We are thrilled to welcome writer TC Parker to the June 2022 Shelf Edition!
Where I Buy Books
My reading tends to be a mix of physical titles I buy online, Kindle copies I can read on my phone when I’m waiting for my kids to fall asleep… and books I pick up second-hand at charity shops and stores I happen to walk past. The latter choices especially tend to be quite eclectic; I’m reading The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo at the moment, and I’m pretty sure I’d never have picked it up, had I not seen it in my local branch of Age UK…
Recent Favourite LOHF Titles
I have quite a few current LOHF favourites.
I recently finished, and loved, Catriona Ward’s Sundial – a tense, unrelentingly oppressive story that marries isolation horror with some genuinely unsettling domestic psychodrama.
Hailey Piper is a perennial favourite, not to mention a genuinely wonderful human being, and The Worm & His Kings and (the Stoker-winning!) Queen of Teeth take pride of place on the shelves – they’re queer masterpieces, both of them.
Sonora Taylor’s Little Paranoias is one of the best short story collections I’ve ever read (… someone needs to adapt Weary Bones for TV, and soon…), and Grindhouse Press’ Worst Laid Plans is a hell of an anthology: V. Castro’s Cucuy of Cancun and Hailey’s Unkindly Girls are standouts.
Older favourites include Lauren Beukes’ Broken Monsters, which leaves you with the kind of grotesque after-images of murder it’s impossible to shake, and Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned, which I’ve loved since I was a teenager. (If I were ever to be a vampire, you’d better believe I’d be the kind of vampire who speaks a dozen extinct languages, keeps extensive genealogical records and lives in a compound carved out of the side of a mountain in Wine Country). Tananarive Due’s collection Ghost Summer is also wonderful; I’m looking forward to checking out her vampires soon, too. (My Soul To Keep is already waiting for me on the Kindle).
LOHF TBR
My TBR is absolutely enormous and forever growing (…isn’t everybody’s?) – but I’m very excited to dive into Laurel Hightower’s creature feature Below. Everything Laurel does is miraculous – Whispers In The Dark blew me away when I read it, and I’m not sure Crossroads needs much of an introduction. I’m halfway through Hailey’s space-horror Your Mind Is A Terrible Thing right now, and have been dipping in and out of Scott J. Moses’ anthology What One Wouldn’t Do, which features stories from a number of LOHF, including Laurel, Hailey and Steph Ellis – whose Five Turns of the Wheel, incidentally, is one of the best folk-horror novels I’ve read. I’m looking forward to finally reading Eve Harms’ Transmuted, as well as Alex Woodroe’s anthology Your Body Is Not Your Body – the profits of which go to trans youth in Texas, and which everyone should pick up immediately.
LOHF Releases I’m Excited About
I love Cina Pelayo, and her upcoming (early cinema-inspired) sequel to Children of Chicago is already filling me with anticipation. I’ve got Hailey’s No Gods For Drowning on pre-order, as well as RJ Joseph’s Hell Hath No Sorrow Like A Woman Haunted. April Yates’ sapphic horromance Ashthorne is going to be awesome, as is Catherine McCarthy’s A Moonlit Path of Madness … and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the recent WIPs I’ve read from Lynn Love and Shauna Mc Eleney, both of which have left me broken in all the right ways.
There are almost certainly many, many more I’ve left out here… as so many others have pointed out, this is a particularly good time for women writing horror, and I want to read them all!
What’s New For Me
I’ve just released a new novel, Hummingbird, which was a bit of a labour of love – but a lot of my energy lately has been spent on growing a small press, Hold My Beer Publishing, with my friends (and regular collaborators) Edward Lorn and Daron Kappauff. We’ll be reissuing some of the titles from my back catalogue this summer, as well as a few new releases – but also have some other, very exciting plans up our collective sleeve, so… watch this space, I guess…
Author Bio
TC Parker is a writer and researcher based in the fox-ravaged wilds of Leicestershire, where she lives with her kids and partner.
The author of the El Gardener feminist heist trilogy (The Debt, The Push and The Remembrance) and the horror novels Saltblood, A Press of Feathers, Salvation Spring, Maiden (with Ward Nerdlo) and Hummingbird, she’s been a copywriter, a lecturer and, very briefly, an academic; now she runs a semiotics and cultural insight agency by day and dreams up horror and crime fiction at night, when the kids are asleep.
Visit her online at www.tcparkerwrites.com and follow her on Twitter: @tcparkerlives
Thank you for joining us, T.C! Our TBR piles also thank you!
If you would like to be featured on a future shelf edition please leave a note in the comments. We’d love to see your shelves!
Teresa creates our Shelf Edition posts and is one of our LOHF Awards readers. You can find Teresa on Goodreads, on Twitter as @teresa_ardrey, and lurking in a corn maze.
No comments:
Post a Comment