A bleat in storywriting12/24/2023 ![]() We fear the unknown because we fear the dark. They contain many of the elements that make horror what it is: subversion, admonition, fear of the unknown. You want to see the simplest heart of horror, you could do worse than by dissecting ghost stories and urban legends: two types of tale we tell even as young deviants and miscreants. This is our literary legacy: the flower-bed of our fiction is seeded with these kernels of horror and watered with gallons of blood and a sprinkling of tears. Everything’s all crushed bodies and extracted tongues and doom and devils and demi-gods. Horror’s Been In Our Heart For A Long Timeįrom Beowulf to Nathaniel Hawthorne, from Greek myth to Horace Walpole, horror’s been around for a long, long time. It’s me, Steve.” And you just bleat and scream. Sidenote: the original translation of tragedy is “goat song.” So, whenever you’re writing horror, just say, “I’M WRITING ANOTHER GOAT SONG, MOTHER.” And the person will be like, “I’m not your mother. ![]() It is her downfall - possibly literally, as the slasher tosses her down an elevator shaft where she’s then impaled on a bunch of fixed spear-points or something. We know that’s a bad goddamn decision and yet she does it. When the girl in the horror movie goes to investigate the creepy noise rather than turn and flee like a motherfucker, that’s a micro-moment of tragedy. ![]() Horror is best when it’s about tragedy in its truest and most theatrical form: tragedy is born through character flaws, through bad choices, through grave missteps. In the Snooki book, we experience revulsion as we see Snooki bed countless bodybuilders and gym-sluts, her alien syphilis fast degrading their bodies until soon she can use their marrowless bones as straws with which to slurp up her latest Windex-colored drink. We feel the fear of Harry and Sally, a fear that they’re going to ruin what they have by getting too close or by not getting too close, a fear that’s multiplied by knowing you’re growing older and have nobody to love you. You feel horror when John McClane sees he’s got to cross over a floor of broken glass in his bare feet. It’s an existential thing, a tragic thing, and somewhere in every story this dark heart beats. It’s not all about severed heads or blood-glutton vampires. ![]() Horror is about fear and tragedy, and whether or not one is capable of overcoming those things. At The Heart Of Every Tale, A Squirming Knot Of WormsĮvery story is, in its tiny way, a horror story. Add your own thoughts to the horror heap. These are the things I think about writing horror. None of this is meant to be hard and firm in terms of providing answers and advice. Both are occasionally grisly and each puts to task a certain existential fear that horror does particularly well, asking who the hell are we, exactly?Īnd so it feels like a good time - with Halloween approaching, with DOUBLE DEAD in November and me writing MOCKINGBIRD at present - to visit the subject of writing horror. BLACKBIRDS and MOCKINGBIRD feature a girl who can touch you and see how and when you’re going to die and then presents her with very few ways to do anything about it. DOUBLE DEAD takes place in a zombie-fucked America with its protagonist being a genuinely monstrous vampire. These days, not so much, but only I suspect because the horror releases just aren’t coming as fast and furious as they once did.īut really, the novels I have coming out so far are all, in their own way, horror novels.
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