Call for Chapters

Few writers working in horror today have built as monster-saturated a body of work as Stephen Graham Jones. Across dozens of novels, novellas, and short story collections, Jones has returned again and again to the monstrous: werewolves in Mongrels (2016), a vengeful elk-spirit in The Only Good Indians (2020), slashers both literal and figurative across the Indian Lake trilogy, a haunted mannequin, demons, and most recently a centuries-spanning vampire in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (2025). Jones has described horror as a genre "about the unknown, about the shadows just around the corner. It's about fear of the future, fear of the past, fear of oneself."[1] His monsters are vehicles for working through questions of grief, masculinity, colonization, kinship, survival and so much more

This edited collection invites sustained critical attention to the monstrous as a unifying thread across Jones's body of work. We are interested not only in his best-known horror novels but in the full arc of his career from his early fiction such as The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong (2000), The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto (2003), and Demon Theory (2006), through his short fiction collections (Bleed into Me, The Ones That Got Away, After the People Lights Have Gone Off), to his contemporary horror bestsellers and his work in comics. We particularly welcome chapters that draw connections between his lesser-discussed earlier texts and the monsters of his recent, more widely read horror fiction.

While the collection centers Jones's own work, we welcome comparative essays that situate Jones alongside other writers of horror if Jones's work remains a central object of analysis.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

• The werewolf and questions of inheritance, family, and the body in Mongrels (2016).
• The vampire as historical witness in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (2025).
• The slasher reimagined: Jade Daniels and the Indian Lake trilogy (My Heart Is a Chainsaw, Don't Fear the Reaper, The Angel of Indian Lake) as feminist and Indigenous revision of slasher conventions.
• Night of the Mannequins (2020) and the uncanny object.
• Monstrous figures I Jones’s shorter fiction such as Bleed into Me (2005), The Ones That Got Away (2010), and After the People Lights Have Gone Off (2014).
• Land, place, and the monstrous.
• Jones's use of genre blending across slasher, werewolf fiction, vampire fiction, and literary horror, and what this hybridity suggests about monster taxonomies.
• Jones’s use of humor and irony in defusing or intensifying monstrous dread.

Finished chapters will be approximately 5,000–7,000 words and should engage closely with one or more primary texts by Jones, situating the analysis within relevant scholarship in horror studies, monster theory, and/or Indigenous studies.

Please submit abstracts of 300–500 words, alongside a short biographical note (75–150 words), to Dr. Valerie Guyant at Valerie.guyant@msun.edu by November 1, 2026. Draft chapters will be expected by July 2027.

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[1] Stephen Graham Jones, quoted in "Book Club Author Suggestion: Stephen Graham Jones," Colorado Virtual Library.