The Mothers and Fathers Italian Association
By Thomas F. Monteleone
Borderlands Press
HC, 2003
ISBN-10 : 1880325209
MAFIA is a conservative view on publishing, horror and the writing life
By Thomas M. Sipos
web posted June 2, 2025
Since 1976, novelist, screenwriter and editor Thomas F. Monteleone has chronicled the art and business of horror in his MAFIA column, bouncing about small press zines, usually moving whenever its home folded. In 2003 all his then extant columns were reprinted in his book, The Mothers and Fathers Italian Association. Much of it remains informative and all of it remains entertaining.
Monteleone is a conservative horror writer. So much so that in 2023 he was expelled from the Horror Writers Association for making "offensive" statements, about which you can read in File770, and the Daily Beast, and Alan Baxter's letter of complaint. But I digress ...
Aspiring genre writers will find much useful info in MAFIA. As a former anthology editor, Monteleone reveals the common mistakes writers commit that guarantee rejection. He warns of the career risks of writing media tie-ins, and advises authors not to use their real names, especially not for the bottom-of-the-barrel tie-ins. Overall, Monteleone gives the impression that the tie-in ghetto is just notch above "all the hopeless mooks who send their stuff to rip-off artists in the Writers Digest Classifieds."
Monteleone offers us a peek at his royalty statement -- and how it revealed that his publisher wasn't properly promoting his orphaned book. He also relates his experiences writing for Hollywood, genre fan gossip, political and philosophical commentary, and humor -- all presented with Monteleone's "in your face/suffer no fools" attitude.
Are you a fool?
Monteleone bristles at the "dumb questions writers are always asked" such as: "Where do you get your ideas?" Even worse is the usual followup, whereby the querist offers to provide a book idea, if the writer will write it for a 50/50 split. Says Monteleone: "Now isn't that just about the most fabulous thing you can ever imagine happening to a writer? I can tell ya, friends, we all dream about that one ... it's right up there with being at the top of the bestseller list for 47 weeks and selling movie rights for ten mill."
Are you impressed by literary awards? Think a Nebula or Stoker proves a book's merit or writer's talent? You might not think so after reading Monteleone's devastating report from inside the sausage factory.
Says Monteleone: "The most popular way to select winners is by a long nominating and winnowing out process which, in the final accounting, can often turn out to be a grand invitation to bribery, cronyism, and other sleazoid activities of which we're all capable.
"It goes like this: a friend of mine has a story or a book nominated, and he thinks it's a pretty good effort, so he gets on the phone and starts asking me and the rest of his buddies to make sure they read the work in question. What he really means is: read it if you get the time, but Jesus Christ, don't forget to vote for the sumbitch. Sometimes writers even forgo the proprieties and just call in old favors. ('Okay, I voted for that turgid piece of crap of your's last year -- now it's your turn in the barrel, old buddy.') And if you don't believe that goes on, then you must be one of those people who kept sending Jim and Tammy your money even after the brown matter hit the whirling blades.
"I can tell you personally, it's a fact of life. I've had plenty of friends ask for nominations and yeah, grunge that I am, I've asked friends to do the same for me -- although this sin was committed primarily back in my SFWA days. Worse, I've nominated stuff I didn't have time to read (and then weeks or months later went back to finally check out the piece -- only to discover it's a ghastly piece of dreck).
"Yeah, I know -- real slimy. But you gotta know I'm not alone on this one. It's part of what greases the machinery's gears. ... Having seen the grievous error of my ways, I have since refused to participate in awards politicking or favor-trading." He adds: "I speak from the heights of Sagacity Peak and Mt. Experience here and not from the lowlands of Sour Grape City. I received a Bram Stoker Award in 1993 for Superior Achievement in a Novel."
Although acknowledging that awards sometimes boost careers, Monteleone demolishes the myth that they guarantee lasting financial success. In MAFIA he recounts the sad fates of two genre giants: Theodore Sturgeon and Fritz Leiber.
Leiber alone had won "eight Hugos, four Nebulae, three World Fantasy(s), three Gilgameshes, in addition to a Derleth, a Stoker, British Fantasy, and a Balrog." Both men were wildly successful in terms of publishing credits, influence, and respect. Even so, "Both men spent the last decades of their lives in a constant struggle for survival beyond the basic amenities. ... both died with little recognition (outside genre fandom) for their immense talent."
Sturgeon too had a collection of awards, and Monteleone recounts a choice bit of gossip. Awed by Sturgeon's work, Monteleone anxiously awaited his first meeting with Sturgeon, in the Manhattan living room of a mutual friend. Upon hearing Sturgeon's entry, Monteleone turned around and ...
"I'm sitting on the couch and I am eye-level with what is always referred to as the groin. More accurately I'm face to face with Ted's flaccid dick and a rather stupendous set of nuts. ... I'm trying to act like everything is cool and I deal with this sort of thing all the time, but in the meantime there is a neon sign in my head, flaring and pulsing out a message, which says: YOU'VE JUST MET THEODORE STURGEON'S BALLS AND THEY'RE BIGGER THAN A PAIR OF KEY LIMES."
Turns out Sturgeon had become a practicing nudist. He behaves as if nothing is amiss, sits across from Monteleone "so serene and natural" and begins conversing. Monteleone leaves several hours later feeling sorry the "strange, sad, little man. He is into all kinds of tangential stuff -- from the more usual things like vegetarianism, mysticism, and other post-hippiedom vagaries, then ranging through nudism and into more esoteric territories I couldn't even recognize." But he adds that Sturgeon "was a gentle, sincere, incredibly sensitive person. ... Ted had no trouble being himself, and I'll always respect him for that."
Yes, I quote Monteleone extensively, but that's because he is so quotable. Peruse MAFIA at random and you will find each column enjoyable and relevant, written in prose that is erudite, colloquial, and eminently readable.
I said that MAFIA is more than shop talk and fan gossip. I said it includes political commentary. In a 1977 column, Monteleone was remarkably prescient in anticipating political correctness while it was still a glimmer. "A most amusing incident occurred about a year ago when one of SF's most highly regarded female writers wrote a scathing tirade to the SFWA Forum attacking one of SF's most highly regarded male writers, based in part on the guy's mention in his most recent novel of one of the male character's admiring the lovely motion of a female character's breasts bobbing about in zero-G. From what I gathered from the fusillade of letters that followed, the female writer was incensed about the inclusion of such things in modern SF proclaiming they should be roundly condemned, and -- this is important -- that the male writer should not write about this kind of sexist activity. That is patently absurd."
Monteleone opposes restricting writers to certain subjects, or imposing quotas on characters, or publishing stories on criteria other than merit. It seems so obvious, he laments, "God this is prosaic stuff."
In an annotation, he debunks "This 'gender' nonsense. Humans have sex, not gender. Gender is a grammatical term used ever since the days of Latin to distinguish the declension of nouns into categories called masculine, feminine, or neuter. The Politically Correct Robots somehow picked up the word 'gender' and have been throwing it around with their usual supercilious elitism. And they have been using it wrong."
He also he decries an SF anthology open only to women writers. "That's pretty much the same as No Dogs or Jews Allowed, No Irishmen Need Apply. ... That anthology simply had no more business in existence than a book called GREAT SCIENCE FICTION BY WHITE GUYS."
Monteleone is well aware that women need no special help. In a 1990 column, he reports: "The majority of book editors in Manhattan are female -- and have been for the almost twenty years I've been involved with publishing professionally." And based on his slush pile experience, he explains how stories by women were generally both worse -- and better -- than stories by men.
Women surpassed men at providing "an underlying theme which deals with a search for some kind of emotional fulfillment that's often absent from men's writing. And if there is one element that makes women potentially better writers of HDF [horror/dark fantasy], it is this single factor -- because good horror or suspense writing requires an emotional response from the reader, and if things are really cooking, a multi-layered response, an emotional matrix, if you will, that leans on the keys of not only fear and loathing, but also sadness, regret, and yes, even love."
On the other hand, "Women's conflicts tend to spring from psychological conflicts rather than physical ones, and rarely from boojums and monsters. Yeah, ladies, you heard it here first -- you don't, ah ... give good creature."
Women also write with more style. "I found the ladies' writing to be more lyrical, and more conscious of the traditional techniques of imagery, metaphor, and symbol.... men tend to write a more colorless, lean, fightin'-mean lines of prose." Women are worse at ending a story "with proper bang ... Their resolutions tend to be a bit on the flat side."
Long before he was expelled in 2023, Monteleone was denouncing HWA's hypersensitive hypocrites; all the "dark poets and writers" who, despite their self-ballyhooed "darkness", seem to have confused horror with the Hundred Acre Woods. These Dark Poohs were offended by HWA's membership tiers. That while anyone could join HWA as an Associate, you needed a scant minimum of professional sales to join as an Active and receive voting privileges. Some Associates saw that as "elitist."
Monteleone blames this internal class envy for the decline of HWA as a professional association. In "A Heinous History of the Hardly Writing Association" (perhaps his most controversial column) he reports that HWA was founded about 1988 by Name authors -- those who had the respect of publishers and were prominently listed on anthology covers. But as the number of less established Actives (those "credited" on anthology covers as "And-Others") and Associates increased, resentment simmered. Attempts to appease the have-nots with lowered admission standards and more Stoker award categories (so more members had a chance to win something) failed to halt the vicious flaming of those nasty "elitists" in HWA's online GEnie forums.
By the late 1990s, the battle lines were drawn. "[T]hat's how it finally came down: the And-Others declared war on the Names. And it's no secret how it came out. Over a month or two in which a new election slated representatives of both factions, the internecine conflict ended with the rebels defeating the evil, complacent, and bumbling Empire in the election, which sparked off a new round of various Names' heads being displayed on cyber-spears. What happened next was most likely inevitable and probably the wish-fulfillment of most of the And-Others' wettest of dreams -- about 95% of the Old Guard, the Names, essentially said what any self-respecting person would say, which is, of course: 'Fuck this.'"
The Names didn't need HWA, they already had lucrative careers, so they quietly left by not renewing their memberships, leaving behind a "professional" horror writers association with few prominent horror professionals. Atlas shrugged.
Monteleone's "Heinous History" was followed by cyber-flames and irate letters, including from a writer denouncing HWA's former "elitist clique" and their "discrimination and hostility" and the need to level the playing field.
MAFIA reprints her letter in full and Monteleone's response: "What you can't seem to grasp is that there is no disdain for new or aspiring writers, and never was, but there was (and should be) a HIERARCHY in HWA, and like all other things in the UNIVERSE, an application of the Bell Curve. Here's a head's up: success and achievement have to be earned. I heard the plaintive cry of whining socialist in you with this 'leveling the playing field' crapola.
"Listen, Madame, the playing field is NOT level, and never has been, and never will be. It is the essence of competition, achievement, and failure. It is natural selection -- that thing that all underachiever disavow. Read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and wake up. You rail against the big wheel writers who are RESPONSIBLE for the success of the genre and the rest of you. You are like the workers who hate the wealthy industrialist who runs the company (the company he built from a dream and sweat and RISK ... the company none of the workers had the balls or the vision to create themselves). The world has leaders and it has followers. It has big dogs and little dogs. Welcome to the pound, baby.
"What HWA was trying to do was remove the line of demarcation between all levels of professional writers ('let's all be brothers and sisters!') and have everybody treated the same whether you sold your book to Random House or to the chop house. Sorry, but if you do that, then your intended 'clout' and influence with the publishers (those mean guys who take all the RISK by buying your books in the first place) is diluted because you are perceived as mostly amateurs calling yourselves professionals.
"If you don't have a level to strive to, guess what? Nobody strives. Did you ever wonder why the world market never clamored for any Soviet stereos or toasters?"
Monteleone's political and social commentary sometimes only tangentially broach the genre. In one column, he decries celebrity worship and skewers the idiocies and hypocrisies of Alec Baldwin, Barbra Streisand, and "Rosie O'Donnell who called for all guns to be outlawed and all gun-owners to be arrested, but who told reporters she thought it was perfectly all right for her bodyguards to carry concealed handguns."
Monteleone's blue collar parents both worked so he could be taught by Jesuits, and he remains passionate for education. His son still illiterate by second grade, Monteleone investigated the school -- and found students facing each other (rather than the front) in "learning groups" so they could "help teach each other" while the teacher wandered about the classroom. Estimating that only 30% of the students ever paid attention to her at any time, Monteleone asked the teacher about the setup.
"She smiled with a saccharine patronizing smile and told me that was the 'old' way of teaching, and that it just wasn't done anymore. I nodded, and told how great that was, but I had some news for her: those kids weren't paying attention to her and they weren't equipped to 'teach themselves,' and that the desk set-up is very counter-productive to creating an environment where kids can be focused. In other words, they aren't learning Jack."
The next day Monteleone enrolled his son in Catholic school "and within a few months hey! guess what!?, he was reading. (He was also more polite and attentive and well-behaved. Funny, huh?)"
In case you're wondering what this has to do with horror or publishing, Monteleone retorts that horror writers have no future if people can't read; nor can free societies (and freedom of expression) survive without widespread literacy. Additional columns expose the racist assumptions underlying Ebonics and the dumbing-down of standardized tests scores for minorities.
Monteleone "believes in the truth and validity of such pesky and bothersome documents as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers, and the general idea that good government is less government." Although, after calling himself a libertarian, he adds, "Actually, I think I'm really more of a Jeffersonian or constitutional conservative."
MAFIA reprints fifty columns, each of them a gem. My review only skims a few columns, so despite my extensive quotes, know that there's a whole lot more Monteleone in this book, which contains not only knowledge, but wisdom. Whether one's interest is in the writing life, or publishing, or Hollywood, or simply insight into how political and societal issues resonate within the genre communities, one will find MAFIA entertaining and enlightening. 
Thomas M. Sipos writes horror fiction, satire, and film reviews. His website is http://www.CommunistVampires.com/
