Dark & Twisty

Finishing up a course in reading of horror ended with an essay from On Writing Horror.  This essay discussed the quality of horror.  Yes, quality is to be had in horror.

The fact is horror is losing ground.  Many of our old standards have been stolen by other genres.  Romance writers decided that vampires were sexy, ignoring the whole fetid breath thing.  Ghosts have been passe in many ways for a long time.  We, as horror writers, overdid zombies ourselves.  Werewolves are still there but I just yesterday saw a romantic anthology featuring those lycans.  So that leaves us with two things.  One is we have to adapt or two come up with something new.

There isn't anything new.  Solomon said that in the Bible over four thousand years ago give or take a thousand years.  So, we have to take what we have and make it fresh.  That's quality.  All genre's suffer the same fate as horror.  Vampires are really just undead lovers in the bodice ripper world.  Ghosts are just the lovers who don't have bodies. The same tropes apply.

The essay discussed how freshiness and realiness is the maker of quality in horror fiction.  Vampires can be many things besides blood suckers.  They can be emotional vampires. They can live off of fear, love, laughter.  Imagine a clown that feeds off of laughter. Right there is (probably not) a fresh view of a vampire. It's grounded in reality as well.  A common phobia is that of clowns. 

Reality can also mean making sure the story, the horror is geniune.  Horror is one of the most fantastic genres.  There is little literal reality in it.  Vampires, ghosts, werewolves, zombies, witches and wizards none are real. But they can exist in a reality.  Part of writing good horror, or good fiction of anytime is making the world of the story real. That's all in quality. In the world of my clown laughter vampire the creature is real, but has to be bound by the conventions of that world.  Just as magic has to have its laws, which seems out of sorts, our monsters have to have theirs.  Our stories must be bound by the reality of that world we have created and that is quality.

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I’ve made a habit of reading a “how to” book per semester while at Seton Hill.  Okay, the  habit is a bit of a requirement, but I still read them and in some cases, more than one per semester.  This term besides On Writing Horror, which is my second time reading it (third if you count the first edition), I’ve been reading Writer’s Workshop of Horror. 

One of the things I like about books similar to WWH is that each chapter is by a different author.  This lends to easy reading.  Each chapter is an essay into itself with its own lesson.  I read the book over the whole course of the semester, not as a book to finish in a more finite time.  It lent itself well to this type of reading.

Besides, the praise I have for this book, which is plentiful, it also won this year’s Stoker Award.  So, we all know that it is a good book. 

Many times when reading these “how to” books, all the advice is the same.  This book did a different take on that.  Every author had a different topic to cover, and each brought his or her style to it.  This made for a wonderful read.  Some of the most memorable information still sticks with me. 

Gary Braunbeck wrote that he imagines characters by how they treat their coats and how they eat their cereal.  This fascinated me.  His explanation of what each treatment meant was very humorous and insightful.  We don’t often consider how the mundane things in life guide the greater parts of personality.  This is something that I cannot believe I missed before. (I worked for 7 years as a psychotherapist.  Personality is something I know.)

Robert Lee essay on how trying to be Stephen King ruined his life put a humorous take on things as well.  The essay had a very serious point that no writer should try to be another writer, nor take all advice with some grain of salt.  Ironic that such an essay would be in a “how to” book? Maybe not.

The only downside to this book was the interview sections.  To me, interviews with writers recorded in books rarely offer much insightful information.  This is case with the few interviews in this book.  I liked that several editors weighed in on the importance of the look of the project and how to keep to the rules.  I usually try to do this, but it’s nice to know that some more cavalier writers might learn from this.

The book is also assessable.  Unlike books like On Writing Horror or Stephen King’s On Writing, this book is written by mostly midlist writers in the grand scheme.  Though most of the names are familiar to the horror writer, and the true horror enthusiast, they might pass without notice by the lay population.  The book is written by writers who aren’t part of the literary superstar status.  These are the blue collar writers.  The Joes and Janes that make their living by writing and maybe some other job.  This is me or where I want to be.  It is the accessible dream.  It’s the level that I can reach.  What a great bunch of folks to get advice about writing and the business from. 

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I am going to risk failing the entire course I keep this blog for with this entry, but Cabal sucked.  That's it.  That's all I have to say.  I really don't understand how Clive Barker has made it as a writer.  He is little more than a fetishist a kin to the Marquis De Sade, without the talent.

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