Upside Down: Inverted Tropes in Storytelling

I’m excited to be a part of Upside Down: Inverted Tropes in Storytelling, which will be released by Apex Publications on December 13th. The book is a mix of fiction and nonfiction and includes my essay “Fractured Souls: The Evolution of the Gothic Double from Stevenson to King.” In this, I compare and contrast Robert Louis Stevenson’s popular Jekyll/Hyde trope with the characters of Detta and Odetta in Stephen King’s second Dark Tower novel, The Drawing of the Three. In addition to the Gothic Double trope, I discuss the Jezebel trope/stereotype and a couple of others as well.

The book is co-edited by Monica Valentinelli and Jaym Gates, and the other authors include Maurice Broaddus, Adam Troy-Castro, Delilah S. Dawson, Shanna Germain, Sara M. Harvey, John Hornor Jacobs, Rahul Kanakia, Alethea Kontis, Valya Dudycz Lupescu, Haralmbi Markov, Kat Richardson, Nisi Shawl, Ferrett Steinmetz, Anton Strout, Michael Underwood and Alyssa Wong.

The goal for the story writers was to chose a tired trope or cliche and flip it on its head to challenge and surprise readers. Those of us who wrote nonfiction were tasked with exploring and illuminating some of these tropes for readers. Some of the other tropes you’ll find in the book include the Chainmaille Bikini, Love at First Sight, Damsels in Distress, Yellow Peril, The Black Man Dies First, The Villain Had a Crappy Childhood, The City Planet, the Prostitute with a Heart of Gold, The Magical Negro, The Super Soldier, The Chosen One, and The Singularity Will Cause the Apocalypse.

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About Lucy A. Snyder

Lucy A. Snyder is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of the novels Spellbent, Shotgun Sorceress, Switchblade Goddess, and the collections Soft Apocalypses, Orchid Carousals, Sparks and Shadows, Chimeric Machines, and Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. Her latest books are Shooting Yourself in the Head For Fun and Profit: A Writer's Survival Guide and While the Black Stars Burn. Her writing has been translated into French, Russian, and Japanese editions and has appeared in publications such as Apex Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Jamais Vu, Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Steampunk World, In the Court of the Yellow King, Qualia Nous, Chiral Mad 2, and Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 5. She lives in Columbus, Ohio with her husband and occasional co-author Gary A. Braunbeck and is a mentor in Seton Hill University's MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction. You can learn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com and you can follow her on Twitter at @LucyASnyder.

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