Seven top contemporary monster books written by women

Mallory O’Meara is the author of The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick.

At Tor.com she tagged "seven fantastically creepy monster books written by (or edited by) women to frighten up your season," including:

The Rust Maidens by Gwendolyn Kiste

This spectacularly feminist body horror book (is there any other kind of body horror to read?) won Gwendolyn Kiste last year’s Bram Stoker Award for first novels. Two best friends have just graduated high school and are trying to figure their lives out in the industrial wasteland of 1980s Cleveland, Ohio. Meanwhile, the girls in their neighborhood are also changing, but not in a philosophical, college-bound way. These young women are slowly transforming into grotesque creatures made out of glass and corroded metal. No one knows what is happening or why, but our two main characters believe these rust maidens know more than they are telling. This might scratch your Stranger Things itch.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue