Noteworthy Women Any Month of the Year

DANI BROWN

Suitably labelled “The Queen of Filth”, extremist author Dani Brown’s style of dark and twisted writing and deeply disturbing stories has amassed a worrying sized cult following featuring horrifying tales such as “Ghetto Super Skank”, “Becoming,” “56 Seconds”, “Sparky the Spunky Robot” and the hugely popular “Ketamine Addicted Pandas”. Merging eroticism with horror, torture and other areas that most authors wouldn’t dare, each of Dani’s titles will crawl under your skin, burrow inside you, and make you question why you are coming back for more.




November Group
Persistent Artists

November Group were an alternative musical group, and a participant of the Boston New Wave scene in the early 1980s. The group was formed primarily around two female musicians, vocalist and guitarist Ann Prim and keyboardist Kearney Kirby. Other members included Joel Beale and Alvan Long. The band took their name from a group of early twentieth-century German expressionist artists known as November Group. The group's musical style has been described as cold wave.


Kearney Kirby

You could say Kearney Kirby came back for an encore. From playing folk songs on her acoustic guitar, the Massachusetts native switched to cover bands and then played in the electronica/new wave band November Group before semi-retiring from the stage in 1990 to engineer and produce. But life had another turn in store. In 2001, as Kirby faced cancer, she also got an unexpected project that gave her professional interests a new shape.

Six years and several similar projects later, she came to Berklee to get formal training in music therapy. Now she's completing her final semester of course work before starting her internship. She's one of several students in Berklee's music therapy major who are over the age of 50, using their combined life and musical experiences to help others heal.

Ann Prim

Based in Saint Paul, Prim’s background in graphic design, still photography, and music composition has guided her towards a unique filmmaking style. Her debut short, The Afterling (2010), achieves a surreal, ominous style of stop-motion animation reminiscent of the Quay Brothers, yet her next four films were all “non-traditional narratives,” approaching the complexity of human personality through implication and emotional tone. Her “Vellum Trilogy” explores three female artists—a painter, writer, and dancer—balancing their art and their lives; the first two parts, A Brief Conversation (2010) and Little Words (2012), have already been completed, while the third, Notes from There, is currently in pre-production. More recently, Prim has returned to an abstract, avant-garde aesthetic with the experimental shorts Time Has Peeled Back the Skin of Things (2013) and Filmetto Porta 241 (2014).



JO KAPLAN

Jo Kaplan is a lover of all things spooky, having grown up on a diet of Goosebumps and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark as a kid. Now she writes stories that creep up from the dark places of the psyche. Her novels include It Will Just Be Us and When the Night Bells Ring, and her short stories have appeared in Fireside Quarterly, Black Static, Nightmare Magazine, Vastarien, Haunted Nights edited by Ellen Datlow and Lisa Morton, and Bram Stoker Award nominated anthology Miscreations: Gods, Monstrosities & Other Horrors. She has also published work as Joanna Parypinski. In addition to writing, she teaches English and creative writing at Glendale Community College and plays the cello in the Symphony of the Verdugos.

Rebekah Kennedy
Starring in "Two Witches"(2022)

Now available to stream on Arrow.

The Darts
If Elvira & Wednesday Adams did shots of snake venom
at a bachelorette party, that's The Darts.

I

Love Tsunami, the latest from The Darts

now available to stream.

Les Femmes Grotesques

by Victoria Dalpe

A Modern Romantic Horror Anthology

Review by Anthony Servante

In Les Femmes Grotesques, Victoria Dalpe utilizes a malleable narrative style that can only be described as chameleon. Every narrator she creates is different from the last. For me, this is an accomplishment that is difficult to overcome for some writers. Such anthologies tend to have a similar-sounding narrator telling a different story in every tale. Dalpe's narrative style creates a unique spin on the tale at hand. Each narrator neither intrudes or dominates the story. Rather, they merely guide the reader through the story of our protagonist, allowing the horrors of his dilemma to accompany him and us to the story's conclusion.

It's easy to admire a great storyteller who lets the story speak for itself.

The language of the stories is tightly constructed with fluid narratives. The horror of each story mounts as characters interact. Much as we find in theater plays, the dialogue is crucial building suspense. We don't see the horror as much as we expect it to arrive. In the opening story, "A Creak in the Floor, A Slant of Light", each character interacts and reveals new details to a possible monster lurking in the building. Our protagonist cannot believe the accounts but questions their validity while his fears begin to exaggerate the situation he has been tossed in. By the time he realizes the truth, it is too late. So, too, is it too late for the reader to back out of the narrative. We face that ending along with the protagonist.

Victoria Dalpe creates seamless horror in each tale with such language and narratives. Good poets can do that. Good prose can too. But to merge both forms into story form so seamlessly is a lost art we haven't seen since the English Romantic writers. Shades of Mary Shelley and echoes of John Keats abound in this dark collection of short horror tales.Dalpe is a modern Romantic who shines through her solid writing and talented storytelling. She has created a rich work of literary horror here with Les Femmes Grotesques.