Tag Archives: horror

I almost never remember my dreams. I am certain that I dream most nights, but at best, I retain only a vague synopsis or a phantasm of the feelings inspired. Despite this, I have one reoccurring dream that my mind holds onto despite my efforts to forget the morbid stillness of the tableau.

In the dreamspace, there exists only a room. The floor is covered in white tile that extends into an undefinable vagueness around the edges. At the center of the room is a sunken pool, a large square depressed into the ground about a foot. The tub is mostly filled with gently rippling water which reflects the glow of lighting that feels coldly institutional. The grout between the squares of ceramic are a pale brown-red where water had been splashed during a struggle. The water of the pool is pink with what I am certain is my blood.

I never understood why this image inspired dread upon awakening, until I mentioned the dream one day in passing to my mother. She had been washing dishes at the time, and stopped to listen as I talked. I remember the silence that followed my description, and the deep breath she took as she set the item she had been holding back into the sink. Turning to me, she told me that she had hoped I would not remember that place, but because I had, I needed to know.

You see, when I was almost 3 years old my parents had left me with the sitter they and many of the families in our neighborhood had been using for years. The woman ran a childcare service out of her home, and unknown to all the parents was over the capacity she had been legally licensed to care for. This fact came to light when one day I was loose in the kitchen while she was making Jell-O. With the infamous timing found in nightmares and fiction, I managed to get underfoot just as she lifted the steaming bowl from the counter to bring to the fridge to cool.

The burns on my little feet were horrific.

I was rushed to the hospital, where my parents met me. In a twist of luck also rarely found in the real world, one of Canada’s best plastic surgeons was in the receiving area of the ER as I was dragged in and decided to take my case.

Each day, my toes had to be cut free from each other and the wrappings the doctors had to use to keep them separated. Despite medications and the other treatments they used, necrosis had been unavoidable. To keep the infection under control, my dead skin had to be scraped off with a stiff bristled brush nearly daily. My mother, late in her pregnancy with my younger brother, had to hold me down as I screamed and thrashed so a nurse could do the gristly task in a shallow depressed pool in a white tiled room.

It was both brutal and necessary, but because of those chances and the choices of all involved, my feet eventually healed and grew normal and whole. Even so, my mother says that was the hardest thing she has ever done. She took a leave of absence from work to stay with me in the hospital and only left my side at night when my father took the vigil with me. After catching what sleep she could in the Ronald McDonald House next door, she would return to let my dad shower and go to work. That experience and kindness is why the Ronald McDonald House is one of my favorite charities.

I’ve often read stories where writers use dreams to have characters cope with traumatic events that occured in the buried past, but never believed that it happened in real life. After all, if the person wasn’t old enough to remember, how could the trauma reappear in dreams? How could it be so specific and real? I would have sworn that it wasn’t possible. Apparently, I was wrong.

Haunted Hospital

September 18, 2014

fictorians

Author's Perspective Guest Posts Horror Reflection 2 Comments

A guest post by Paul Genesse.

I worked the night shift in a haunted hospital for ten years. The building was over a hundred years old and thousands of people had died there. I’m not going to mention the name of the facility, but it’s a famous hospital in Utah, where I started working in the late 90’s.

I ended up on a cardiac floor where people didn’t die that often, but we had the most code blues of any other non-intensive care unit in the whole facility. People with heart conditions are on the brink of death and their hearts often give out suddenly.

We nurses were always on edge, and whenever a patient said, “I’m going to die tonight,” we would always reassure them in their room, but when we left we would freak out and go and tell someone immediately. Very often, when the patient made that ominous prediction, they were right. A few hours later, they would die. It was super creepy.

I had several personal experiences with the supernatural while working there, and I collected a lot of the stories from that hospital over the years. One of strangest involved a close friend of mine, Nick (not his real name) with whom I worked with for many years. Nick was working the night shift when a doctor in a long white coat walked down the hallway toward a dead end section of rooms with no exit. My friend was sitting down and was nearly half-asleep and thought it was odd to see an MD coming at that time of night, around 3:00 AM, to see a patient.

A few minutes after the doctor walked by, a call light went off in that section. Nick answered the call by going to the room immediately. The patient was wide awake, with all his lights on. Moments before the patient had been in a deep sleep. Nick asked, “Do you need some help?” The patient was excited and said, “My brother just came to visit me.”

There was no sign of the brother in the room. Nick was confused, as he did not see anyone leave the area. The brother was not in the bathroom or in the other three rooms in that section. There was no way he could have left without Nick seeing him.

Nick said something like, “Where is he now?” The patient had a stunned expression on his face and said, “My brother has been dead for seven years!”

The brother had died in the same hospital, but on a different floor. Nick asked about the conversation they had. The dead brother told his younger sibling that he should not worry, and that he was going to survive this illness.

The patient went home a few days later.

This even really happened. The man lived through his health scare and went home.

Nick was a skeptic about ghosts until this event, but not any more.

I could go on about ghost stories in this hospital, and I’ll tell a few more.

A friend of mine, Emily (not her real name) was working in an ICU at this hospital and witnessed haunting activity in a specific room soon after a particularly nasty and disoriented male patient had died. The ghost would touch staff, creep them out with an ominous presence, and scare the current patients staying in that room—who would ask who the tall man was. Emily would ask for someone to go in with her after some frightening experiences. That’s how scared she was.

Once, this nasty ghost was seen manifesting as a full-bodied apparition in the doorway of the room where he died. This event freaked out a different nurse really badly. As far as I know, this was the first time anyone had seen the ghost as a full-bodied apparition, but the strangest thing about this was that the spirit had a breathing tube (an endotracheal tube) dangling from his mouth. He seemed to be choking and reaching out for help as he stood in the doorway. The man was very tall and big, so he was quite intimidating.

Emily quit her job and transferred to a different hospital. She could not face the haunting activity any longer.

I could go on as I have a stack of stories about supernatural events, including poltergeist activity, disembodied voices, apparitions, and more.

I’m so glad I don’t work at that hospital anymore. Whenever I walked into that place, dark and troubling energies would hit me. I had to learn how to block them out. To this day there are reports of supernatural events there, especially on certain floors that are now abandoned. The security guards who patrol the place have seen and heard all sorts of disturbing things—people calling for help when no one is there, and they see shadows moving in abandoned patient rooms. TV’s and call lights go on randomly in vacant rooms all the time.

Healthcare workers are pretty tough people overall, but just walking down to the cafeteria in the middle of the night was frightening for some of my friends. Those dark hallways filled with shadows and that odd vibe was especially disturbing for the more sensitive staff.

Some people are skeptical about ghosts and the supernatural. I think that’s fine and very reasonable. Not believing in the paranormal is a great defense mechanism. You don’t see things when the more sensitive people do. Personally, it’s worked for me in the past. I’d much rather not see scary things, even though, at the edge of my peripheral vision, I know they’re there.

Guest Writer Bio: Paul Genesse is the author of The Golden Cord, The Dragon Hunters, and The Secret Empire, the first three books in his Iron Dragon Series. He has sold several short stories—many of which involve ghosts—which appear in various DAW anthologies, and elsewhere. He’s been on a few paranormal investigations and may have once encountered a demon—which turned out to be research, as he’s the editor of the five volumes in the demon-themed Crimson Pact shared multiverse anthology series. He works full time as a cardiac nurse, but has worked as a copy editor, computer game consultant, and naturally he enjoys speaking about writing at conventions, and doing school visits. Friend him on Facebook or find him online at paulgenesse.com.

Having the Self Awareness to Horrify Others

February 20, 2014

Nathan Barra

Craft & Skills Horror Nathan Barra Self-Awareness 1 Comment

I write short stories to experiment with new genres and techniques. Last August, I caught wind of an anthology that was opening for submissions. However, the genre, horror, was largely beyond my experience. I had read a few books, watched a number of movies, and even written a piece or two, but I was still stepping outside my comfort zone. Perfect! I brainstormed, scanning my consciousness for an idea that was shiny enough to start with that I could polish it into a true gem.

My inner eye first turned to the bestiary, drudging up images inspired by the abominations of Lovecraft, the near satirical creatures of B-rated movies and creeping things that I had imagined living in the shadows as a child. I paired monsters with characters, with milieus and with plots, searching for tension and conflict. I worked my way through what felt like dozens of combinations, fleshing out a few, but discarding most. Everything still felt flat, unexciting and unoriginal.

Frustrated, I stood up from my computer and wandered, trying to figure out where I was going wrong. The monsters I was creating were as good as any I had ever read, seen or made up myself. There was nothing inherently wrong with any of the elements I had assembled, and yet, I was not having a strong emotional reaction. How could I expect anyone else to feel when I did not?

As I prefer my horror in the form of movies, I turned to my collection, flipping through the pages of disks, looking for the echo of emotion that the remembrance of a truly good horror inspires. Das Experiment. Mr. Brooks. Untracable. Pathology. Of all my movies, these four psychological thrillers inspired the strongest reactions of anticipation and fear, the same emotions I sought to evoke in my readers.

For me, it was the difference of conscious intent. The creatures I had imagined were beasts, acting on instinct or hunger. The villains I had admired and feared were rational and extremely intelligent, acting for a variety of motives but all with horrifying cruelty and viciousness. It was the actions of humans and the human mind that I feared more than the brutality of beasts.

I spent hours over the following weeks considering what horrified me, coming up with a number of story ideas that I feel are gems in need of polishing. The difference for me was self-awareness. I found that I could not write something truly horrifying to others until I could first horrify myself.

What is Horror? Really?

February 19, 2014

fictorians

Guest Posts Motivation The Writing Life 1 Comment

dan_wells[1] A guest post by Dan Wells.

I sold my first book about a year and a half ago, and I was bouncing off the walls more literally than you probably care to imagine. It the was the first step in the fulfillment of a life-long dream, and I was so happy I couldn’t stop telling pretty much everyone I knew or met or interacted with. I quickly learned there were only two basic versions of this conversation.

The Good One
Me: I just sold a book! I’m going to be published!
Other Person: That’s awesome!
Both of Us: Yay!

The Other One
Me: I just sold a book! I’m going to be published!
Other Person: That’s awesome! What kind of book is it?
Me: Horror.
Other Person: I don’t read horror.

This basic template held true in almost every situation, including–and this surprised me–dedicated genre fans. People who have read more fantasy and science fiction books than most people have ever read anything. The thing is, there’s a lot of crossover between the rest of the speculative genres: if you read fantasy, you probably also read a bit of SF, and a bit of paranormal, and a bit of historical, and so on and so on. There are exceptions, and most of us tend to group around one or two subgenres that really get our motor going, like hard SF or cyberpunk or urban fantasy or whatever, but horror, for most of us, is the odd one out. Except for a relatively small group of self-identified horror fans, nobody reads it.

Except that everybody reads it, they just don’t admit it, or maybe even know it.

Ask people what horror is and you’re likely to get one of two answers: “Stephen King” or “slasher movies.” Never mind that Stephen King hasn’t written a full-on horror novel in decades, or that slasher movies are in a medium so removed from novels as to make the comparison meaningless. These are what people think of when they hear the word “horror,” and that colors their entire perception of the genre. Our concept of horror is frozen in a single period of history, let’s call it 1973 (the publication of Carrie) to 1988 (when movies like Child’s Play represented the last hurrah of the slasher movie before they tipped fully into self-parody). Horror films have never truly left, because they’re cheap and profitable, but their quality and popularity have gone in waves; I count two horror film renaissances since the heyday of the 80s, maybe three depending on how you define them. But horror novels have never achieved anything like their 15-year peak, possibly because of the way the giants of that era (King, Dean Koontz, Clive Barker, James Herbert) so thoroughly dominated the genre.

And the truth is, this shifting definition is kind of correct, in its way: if we define “horror” as “the kind of stuff King and Herbert wrote in the 70s,” then you’re right, most people don’t read horror anymore, and that’s fine because most people don’t write that kind of horror anymore. The genre has moved on, and King and Koontz and Barker and a giant host of others are still writing it, but the genre label is still stuck in the past. Today we hide our horror in a jumbled pile of other labels, secretly infecting almost every shelf in the bookstore. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro writes “vampire historicals,” but they’re really horror. Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden books are “urban fantasy,” but they’re really horror. Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville books are “paranormal romance,” but surprise, they’re really horror. F. Paul Wilson writes “thrillers” that are obviously horror. These books and more are incredibly popular–Dresden got it’s own TV show and roleplaying game, for goodness sake–and the odds are incredibly good that the same people who claim they never read horror will, when pressed, admit that they’ve read a lot of these other things. They just don’t call them horror, and the bookstores don’t call them horror, and thus horror doesn’t sell and thus the myth perpetuates.

Trying to tie horror down to a single genre or representation is missing the point. Some say that horror is defined by its supernatural elements, but I think horror goes beyond the trappings and the props to get at something much deeper and more meaningful; it’s less of a genre, in my mind, than a style or a perspective. Let’s go back to the roots of modern horror and steal a definition from H.P. Lovecraft: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” So we could say that horror is about fear, and in that sense we can find horror everywhere. In military fiction much of the plots are driven by the uncertainty of who will live and who will die; they’re about the fear of death and the loss of honor; they’re horror. Espionage novels are about the fear that an enemy nation will subvert or conquer your own, literally stealing your way of life; that’s horror. Romance, at it’s heart, is about the fear that the person you love doesn’t love you back; that’s one of the most horrific things I can think of.

So what separates these genres from “real” horror, whether we label it as such or not? Let’s go back even further to Anne Radcliffe, the original godmother of gothic horror; roughly paraphrased, she separated terror and horror in a fascinating way, saying that terror is the emotion we feel while waiting for something bad, and horror is the emotion we feel while facing it. Terror is about dread, but horror is about confronting the thing that we dread–it’s about our revulsion, our shock, our struggle to understand and adapt. In a thriller we race the clock and stop the bad guy, but in a horror, the bad guy wins: the bomb goes off, or the protector dies, or the true love marries someone else. We have to pick up the pieces and survive. Horror is about facing our losses head on, and being either crushed or strengthened by your reaction to it.

In light of this definition, we can see the rise of horror in all our media, from The Hunger Games to Man of Steel. We are a society that has faced true horror (9/11 is the obvious one, plus any number of other terrorist attacks, military actions, mass shootings, and so on), and we’re dealing with those emotions and repercussions in our art. We are primed for horror, because we are searching for stories about survival. This, in turn, makes us a culture primed for heroism: we’ll face the horror, and we’ll live through it, and even if the characters die the readers will still be there at the end, breathless and alive and shaking our head in relief. Horror gives us a chance to overcome the things that try to break us.

Horror is everywhere. Go out and make some more of it.

Guest Writer Bio: Dan Wells writes in many different genres, including supernatural thriller (I Am Not A Serial Killer), psychological horror (The Hollow City), and science fiction (Partials). He has won two Parsecs and a Hugo for his work on Writing Excuses, a podcast for aspiring writers. Visit him online at www.thedanwells.com, or say hello on Twitter: @thedanwells. His newest book, called RUINS, is the climax of the post-apocalyptic Partials Sequence, and launches on March 11.