Unique Spirits: Essays by Asian Women in Horror from Black Spot Books

Black Spot Books launches its new non-fiction imprint with Bram Stoker Award®-winners Lee Murray and Angela Yuriko Smith’s UNQUIET SPIRITS: ESSAYS BY ASIAN WOMEN IN HORROR [Black Spot Books Non-Fiction, February 14, 2023], a collection of twenty-one essays from Asian women-in-horror.

In UNQUIET SPIRITS, twenty-one women of the Asian diaspora join their voices to share what it means to be the lesser half of a maligned minority. All experienced writers with a focus on horror and the occult from a variety of genres, these women share what it is like to live with unquiet spirits—ghosts, demons, witches and vampires—common to the Asian experience. Their essays articulate pain, humiliation, denial, and hunger through a supernatural lens, proving that the spirit world is a mirror image of our own. The horror is on both sides of the veil.

From hungry ghosts, vampiric babies, and shapeshifting fox spirits to the avenging White Lady of urban legend, for generations, Asian women’s roles have been shaped and defined through myth and story. In UNQUIET SPIRITS, Asian writers of horror reflect on the impact of superstition, spirits, and the supernatural in this unique collection of personal essays exploring themes of otherness, identity, expectation, duty, and loss, and leading, ultimately, to understanding and empowerment.

Unquiet Spirits is edited by multi-Bram Stoker Award®-winning authors Lee Murray and Angela Yuriko Smith and includes a foreword by Bram Stoker Award®-winner Lisa Kröger. This is the third in Murray and Smith’s series on Asian women-in-horror, which also includes the poetry collection TORTURED WILLOWS (2021) and the fiction short story collection, BLACK CRANES (2020), both of which have previously won the Bram Stoker Award®.

Unquiet Spirits will be available in paperback, hardcover, and e-book on February 14, 2023.

ADVANCE REVIEW COPIES OF UNQUIET SPIRITS AVAILABLE ON NETGALLEY AND EDELWEISS