It’s spooky season. Maybe you have your costume all picked out and your favorite scary movies set to stream, but do you need a little eerie reading material?
A new short story collection has you covered. It’s called “Beneath the Bluebonnets: Tales of Terror by Texas Women.”
Carmen Gray, who edited the collection, joined the Standard with the details.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Well, you, I understand, are a writer and had an experience of being involved in a similar project in the past, but you were one of the only female writers. Was that really what spawned this idea bringing together all these women authors?
Carmen Gray: Yes, actually. I guess it was about 10 years ago, my first short horror story was chosen to be in a collection called “Road Kill: Texas Horror by Texas Writers,” and it was the first volume, which was really amazing. Honestly, I’m very grateful to have been chosen to be in that collection.
But something I noticed back then was I was among all-male writers in this group and I thought, wow, this needs to change. Especially in my mind, I feel like women need to have a bigger platform in all genres, but especially in horror because it’s predominantly male.
I believe that women have lived more horror in their lives than men. Starting with, well, we can just go into so many different things, but…
Well, let’s pull those pieces apart just a little bit. What do you think it is that that women bring to horror?
It’s really just known that women, starting from the time they’re little, go through things that men don’t go through. We have our menstrual cycle, some women have babies, I mean these are all things that are body horror actually. It can be considered that. The way women have been treated, and especially women of color, even more so.
So, we have had to battle, and of course we can even touch on what’s happening nowadays with the Cornell 7.
There’s a lot that women have to say about their lived experiences with horror. And I feel that this is a great platform for women to voice their experiences through fiction, so it’s a safe way to write their stories.
» MORE TALES OF TERROR: ‘Something Followed Us Home’ gathers Latin American horror stories — just in time for spooky season
What’s unique about writing something that’s only a few pages long and telling a horror story in that short amount of time?
Yeah, it can be a challenge because people who like to write novels, you have to kind of shorten the whole journey — the climax, the denouement, everything. I also feel it’s really digestible, although some of these stories are a little intense.
But you can choose to just read a short story in a few minutes, really, or just as you’re lying in bed at night, although I don’t know if you want to read some of those stories at night. They might keep you up.
Did you give your writers any instructions on sort of what you were hoping they would write about, or was it sort of just a free range of anything else?
Yeah, so this is the first collection, and I hope there will be more. That’s my goal.
And it is specifically Texas-based. That is one thing I took from “Road Kill,” because I liked the whole idea of it being Texas-focused.
I am a native Texan. I come from a long line of native Texans, and I feel like Texas is a particularly spooky landscape. There’s a lot of haunted stories from this state. I really wanted it to be Texas-specific. So that was one of the things that was definitely one of the parameters.
But really, it was kind of like, just run with this. Some of the authors gave me stories that they’ve already had in other prior collections. And what I did is I noticed that as I started putting it together, there was a really strong theme that was showing up, and it was a lot of autonomy — issues of the fear of loss of autonomy.
And I think that, I mean, that’s in all of our collective consciousness right now because of what’s happening politically in particular in Texas.
Well, I don’t want to spoil anything, but you are a writer in this too. What did you write?
Well, so my story is called “The Disappearing Women.” In “The Disappearing Women,” it really touches on kind of a “Handmaid’s Tale“-ish type of story, but with a woman who is Mexican American.
There’s all kinds of issues that arise for her in this kind of dystopian world that she finds herself in and how she handles the media, how she’s a in a newsroom and what exactly she has to do to maintain a little bit of sovereignty, but in reality, she she’s not able to keep that.
So, it’s horror in a… How do I say this without giving it away? I think I’m not going to tell too much about it. I want the audience to pick up the book and read it for themselves.
Well, you mentioned this idea of autonomy that really emerged as a theme. Did anything surprise you as you got these stories back?
It felt really interesting to me that the theme just kind of on its own emerged. And like I said, I think that it is really because it is on all of our minds as women here living in Texas under some very restrictive laws that are becoming even more restrictive and our reaction to it.
It comes out in these stories and a lot of them — not in all of them, but in most of them.
Something that you wanted to emphasize: I was complimenting the cover here, and you said none of it is AI. That was important to you.
So important, especially in this day and age of artificial intelligence kind of taking over humans versus robots. And there is a story actually about robots in there that I think you’ll find interesting.
But all of the writing is human-made, along with the cover art. So that’s something we’re really proud of for this collection.
This story first appeared in the Texas Standard.