Good morning,

Today’s Fem Friday is all about horror and the women who write it, and there are also four links instead of the usual three. I hope you enjoy all of them.

Mariana Enriquez’ Things We Lost In The Fire was one of my books of 2017, and if you were interested in that but have not yet bought the book you can read one of her stories, Spiderweb, and see if you like it:

If they were always cicadas, their summer noise would remind me of the violet flowers of the jacaranda trees along the Paraná, or of the white stone mansions with their staircases and their willows. But as chicharras they make me think of the heat, rotting meat, blackouts, drunks who stare with bloodshot eyes from their benches in the park.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/19/spiderweb

Here’s an interview with Mariana Enriquez, talking about horror and the setting for Spiderweb:

the tradition there of ghost stories, local monsters, and saints is very different from what you can absorb in Buenos Aires. Even in the cities of the northeast there is a relationship with the supernatural that is not cynical and sometimes can feel deeply disturbing.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/this-week-in-fiction-mariana-enriquez-on-the-fascination-of-ghost-stories

In a totally different kind of horror, have you seen Alice Lowe’s Prevenge? It is superb and also horrible, and she was really pregnant while she was making it:

In the very personification of the adage “necessity is the mother of invention”, Lowe came up with the concept when she found herself jobless and pregnant for the first time at 37 years old. “I had projects in development and it was taking ages and I was getting frustrated […] I got pregnant thinking: ‘Nothing’s happening right now with the film world, if I’m gonna have a kid, it’s gonna be now.’”

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/feb/14/alice-lowe-on-violent-british-horror-comedy-prevenge

To finish this theme of the casual horror of the everyday, here’s a Mallory Ortberg classic – Erotica Written By An Alien Pretending Not To Be Horrified By The Human Body. Please enjoy:

“Jostling occurred for an extended period of time, then silence.”

http://the-toast.net/2014/04/02/alien-erotica/

OoooOOOOOoooooOOOO,

Alex x.