On Horror

A while back I wrote a science fiction piece that centered around cannibalism. Some of the people who initially read it, including my dear friend John, told me that it was nice, but it was really more of a horror story than a science fiction one, which took me completely by surprise. Yes, I'd put some kind of graphic bits about dismemberment into the piece, but I'd done my best to present them through the eyes of a character who saw absolutely nothing weird about it; within the context of the story, almost no one was bothered by it. The point was to highlight the desensitization and play it against a pretty innocent adolescent love story that provided the bulk of the action. None of the characters were in any jeopardy, or even had any particularly intense moments outside of love sickness. Folk seemed surprised to learn that I hadn't thought of the story as horror at all.

I have some ambivalence about horror. Actually it's the exact same ambivalence I have about comedy, when you boil it down. Both genres are working to elicit a very specific and subjective emotional experience: respectively terror and a good laugh. It's a very tricky thing to do. Tastes vary and presentation is at least as important as content. It's a smoke and mirrors show in which surprise is a vital factor, and it's easy to get disastrously wrong. A story that isn't funny or scary runs the risk of being everything from banal to obnoxious to downright offensive.

Add into that mix that what constitutes "horror" in fiction is a wide and varied rainbow of dark stories. I tend to like the Lovecraft flavored horror best, because so much of the real menace happens out of sight- just flashes in the corner of your eye of something huge and horrifying- and because I dig the fundamental terror of a universe that is at best apathetic to human concerns, and at worst openly hostile. By contrast, there's a vein of horror that tends not to do much at all for me, in which a main character will go about being as terrible as possible a person, and then in the end get their just desserts through some supernatural means. On the one hand, it's not necessarily my bag because I tend to dislike the main characters enough that I don't want to follow them long enough to see them get killed, but on the other, this feels less horrific to me because the basic premise is that there's a just universe, and bad things ultimately happen to the people who deserve it. It's a bloody but comforting thought- one that doesn't instill in me a sense of disquiet and uncertainty. I feel like the best ghost stories make you a little afraid, somewhere in the back of your head, that the ghost could be coming for you. That it doesn't matter if you're good, or if you do what you're supposed to- or if it does, it takes only the tiniest slip to make yourself vulnerable. Perhaps I have an unduly high opinion of myself as not deserving celestial vengeance, but it's that potential for random unmerited terror that gets my blood racing.

But as I said, tastes vary.

That's true too of the level of gore. For me, how much ripping flesh and rotting viscera makes it onto the metaphorical "screen" doesn't directly correlate to being scary. You can write a good menacing yarn without any of it, or you could stuff your story to the gills with gore and actually have it achieve the opposite effect. The blood and trauma can become desensitizing and almost slapstick, if they're hung on a frame that isn't sufficiently robust to hold their weight.

It's certainly not something I have down to an exact science, or even a concise thesis (as you can probably tell from this post). These are my best guesses for what makes good horror for me:

1. Evil will triumph. Even if your character escapes momentarily, something fundamentally antagonistic to clean, decent humanity is going to win out in the long run.
2. There is a sense of menace to the reader, however hypothetical or indirect it may be. It certainly doesn't need to be spelled out in "La Llorona comes by the night for children who walk unsupervised by the river" terms but perceived safety undermines the feeling of horror. And if it's not a warning about the thing that might be under your bed, then your story's just a record of things that happened.
3. It incorporates a problem far out of the ordinary. Ordinary problems can be solved rationally. You can get your head around them. The problem need not be paranormal- there's great psycho horror- but it can't be normal.
4. It plays off fundamental and universal fears, as much as that's possible. Darkness, violence, the unknown, tight spaces, falling, blood, jeopardy to loved ones, clowns, whatever you like. People have visceral buttons and part of the fun of horror is having them pushed.

Anyway, those are my genre thoughts. I don't, in practice, consider myself a horror writer per se, but that's where the money's coming from, and I'm as happy to wear that hat as anything else, I suppose.