The Return of the Ghost: Hauntology, Hontology & the Art of Growing Good Horror From Dead Things Today

It has long been surmised by the Literary Establishment as well as much of our genre establishment that the best of the ghost story is behind us.

“Authority” after “authority” has said so. Yet since the 1980s, there has been a growing American fascination with ghosts in general that is eerily reminiscent of that early twentieth century fixation on seances and spiritualism. From talk shows featuring modern-day mediums to Hollywood offerings that range from comedy to romance to outright Horror, right down to ghost hunters and fascination with demonology and witchcraft… we have become obsessed with ghosts.

Isn’t it ironic that we seem unable to capitalize on this successfully in the genre? And why is it that so many other academic researchers outside of Literature have seen the obvious and are actually studying the phenomenon?

Maybe it is time to wake up – to see with open eyes what these other academics are seeing:

That our obsession and preoccupation with ghosts is all about our national heritage and the subtext of our reinvented history.

That ghosts are Literary business. And it is no wonder a great ghost story is so hard to write even when we are bursting with personal demons.

Hauntology and Hontology: the Future is Cancelled

One of the most interesting discoveries to make about the Horror genre is that Horror is complex in its primordial roots. Horror is not just about urban legends and folklore and paperback terrors – indeed Horror is all about philosophy, biology, brain science, social science, chemistry, physics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, history and religion. And in every one of these academic subjects lies a research angle or two that draws inference from Horror and our invention, use of, and reaction to it.

We don’t have to flirt with haunted houses or seances or EMF meters chasing rumors of spirits to be drawn to the subject matter – to ask apart from religious association if ghosts are “real” and if so what their presence means. We don’t have to dissect and catalog the types of ghosts and hauntings to be captivated and disturbed by the idea of their presence. Yet we have been doing this in increasingly commercial ways since the 1980s, rationalizing that we are not at all incorporating “deep” religious questions into our own investigations which we proclaim are objectively scientific or cloaked in simple “curiosity”… We have been operating under the pretense that we ourselves have no secrets, and that our “interest” in the subject matter is exploited purely for the sake of entertainment.

Whether we are talking about paperback plots or haunted asylums, we posit a curious divestment from the subject matter of ghosts and the bigger questions they represent.

But that is not how historians and philosophers in particular are seeing this fascination with the paranormal.

Forget psychology and religion. These folks are associating a concurrent rise in ghost-busting with an international rise in political populism and  Black Lives Matter… In the cultural global phenomenon of cancelling the future in the effort to glorify and reclaim a reinvented past rife with – not ghost stories – but the real thing: Horror.

So how is this connected – this seemingly unrelated pursuit of proving or disproving ghosts and who we elect as President of the United States or Prime Minister of the UK, or ruler of a China or Russia?

The answer – as Mark Payne put it – is our collective “shame of life.” Payne, a professor in the Department of Classics and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, explains: that “shame is the route by which we access the capabilities for living that are abrogated in modernity. This is the hontology of my [book] title, as opposed to the hauntology that Fisher took up… that it is the loss of the New World as a horizon in which these abrogated capabilities were still in play, and the inhabitants of the New World as presenting forms of life before which Europeans felt shame in comparison with their own…” (Payne 1)

In other words, all of that American Exceptionalism that we have pushed at each other nationally and internationally, has led to all of us feeling not only inadequate in these times of global economic and historic and social challenge, but has led us to rely on historic narratives of shady origin to begin with. We find ourselves competing with a mythology even as we attempt to reconstruct it in its own image. We are desperate for a semblance of stability we believe past generations have had, when in fact past generations were simply too (willingly or intentionally) socially isolated to compare notes about reality.

And as any ghost story lover can tell you, what we believe about reality means everything.

“Shame – la honte” is a term derived from French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s 1993 lectures on Marx and Marxism, in which the title of the collection (The Spectres of Marx) refers to a statement by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels at the beginning of The Communist Manifesto that a “spectre [is] haunting Europe.” Payne then asks, “What is this specter-ridden Europe?” And his argument is that shame lies somewhere in between the hegemony (leadership and dominance) of the United States with its own foundation resting on a repurposing of its indigenous peoples and an original (and borrowed) history from Europe that has resulted in a simple reinvention of the same Europe its founders had left…repeating the same sins from European pasts while proclaiming… well… alternative facts. And furthermore that the consequence of this reinvention has led (over time) to the realization that the lives we are living “is not really life.”  (2)

We have then a great need to keep our mythologies about – for instance – cowboys and Indians alive in our imaginations. We Americans need the fantasy of true freedom, true democracy, of feeling what it is to truly live every moment “to its fullest” by selectively remembering only the adrenaline of success of the hunt, or in war, in overcoming death. We romanticize a history that is neither true nor viable in order to live vicariously through those images.

This is why we have to keep Native Americans culturally “dead.” If they are “alive,” they challenge the carefully crafted myth of freedom… from Chief Wahoo to Thanksgiving.

We have, in our fictionalized American lives, repurposed Native ones for our own use – supplanting indigenous peoples and making our real indigenous people superfluous, redundant, and strangely disingenuous. Says Joshua T. Anderson in an essay from Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre: “Carol Clover suggests there is a ‘special connection between the country folk of the urbanoia [or city-revenge] films,’ such as The Hills Have Eyes and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, ‘and the Indians of the settler-versus-Indian western.’ As Clover elaborates, ‘In these stories both redneck and redskin are figured as indigenous peoples on the verge of being deprived of their native lands,’ suggesting that ‘the rednecks of modern horror even look and act like movie Indians…” (Weird  132)

Here not only have we eviscerated that freedom, but we have devoured the dead and become one with the delusion. We have absorbed democracy – not practiced it. The American cowboy represents that ‘rugged’ individualism we value in our cookie-cutter understanding of our indigenous populations, that sense of imagined democracy in which we allegedly ‘do nothing we do not believe in personally,’ and abscond with the belief that we can in fact do anything and be anything we want…that the West (if not the Western U.S.) is a big enough place in which to act out our dreams.

Yet go West and the land is full. The Indians are “disappeared” onto out-of-sight/out-of-mind reservations, and the cowboy is a caricature for commercial use and selling cigarettes. We have no place left in which to realize our manifest destiny of machismo and individualism…

Go West and we are deflated. Our hopes are crushed. There is nowhere to go, no world to conquer, no challenge against which to prove ourselves… in which to live… We have killed ourselves. And we are haunted by that which we can no longer have.

Hauntology is described by James Ashford in an article from The Week, as “the idea that the present is haunted by the metaphorical “ghosts” of lost futures.

The concept asks people to consider how “spectres” of alternative futures influence current and historical discourse, and acknowledges that this “haunting” – or the study of the non-existent – has real effects.”  https://www.theweek.co.uk/104076/what-is-hauntology

Is it starting to come together – this quirky marriage between philosophy and history and Horror?

We keep telling ourselves that other people or peoples live more “real” lives. And we compound these imaginings with the knowledge that they are living these presumed lives despite our most vigorous efforts to eradicate them. And the more we entertain this inner dialog, the more personally angry we become at those people while believing ourselves even more disenfranchised of our own dreams. There is a term for this…

Hauntological melancholia…We become terrified that we – as a nation or even as a species – have already lived our best lives, done our greatest things, that we are a civilization and species in decline.

Says Mark Fisher, there are “two kinds” of such melancholia that the hauntological kind springs from: the first is “Wendy Brown’s ‘left melancholia’ [which] is most at home dwelling not in hopefulness, but in its own marginality and failure, a Left that is thus caught in a structure of melancholic attachment to a certain strain of its own dead past, whose spirit is ghostly, whose structure of desire is backward-looking and punishing.” (Fisher 23) Herein the loss of the future we assumed to be ours has led to that weird pride of failure we see enacted by those ‘proud to be poor/I am what I am’ folks – a pushback to an immobile and stagnant future bereft of all imaginable forward momentum by being proud of how we got here because we can’t be proud of where we are going. We look backward and say it has all already been done.

We have to ask: is this why we have woken up – because the car stopped and the driver is gone?

Fisher states that his interpretation of hauntological melancholia means that instead of “giving up on desire” we instead “[refuse] to yield. It consists, that is to say, in a refusal to adjust to what current conditions call ‘reality’ – even if the cost of that refusal is that you feel like an outcast in your own time.” (24) And here we are left with those who are aware of the loss of momentum, and the awareness demands an accounting of our own selves. Is this all there is to life? we ask, isn’t there something MORE? Why don’t I FEEL anything?

So we look backward for comfort. And encounter a new wall – one Fisher identifies as “post-colonial melancholia” which dirties the myth of how we got here…and is the second type of hauntological melancholia influencing his research.

Says Fisher, “Paul Gilroy defines this melancholia in terms of an avoidance: it is about evading ‘the painful obligations to work through the grim details of imperial and colonial history and to transform paralyzing guilt into a more productive shame that would be conducive to the building of a multicultural nationality that is no longer phobic about the prospect of exposure to either strangers or otherness…”(24) It is about justifying why our own failure to thrive has happened; it is blaming the Other and the immigrant…Fisher is instead linking his understanding of  hauntological melancholia to the loss of the narrative of promise as compromised by the framing of our decisions of the past – in other words, nostalgia for what we think our past promised us…the evaporation of what we thought was the process, the guarantee, the formula for success if not happiness.

We have been unable to process the concept of a shelf life for “the good old days.” We lost them — therefore we must claw them back.

And here we are, living with all four forms of hauntological melancholia peeking out behind a pandemic.

And as Fisher points out, it has led to the feeling that “the 21^st century hasn’t started yet. We remain trapped in the 20^th century…[where] the slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations.” We no longer hope for a new innovations in music or technology or the arts…We do not, for example, expect to ever see another band like The Beatles, or an artist like DaVinci. “The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed.” (Fisher 8)

And don’t we know all about this in our genre? Stephen King (unless we change our own philosophy) will be the last great Horror writer, and H.P. Lovecraft will be what Horror was really aspiring to, and therefore will indeed come to represent the end of the genre’s evolution. Yet this is everywhere…

Look at fashion. At music. At cars. There is no innovation…no sign of diversification or development, no evolution…We just keep making more of the same…of everything.

And this is directly linked to the past — our past and our narrative of it – as surely as it is linked to the way we feel right now, in this historical moment.

Are we not seeking ways to tell our Horror stories in the midst of this pandemic, surrounded by the ghosts of our carefully constructed, self-immolating history?

We have been high-centered as writers in the genre because we know this is BIG. And we have been looking for an angle. We have been hoping for word from on genre high – from a knowledgeable and eager Establishment.

And we have been left to figure it out on our own.

Back to Ghosts

So here we are at this precarious moment in history (yes, history is something that is made by the present) and we have no clear understanding of either our future or the past.

Yet what if this is indicative of one of those truly integral moments we have seen in the past? The kind of moment that leads to a lurching explosion of discovery and invention?

We may indeed be on the brink of another “Golden Age” in our genre – one that will break more than a few norms because it is time for them to be broken and replaced with our next growth spurt, and as a consequence then build if not rebuild our fanbase.

Clearly our ability to fantasize about the past and the people in it is without boundaries – moral or factual. And we need to imagine those things so we can fit that narrative into our own. However we need to come to terms with the likely reality that the future for our ancestors was no more clear for them than it is for ourselves; and that all of that romanticized living of those  “real” lives meant they had precious little time or energy to do much more than plod onward on their own best guesses…just as worrying about bills, and Covid, and growing up to being whatever we wanted to be as children and raising children sucks up all of the oxygen in the room and saps our psychic and physical energy.

That those in the past were in the business of making the ghosts we are now obsessed with is of more than passing interest to historians and philosophers seeking to unravel the mystery of why we seem to be imploding in our national identity, politics, and personal lives. Ghosts are back – and back in a big way. And we are making more of them daily.

Is seeing them, pursuing them, or denying them a sign of our cultural stability?

Perhaps. Because it means that something is bothering us… a narrative we thought we controlled is proving to have a life of its own… a different version of the truth. The subtext is rising out of the ground we buried it in and following us home from the graveyard. It haunts us. And it threatens to possess us.

“Who are you?” we ask of the dark. “Why are you here? What do you want?”

And when it answers, we turn off the recorder. We run screaming back out to the light from the place we intentionally went into in order to find a ghost. We laugh nervously. We scared ourselves. The ghost was real, but we didn’t really want to know it: we didn’t stick around for the answers we didn’t want.

Says Jeffrey Weinstock in his introduction to Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination, “The idea of the ghost, of that which disrupts oppositional thinking and the linearity of historical chronology, has substantial affinities with post-structural thought in general. The ghost is that which interrupts the presentness of the present, and its haunting indicates that, beneath the surface of received history, there lurks another narrative, an untold story that calls into question the veracity of the authorized version of events. As such, the contemporary fascination with ghosts is a reflection of an awareness of the narrativity of history.” (5)

There is precious little that is more interesting than the dead who don’t stay dead; ghosts defy being confined to narrative, to discerned facts, enacting their own versions of truth. Ghosts are also liminal things – not only existing between living and afterlife/oblivion, but also between past and present, operating outside of time and space. They represent both justice denied and justice sought. They represent the would-be of US.

We need ghosts. We need them to be real… Continues Weinstock: “They speak to our desire to be remembered and to our longing for a coherent and ‘correct’ narrative of history. We value our ghosts particularly during periods of cultural transition [my emphasis], because the alternative to their presence is even more frightening: if ghosts do not return to correct history, then privileged narratives of history are not open to contestation. If ghosts do not return to reveal crimes that have gone unpunished, then evil acts may in fact go unaddressed. If ghosts do not appear to validate faith, then faith remains just that – faith rather than fact; and without ghosts to point to things that have been lost and overlooked, things may disappear forever…That ghosts are particularly prominent in our cultural moment indicates that we are particularly vexed by these questions.” (6)

Are we not at this time in a particularly profound moment of cultural crisis? Are there not voices crying out for justice and governments in turmoil? Are there not endless horrors spilling from the pages of carefully penned history? And are we not all screaming at each other, waving flags and beliefs like amulets against a history we are afraid to acknowledge when the future is no longer anticipated or viable?

And is that crisis of culture not directly related to history and the narrative that can no longer be contained by simple racism?

When the truth wants out, ghosts walk.

Back To Horror

What we are seeing here makes for a very interesting time and future for the Horror genre. In the attempt to suppress creativity and “control” the direction of the genre’s new writings and writers by rejecting Horror that is not in keeping with the Weird tradition of H.P. Lovecraft and additionally disparages our rediscovery of and struggles to reinvent the Literary ghost story, we have been on the wrong side of our own history. And we have stifled our own growth.

Other academic theorists have been doing our work – seeing in our genre what we have refused to see and to nourish. Our newer Critics are both too few and too typical – meaning it is the nature of Literary Critics to choose a writer and their catalog of works in which to build their own body of work in Criticism. So with too few Literary Critics and too much work waiting to be Criticized, we simply need more voices pointing out the obvious and sending our writers off in new directions.

Hauntology and Hontology – ghosts of the past that devour our future and shame that devours our present – are the fertile Literary ground we have been seeking. Neither excludes traditional monsters or folklore, yet both can open the door to better and more relevant Horror as we come to grips Nationally with the errant narrative of our own history, This is the chance for us as writers to tell our own stories – whether you are a white writer in the genre enduring the shock of realization and the guilt of institutionalized behavior you never meant to be a part of, or if you are in that oppressed class of “Other” enduring a very public and painful birth – these two theories are going to reinvigorate the ghost story subgenre. We simply need to be taking our cues from other genres, other academic studies from other academic theorists – including Film Critics – and our own lives.

We need to tell our tales. Dead men (and women) most certainly do tell secrets for which there are always two sides, because injustice haunts every living thing on this planet. It is our job as writers in the genre to speak those evils no matter what genre editors say or prefer, no matter what Critics want to see more of. We are the intermediaries, the documentarians, the liaisons between those who study and publish and judge the genre, and those who live and read it.

Don’t be afraid to turn out the lights…Call it forth, summon its forbidden truths with your eyes wide open.

Use what is happening today.

Call it by its name and it will come.

Tell us a ghost story…

References

Anderson, Joshua T. “The Werewolf and the Were/Wear/Where-West in Stephen Graham Jones’s Mongrels.” Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre. Kerry Fine, Michael K. Johnson, Rebecca M. Lush, and Sara L. Spurgeon, eds. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, c2020.

James Ashford. “What is Hauntology? The Idea Asks if People Can Be Haunted By Ghosts of Lost Futures.” The Week U.K., (31 October 2019). Retrieved 12/15/202 from https//www.theweek.co.uk/104076/what-is-hauntology

Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014.

Kleinberg, Ethan. Haunting History: For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, c2017.

Payne, Mark. Hontonology: Depressive Anthropology and the Shame of Life. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2018.

Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination. Andrew Weinstock, ed. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press/Poplar Press, c2004.

Horror as a Second Language (Fresh New Horror From Other Places & Cultures)

When we look at the tradition of Horror, we tend to embrace its ethnocentrism as a characteristic of the genre – a living trope, if you will.

We think that the construction of the genre happened in a Western vacuum and that there exists some kind of “proof” that no one else shares in the tradition of true scary tale telling. It is as though it is not legitimate if it is not published in an English-speaking country and contains predictable Western characters living out a familiar plot. We point at the acknowledged (and therefore “official”) history of Horror without recognizing that those who have judged our stories and uplifted the genre’s profile to (at times) cult status have also been “traditionally” white and male and Western – the same ones who historically controlled the presses and the public’s choice of content and access to the written word. Are we right, then, to assume that no one else is (or has ever been) writing Horror of value?

The answer is a resounding no; Horror is neither exclusive nor rare – not in experience nor the storytelling. And perhaps the key as to why we seem at a creative and Literary stalemate in our modern writings is ensconced in the significance of “how” – in having fashioned this odd, culturally exclusive bubble – all of our best efforts have resulted in a kind of genetically compromised inbreeding of ideas. In our hand-over-fist attempts to understand what we think Horror formula is or should be, perhaps it is we who have become the victims of our own intent to discredit others.

This means our contemporary problems (especially in American Horror) may well have grown in its isolated and lonesome Petrie dish to be not only about who is telling what stories, but about the future of the American side of the genre. We are unquestionably at a Literary and creative impasse.

And we had better start asking what happens when all of the 1970s-1980s bestselling authors stop writing. What exactly will we do then?

Robbing Horror From Other Cradles

At a time when we are unwilling or unable to create the kind of Horror that excites our readers and grows our constituency, we need an infusion of original DNA – the kind of DNA that descends from folklore and fairy tales – the gritty stuff of childhood fears. And we need to do this shamelessly – borrowing from those older traditions tucked neatly into vague heritages because while we were being all puffy and proud about our modern sophistication and electronic gadgets, what we call The Old World was still telling scary tales of things that go bump in the night. And people who grow up with those storytelling traditions clearly have a thing or two to teach us about where we all (and our monsters) come from.

For those of us on this side of the pond, it’s time to climb out of the creative box we have put ourselves in – from what we call our genre to who writes in it. We have no proprietary rights here; just because some smarty-pants marketing department decided to print the word “Horror” on the spines of countless Western paperbacks in the 1970’s does not mean it is the correct name to call our genre, or the one with which the rest of the world concurs. Nor does it mean that the rest of the world interprets “Horror” in the same way as we do in the West.

Why has our Horror all become one-dimensional? Homogenous and flat? Because “we” have decided what formulas constitute Horror, all to the denigration of other traditions of storytelling.

Yet isn’t that where we got our ideas about Horror in the first place? It’s time we confessed the truth: the West did not invent Horror. We may have perfected a branch of the tree, but we are not the whole of it. Our roots go much, much deeper and come from afar…

And every person who came here brought a little piece of that with them.

We cannot claim to not-know this entirely. Our genre’s historic use of Orientalism and racism to further heighten a presumed white reader’s fears or to elevate the exotic mystery and exploit the willing ignorance of a class of readers groomed to see themselves perfected in an ethnocentric mirror is no different in Horror than in any other genre. But in Horror, it has fast become this almost-necessary ingredient we are directed to mimic. Because we have not been able to “move the Literary needle” in American Horror since Lovecraft, that is where we are directed to learn about how to write the good stuff.

But what if we don’t want to because no one does Lovecraft better than Lovecraft, and most importantly, because the rest of us are no longer as threatened by different peoples or cultures? What happens when dread and fear turn away from dimly lit rural areas with secret histories to vibrancy, exploration and inclusion? What happens to Lovecraft mimicry?

What happens when we have outgrown that narrow Worldview?

Today most of us are able to acknowledge the pinch of this and dash of that from other cultures and folkways that have driven the more muted successes that line the cages of our genre and we are increasingly curious about it. From Japanese filmmakers to Russian folklore, we are intrigued by the monsters some part of us always suspected were watching us from the shadows. More importantly, we are starting to ask what happens when in following the Lovecraft-enamored lead of the Western Horror Establishment we continue to drown out international and “minority”- voiced Horror, displacing it as an anomaly or christening it Other-relevant “Literature” to keep it at a safe distance.

Horror should never be “safe.” And trying to hold onto Lovecraft and the singular whiteness of Horror is contributing to the lack of historical awareness so necessary in our genre.

It so reminds me of that unfortunate music fan who suggested that Paul McCartney was lucky to receive a “break” from Kanye West and might someday make something of himself “Cuz Kanye just handed this guy a career”… (not a shining moment.)

 

Why don’t we KNOW where we come from? And isn’t it possible that this very tone deafness is one of the contributing causes to the endless cookie cutter “plateauing” of scary in the genre as we know it?

If we really dare to look at the Horror genre’s origins, we will find the richest veins in folk and fairy tales from our Old Countries – the very things an “advanced” and “civilized” culture likes to mock. But in the dark of the night, isn’t that where Horror gets under our skin uninvited, rummaging about and prickling our skins? Does it really matter where the scary images come from if they are coming after us?

It’s time we started researching the rest of the world’s stories – rediscovering some, and hearing others for the first time. Because these are the stories and the traditions we carry with us as we move through the world, colliding with each other. Of course this means learning about other people, how they live and think. It means letting ourselves sink into other life ways in order to find the Horror we crave.

And it means allowing ourselves to be corrected… To acknowledge real history, real traditions, and the real Peoples who live them intimately. It also means admitting to ourselves that we live in bastardized, cannibalized times. We bring fragments of Horrors from our lineages, and those halflings collide unceremoniously with Things That Were Already Here. Isn’t it time we exploited our own ignorance? Paid the price of our own desire to minimize our once hidden roots? Our personal roots?

We don’t need sacred Indian Burial Grounds or gypsy curses to amp up our Horrors… we have our own sins making monsters in urban factories right now.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t read those first-hand accounts and value them for themselves…to inspire and remind us that we have our own stories if we will just stop and look. It helps us to see how other people tell these tales, to “spin” our vocabulary, to look askew at what we cannot see directly. We need to, not only for ourselves, but because of the obvious: we no longer live in a vacuum no matter how many walls we endeavor to build. We need to see that even Lovecraft would have a hard time being Lovecraft today.

And is it really such a bad thing – really – to stop “using” other peoples whose customs we don’t know to scare our readers with? Because in a global economy, there are no secrets – not really. If a writer makes something up for the benefit of plot, he or she will ultimately be exposed for the careless or arrogantly conceived error and deservedly so. But there are wondrous stories to be had, to savor just as they are – cultural accents and all.

Of course, this means getting out of our comfort zone. But that is the nature of Horror, isn’t it? And haven’t we learned that wondrous things await if only by way of Japan and its gift of Godzilla, and its ghost traditions pushing into our own culture by way of films like Ringu (The Ring)and The Grudge and the world of Manga?

 It’s All About Language and Culture and Horror Underfoot

While it’s hard to believe that modern music fans don’t always know the names of the bands and musicians that shaped the genre they are in, we of the Horror genre should not throw stones. We are doing the same thing right now, oblivious to our own genre history, crashing about like the proverbial bull in the china shop looking for a new mythos when we don’t even know the last one. We don’t learn our genre history, which squares so nicely with no one teaching it to us. We just keep clinging to the Lovecraft life raft, even if it happens to be the Titanic.

How long before we have a Paul McCartney-Kanye West moment of our own? You realize it is more likely to happen the smaller we make our universe, right?

We like to think that the Horror galaxy revolves around a white, Christian, English-speaking sun – because the little of “everything” we know tells us this…

Yet we could not be more wrong. All of our best tales descend from our Old World roots…and that must mean that out there somewhere is the motherlode of scary… It’s not, after all, like we haven’t drank from that well before – Horror was seeded in our early days of human history, and we have carried remnants of it out into our new and ever changing world with countless diasporas. Yet we tend to not use this personal version of Horror DNA. Instead we look askew at stories presented by “other” countries, often in “other” languages.

Up to this moment, we have hidden behind our world dominance. We have blatantly bragged that those who want to be heard need to speak the way we want to hear language. We don’t read foreign authors, we don’t like names or place names we cannot pronounce, cities we cannot picture, weather that does not mirror our own. We also don’t like the pools of secrecy we ourselves create when we push groups of humanity into the shadows of our entitlement and the people there speak words we don’t know the full meaning of. This is true whether such people on the margins speak Spanish or Black English or something from the Middle East.

Let’s just admit it: we are control freaks. We have a driving need to understand the nuance of every word we read, every meaning implied. And even though in the Horror genre, that can be an absolute necessity to “getting” it, there is still more to our aversion to works that come from “Other” places…

From International writers writing in other languages, to works written that speak of other traditions and cultural importances… we dislike the feeling that there are secrets being coded for certain readers. We feel that way about slang and inner city lingo as surely as we stink eye the immigrants speaking Spanish in the lunch room. Yet we need to get beyond our own Lovecraftian self-importance… we are missing out on some great storytelling – the kind that sends you to your own keyboard and pokes the Muse.

And alas, we are going to have to work for it…because language has its own cultural complications— the most obvious being when dealing with those which are “not-English.”

One of the biggest problems for international writers is being read by English Speakers. We are less likely to be bilingual than most other cultures, assured as we are that it is English that will continue to dominate everything that matters on the world stage.

And what this means is that we take our arrogances into the Literature we read… We not only fully expect to read things in our language, but we judge it differently even when it is delivered thusly. We underestimate what it means for a work to be translated.

In fact, we all too often misinterpret a writer’s talent by the fluency of the translator. However sometimes translators are “functional” but not “artistic.” Where all writers need translators with the eyes and ears and imaginations of poets, all too often we get novels that instead of reading like Dostoevsky, read like Google. This is due to cost, availability of a good translator, and having someone who can judge the finished product properly. Once one leaves their native language, this can be a real challenge – for writers and editors.

This is a real problem. The author needs a fluent translator to make their work accessible in other languages – languages they likely do not speak. And because they do not speak it, they cannot easily judge when a translator is fluent in both languages – fluent enough to tap into nuance and vocabulary yet still capture both those necessary interpretations as well as the voice of the author.

Translation matters, whether we are talking editing an inner city/urban work or a foreign one. And just as we ascribe proofreading errors to writers and their talent, we associate a translation with the quality of the original work if not the literal intelligence of the author. Yet nothing could be farther from the truth: nuance of the native tongue once lost results in a confusion of original intent, of the poetry of the prose and disagreement about what the original text meant.

 

Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s I Remember You: a Ghost Story – an example of how translation should work FOR the work…

 

So we have to expect this kind of disparity to happen in translations of works that come from other language traditions. We have to be patient…flexible.

But we also have problems with writers who use what we have been institutionally guided to consider “bad” “incorrect” or “flawed” English…the most noticeable of which has been “Black, Regional, or Urban” English. In fact, we have the exact same problem in native speakers of English when it comes to interpreting and accepting slang, and cultural diversity within a work.

While sometimes we cannot connect to the story because we are not the intended audience, it is a fact that we tend to shy away from stories that involve language we are unable to “decode”…

Sometimes it is because we simply cannot pick up on the important nuances, the cues, the double entendre – the dog whistles. Never mind that this is because we are used to our own dog whistles…We feel shut out in the same way people from other cultures feel shut out when reading about ours. We simply have gotten used to the idea that being “top dog” in the publishing of Horror, it was “everyone else’s” job to understand the nuances of what we meant.

The shoe always pinches when it is on the other foot…But pinching is a sign that there is something alive in the shoe – that maybe the shoe is wrong, not the foot. We need to have the patience to unwrap the mysterious gift. Yet we have been institutionalized right out of the curiosity.

We bristle for example when non-Christian references are in the stories, unless we can give them the appropriate “Lovecraft spin” where exotic means “sinister” and “threatening”… And if the character does not look and act like us, we feel summarily “excluded”… as if “our” genre has been pirated…invaded. This is one reason why women wrote pulp and men wrote Literature back in the day…and why the inference remains a ghost on the battlefield of diversity in Horror today.

Because “today” we are excluding Horror from all over – including right under foot. We have been taught that reading should be easy and entertaining. We have forgotten that reading – especially Literature with its references to history and socio-economics and tyranny and justice– is work…

Publishers “get” this – that we are now not only lazy but expected to remain content to be lazy from here on – and clearly consider that this is far too complicated an issue to fix. So instead of new and exciting and different Horror, we have Horror from “Other” countries and cultures being farmed out to other genres or marketed as Literary statements – fodder for Critical Thinkers and Lit-lovers to decipher and ruminate upon. The face value of the story-telling is simply dismissed.

The very idea that Horror should include more than monsters is being banished while having the Bible of Lovecraft waved in our faces. Talk about contradiction. No wonder American Horror writers are all-too-often writing peculiarly ineffective and vacant fiction…

Banishing all works by “Others” which doesn’t carry a pre-approved Lovecraftian exploitation of fearing the same “Others” only re-confirms our suspicion that this makes these works not really Horror…Because Horror comes in only one color and one flavor: vanilla.

We further conjecture that all American Horror should be non-threatening and easy-to-digest, even when salaciously gory. And as the market for Horror tightens, the belief is becoming reinforced – making the whole idea that we all should be writing in some way like Lovecraft while being all pulpy and writing fast moving, two-dimensional action figure prose right into that very pair of cement shoes dragging the whole genre to the soggy bottom…

We have a tendency to decide that we are better off to reject works which require a bit of decoding.

We don’t want to think and we don’t want to go outside our comfort zone. But isn’t that exactly the price of admission? Isn’t that the very essence of Horror?

We have done this with African Americans for decades. We shrink from the use of Black English because we are just not sure what to do with it. Is it a dialect? Is it just “bad” English? Is it a regionalism? Slang?

And what about regionalism? Does a Southern character or a Southern accent make the Horror Southern Gothic and Literature because we don’t want to work to understand it in Horror? Why is Horror only Horror if the dialogue fits in a comic book balloon?

Why does it matter in Literature? How many Cockney accents have we navigated in English Literature because it was part of the story? Part of the setting? The time-and-place of historical value?

Experts are still in debate over it. And meanwhile editors everywhere – especially in traditional publishing – are at a loss as to how to edit such fiction. It is far easier to call “Black” and “Other” writing niche and reject the work, or pronounce it too burdened with Literary elements because most likely it will take African American and “Other”editors to edit such works submitted for publication…editors from the culture the story comes from in order to edit the right things out and clarify the things that need to stay in.

Decisions have to be made as to whether the language in the work is supposed to (pardon the pun) add “color” to the language, to orient characters and setting, but also as to whether or not it is also meant to exclude certain readers not in the intended audience, or to educate them into a different culture and viewpoint.

This is not as easy as it would seem. And this affects international and national works as quickly as it effects regional U.S. ones…

For one thing, we have been taught that language is either right or wrong in its execution. Yet we have so many regional subcultures in the English language alone we should be familiar with the fact that such “color” when added to Literature seats that work firmly in a time or place – it becomes part of setting and character. The only good excuse for exclusion on these grounds is when the work cannot be in some way “accessible” and its meaning appreciated by outsiders to a storytelling degree.

For example, when a work comes from another culture, country or language, the author or translator should allow for some “redundant” coaching… some of the native language should stay in the story – reminding the reader where it is coming from.

Example: “Mira,” said Pablo, “Look.” (Mira means “look.. And we learned something from the redundancy without losing the author’s proficiency of language.)

But there are also other cultural things that need explanation for new and “reverse-Other” readers.

Example: “When she calls out to Ashoke, she doesn’t say his name. Ashima never thinks of her husband’s name when she thinks of her husband, even though she knows perfectly well what it is. She has adopted his surname but refuses to use it, for propriety’s sake, to utter his first. It’s not the type of thing Bengali wives do. Like a kiss or a caress in a Hindi movie, a husband’s name is something intimate and therefore unspoken, cleverly patched over. And so, instead of saying Ashoke’s name, she utters the interrogative that has come to replace it, which translates roughly as ‘Are you listening to me?’” (From Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake)

(Here we have learned about the character, her husband and her culture…yet presented in a way that does not offend the outsider or someone from that culture because it adds color to the prose.)

This is how good writing and proper editing is done. It is not the job of the reader to figure things out, but the job of the writer to draw us in – to make us want to learn more and to learn something by way of the story in spite of ourselves. And it is the job of the editor to help us all get there, especially in translation and even in our own language.

Those of us who like Horror already speak a second language – the language of our genre. Most of us who like Horror like it for the escapism – and the one predictable trope that never, ever changes: not the one about white creation myths, but the one that proves time and again, through ghost and monster and sheer coincidence that justice will prevail through the impersonal and savage law of nature because we are none of us innocent.

In the world of Horror where cross-pollination is key, we need different voices – ones whose different cultures or ways of speaking frame Horror in a new light, cast shadows in familiar yet peculiar angles…

Sometimes I think it must just feel like too much work to resolve in the eyes of traditional publishing – too much work for too much of a gamble…And that is exactly how we keep winding up with the same voices in Horror and Literature, all speaking the same way…It’s how we lost our DNA, our sense of direction and originality nested in our commonality.

So take a minute. Peruse the following list of writers from all over – including a few right here in these United States whose work was probably labelled a bit “niche.” You want new Horror? Original Horror?

Start here. And yes, there are Americans on it – either from or influenced by somewhere else, and in one case from traditions outside the mainstream but homegrown nonetheless…These are voices of different cultures…

Get your crucifixes… because these writers are the future of Horror – if we will only open our eyes and read.

Horror Authors Unseen – A List From Here to Everywhere Else

Asa Nomani (Japan) Now You’re One of Us

Otsuichi (Japan) Goth

Asamatsu Ken (Japan) Queen of K’n-Yan

Mariko Koike (Japan) The Graveyard Apartment

Yrsa Sigurdardottir (Iceland) I Remember You

John Ajvide Lindquist (Sweden) Let the Right One In

Karin Tidbeck (Sweden) Amatka

Eden Royce (African American/Gullah and Southern Gothic influence) Spook Lights, Tying the Devil’s Shoestrings –YA coming Summer 2020

Tananarive Due (African American/Nigerian influence) My Soul To Keep

Violet Kupersmith (Vietnamese American) The Frangipani Hotel

Stephen Graham Jones (Native American) Mapping the Interior

David Bowles (Mexican American) Chupacabra Vengeance

Jeremias Gotthelf (Germany) The Black Spider

Daniel Kehlmann (Germany) You Should Have Left

Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Netherlands) Hex

John Harwood (Australia) The Ghost Writer

Michelle De Kretser (Sri Lankan-Australian) Springtime, a Ghost Story

Simone St. James (Canada) The Haunting of Maddie Clare

Cherie Dimaline (Canadian First Nations) The Marrow Thieves

Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Canadian-Mexican) Certain Dark Things

Samuel Marolla (Italy) Black Tea and Other Tales

Giorgia de Maria (Italy) The Twenty Days of Turin

Samanta Schweblin (Argentina) Fever Dream

Guillermo del Toro (Mexico/Mexican American) Pan’s Labyrinthe

Luis Abbadie (Mexico) El código secreto del Necronomicón(The Secret Code of the Neconomicon)

Julio Cortezar (Argentina) Tomada House

Bernardo Esquinca (Mexico) Demonia (and Other Stories)

J.F. Gonzalez (Spanish American) Clickers

Carmen Maria Machado (Cuban American) Her Body and Other Parties

Andres Barba (Spain) Such Small Hands

Zhou Haohui (China) Valley of Terror

Han Kang (South Korea) The Vegetarian

Rene Depestre (Haiti) Hadriana in All My Dreams

Carolina Sanin (Columbia) The Children

Sadegh Hedayat (Iran) The Blind Owl

Otessa Mosfegh (Croatian Iranian) Eileen

Ahmed Khaled Tawfik (Egypt) Beyond Nature

Ania Ahlborn (Polish American) Within These Walls

Anna Starobinets (Russia) The Recrudescence of the Cold

Tony Vilgotsky (Russia) Eye of Satan (aka Warriors of the Church)

Ludmila Petrushevskaya (Russia) There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales

Nuzo Onoh (Nigerian British) The Reluctant Dead

Amos Tutuola ( Nigeria) My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

 

 

You Can’t See Creepy With a Cellphone Light: Guilt & Shadows in American Horror

American Horror. It’s become this great, terrible disappointment.

What used to set my imagination on fire is now a non sequitur, a discombobulated mess of unrealized terrors.

I am bummed.

That realization started with the attempt to watch a movie in a movie theater not so long ago… A simple task, one which turned out to be a farce in a room full of bobbing silhouettes, a lot of explosions from nearby theater screens, and scores of cellphones – like fireflies – punctuating the darkness that was supposed to have monsters in it.

Imagine my Horror when the stars of the movie produced their own cellphones , holding them out like crucifixes to ward off the darkness of their haunted house. No wonder it took so long to find something scary. When the worst that can happen is no signal or a deficit of bars… well, the Horror just doesn’t get a foothold.

Today’s biggest fear: Not being able to text a buddy or access your Facebook profile.

How does a Horror writer work with that?

And if we are facing a future Renaissance, how do we “tap” into the important stuff – you know – to make American Horror more American? And Horrifying?

 https://bloody-disgusting.com/news/3223252/stop-being-a-victim-you-can-stop-cell-phone-use-in-theaters/

 

It’s Under the Bed

It seems to me we’ve managed to lose – or maybe just misplace – a few important Horror tools in our rush to be “civilized”… I mean, whatever happened to worrying about going to Hell, or Hell coming after you personally? About footsteps behind you, whispers from no one, eyes in the dark, cold air in the summer time?

We have cheapened our monsters in American Horror…They are expected guests, too often late to the party, overdressed, and so glossy they risk flirtatious comparison to better monsters once constrained in zippers…We have conditioned ourselves, desensitized ourselves, and routinely dismiss the edgiest of new creatures because name-dropping is how we roll. But the best terrors have always been the simple, personal ones…

Whatever happened to real ghosts… the kind that aren’t really a serial killer, or a psychotic break, or evil stepmothers, a disguise for the worst possible witch EVER, or the disconnected, secular demon with one of two names?

Man, I miss ghosts… the really great ones that weren’t CG drawn, or implied by empty rooms with swinging light fixtures.

Whatever happened to real monsters… the kind that have tentacles and hide in weird, inconvenient places? Not the ones that are really an alien invasion, or a cut-and-paste frenzy of amalgamated, unexplained and resurrected traditional monsters, not another nuclear accident or escaped virus… But real dine-on-your-guts, eats-you-while-you’re-alive monsters? The kind that dropped out of our ancestral imaginations to stalk us through dark forests and black nights?

Man, I miss monsters….the kind that single us out of the herd and hunt in plain sight, or pull us under the bed by our ankles.

Isn’t it just a little bit sad that we are unwilling to put down the technology long enough to be scared? (“No, scare me with my cellphone – in case Fame and Fortune calls…”)

Well as a Horror writer here’s my theory: you’re too chicken to put the cellphone down. Sophisticated audience my sagging butt…You can’t even sit in a dark theater without a light in your hand. Oooo…Big Brave Modern Person waving a phone screen around a haunted house daring the ghost to show itself…

You want to see a ghost? Turn off the lights, dummy.

This is why British Horror works (listen up, I’m going to spill their secret): Technology may be present, but it doesn’t work where the monsters are.

That’s right. Monsters only live in that place between cellphone towers. When they are not inside them.

Call it atmosphere, call it obsession with an antiquated past. Go ahead and accuse them of exploiting their rich abundance of creepy ruins. But the British get it right on the most important score: they are going to isolate you long before the monster comes…they are going to give you a sweeping moor so you can see it coming…they are going to tell you WHY you DESERVE it.

(Sure, I probably should just go on and move to England. But they wouldn’t like me there: I have a funny accent.)

Really, American Horror writers have no excuse. We create new ruins daily. Just because we call them blight, or strip malls, or White Flight changes nothing. And they are loaded with all kinds of socially-dysfunctional atmosphere. We build them everywhere…on our own graveyards, on Native American graveyards, on Grandma’s house that some large corporation spent years of litigation forcing her out of just so a shopping center could sit empty on the spot.

We have slaughtered our own wilderness…riddling it nonthreatening Bambi-like animals and exclusive, gated neighborhoods that tend to get devoured by large wildfires, and lots of ATV trails…cause, you know, the forests belong to everyone…We leave islands of non-native trees and call them forests. We shoot wildlife that wanders into our neighborhoods fearing they will eat our children in revenge for depriving them of natural food and habitat. We expect manicured and managed grounds to keep the tigers and lions and scavengers at bay.

We avoid religion at all costs. We pronounce ourselves atheists or agnostics or some new species of Christian… all of whom remain mysteriously and miraculously unaffected by the doings of the Underworld, death, and its untidy accoutrement.

So why do we have the audacity to complain when “nothing” scares us?

I say it is an act. I say it indicates just how very scared we are…with the lights ON.

 

https://www.beyondsciencetv.com/2017/07/25/the-mysterious-shadow-people/

Guilt: the Equal Opportunity Shadow Person

I find it interesting, this sudden manifestation of “shadow people” in all things Horror. But in truth, if we refuse to turn out the lights, what real recourse does any self-respecting ghost or monster actually have?

When we look at Horror – really LOOK at it – chances are what we are seeing is our own fears manifest. It’s what has made Horror not only a great genre, but a universal one.

We share fear as former prey animals, because before we built SUVs and McMansions, we slept in trees and under bushes where job success meant staying alive another day. And even though we are living lives that typically mask those memories with overnight delivery and beds we still find need to elevate ever higher off the ground, we dread the impersonal death we all face and which might just be watching us from the closet, its claws and tentacles retracted but still visible underneath that pile of clothes…

But for modern humanity that fear has taken on yet another dimension and indistinct origin – guilt. Sometimes it is collective guilt – the sense that we as human beings could have conducted ourselves better. But more often it is personal – the sense that just because an ancestor was not held to the scales of Justice, or that what we ourselves did to a coworker went unremarked – an avenging angel awaits our one moment of inattention. Like any delinquent child, we manipulate and lie and deny all things that might bring the sword down on our own heads. Yet deep down, we know justice will not be denied, and we fear the manner in which it will come for us.

The Shadow Man is the perfect manifestation of an equalizer. Shadows are by definition both part of and separate from us, featureless, colorless, yet sinister and representative of a primal terror of things come from above to end us.

How many toddlers run screaming from their first glance of their own shadow? How many creatures subconsciously duck when one moves overhead? It is perhaps why we look up so often, dreading to see God seeing us…knowing we are flawed creations, destined for sin, careening toward judgment, knowing we deserve whatever the Creator chooses for us.

We cannot escape our shadow: it goes everywhere with us, even when total light or total dark obliterates its image. And we watch it, mesmerized by its mimicry of our every move. It is because predators hide in shadows that we do not trust our own.

And so it is a logical next step to exaggerate our fears by giving shadows a life of their own – even liberating our own to take vengeance upon us.

It doesn’t matter that some deny guilt altogether, rejecting their place in human events if not their own lives and actions.

Monsters can see in the dark.

 

http://archcity.media/2017/03/02/judgement-zone-vol-1/

Saving Ourselves

We still have just enough religion left in our souls to suspect there are consequences for everything, and to everything we will be held accountable. It makes sense; most religions tell us the Creator left us “in charge” of the planet and all life on it.

We are not free to point at failed leaders or flawed icons. The responsibility is absolute.

Yet we rebel. We point at each other, or dismiss the crimes if we cannot bury them or rewrite them out of existence. And so what is left if not our shadows?

It does not surprise me that Shadow People are the newest monster to enter the Horror pantheon. The more global we become, the more likely our sins against one another will rise to the surface. That they remain close, disguised as faceless imitations of ourselves is not surprising. We cannot go anywhere – not the White House, not Hollywood, not Mars – without our sins following us. Like shadows.

And perhaps it is all about frustration in the simple execution of justice that makes Shadow People so popular a phenomenon. There are so many, after all, who seem to get away with unforgivably much, without any sign of justice descending.

For that we need our demons to part the veil and savage the world. We need the sense that if the Creator won’t do it, then something darker will. And we relish the thought.

Yet we also worry about our own culpability. This is why so much Horror is written: we struggle with the parsing out of judgment. We ponder the Great Biblical Flood, and the realization that only one family was spared, deemed worthy of salvation. We suspect our own hands are not clean, and hope we can fool our final judge with tilted halo and angelic smile.

Guilt is why we light every corner. It is why we suspect every shadow.

https://www.ghostlyactivities.com/dreaming-ghosts-monsters/

Dissembling, Disassembling & Dissociating

Horror has for some time now, embraced the overpopulation of monsters in its stories. One is never enough – especially in the United States. But worse than that, the monsters take shape and then are dismantled and reshaped and denied and then made into something else less paranormal, less religiously centered, and more psychological so they can be properly slain.

We are completely unable to commit. We hide among masks and monsters we prove to be not what they appeared, performing creative gymnastics to compartmentalize the guilt that summoned them.

I have long wondered why one really good, complete, storied monster is not enough in contemporary American Horror.

I have watched us build creatures that like Legos are deconstructed and reconstructed to the point that we lose interest in why they are there at all, until the subtext is so subverted and mangled that it comes as no surprise Literary Critics say that as writers we don’t “get” it.

But I think they are wrong: we “get” it, we just don’t understand the strength and responsibility it takes to wield it…to face ourselves. In the dark. Surrounded by shadows…

I confess that as a writer I have struggled with this power. In this time of conformity, it is easy to edit the monster right out of the Horror and the Horror out of the monster. In attempting to follow the long laundry list of what makes good writing and good monsters, we often find we have lost the slimy beasts themselves. We wake up to reread the revision and find we have written that same unsatisfactory story we hate in the theater.

Horror is elusive with too many people in your head…

And with so many examples foisted in front of us that are just wrong, how do we start to get it right? How do we readjust our monster-making machinery?

Perhaps first, we need the monster out of the shadows – just for a quick look, a quick confession.

Monsters are not the climactic answer, the tah dah! … Monsters are vehicles for expressing the subtext of guilt, of Justice Due.

To find them we most certainly have to be willing to turn out the lights…to experience the sounds of something unseen prowling about, weighing our souls. We have to embrace the fear.

That means we have to acknowledge the very act that causes the guilt…

The need to push that away, to deny we were even at that party is not good enough. Denial makes the monster bigger.

Yet we have adopted the convention that our characters must NOT – no matter what – acknowledge the monster “because it gives them power over us…”

How many times have you heard that?

How many times was it wrong?

Ghosts walk because of something we did. Denied in Life, they will not be denied in Death. Ignore them at your own peril…

Ghosts follow because it is you who must set things right when it is perhaps not you but your kind who owes the debt.

Shadows are ghosts freed from the haunted house. It is their nature to follow you. Everywhere. Even when you cannot or refuse to see them. Like your sins.

There is no elixir. No amulet. No exorcism. There is only an increasing demand for Justice denied.

Why don’t we just turn out the lights and face it? One has to wonder where our Literature is in these trying times, when we are otherwise being forced to acknowledge our failings and our stand up for our values and beliefs. Human ethical trials are, after all, where the world’s greatest Literature comes from…

Where is our Great American Horror of this era? It is lurking in an uncertain future, waiting for its writers to start seeing in the dark…

I personally think it is in that dark theater, its audience loaded down with cellphones, complaining that nothing is scary anymore, that Horror is a ripoff. I think it is in the denial that we have anything to do with anyone else’s suffering on this planet. I think it is the desperate hope that we can lie our way out of being devoured alive by the monsters we have created.

I think we should all turn out the lights and see.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKUcW2uyYUc

Scaring the Lit Out of Yourself: Making Good Horror From Bad Memories (World View Part 2)

When Horror writers think of Horror as Literature, we think foremost of Lovecraft; Lovecraft is so intimately and unequivocally ours…Unlike Poe, who having been repeatedly devoured by Critics of Olde (who in turn we resolutely believe did not “get” us), seems hopelessly ensnared in academic debate even as he rises as proof that Horror is indeed Literary. Lovecraft is accessible to our imaginations.

Lovecraft is indeed different. Lovecraft is us.

He is the traditionally rejected writer dedicated to his own vision of monsters. He is the rebellious outsider, the flawed character in his own story, a rich man made poor, a lonely man made so by his own inability to navigate society. He is the one who said, “I told you so,” the one who showed up his critics and enemies by outlasting them all, and becoming one of the foremost and most immortal of Horror writers. Lovecraft is our revenge upon all naysayers made real. He is our idol.. because he transcended all predictions and Criticisms of his time. For that, we love and adore him.

But what we tend to forget is how isolated, terror-filled, and haunted his life really was.

We forget he was extolled and emulated only after his death; instead we picture him happy and wealthy, when Lovecraft lived an opposite life of constant poverty and was tormented by his own tailored variety of demons. And those monstrosities were so real he not only wrote about them – he named them and gave them their own worlds as they relentlessly chased him through his. That he might well have been mentally ill is (for most of us) beside the point. Lovecraft represents the struggle of an exceptional writer to get his work perfected and published.

Lovecraft is a community triumph.

And while what Lovecraft wrote is now being identified as the highest form of Literary – replete with a Critic-adored World View, he once was indeed…us.  That this may provide a useful hint as to the technique we need to find and put to use is — for many of us — beside the point:  it irks us to be reminded of the truth, knowing how passionately we identify with pieces of his life as imagined by ourselves.

And so we do not understand how he performed the trick. Like any good bit of magic, we have missed the essence of the illusion by being distracted by that very illusion.

That Lovecraft might well have performed it by accident disturbs us. We are formula hunters…Pattern seekers. And we want a sure-fire, step-by-step instruction manual.

To get there, we have to recognize the secret of the Secret Sauce; World View is a consequence of personal experience.

And how you mine personal experience is encapsulated in two sentences of advice we have had drilled into our brains with absolutely no understanding of what was meant:

• Find what scares you.
• Write what you know.

It turns out that writing good Horror depends heavily upon your ability to turn bad memories into good story. It means –even if you are convinced you have neither baggage nor enough life experience – learning to scare the Literature out of yourself… Because if you are going to expose your World View, personal experience is your vocabulary.

 

Finding What Scares You

In the search for World View, we must look for metaphors. What incidents in your life provide the necessary cover for Life’s Bigger Issues? Chances are, they are the smaller ones…

Yet we are easily overwhelmed by thinking in Literary terms. So it is often better to think in personal ones, and then stitch in the Literary reinforcements at some later point of revision. To do that, we can safely start by using the advice of common How-to tomes…

However, over-used phrases like “write about what scares you” and its near and necessary relative “write what you know” are too nonspecific. They leave a lot open to misinterpretation and we can spend long, lonely years toiling down primrose paths of flat, boring Horror.

But if you are going to write good Horror, you need to understand exactly what is meant by both phrases. There are inextricably linked. And they don’t mean what they sound like they mean: they mean precisely what they mean.

Sound confusing?

Good. That means you are already thinking about it.

When we are told to “find what scares us” in particular, we suddenly become surface dwellers. In essence, we fail to go deep enough into the ugly, emotionally scarred territory of our own subconscious because we spend our lives trying to minimize the damage other people keep trying to do to us and our fragile egos. It is not so easy to reverse course, to dig deep and poke our private humiliations and fears. In fact, it often takes multiple attempts, multiple drafts, and some incredible, hair-tearing moments to pull it off.

According to Charles Baxter in his book, The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot, subtext, or “the unspoken soul matter… that critical twilight zone… that landscape haunted by the unseen” (4) is the provenance of characters. And it is through the artful manipulation of “dramatic placement” that the hidden is revealed – but not just shown. Subtext is a potent revelation that must be deduced, felt, and infallibly honest… where “what is displayed evokes what is not displayed.” (3)

Sounds simple. But this is astoundingly complicated, especially for new writers who tend to grab onto Horror with both hands while minimizing their own world experience. Worse, we are often in love with the creative process. We wallow in the magic like cats in catnip.

For many of us, writing is an escape. It’s like going to the movies and sitting in a dark theater watching a personal showing of an unknown story unfold – this is true in particular if you are an organic writer. To interrupt that process of drafting and probe about for unsettling memories or associations can (in your own mind)  wreck the whole thing.

This is largely because being human we choose to insulate our emotional selves from eviscerating wounds. To get it out, we have to trick ourselves. We may have plethora of great and ugly experiences we expect to tap for our writing. But thinking about it is depressing, defeating. It is natural to think of those very personal horrors only in the quiet of your room, when the world is shut out and you feel marginally safe to play with razor sharp images. So we write in circles… in denial.

We create a story with vivid characters and wonderful setting and a plot that seems to lie flat on the page and never quite scares anyone much. We fail to engage our own warp engines…

Yet we all already instinctively know that the best Horror is buried deep: that is where the elevation of the story hides. And our own self-defense mechanisms are constantly plotting against our conscious selves to keep it there.

So when we are asked in public what really scares us – as in a writing class (or when our minds are in public-mode) – we tend to choose and reveal innocuous things that mark us as “one of the group” but not the one who is the most vulnerable. This is not by mistake; not only do we have the savage lessons of predator and prey to remind us of the importance of the safety of numbers, but we have the collective peer pressure of Modern Times…

Continues Baxter, “Our times are marked by mishearing and miscueing and selective listening and selective response – features associated with information glut and self-inflammation” (85) No one really wants to hear our pain, and we are endlessly encouraged to not-think about things we are led to believe we cannot change. It is therefore not so far a leap to burying our own unpleasantries.

This is normal in a world where such vulnerability is met with the most unimaginable cruelties. It means there is a problem with society. And there is your Literary entrance to Horror…

Horror is a unique genre. It is all about the ugly details of how we fail each other, exploit each other, and seek vengeance upon each other.

Yet it is also a very personal genre. Every one of us is a little bit Lovecraft. A little bit King. A little bit Poe. It’s why their writing speaks to us. Why we identify with it, and feel the need to regurgitate our own mortifications.

It is also why it is okay to not be perfect, to have flaws, and to have suffered for them.

Alone in our rooms (even as adults), we often spend way too much time tending our personal terrors, agonizing over things we cannot change, doting anxiously over perceived missteps and mistakes, aghast at our own propensity for victimhood.

The paranoid dialogue is endless, overwhelming, and even debilitating at times. But when the suggestion is made to find what scares us, we think in cartoons; we use place holders like Vampires and scaly monsters in effigy…we ignore the list of darker memories, the unspeakable horrors that haunt our dreams and stalk our hopes and supplant it with lists of petty annoyances like dress codes and politics.

The two lists are indeed quite different, but they are related, and they may be both true. The petty list elicits chuckles or empathetic nods. But it is the first that makes everyone uncomfortable, because we can see ourselves reflected in the mirror like ghosts.

And it is the first list that is most often private. It is the one that circulates in your head and makes ulcers in your stomach. THAT is the one you need to go to…because that one is real. It doesn’t matter if it seems small by comparison to Other People’s troubles. If it haunts you…you are plagued by monsters.

Horror is all about profound truth.

But understand, it is not about confession. You don’t have to write a diary entry to write truth. You do not have to be graphic. You do not have to “out” the child molester in your family. You do not have to have a child molester in your family. But like friend Vampire, you need to draw the essence of the specific fear out to create a solid story around a real Horror.

You have to create resonance. So whether you are writing about a very real personal Horror or imagining one, you have to find the common ground shared by emotions…primal emotions.

Good news: Horror is all about emotions. We all have them. And we all know what is inferred when the right emotional buttons are pushed. You are unique; but what scares you is universal because we all share the same unspoken language of fear. Likewise, how something happened to you is unique. And when you write using those situations or their possibility, no one will ever know for sure if you are being biographical or just insightful and intuitive.

All you have to do if find those unique ways of combining words to summon the images of the monster: that is subtext in its elementary form, the lump of clay all stories start with. You already know how fear makes you feel – that is what is important and potent – everything else can (and probably should be) researched.

It is also where personal experience pushes out character and scene.

This is all Stephen King territory, by the way. King is absolutely tormented by what it is to be an awkward teenager: it clearly made an impression upon him which he cannot forget and which haunts him to this day. It’s why we love him: he gets it. He knows and writes about the awful dread of an acne outbreak right before the prom with your first real crush. He writes about social group rejection. About unrequited love. About how it feels to be bullied. About hating yourself at a time everyone else seems confident and gifted. And then he makes monsters who know exactly how to manipulate those fears.

But what you don’t see is that a whole repertoire of terror is right there in you right now… just waiting to be put to good use. Whether you are twelve or eighty, I guarantee you can dredge up the memories of your most horrible days. Contrary to every piece of adult advice, they do not go away. They live in effigy in your mind forever.

So you might as well put them to work.

Writing What You Know

This little phrase is another snipe hunt novice writers are sent on.

We think we must wait to write then, until we have worked through our first “everything.” But it is not about some vast accumulation of life experiences. It is about empathy. About sentience.

So what if you want to write about a character who commits suicide? You can’t do that and live to tell the tale.

What if a character is an addict? Is the editor suggesting you should indulge before you can write “legitimately” about it?

Let’s be smart about this; of course not. So how do you write what you know?

For one thing, writing what you know means mining your own emotional reactions to personal experience and transferring THAT to your writing.

We all have unpleasantries in our lives, bad memories, embarassments, humiliations, things that went sideways. Nobody’s life is perfect…not really. Of course, maybe the Horror is that everyone thinks your life is perfect…

But in reality, it most certainly is not. Now, if only we as writers can tap into that…to drill down to the bone…

You know how it feels. So you must take how that feels and elevate it. Give those emotions and dreads and horrors to your characters, mask it just enough that there is room for the story itself…. story is biographical but NOT biography.

You can write about a horrible event, a tragic event, a true event – for example… but in order to reach other people at their core, it has to be about the reaction to the event…You must take all of your memories of how The Event marked and marred you, and season your story with those real memories and emotions…leaving just enough off that your reader must imagine the worst that comes after. You want the reader to discover what is happening…remember show-don’t-tell? Well here it is.

But here is the deal. You don’t have to have been there. You have only to be human enough to empathize, to be able to imagine the absolute horror of it.

For example, imagine how it must feel to accidentally kill a child with your car. The emotions are immediate, visceral…unforgiving. Most of us cannot even imagine how one could successfully move beyond that moment of pure hell.

So you don’t have to have actually been there. You can indeed write about anything, as long as you remember that out there –somewhere – someone already has lived it.

You need to care enough to get it right. That means – especially if you are young – you need a reader of your work that does indeed know something about the kind of tale you are trying to tell. Someone who can give you advice and let you know if you captured the reality of it or not. If you do not have the Life Experience required to be accurate in the telling of the tale, find someone who has. It’s not that difficult.

But you also have an obligation to do as much as you can first.

Writing what you know is all about fear. Dread. Social blunders. Awkwardness. Vulnerability…That is something we all already know intimately...because of our very own personal past experience.

You have to dig deep. Mine those emotions and nightmares and reshape them in your characters.

That is writing what you know. Dragging the resonating fears out of us (your readers) is how you write good Horror. You must make your reader uncomfortable. And that means you must make yourself uncomfortable…to scare yourself, as Stephen King says.

And keep in mind that most of our genre’s most successful writers wrote their best as young people – before Life got in its licks, but emotion was king.

Sometimes great Horror is about the raw stuff we fear as young people and utilizing the brevity of youth to just say it…

But how far should you go?

The answer: as far as it takes.

Fear is never a “tah dah!” moment. It is a seedling.

It is a conclusion the reader makes… it is not a salacious moment of abhorrent adjectives. It is not cheap. The coin is very precious and you must spend it wisely. This means that much of the monster is never seen… just a claw here, a fang there, the drag-marks made by the victim.

The secret is you want the reader to imagine the worst and if you succeed in making that happen the worst will materialize right there in your writing… BETWEEN THE LINES. Unspoken. Unwritten…in subtext.

When you are successful, the reader will come away with chills, with a haunted memory of having read your story….not necessarily the details of it, but because you described it like you were there and you dragged the reader there.

Again, Stephen King. It’s why he is so successful at scaring us.

If you are going to write about the most horrifying thing in your life, it may be the best – or the worst – writing you will ever do. But don’t give up. Keep remolding the clay. Have you said too much? Too little? Used the wrong words? The wrong monster?

Did I tell you writing is hard?

Did I tell you writing is work?

Writing is also slow torture.

And Literary Critics look for that torture to last a lifetime of writing. Literary Critics look ultimately at a writer’s catalog of works, rummaging around in World View, looking for subtle changes in the writer and the life’s work the way they looked for World View itself in each individual work. They are looking for a kind of character arc – YOURS.

The “why” comes as part of the sum total job that a Critic does: first they find a Literary work. And then they ask: was it a fluke? Or is the writer Literary?

Because we change as Life has its way with us, it is logical that our World View would change right along with us – either growing deeper and more resolute, or resulting in an epiphany of change. That is what the Critic needs (and hopes) to see over a writer’s lifetime. It is not what you as a writer construct, but what is constructed by the act of your writing.

So what if you are an older writer who is not exactly long on time? Then a Critic needs nuance…perhaps a revelation of those changes that have already happened by presenting good characterization and a passionately true depiction of those earlier views. Yet aging is no excuse: we most certainly do continue to change as we age. And that change will continue to inform your writing…if you remain honest.

Because writing is about the most personal, the most painful, the most outrageous emotions we contain and which subsequently rule and sabotage our subconscious, typically ruining everything that matters. It is all about extracting the pain that you have spent all those years trying to bury, to deny.

Writing is about life and death. Horror is about digging up the bodies.

But more importantly, Horror is all about you – the real you, the alone-in-the-room you.

And no one can tell the story that you will, as long as you write what scares you the most and write what you know. Because to showcase that lusted-after World View, you’re going to have to get personal. You’re going to have to scare the Lit out of yourself.

And nothing scares like honesty.

 

References

Baxter, Charles. The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, c2007.

Phillips, Carl. The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, c2014.