Lisa Kröger > Quotes

“Perhaps the weirdest tale is how we’ve managed to forget the women who created such amazing stories.”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“What do queer activism and vampires have in common? Turns out, a lot.”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“Haunted house fictions play upon the complex fears and concerns about domestic issues that women have long grappled with.”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“There seems to be an unspoken assumption that women aren't interested in horror and speculative fiction, despite ample evidence to the contrary.”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“Writers like Washington Irving, Charles Brockden Brown, and Nathaniel Hawthorne added uniquely American elements to their horror stories, informed by the early settlers' Puritan faith and fears of indigenous peoples: eerie woods, the devil, and witches.
Even today, much of American horror fiction reckons to varying degrees with fears that are tied up in the nation's history, fears of supernatural evil, of the racial other, and of the frightful consequences of the violent past coming home to roost.”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“Why are women great at writing horror fiction? Maybe because horror is a transgressive genre. It pushes readers to uncomfortable places, where we aren't used to treading, and it forces us to confront what we naturally want to avoid.”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“Morrison read a news clipping about Margaret Garner while doing research for another book, and she decided to try to imagine what caused a woman to commit infanticide. What does it mean to be a mother to children who literally belong to another person?...What she created was a novel in the tradition of ghost stories, but in which the ghost represents more than just a person returning from the afterlife. The spirit also stands for the estimated sixty million people who died in the so-called land of the free during the time of enslavement.”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“Regina Maria Roche’s Gothic novels were so popular that Jane Austen name-checked one of them in Northanger Abbey”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“When women engage in rebellion in the form of occult resistance, they are labeled witches, for good or for bad.”
― Lisa Kröger, Toil and Trouble: A Women's History of the Occult

“In a way, women have always existed in occulted space. They were meant to be hidden; their role was one that existed behind the scenes, as caretaker of the family and keeper of the home. Their role was never intended to be public—that is, until the occult told them that they could step forward and take control of their own destiny.”
― Lisa Kröger, Toil and Trouble: A Women's History of the Occult

“If people could use the occult as shorthand for invented power to be taken away, then why couldn’t women use it as a way to gain power for themselves?”
― Lisa Kröger, Toil and Trouble: A Women's History of the Occult

“Regina Maria Roche did not deviate from the Gothic script in any of her fiction, to the point of being formulaic. Her novels are full of banditti-riddled forests, haunted and crumbling ruins in the midst of idyllic pastures, perfectly pale heroines of unparalleled virtue, and fainting women. So many fainting women.”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“In any era, women become accustomed to entering unfamiliar spaces, including territory that they’ve been told not to enter. When writing is an off-limits act, writing one’s story becomes a form of rebellion and taking back power.”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“Calling a woman a witch was a way to punish her for any behavior that could be interpreted as outside a woman’s place in a Puritan community. Whether women were seen as too seductive or too outspoken, the accusation of witchcraft was a warning of what would happen should that power ever be too real.”
― Lisa Kröger, Toil and Trouble: A Women's History of the Occult

“The story demonstrates Bowen’s flair for injecting life into a tired horror plot by putting women in dangerous situations that are rooted in the real world, with details like abusive spouses and the isolation that comes with a lack of access to education.”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“As this long history of the vampire story shows, these creatures may take various forms, but they’ll be with us for some time, lurking in the shadows of our stories for as long as we tell them.”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“The hauntings in these houses are bound to families and their attendant tensions. Secrets and broken relationships fuel the supernatural activity. The focus is on mothers and daughters for Macardle and Jackson and on marriage in du Maurier’s Rebecca. Intimate spaces within the larger homes also play important roles: nurseries in Macardle’s Cliff End and Jackson’s Hill House (and, later, Susan Hill’s Eel Marsh House in The Woman in Black); the second Mrs. de Winter’s bedroom, boudoir, and writing room in du Maurier’s Manderley.”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“Because séances were usually conducted by women, these events afforded women a unique, unprecedented opportunity to speak freely outside the home. Their communicants from beyond often preached abolitionist and feminist views to audiences. It was a win-win situation: the women were able to speak their political views while blaming it all on the inhabitant of the Great Beyond.”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“From the 1920s until the 1950s, fans of horror, science fiction, and fantasy got their fixes through pulp magazines, so named for the wood-pulp paper they were printed on.”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“Helen Oyeyemi understands that fairy tales are essentially horror stories—cautionary tales that tell us about ourselves and our place in society.”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“And it was women who took the genre to the political realm, making their ghostly tales much more than just scary stories to tell in the dark.”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“He notes that between 1900 and 1905 Hopkins published four novels, at least seven short stories, a historical booklet about Africa, more than twenty biographical sketches, and numerous essays and feature articles for the magazines The Colored American (for which she was literary editor from 1903 to 1904) and The Voice of the Negro.”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“More recently, the Showtime television series Penny Dreadful offered a rather heartbreaking storyline involving the monster and his horrified creator.”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“Fans of Dungeons and Dragons will recognize the science fiction of Margaret St. Clair even if they don’t recognize her name. Gary Gygax, one of the pioneering designers of the game, included her in Appendix N of the Dungeon Masters Guide (TSR, 1979), which is a list of his inspirations in creating his extensive world. Specifically, Gygax mentioned St. Clair’s novels The Shadow People (Dell, 1969) and Sign of the Labrys (Mineola, 1963).”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“women who write have always used uncanny and supernatural storytelling for sharing tales about their lives and for illustrating the deep traumas of life.”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“Throughout her more than one hundred short stories and nine novels, St. Clair used her speculative fiction to explore human potential, both our depths and our heights.”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“Elizabeth Gaskell—Mrs. Gaskell to most who knew her—was so successful at managing her home life that she managed an entire second home, without her husband even knowing she owned it. How did she do it? Mrs. Gaskell wrote ghost stories.”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“We may think of people who lived during the Victorian era and the decades after as staid, prudish, buttoned up, and intolerant, but Lee wore her feminism—and, during World War I, her pacifism—on her sleeve. In fact, she literally used her wardrobe to show how she felt about Victorian conventions.”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“(What is it with ghosts who play the organ? We’re waiting for one to pick up the clarinet.)”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

“hauntings are more broadly defined. People can be haunted by ideas, by the past, by an obsession. Inanimate objects can be haunted as well, holding on to some nameless evil or trauma that won’t dissipate. Vernon Lee’s brand of supernatural fiction fits this latter category: less about ghosts resolving their mortal issues and more about people who can’t escape their own psychology. Lee’s characters are women obsessed with strange ancestors, or men who are artistically—and sometimes sexually—frustrated. And they’re all dangerously preoccupied with, and almost possessed by, the past.”
― Lisa Kröger, Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction