Flesh splits. Bones break. Screams build. The synchronicity of woman and wolf has long been buried. Ruled by the moon and her cycles of blood, rage, and transformation, the desire and pull to shapeshift and transmute runs deep beneath her skin. She is a beacon of duality, the divine and the monstrous, the deep glow of wolfsbane and the indent of fresh bite marks on skin. We fear her because we are her: the feral, the wild, the mad. From Angela Carter's The Company of Wolves to Rachel Harrison's Such Sharp Teeth, women have been dancing with the wolf and teasing it out of the woods for centuries. We feed the untamed, hoping to release the beast inside, giving us strength, sisterhood, and the confidence to howl. The animal releases us from shame and permits us to seek out and accept our truth. With the wolf, we are free; with freedom, we are empowered. In a world where silver is the least of our worries, Howl seeks to give voice to the wolves and women of contemporary horror as they shed their skin, unhinge their jaws, and bare their teeth for all to see. From award-winning editors Lindy Ryan and Stephanie M. Wytovich comes Howl, a brand-new anthology of original stories and poems from women of contemporary horror who give voices to wolves as they shed their skin, unhinge their jaws, and bare their teeth for all to see. Featuring Delilah S. Dawson, Christina Henry, Gwendolyn Kiste, Ai Jiang, and many more, with an introduction by Rachel Harrison.
Authors
LINDY MILLER RYAN is a Bram Stoker Awards®-nominated and Silver Falchion Award-winning editor, author, short-film director, and professor. Ryan the current author-in-residence at Rue Morgue, the world’s leading horror culture and entertainment brand, and a regular contributor at Booktrib and LitReactor. Her guest articles and features include NPR, BBC Culture, Irish Times, Daily Mail, and more. She is an active member of the Horror Writers Association (HWA), the International Thriller Writers (ITW), and the Brothers Grimm Society of North America. In 2022, she was named one of horror's most masterful anthology curators, alongside Ellen Datlow and Christopher Golden, and has been declared a "champion for women's voices in horror" by Shelf Awareness (2023). Her animated short film, TRICK OR TREAT, ALISTAIR GRAY, based on her children's book of the same name, won the Grand Prix Award at the 2022 ANMTN Awards. Ryan is currently a full-time professor at Rutgers University in the Masters of Professional Science program, She is also a guest faculty mentor in Western Connecticut State’s MFA program. Prior to her career in academia, Ryan was the co-founder of Radiant Advisors, a business intelligence research and advisory firm, where she led the company’s research and data enablement practice for clients that included 21st Century Fox Films, Warner Bros., and Disney. In 2017, Ryan founded Black Spot Books, an independent press focused on amplifying underrepresented voices in horror, where she maintains her role as President after the company was acquired in 2019 as an imprint of Vesuvian Media Group. Ryan served from 2020 to 2022 on the Board of Directors for the Independent Book Publishers Association and was named one of Publishers Weekly‘s 2020 Star Watch Honorees. Currently, she is the co-chair of the Horror Writers Association Publishers Council. Ryan grew up cutting her teeth on Goosebumps and universal monsters. She has published numerous academic texts and also writes clean, seasonal romance under the name Lindy Miller, where her books have been adapted for screen.
Stephanie M. Wytovich is an American poet, novelist, and essayist. Her work has been showcased in numerous magazines and anthologies such as Weird Tales, Nightmare Magazine, Southwest Review, Year's Best Hardcore Horror: Volume 2, The Best Horror of the Year: Volume 8 & 15, as well as many others. Wytovich is the Poetry Editor for Raw Dog Screaming Press, and an adjunct at Western Connecticut State University, Southern New Hampshire University, and Point Park University. She is a recipient of the Elizabeth Matchett Stover Memorial Award, the 2021 Ladies of Horror Fiction Writers Grant, and has received the Rocky Wood Memorial Scholarship for non-fiction writing. Wytovich is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association, an active member of the Horror Writers Association, and a graduate of Seton Hill University’s MFA program for Writing Popular Fiction. Her Bram Stoker Award-winning poetry collection, Brothel, earned a home with Raw Dog Screaming Press alongside Hysteria: A Collection of Madness, Mourning Jewelry, An Exorcism of Angels, Sheet Music to My Acoustic Nightmare, and The Apocalyptic Mannequin. Her debut novel, The Eighth, is published with Dark Regions Press, and her nonfiction craft book for speculative poetry, Writing Poetry in the Dark, is available now from Raw Dog Screaming Press. Her 2023 poetry collection, On the Subject of Blackberries, is out now. Follow Wytovich at http://stephaniewytovich.blogspot.com/ and on Twitter and Instagram @SWytovich and @thehauntedbookshelf. You can also find her essays, nonfiction, and class offerings on LitReactor.
