[ Photo by Henry Söderlund – “Worldcon 75 – Hugo Awards Ceremony is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. CC BY 4.0, Link ]
In February 2017, I wrote a post titled ‘My Female Horror Authors Reading List’. In this post, I talked about February being the Women in Horror Month, and how even though I am a female horror writer, I haven’t read many female horror authors. Therefore, I decided to do a female horror author reading challenge. I made a list of ten female horror authors who I haven’t read before with books in my local library (use your library, folks): Shirley Jackson, Daphne Du Maurier, Mary Shelley, Anne Rice, Lisa Tuttle, Melanie Tem, Amanda Stevens, Dion Fortune, Caitlin Kiernan and Nancy Collins.
Note: Since starting the female horror author reading list, I have found out that Caitlin Kiernan wasn’t available in the library. So, I have replaced Caitlin with Alison Littlewood, and I will also be reading The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates.
[The Mysteries by Lisa Tuttle]
The first book I decided to read off my list was The Mysteries by Lisa Tuttle. While Lisa Tuttle is considered a horror author (as well as a science fiction and a fantasy author), the book I chose to read wasn’t a horror novel. The Mysteries is a fantasy mystery story, which I didn’t mind because I also like reading crime and fantasy, and I especially love when the genres are mixed together.
In this story, we see a private investigator called Ian Kennedy take on a missing person’s case that is similar to his previous case. A young woman called Peri has been missing for two years, and when Ian notices the similarities between the new case and his previous case he realises that this is more than a simple missing person case.
It’s an interesting story that blends mystery and fantasy together. Of course, with it not being a horror, it didn’t scare me, but it kept me intrigued enough to finish the book. The characters were three dimensional and believable, and I found Ian likeable. The only issue I have with The Mysteries is that one of the story questions remained unanswered. While I do like an open ending, because it allows me to use my imagination to fill in the blanks, this one question was one that I wanted answered to help me understand its relevance to the main story.
While Lisa Tuttle won’t be one of my new favourite authors, I would be happy to read another one of her books, especially one of her horror novels. Being a fan of horror, crime and fantasy, it was interesting to see how you can successfully blend two of the genres.
The Mysteries is an enjoyable and easy read, and I would happily recommend Lisa Tuttle to anyone looking for new authors to read.
Keep writing, folks!
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