Happy Halloween everyone! We’re finally at day 31 of the ‘A Scare A Day’ challenge. I hope you’ve enjoyed the stories and the blogs! It’s been a lot of work but I’ve loved seeing everyone’s opinions (whether you joined the discussion here, on social media or just in chatting to me!) and the blog has made me thing a little harder about each of the stories we’ve read. If you’ve enjoyed the challenge and my blogs, you can always tip me here!
Today’s story was ‘The Girls That Follow’ by J. Choe which was published by Nightmare Magazine this very year (we’re on the cutting edge over here!). You can read it here. I like to use the last few entries on the list to highlight writers publishing today and some of the amazing magazines which are publishing great horror and speculative fiction right now. If you’ve enjoyed the stories on the list, do go and check out more stories from the magazines featured!
We ended the list where we began – with werewolves – but with a very different and much darker story. One of the things I love about ‘A Scare A Day’ is the way that it brings very disparate stories into conversation with each other. While reading ‘The Girls That Follow’, I couldn’t help thinking back to Marie de France’s ‘Lay of the Werewolf’ (our first read, see the blog here). In the lay, we meet a werewolf who retains reason, loyalty and devotion, who forms a stark contrast to the monstrous beasts of a later werewolf imagination. His wife betrays him by revealing his form and abandoning him. ‘The Girls That Follow’ offers a the story in reverse. A man who is becoming a beast, whose werewolf nature is nothing but hunger and destruction, as likely to turn on supposed friend as prey. His partner notes that after so long as a werewolf, ‘it’s now something he can control’ but this doesn’t mean an end to transformation or the end of his murderous hunger. She wonders ‘how much more he can control. How much he’s not telling me.’ The suggestion, of course, is very much that he is who he chooses to be. Marie de France’s ‘Bisclaravet’ is a ‘beast’ in name only, a man who wears the form of the wolf. He hesitates to change form back to a man but it isn’t for love of rules thrown off or appetites indulged. In contrast, ‘The Girls That Follow’ depicts a man given up to his own monstrosity – neither man nor wolf but the worst possible combination of the two. He gains control over his form but uses that control to make himself more monstrous and to drag his partner with him in a mix of denial and acceptance, coercion and devotion. Whereas Bisclaravet’s wife is anathematised for her lack of devotion, the partner’s devotion in ‘The Girls That Follow’ is itself monstrous. She should reveal his form and abandon him (as Bisclaravet’s wife does) but she is caught in a trap, following him like all his other victims. Both victim and monster herself.
Romancing the Gothic 