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Cries from the Catacombs #3: Characters Make Horror Horrifying, by @Matthew_NCC1701

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College, Sophomore year. The class was about some of what we call Dead White Guys. Could have been the Beats, but most likely it was the Romantics. Maybe the Modernists. Don’t remember. Anyway, I’m sitting there before class begins, reading Stephen King’s Misery and my arch-nemesis (i.e. a girl I knew since high school and was already trying to out-do me in literary pomposity) saw my book and sniffed audibly. “How could you be reading such pedestrian writers?” she asked.

“Stephen King shows more literary prowess in one chapter than most of these assholes do in an entire novel,” I shot back. I held up Misery and let her know how you can actually feel the tension of this poor writer, and not just when the crazy lady cut off his feet (in the movie version she merely broke his feet with a sledgehammer), but in watching the typewriter keys start to fail. Because if he didn’t finish this book, she would kill him. “That kind of tension, suspended across 300 pages? THAT’S literature!” I said.

She snubbed this slight and I don’t know what she did next. Probably went back to pretending she understood Pound’s Cantos or something.

The point is this: character helps truly create the suspense, and King is a master at that. I forget what book it is (probably Salem’s Lot), but he creates a character on one page and kills the guy off on the next and you, the reader, actually FEEL THE LOSS.

That’s powerful writing, and you should incorporate it into everything you write.

Let me try an example: I could write something like

The werewolf leapt out of the shadows and tore his entrails from his belly, spilling over the ground as the man screamed. The wolf howled and sunk his teeth into the man’s throat.

Graphic. Cruel. But there is something missing here. Hm. Let’s see if we can spruce this up:

Jarrod walked home after closing the diner after midnight. Needed to be up at dawn for his second job at the glass plant, but the apartment was only a block away. He was looking forward to kissing little Charlotte (her four month birthday today!) on the forehead as she lay sleeping in her crib.

He still couldn’t believe he hadn’t wanted her when Mary told him she was pregnant. But now, now he couldn’t imagine life without her. He asked Mary for forgiveness every day for ever suggesting that she go to the clinic.

The werewolf leapt out of the shadows and tore Jarrod’s entrails from his belly, spilling over the ground as he screamed. The wolf howled and sunk his teeth into Jarrod’s throat.

Charlotte, a block away, (four months old today!) heard the howl and the scream in her sleep, but she would never remember. She would never know her father.

Might be a bit much, but I think you understand where I’m going with this. Take the time to make the people real, and the horror will be that much more deliciously horrifying.

By @Matthew_NCC1701 – http://verblegherulous.zenandtaoacousticcafe.com/

What horror means to me, by @CAnthonyBiron

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When I was a kid, we lived in a big old house. Everywhere, there were dark corners and shadowy spaces – just like any place that’s been around for a hundred years. My room had a closet, and I always kept it closed – especially before going to sleep. One night I had a dream about it. I was walking toward the closet door, and I couldn’t stop my hand from reaching forward. I turned the handle and looked inside. There, above my head, beside a naked bulb with a string, was a trap door I’d never seen. I looked away for an instant, and when my gaze returned, the panel had shifted. It was open a crack – just enough to let me see the darkness of an undiscovered attic. Something was up there, and it was looking at me.

That’s what I think about when I write horror.

And I want both of us – reader and writer – to explore that shadowy place together.

By @CAnthonyBiron – https://canthonybiron.ca/

Cries from the Catacombs, by @Matthew_NCC1701

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Why Write Horror?

Why should you write horror? Why shouldn’t you? You may not even be asking yourselves these questions, because you just know that’s what you want to write about. Perhaps you are like Stephen King who, in an interview early in his career, admitted that he wrote horror because he loved scaring the shit out of people.

Now, don’t ask me to quote the source of that interview. I don’t know. Might have been in a Playboy magazine that I snuck from my dad’s office drawer, I don’t remember. Google it if you want to know if it’s true. I pull a lot of stuff out of my ass-orted memory collection. Sometimes it’s verifiable, sometimes not, but we’re getting off the point here …

First, let’s get one more thing out of the way: I am going to assume if you are reading this, that you are a writer. I will never tell you if you should or should not be a writer. That is for you to decide. Personally, I think writers write because not to write is suicide (I think that’s from Mr King as well. Maybe he should have written this essay!) Even though I’m too lazy to edit, I write every day out of mere compulsion: words just come to my head and I jot them down.

But HORROR! Why this genre and not something like Romance or Sci-Fi or Fantasy or Dummies manuals? I think if you are on this site (thank you, PG Patey, Keeper of the Keys to the Horrorprompt Catacombs), you are attracted to the dark side of fiction, the creeping things, the blood spatter patterns across the dank walls of the crypt, and if you are, then you should write horror.

Again, why? I liken it to something that I heard a comedian say once (again, from my grabbag of things I’ve picked up along the way), that being in a room full of people making jokes about things that make us all mad (i.e. traffic, waiting in lines, flying in economy class, etc.) is cathartic. It is a room of people all laughing together at the same things that make everybody mad, that everybody can come together and it’s a giant emotional release. Then, everyone goes out into the night, feeling a bit better.

It’s similar with horror: write what scares you. Write what you think will scare others. When you do this, you are sharing, and your readers partake, and everybody comes together in a cathartic “safe zone” (i.e. your words on the page/screen) and together, everyone can face the horror equally, and manage it better.

The world is a damn scary place. Most of the time we’ve got no one to share it with, and we wander it alone. Writing horror helps us all to know that we call can face this fear together.

So, pick up that pen or grab that keyboard and start slinging some blood spatter patterns against the wall of that crypt!

By @Matthew_NCC1701 – http://verblegherulous.zenandtaoacousticcafe.com/