I write horror — dark, visceral, graphic, psychological horror. That still surprises people. Not because the work is unusual, but because a woman wrote it.

Horror is strongly associated with men. That association stuck long ago, but it doesn’t reflect reality. The genre didn’t start loud, it started cold.

Mary Shelley and the Birth of Horror

Mary Shelley is not just a historical figure to me — she’s proof.

Frankenstein isn’t just important for its time. It’s important, full stop. It’s cold, unforgiving, philosophical, and cruel in the way only good horror can be. There’s no comfort in it, no redemption arc disguised as hope.

Shelley didn’t write fear as spectacle, she wrote it as consequence. Creation, abandonment, responsibility, obsession. These are not soft themes. They are brutal ones.

They Were There and They Mattered

After Shelley, women kept writing horror. Ann Radcliffe helped shape gothic suspense. Charlotte Perkins Gilman gave us The Yellow Wallpaper, a slow psychological descent that still works today. Shirley Jackson proved that horror doesn’t need monsters to be terrifying with The Haunting of Hill House.

They wrote fear through isolation, pressure, obsession, and mental collapse. Much of it was later classified as gothic, literary, or psychological fiction. That separation shaped how readers learned to recognize the genre. The label shifted, but the intent didn’t. Women didn’t disappear from horror. They were re-shelved.

Why Have Men Dominated Horror?

Horror became associated with men because of audience, market, and visibility. The genre grew through pulp magazines, paperbacks, and later film. Those spaces were male-dominated. Violence, escalation, confrontation, and spectacle sold well there. Publishers followed demand. Recognition followed exposure.

At the same time, women writing equally dark material were often categorized elsewhere. The same fear ended up labeled suspense, thriller, or literary fiction. Not because it was less disturbing, but because it didn’t match the image horror was selling.

Genre follows readership. Horror leaned male, and romance leaned female. Mystery and thrillers landed between them. Writers go where readers already exist. That’s not ideology, that’s structure.

I don’t write horror to challenge expectations. I write it because that’s the form that fits what I want to say. When people react to the violence or the psychological intensity of my work before they react to the work itself, it confirms the point. The surprise isn’t about quality. It’s about who they expected to be behind it.

This is why it still shocks people when a woman writes graphic, psychological horror. Not because it’s rare, but because the association was built long before they encountered the work.

Men Were Louder

Women didn’t arrive late to horror, they helped shape it. From Mary Shelley onward, women have written fear without apology and without explanation. Horror doesn’t belong to men or women. It belongs to the people willing to write what’s uncomfortable and leave it there.

I write horror because that’s what I write. So did Shelley. That’s enough.