“This is a horror story: the mandate is to present a malefic universe.” That quote is from science fiction and fantasy (and occasional horror) author Daniel Abraham and I agree that this is where all horror stories begin. Once past that initial point, of course, there are a lot of different directions you can go. It’s a gross oversimplification, but horror is often divided into two categories: psychological and visceral. There are many degrees between the two extremes, not to mention all the various genre qualifiers that can be appended to any form of horror. but if you are beginning a horror story, it helps if you can decide roughly what kind of horror you are going for.

Is this story all blood and guts, tapping into the primal fear of being killed and/or eaten by a creature or entity you are incapable of fighting back against? Or is this a story of shifting shadows and fleeting glimpses of something insubstantial but terrifying, something that causes you to question the laws by which our world works? In short, are you trying to tap into the primal terror in the animal portion of the brain, or the existential terror that is our consciousness’s most dubious gift to us?

Since I’d wager that more people watch horror movies than read horror books, I’ll look there for examples. Movies actually adhere pretty rigorously to this stylistic split. If you’re watching a slasher flick like a Friday the Thirteenth or a Halloween, you’re trending more towards visceral horror. If you’re watching something more like 2013’s The Conjuring, you’re in more psychological horror territory.

When you get into the written word, however, an interesting thing happens. Movies, after all, have one distinct advantage over books. As a species sight is our primary sense. Graphic novels aside, we generally can’t show readers actual pictures. We have to hijack their imaginations to tell the visual parts of stories for us. But a movie, provided you keep your eyes open, can force you to look at whatever horrifying image the filmmakers want you to. With a book the the reader’s mind is free to imagine the story in as vivid or as vague detail as it wants. For this reason, I think that visceral horror stories have to work a lot harder to have the same impact on the page as they do on the screen. By the same token, psychological scares on the page can prey upon already-primed imaginations, giving them a short cut to terror.

This is not to say that visceral horror in book form can’t be done. I challenge anyone to read Scott Sigler’s Infected or Scott Smith’s The Ruins and not be terrified (and nauseated)by the extremely visceral body horror elements present.

Ultimately the most effective horror stories make at least some use of both methods to achieve maximum impact. This is really more of a continuum than it is a set of polar opposites. You’ll have to determine what effect you are going for and utilize the correct techniques to scare your readers silly.

Falling in Love With Evil

February 12, 2014

Quincy J. Allen

Character Craft & Skills Quincy Allen 1 Comment

A while back I had to tell myself to put the keyboard down and step away slowly. As a result, there’s a project I haven’t touched in over a year. What’s worse is that one of the people from a critiquing group back then keeps asking me to finish the damn book.

So what happened?

It’s simple. I fell in love with a major demon and his insidious sidekick. I was drifting away from the hero’s tale and letting that vile pair carry me along in directions I’d never thought of when I was plotting the story. It was starting to look like the demons were not only going to win, but win in a landslide of blood and death and violence and….

Errr… there it goes again. Sorry.

Over the course of the first twelve chapters, it was a lot more fun to step into a demon’s skin and lay waste to anything that crossed its path… and do so in what I must say were rather creative and cruel ways. And as I got deeper and deeper into it, my hero was left “over there” in the next room, waiting to get some airtime.

Writing is freedom. We’re gods in there, and we can literally do whatever we want. And sometimes we need to step back and realize that for the most part, the good guys have to win and there is such a thing as too much… especially when it comes to bad guys.

Maybe I’m old fashioned, and there are certainly great novels that have pushed the limits of even my rather fuzzy notions of propriety, but in my estimation, a story still needs a hero, still needs a villain, and the hero still needs to win unless there’s a very good reason for him or her not to.

So I put the keyboard down and stepped away.

I still have mixed feeling about that. It’s not that I have any qualms about putting together really despicable and dangerous characters. Far from it. It’s that there was a story I wanted to write—one I still do—and the demons were dragging me away from that. There’s a part of me that thinks I should have continued merrily on down that road. The words were flowing and I was literally running towards a destination. The problem was that I didn’t know what that destination entailed or where it ended.

I was running blind.

Let me couch this all with a little problem I have. I’m running a business, the business of writing, and my novels run too long for an author at my stage of his career. I need to crank out 90k-100k word novels, not 140k word novels. I know this is a problem, because my two finished novels, while good, are too long for their genre… which makes them a hard sell. It’s okay. The indie market has afforded a number of great opportunities, but I defined my parameters when I started, and for the book I was trying to write, 100k was and still is the max.

I made a business decision, and there it sits—waiting and watching… ready to grab hold of my brain once more. But the next time I pick it up, probably in the spring of 2015, I’ll be able to wrestle those demons and make them do what I want instead of the other way around. And if I can force them to do my bidding, I think it’ll turn out to be a damn good 100k-word novel.

The moral is, be careful what you write, and make sure you are writing towards a goal. And if you decide to change that goal along the way, be certain the course correction is in your best interests.

Making Murder Acceptable

February 11, 2014

Colette Black

Character Colette Black Conflict Craft & Skills 3 Comments

Loving a murderer can be difficult, but when you have a heavy-on-the action romance, sometimes it’s necessary. So, how do we make someone who is capable of committing murder, likable to our readers and our love interest? Here are some ideas, many of which parallel Marie Bilodeau’s recent post. The more of them we use, the more likable the hero becomes. Conversely, too many and the hero becomes cheesy. Finding the balance, and finding what fits for your murderer’s personality, is the fun part.

1) Give your murderer a good reason: An Uzi-fest on a whim in the middle of a family-filled park is not going to sit well with anyone. An Uzi-fest to destroy the carriers of a lethal virus in order to save all of humanity, though still difficult to stomach, allows a reader to sympathize with your hero’s difficult decision.

2) Make the victims deserve it: Innocent families gathering in a park don’t deserve to die. The families belonging to “We Believe in Aryan Race Dominance,” who took over the park, inoculated themselves against the lethal virus they then released, and are intending to destroy everyone who doesn’t fit into their standard of perfection, might deserve to die–at least, the parents. I have to admit, having the kids die might still be questionable.

3) Conscientious murderers feel remorse: Even if the crazy adults got what they deserved, the murderer has to feel bad about what he’s done, and devastated about the children put into this situation by their parents.

4) No other choice: If gathering the perpetrators up and putting them in a giant plastic bubble for the rest of their lives was an option, then mowing them down with an Uzi was not an acceptable alternative. We need to believe that the murderer had no other options, or believed s/he did what had to be done.

5) Make the murderer likable: David Farland talks about this in his seminars and I think he calls it “petting the dog.” While racing to the park in his/her car, if the murderer swerved to avoid a dog in the street, we like our murdering hero better because we know he cares about animals. It doesn’t have to be a dog. It can be another animal, a child, an older person… anything that shows us our murderer is a caring individual.

6) Make the murderer liked: When others care about a character, the readers are likely to care. Show the readers that love interest early, or show us that the murderer’s friend loaned out his brand new Porsche because he believes in the murderer’s good character.

There are many tricks to creating a murdering hero still worthy of a happily-ever-after ending. What are yours?

Nothing to Fear but the Demons Inside

February 10, 2014

Matt Jones

Matt Jones Reflection 1 Comment

Scary Tree I admit up front that I don’t read much Horror. It’s not that I don’t like the stories or the work as a whole, it’s just that it makes me uncomfortable. And it’s supposed to, that’s its entire job! A good horror novel will take you through an emotional journey no other genre does. It elicits emotions of fear, confusion, pain, angst, and sorrow. All novels attempt to play with your emotions to some degree, but few attempt to do so in a way that is supposed to make you uncomfortable.

Despite all the books I read, I never actually thought about what, exactly, is it in horror novels that makes me avoid them. I enjoy the excitement and the anticipation that they create. The adrenaline rush makes me feel alive and excited in a life where the most fear I’ll feel is while getting cut off on the freeway. The monsters are imaginative and creative. But most of all, the emotions are powerful! For other novels, I’ll smile during the love scenes and sigh during the sad scenes. I’ll play the good reader and act the way I’m supposed to, but usually it’s only horror that can make me act as a frightened boy and not simply a silent observer.

So, if horror novels are so powerful, why do I rarely actually read them? Maybe it’s because these adrenaline filled moments feel unnatural to me. They might remind my mind of past events that brought about the same physiological response. For example, getting shot at in Iraq while deployed in the military. Or, maybe something as simple as the power going out at night while I was in our unfinished basement as a kid. Neither experience was something I enjoyed.

It might also be the discomfort caused by breaking social rules. Many horror characters have to deal with mental issues that either force or just allows them to go against the social norms that have been drilled into us since childhood. You are put into the mind of someone who steals, rapes, maims, and murders without any remorse. While this is uncomfortable to read, the real shocker comes when you let yourself go to the story and you start agreeing with the actions taken. When you’re in the head of that character who is walking down the hall with the knife in their hands and you find yourself agreeing that the little boy must die to ensure there are no witnesses.

To be honest, I’m not sure what the reason is. They are all good reasons, but I also think they are the reasons I am drawn to horror novels every now and then. Whenever I want to shake up the norm and remind myself that these primal feeling still rest within my soul and heart.

However, there might be one other reason why I have an uneasy relationship with horror. A reason that, as an fellow writer, you might experience as well.
When I was younger, my friends and I threw a Halloween party. Part of the fun and games was a writing contest. Bring a story and read it to the group for praise and prizes. I worked hard and wrote a story about a killer who stalks and rapes young women before sending them to their death. It was dark and the motivations were twisted and gruesome. It had a satisfying ending, if not the happiest in the world. It was a good piece of literary work, in my opinion, and it definitely got an emotional response from the party goers. I thought it was a success, but was surprised at the response afterwards.

My friends who listened to the story, friends who I’ve known for years, looked at me as if I was a new person. A girl I’ve dated asked me later how I could think up something so dark. I heard rumors that some friends thought my character in the story was a representation of who I really wanted to be inside. I began to wonder if my friends thought I really wanted to kill them. And what could I say? I was just a teenager. What if these stories that I thought up really were the thoughts of some inner demon?

Maybe I avoid horror because I’m afraid it’ll show me a side of myself that I really don’t want to see. Maybe I do have demons in my soul that will see the words as an invitation to let loose on the world.

I’m not sure I have a good answer, but I do know one thing: I took the fear and suspicion of my friends as the highest praise I’ve ever gotten. Demons or no demons, horror is a part of me. Even if I only open myself up to it sparingly.