The Victorian death photos are straight out of my own childhood. I found a book of them in an Idaho library when I was little. I’m pretty sure I’ve been ruined ever since. They were on a bottom shelf. There were no names in the checkout log. Unlike the narrator here, I didn’t steal the book, but oh, oh, I thought about it.

would like to destroy this notion that some editors have that there seems to be a lack of women writing horror (not “dark fiction.” I mean horror. Real. Damn. Horror.), or that they’re unable to find new and different women writers to contribute to their various anthologies, which is why they can only invite the same two or three women to contribute to their anthologies…. Well, I guarantee that more than two or three women are writing horror—women all over the world are writing the fuck out of horror and knocking it out of the ballpark.

Mythology is something that’s fascinated me since childhood, especially the ways in which societal power-shifts can cause myths to mutate. The worship of Persephone, for example, was a mystery religion long before Dionysus came on the scene, one reserved specifically for women, and if you trace the Persephonean myth back far enough, you’ll find that she transmutes into a sort of “death queen” goddess who actually pre-dates both her supposed husband, Hades, and the sacrificial son-lover figure of Dionysus or Attis.