020 Rebecca adaptation (since we started this podcast at beginning of 2019 with our discussion of Daphne Du Maurier). 

Please rate and review us, or better yet, tell a friend. 

Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is [email protected]. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.

Coppelius’s Toyshop is one of the busiest stores in New York during the Christmas season. With life-sized toy soldiers on either side of the entrance and characters straight out of fairy tales roaming the aisles filled with toys, it’s a paradise for kids of all ages. It’s not a paradise, however, for Connie Willis’s narrator, who is late for a Knicks game and just learned his new girlfriend has a kid that needs to be watched until her friend can pick him up from the toy store. To make matters worse, the narrator hates kids, and he hates the toy store. Unfortunately, when the little boy has to use the restroom in the store, the narrator will see all of Coppelius’s wares as he tries unsuccessfully to find the boy, make the handoff, and get to his basketball game. All the while, he hears the store’s music on repeat and the comforting refrain, “Come to Dr. Coppelius’s/ Where all is bright and warm,/ And there’s no fear/ For I am here/ To keep you safe from harm.”      

RECOMMENDED READING: Connie Willis's short story collection A Lot Like Christmas

Please rate and review us, or better yet, tell a friend. Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is [email protected]. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.

The Christmas ghost story was a staple of winter festivities in Victorian and Edwardian England, so we thought we’d discuss one of the most famous ones: Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story.” The story is told in first person. The nurse, now an older woman, is speaking to a little girl about when her mother was a little girl. The nurse, then a young woman, found herself in a creepy old manor house in the middle of a cold and snowy winter, the only caretaker of the little girl, who had recently lost both her parents. The manor house belonged to a relative, and in Gothic fashion, secrets abound in the old home. No one ever enters the east wing, which has been permanently closed. And there is also the troubling presence of a little ghost child, who appears outside at windows during snow storms. Is she begging to be let into the warm house, or is she beckoning the nurse’s charge out into the cold? 

Recommended in this episode: Valancourt Book's collections of Christmas Ghost Stories and T. Kingfisher's The Twisted Ones

Please rate and review us, or better yet, tell a friend. 

Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is [email protected]. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission. 

On Christmas Eve, while his family is sharing ghost stories around the fireplace, Arthur Kipps remembers his own horrible encounter with a haunting. Kipps, when he was a young and eager lawyer, was sent to Eel Marsh house to sort through the papers of the recently deceased widow, Mrs. Drablow. It should be a rather easy job, except Mrs. Drablow apparently didn’t throw anything away. Even worse, none of the locals will help him or answer any of his questions, their fear of the house is so great. Added to this is the location of the home that is completely cut-off at high tide. All of this is confusing and annoying for Kipps. However, to make matters worse, he soon learns why the locals avoid the house and avoid speaking about it. Eel Marsh House is haunted by its painful past from the nursery to the surrounding marshes, including those pesky bumps and footsteps in the night, the ghostly cries of a dying child on the marshes, and, of course, the Woman in Black. 

Recommended in this episode: the graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler's Kindred

Please rate and review us, or better yet, tell a friend. 

Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is [email protected]. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini. 

Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” is a coming-of-age story, featuring Gan, a young man living on a faraway planet--which at some point in the distant past was colonized by humans. The planet is home to a sentient giant worm-like people. When the humans first arrived, they tried to kill the worms. The worms, in turn, tried to enslave the humans, as they could be used to incubate their own young. But now, it seems, the planet has reached a kind of precarious balance. The humans and the worms are able to live side-by-side. The worms protect the humans by giving them lands to live on, away from worm society. In exchange, the humans--specifically the boys and men--are used as breeding stock for the worm eggs.

Recommended in this episode: Lisa Tuttle's short fiction

Some extra reading on "Bloodchild":

https://www.tor.com/2018/09/06/why-men-get-pregnant-bloodchild-by-octavia-e-butler/ 

https://bookriot.com/is-it-possible-to-misread-octavia-butler/

Please rate and review us, or better yet, tell a friend. 

Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is [email protected]. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini. 

Catherine House is a kind of utopia. The graduates of the prestigious school go on to be the world’s top doctors, lawyers, and politicians. Basically, the kind of people who run the world have come from Catherine House. Even better, tuition is completely free. Students at Catherine House have every need provided for them--all at no cost. The catch? You can’t leave the campus for three years. Each student must cut ties with their “old” lives. There’s no trips home, no outside influences like music or television, and there’s no contact with the outside community. It is an experiment in the perfect community. But just how perfect is it?

Recommended in this episode: The Haunting of Bly Manor and the ghost stories of Henry James

Please rate and review us, or better yet, tell a friend. 

Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is [email protected]. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini.