The Care & Feeding of Genre: Pulp, Lit, and Why “Bad” Horror Matters

For every writer who feels there are just not enough venues in which to sell their work, there are often essays and outbursts from editors who vent their frustration at such claims, citing a certain laziness or lack of talent or persistence in the unpublished. Adding salt to those wounds, they complain that they are overwhelmed by mediocre if not poor writing, and a genuine lack of imagination—never seeing the forest for the trees: that “bad” writing is the price of admission in Horror. Then they go and pull off the scab and suggest that there are “plenty” of resources for the diligent…

I respectfully disagree. If there were, self-publishing would not be so prominent a “remedy” to getting new writing out there, and so many writers would not be giving up on Horror.

What will our Establishment do when the light show that is Stephen King is gone? When there is no Horror writer to point to who can make a living just writing or just writing Horror? When those who dream of a Kinglike career go elsewhere in order to find it? What’s The Plan?

These are important questions someone in the Establishment had better be paying attention to.

Because here is the truth from the trenches: markets are so narrow, so temporary, so often disreputable, too often not-paying authors for the work published, and incredibly difficult to find in the same place twice or even being willing to risk publishing work by novice writers… the result is a lot of us just give up – not on writing – on the genre.

The sad fact is that we are sick of the constraints, the ever growing long list of things we are not supposed to do in Horror. Worse, we had the answer to stagnation in the genre once and we let it wither on the vine: we had trade publications. We had Pulp. And it may be to the consternation of our own Establishment, but the fact of the matter is that Great Horror is just “bad” Pulp Horror gone rogue…

Our History is Pulp (And That Means a LOT of Magazine Markets)

There seems a curious reluctance to admit it, but the Horror genre would be nothing without Pulp.

Pulp publications offered writers like H.P. Lovecraft an opportunity for targeting a market and getting his work “out there.” Pulps churned out their editions (even if often irregularly), and in their many incarnations running from the 1890’s to the 1950’s – a “boom” unequalled until the 1970s-1980s Horror paperback bonanza. Such routine production schedules provided exactly the right kind of environment for writers and their creativity. This why between one magazine in particular (Weird Tales) and one rabid fan (August Derleth) that we even have anything of H.P. Lovecraft to drool over.

So why aren’t we looking to recreate that environment in the genre? What exactly are we afraid of if it isn’t living down the “threat” of “bad” writing? And what exactly is “bad” writing?

Today the answer seems to be “writing that embarrasses the editor and publishers harboring Literary ambitions.” And while that goal of selective perfection in itself is not a bad goal, it is a wrong one if it is the only one. According to David Bayles and Ted Orland in their book Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking (Santa Cruz, CA: The Image Continuum, c1993):

“Artists who need ongoing reassurance that they are on the right track routinely seek out challenges that offer the clear goals and measurable feedback – which is to say, technical challenges. The underlying problem with this is not that the pursuit of technical excellence is wrong, exactly, but simply that making it the primary goal puts the cart before the horse. We do not long remember those artists who followed the rules more diligently than everyone else. We remember those who made the art from which the “rules” inevitably follow.” (95)

In other words, it is the writers who take chances, who push the envelope, who break the rules because their story and their vision demands it that we remember. And when those stories take flight, they take the genre with it (Anne Rice and the whole rise-of-the-Vampire in the 1970’s is a perfect example). But when there are no fireworks for a story… it is labelled “bad”… Just exactly as in Lovecraft’s case – until such a story or writer is “suddenly” discovered to be innovative instead.

But what if we can’t get the work “out there”? What if it isn’t in print at all to be “discovered” later?

Perhaps it is my age (or so some might argue), but I view the Tech generation as a wee bit Pollyanna about the permanence of internet derived work. It seems only the nasty stuff put out there is forever “visible.” Important things tend to “disappear” into some SEO graveyard.

Print, on the other hand,  has a habit of resurfacing at just the right times…it has longevity.

And what of the prominence of deadlines in a writer’s life who aims at an environment like mass-produced pulps? What about the necessity of actually having the possibility of publication in a writer’s life because the bar IS lower? Because “perfection” is not demanded or expected every time –just good storytelling?

And while we (just like editors and publishers and Critics) may feel moved and inspired by what seems to be the success of the moment if not the Classic of Old, say Bayles and Orland: “Making art is bound by where we are and the experience of art we have as viewers” (52). In other words, we cannot BE Lovecraft, we cannot BE Stephen King; we have to be ourselves in order to write and in order to be found by our intended audience…in all our badness, in all our boring modern lives…with all of our common problems be they child molestation, sexual assault, drug addiction, PTSD, psychological illnesses, poverty, identity battles…

And no editor, publisher, or Critic has any business telling us not to write about those things.

In fact, maybe our writing in the genre is so prominently “bad” because they keep asking us to imitate King or Lovecraft without us being so bold as to actually suggest we are trying to “BE” them… And maybe we ourselves are at a loss as to how to find our own voice, our own stories because these writers are so shoved at us for their successes, their originality. Again, Bayles and Orland capture the problem precisely:

“As viewers we readily experience the power of the ground upon which we cannot stand – yet that very experience can be so compelling that we may feel almost honor bound to make art that recaptures that power. Or more dangerously, feel tempted to use the same techniques, the same subjects, the same symbols as appear in the work that aroused our passion—to borrow, in effect, a charge from another time and place…” (52-53)

As writers, we should never confuse wanting to recreate the feeling a work gives us with wanting to write exactly like a successful author…

It is difficult to break the cycle when the entire system used to build our genre’s best writers is gone, when we are left to chase a mythology that we can earn livings as writers just because one of our Greats still does so.

Aside from the cost, aside from the Tech assault on print (formidable excuses as those are), why aren’t we trying to build a grassroots system of grooming new writers in the genre?

The answer is apparently somewhere between pride and shame.

Ever since Horror went slasher and visceral in the late 1980s, there has been a steady push toward more Literary writing in the genre. It seemed a noble goal, except that there is Literary Fiction and there is Literature… These are not the same things, even as the former aspires to become the latter. And most Horror is not even Literary; most Horror is campfire tales, folk tales, and the manipulation of simple emotions – not the complex emotions employed by Literature.

This is not a bad thing. This is the addictive thing that attracts our audience to Horror – the fun of being tricked, of being jolted awake, of being scared without our own permission. And nothing does that like Pulp.

But it doesn’t do it every time or for every one. This is why we need so many writers, so many different tellings of the same tales…And this is where mass market Pulps come in. This is where the grinding production of a weekly or monthly cheap magazine with garish art feeds all of the genre monsters: writers work and often get paid for experimenting with stories and monstrosities, writers get published without “waiting” until they are perfect, best-selling authors.. This is where new writers cut their professional teeth and young people meet and fall in love with Horror.

Furthermore, it is where Great Ones are rediscovered in back issues if we miss them the first time around…

Yet we are repeatedly assaulted by the opinions of editors who cannot and will not build their catalogs or “risk” their reputations on what they judge or assume to be “bad” Horror, let alone on lots of “bad” Horror…Who would risk their future name on editing Pulps today? It’s a tough question. But it shouldn’t be: risk is part of the adventure.

Yet just like in the Golden Age of Hollywood where gems like Casablanca and Rear Window were made as part of a weekly churning out of mediocre and even sometimes “bad” acting, Horror pulps offer that same opportunity, at much the same rate of return. And it is not just because “great” actors or writers also start at the bottom, but because it takes a lot of chaos and a lot of failures to accidentally wind up in a Perfect Storm of Classicism…Just as it did for Poe and for Lovecraft… or Bogart and Bacall.

There is an importance of having your early attempts answer to publication, editing, and deadlines…newspaper reporters prove this all of the time. But so do art students. Bayles and Orland give a great example of this artistic lesson (known – if not acknowledged – by anyone who labors in the arts):

“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of their work, all those on the right solely on its quality…Came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of the highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay…” (29)

There is simply no substitute for rote production of art and writing and the possibility of participation in the production process; this is why we produce some of our best stuff in school or writing clubs – we are acknowledging deadlines. The minute we leave school or our writing programs, we drift. Writing and art become subverted and fall victim to other priorities. And the problem is that dedication to your art of choice is hard to accomplish even with the support of your own conscience and your family if there is absolutely no chance of a paycheck, let alone a career – especially as bills and obligations pile up.

We don’t have a go-to method of apprenticeship for fiction writing in these times… even though the potential for making a lot of people a lot of money is often greater for writers than artists, writers are roundly condemned to the salt mines, ordered to labor alone until a masterpiece is presented in all its total, screen-ready, editor-free perfection. We are all in the Quality Group.

And our work shows it.

State Bayles and Orland: “Good artists thrive on exhibit and publication deadlines, on working twenty hours straight to see the pots are glazed and fired just so, on making their next work greater than their last…” (71)

But there is something else besides creating good writing habits that Pulps and their “bad” writing do for us: they ignite imagination – not because they are Literary, but because they are so not…

If you did not grow up in that era of the Pulps or its afterglow, you have no idea how much simple fun it was to read the stories your parents swore would give you nightmares, to sneak-read them under the covers with a flashlight…and if you were lucky, they DID give you nightmares, and great writing ideas…. Today we seem bent on ruining everything. Even though we have a few examples of similar tales still alive in print anthologies, artwork sentences them to graphic novels, or Young Adult fiction. Horror is being downgraded and hidden. Why? Because of the artwork?!

We NEED the art. It works in tandem with the writing of Pulp fiction. And the two together are indescribably awesome, creating new fans and new writers in the genre…all because of the PROMISE of a career of sorts.

If you don’t know Pulps, you don’t know what it was like closing the covers of one and feeling like we now do coming out of a darkened movie theater, breathless and full of ideas…

You can’t know it because between Technology (which ironically promised all manner of artistic freedom) and our beloved Establishment (which went from loving curators straight to dictatorship) we are led to believe that only certain Chosen Ones should ever see publication, let alone get paid to write…

Worse, we are led to believe that if we write something…”bad”… we will ruin everything the genre has worked for.

But it only ruins what some people want for the genre…what some people seem to think they were put on the earth to decide for the rest of us…

It might just be time to take our genre back.

Because we are seeing an unprecedented stagnation (if not suffocation) of new work, deviant-from-the- norm work, and novice works in the genre. Look, we are not the Country Music Industry: we don’t need moral and technical oversight. We are the Horror genre and we love warts and flaws. So do our readers.

We have seen opportunity taken away from writers who want to write for a living…

We are seeing publishers make decisions against our genre, sabotaging new works intentionally or otherwise by eliminating spine tags that tell readers something is Horror, by eliminating our section, by promoting classics over new publications, by restricting sales performance to mere weeks for discovery and success or failure of new titles by new authors, by reframing our authors as writers in other genres, by laying off our editors, by not offering imports from the UK, Canada or Australia or even translations of foreign writers in stores… I could go on.

We cannot rely on ANY establishment to help us (and apparently, sadly, not our own, either). We are going to have to decide to help ourselves, and that means supporting each other… from the trenches up.

It may mean reinventing the wheel. Or Pulp. Which in Horror is the same thing.

We also have to just get over the belief that we are guaranteed a good time every time…Stories are gambles, and the “bad” ones make the Great Ones shine. This is true especially with Horror stories – stories that are trying to scare us…because we all scare differently. There will be duds. But we need to not to have bet the mortgage or the kid’s braces on the cover price.

So we need freedom – freedom to experiment as writers and as readers. We need to develop a sense of humor, and tolerance. We need to appreciate the attempts at storytelling, because it is not easy and should not be. The good news, is that Pulp still lives….and the power to transform our genre is still potent.

Scary Is as Scary Does…

It is vital for our Establishment to recognize that there is a value and importance in Pulps because they deliver…scenes…images…folklore…

And most writers can tell you, it is not an entire story that leaps to or from the imagination, but a series of emotion-evoking images that emerge from their own minds that leads them to a story or to have nightmares about it…

This is why we read other writers’ work, and watch Horror movies…we are waiting for an image to grab us, to suggest something, and then we derive the story from the inspiration another piece of art suggested to us – art as interpreted by our own fears and reshaped into new art…

But we also value (if not envy) the freedom of storytelling Pulp writers have. It’s all about the monster…there is not so much agonizing over plot and character development as there is about monster reveal – ironically the one thing Literary Horror grapples with and fails at most.

Reading Pulp can lead to an inner explosion of creativity – all wrought by that inner child that drew scary pictures and told stories that raised adult eyebrows. It helps us reconnect to that kid who saw the monsters…

We also have to realize that as we age (even out of the teen years) we subvert our very real fears, mostly in order to keep other adults from finding out about them and exploiting them. But the fears are still there, and as writers, it is our job to excavate them – to not write about what we think will scare other people, but what we know still scares US. This is increasingly hard to do with the burden of perfectly executed Craft hanging above all our heads like an anvil of Doom…

We need air to breathe. Pulps are pure oxygen – heady and hallucinatory.

One of the greatest contemporary examples of American Pulp doing its thing is the website CreepyPasta , https://www.creepypasta.com/ which has recently been mining the print market with anthologies. Here, many writers write under the cloak of anonymity… pseudonyms…”handles”… Readers can give advice, feedback, and rate; there are “stars” and favorites, and story rooms where tales are dedicated to certain characters and certain monsters. For any Horror writer trapped in stasis, trying to manage a block, this is where you need to go for a Pulp Poultice.

Look, “bad” writing is more than okay. “Bad” writing is necessary because through that dark wood lays the secret to great storytelling… Our roots are in campfire tales, stories told to startle and warn – not in perfect grammar and stellar Craft, not in some plot defined lock-step whose prerequisites an editor can check-off.

We have to shed the shackles and mental editors that our Establishment tells us makes for “acceptable” Horror. We have to read everyone who ever wrote in the genre – and maybe especially if they left or were exiled or are just largely ignored. We have to read more Clive Barker. More Neil Gaiman. More Brom. More Tanith Lee.

We have to see ourselves in Horror in order to write it.

And we have to feel free to write it – not worry about whether it’s been done before, not worry about an editor who has gone “on the record” to say he or she doesn’t want to read this or that, not worry about getting into a magazine the Establishment says is cutting edge.

Cutting edge for an editor or a Critic is not cutting edge necessarily for a reader, or a writer. Writers need honesty, to be true to their vision no matter what.

Again, according to Bayles and Orland:

“The unease many artists feel today betrays a lack of fit between the work of their heart and the emotionally remote concerns of curators, publishers, and promoters. It’s hard to overstate the magnitude of this problem. Finding your place in the art world is no easy matter, if indeed there is a place for you at all. In fact one of the few sure things about the contemporary art scene is that somebody besides you is deciding which art – and which artists – belong in it. It’s been a tough century for modesty, craftsmanship and tenderness.” (70)

As writers, we need to write about what moves us…WE are the ones out here – among the rest of humanity…seeing what we are not supposed to acknowledge, feeling what we are supposed to rationalize…

We see crime, we see poverty, we see bigotry, we see racism, we see sexism, we see classism, we see suicide, drug abuse, homelessness and hopelessness, war…all manner of things that shape our intimate lives and which we have so little control over. We want to scream. We do it in art. In writing.

When our establishment slaps parameters on what we can write and how we should write it, it is censorship.

Pulp is the ultimate rebellion.

And if the establishment thinks there is no interest in Pulp, they should revisit the sales statistics on Anime, on Graphic Novels, on Comics.

Readers want to exercise the surface emotions. We can’t appreciate fine Literature if we have mentally exploded or imploded all over ourselves. We can’t muster the patience it takes to critically think if we cannot express ourselves in the most basic of our experiences.

Sometimes we just have to strip down and run naked among the monsters… daring them…counting coup…

It’s part of being human. And if a writer cannot connect with that on an elemental level, there will be no Horror, let alone Literary Horror.

https://dailydead.com/clive-barkers-seraphim-comics-to-release-hellraiser-anthology-volume-two-graphic-novel-this-september/

When will our genre wake up?

When will publishers?

“Bad” Horror is good for the genre. It’s good for writers. It’s good for readers (especially if “great” is not promised). “Bad” Horror matters because it moves the creative needle in Horror and within its pulpy heart hides the Next Great Horror. Are we really willing to risk the loss of all that? Are we so ashamed of the process?

Get over the judgement. Or say goodbye…to writers, fans, artists…and our genre’s future. Pulp is who we are. It’s how we birth a Lovecraft, a Poe, or a King.

And it is nothing to be embarrassed by.

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

Reading Like a Writer: Horror Through Slime-Covered Glasses

There are many reasons to read a great Horror novel: to scare yourself, to scare your parents, or to scare your teachers. But there is one reason that – if you write – you might not have considered: Reading great Horror novels can teach you how to write great Horror.

Seemed obvious, didn’t it?

So why doesn’t “just” reading a great Horror novel beget great writing?

The answer is: there are different ways to read fiction; you can read as the intended audience, you can read as a Critic, and you can read as a writer. And if you don’t understand the difference, you can’t put the writerly gifts hidden in Classic Horror to work.

Reading as the intended audience is easy. You pick up the book and let it take you someplace else; this is entertainment in its purest form and all control is relinquished to the author’s storytelling wiles. There is no commitment beyond the pursuit of enjoyment.

Reading as the Critic is much darker, much more motivated, colored by academic analysis: it is technical, and it is over most of our heads, requiring a great deal of preparation, such as a Classical Literature background, and an understanding of linguistics, psychology, philosophy, and history. Most of us don’t naturally go there and do not want to: it is cold, hard work that seems intent on destroying the innocent bliss of reading for fun.

On the other hand, reading as a writer is a weird marriage of the two. It is at once dependent on enjoying what you read, and then wanting to dissect it in order to understand what made you want to keep reading and what made its afterimage stay in your head. Reading as a writer is all about asking yourself how and why and when another writer managed to get it “right”… it is about studying their technique for the purpose of creating your own.

YES. READING IS TECHNICAL AND SOMETIMES ICKY

Yet for many people – writers included – it never occurs to them to read something differently.

This is in part because we don’t know how. It also doesn’t occur to us to go beyond the pondering of the magic which appears to be involved in the writing of good Horror. We tend to not want to take it apart, to look behind the curtain because it is the magic that we love to savor.

We are, at heart, a superstitious lot…

It doesn’t help that reading as a physical act quickly becomes so automatic that we are not even aware that we are performing a complex brain activity. We seem to “glimpse” a word and it magically forms images in our minds…effortlessly….mystically.

We curl up someplace snug, we open our book, and wait to be enchanted. We don’t think of reading as work, because as we grow into being readers it becomes wickedly instinctive, unconscious – even involuntary….like magic. Words take on a life of their own, threading their way through our imaginations. We begin to visualize. We become engaged in the tale. Soon, we aren’t even aware that we are reading because the story simply and spontaneously unfolds…

As writers we are looking for clues when we read.

And reading as a writer means that you will have to adapt your reading technique; you are no longer seeking entertainment alone – no longer the one being wooed. Instead, you must become a shadow Critic, poking and prodding everything from the sentence structure to characterization, from punctuation to plot, from the outside in.

To do this successfully, a couple of things must happen first:

• You must read the book for thrills
• You must understand what you are looking for

https://frankenreads.org/event/frankenstein-book-discussion/.

THRILL SEEKING ON A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT

Chances are, if you write Horror, you love Horror. This means you can’t read a word of a new story or novel and not get caught up in it. Of course, that is what every author hopes for, so it is not altogether a bad thing. But it is distracting. Your imagination latches on to the prose like a face-hugging alien – pupils dilate and the pleasure centers of the brain light up like Frankenstein’s monster.

It is important, then, to read a tale first for the enjoyment – to get that habitual and natural pursuit of happiness out of the way. It does serve a purpose: you will know exactly when and where that sweet spot of being hooked and being Horrified took place.

Sometimes it even begets your own monsters, new story ideas, or creates a nice, fertile mood for drafting or brainstorming. But reading for pleasure is not reading as a writer, and it should not be mistaken for such.

Reading for pleasure is that something else: a spinning of the channels of the imagination, a hope of hooking up with a really great idea or being swept away by one.

Yet for writers of Horror fiction, sometimes even reading for pleasure can go awry because if you write Horror, you also come to wonder how it was exactly that a given story scared you… and you eventually might come to be distracted by the fact. This is especially true if you re-read the story years later, when phrases like “What was I thinking?” enter the mind because you read parts you don’t remember and you can’t find parts you thought you did read…

“What happened to the Horror?” you might ask. And exactly how did the writer cause us to manufacture details that were implied but not actually there?

This, friends and neighbors, is where Horror goes all Brain Science…

Two things are at work here:

• the writer’s technique,
• and the curious effect emotion has on human memory.

Of course, emotion is not exclusive to Horror; but Horror is – as Lovecraft so accurately pointed out – fear’s first cousin. And fear is one of the most potent emotions because of its ability to hijack the brain and create memories where none previously existed.

When we experience fear, we process it according to our own experiences, and the reconciliation of the emotion with existing memory tends to reshape the new memory as colored by the old. So when we read Horror for the first time or for enjoyment, we are surrendering our brains to the puppet-master of emotion. The monster in the dark becomes more or less sinister based on what we read and what associations we make with it.

So during our teen years, when we fear the ending of the world before we grow up and realize our lives, the monster that threatens this scenario has more scare power than the same monster will when we are at midlife or older, when we are wont to rationalize, minimalize, and offer concessions – even to monsters. While the monster lurking in the closet has more “terror cred” if the reader has ever been or imagined being attacked in their home, the threat of possession by demons more intimate if one is a lapsed Catholic with residual guilt, how much Horror is delivered to a reader totally depends on the reader’s own experiences and learned fear management.

Horror, it seems, is very personal.

So how does the writer tap into that formula that makes a specific fear generalized?

Well, we are going to have to look at technique…and it is as elusive as it is desirable. And we are going to have to admit that not all Horror will scare all people at the same time; in fact historically, much Classic Horror scared its period audiences because of how those stories related to what was happening at the time. If we are able to associate the Horror with something contemporary, the story will still scare us. This means it has to be a Horror that is bigger than the monster – the monster has to represent something bigger.

The bad news is that such success is a bit of a crap shoot.

The writer must be able to gather that perfect storm of what is most likely to scare the bulk of readers in a specific target group at a specific time and for a specific reason, the exact amount of disclosure in when, where and how to reveal the monster, and the strange magic of storytelling.

The first point means a writer must really know his or her audience and not from afar – readers will sniff out the fakers and pretenders — and to actually understand and anticipate what his or her contemporaries really fear the most in life. The second means developing a kind of sixth sense about how to pull back the curtain without shouting “ta-dah!” and flattening the curve of your climax. The third means a writer must connect to that preternatural rhythm of prose that says exactly what it needs to and no more.

And it is the second and third of those ingredients that writers can learn from doing what readers love most – reading.

But there is of course a potentially fatal flaw imbedded in every writer (reading or otherwise)…a kind of subliminal kill-switch

And the glitch is this: very few writers are Masters of Their Domain – once again, most writers are readers and read as readers first. We are addicts of prose – both our own and random words printed on pages. We can’t stop ourselves from seeking the “high” so we might as well admit it; we really do have to read a good book first as a reader. We become as dazzled and bewitched as a fairy with a Celtic knot.

Then and only then can we go back and hope resolve to read as a writer. (And if you think I am kidding, go back and read your own writing – something old that you have forgotten. You won’t fixate on the bad parts that need fixing, but you will congratulate yourself on getting the good parts handled right. Sick, isn’t it?)

We are no different with a Classic writer’s writing; we embrace and stroke the beastly prose that made us feel what we wanted. We excuse any parts we did not understand or disliked. And most of all, we let how the writer set us up slip right past us.

This is why we have to go dark. We have to use the Critic’s lens…those slime-covered glasses that dissect what we hold most sacred.

 

Illustration by Gustave Dore (1832 to 1883). http://wordyenglish.com/p/little_red_riding_hood.html

ALONE WITH THE CRITIC

For most of us, our only exposure to Literary Critics and analytic assessment of writing is both boring and negative. Critics are, after all (and to our knowledge), the ones who rip our favorite authors apart and insult our intelligence by stating outright that we don’t have any. They are the wolves in the sheep pen…

But what we don’t see is that the Critic means we are forever reading as readers and telling them that enjoyment means everything. Critics want more. And if you remember high school, so did your teacher. And then your professor. So why didn’t you get it? Could it be that no one ever really taught you about the many ways of reading?

The bad news is that it is perfectly possible.

For years we are asked to analyze what we read without being shown how to see words acting differently on the page…And for many of us caught in the passions of youth, we don’t want to….we aren’t emotionally ready yet.

But doing so – learning to read the same words, the same stories differently – is what helps us develop the ability to find and judge truth, to understand the use of metaphor and analogy, to separate polemic from satire. Try looking at our current internet, fake-news (which used to be called propaganda by the way), social media-led world, and NOW you see the importance of that talent…

So it was no illusion…education has always placed heavy emphasis on interpreting and deciphering prose. And all of those term papers, research papers, and required reading were about that. Yet education has never been graceful about teaching the details…because education has failed to show us the complete picture of how and why. Instead, it has served to embitter most of us about the critical process.

It made us feel stupid.

Worse, educators are great for coming up with ways to analyze writing, for some ruining the enjoyment of the Classics. And while this is a real fear for those needing to read like writers, and something that does in fact happen to some people, it does more so to those who are closet editors. If once learning how to look at language means you cannot turn it off, then you must face it: you are an academic, an editor, or a Critic. Get thee thou education and do not pass go. Be happy. Follow your obsessive bliss…because all genres need you.

However learning to approach reading academically and as a critical thinker is an important thing.

Reading as a writer is one of those irreplaceable tools every writer needs to master, and one I’d never really heard expressed as a technique before my return to the college classroom. In fact, if I had heard it in any guise before, I probably dismissed it as a cutesy way of inflating the ego. But this is a serious technique, and here’s why: especially within the United States educational system, not everyone reads enough “good” fiction or “Literature” to develop a subliminal sense of how to mimic the different elements that made those works great.

I know I have been guilty of such neglect. I always wanted to read the Classics. But for some reason, unless someone made me it didn’t seem to happen. I always felt intimidated by their greatness, I suppose, figuring that because they were such a source of study, discussion and Criticism that I would not ever fully understand them and I didn’t want to appear even more stupid.

But that is a cheap excuse. Books are books after all, written for readers. Yet I was plagued by the mystery so many modern readers are: what make a book great? What makes literature the Holy Grail of writing?

Unfortunately, it is not as mysterious and awesome as it sounds; it has more to do with the ability of a writer to accidentally or on purpose say something bigger than is stated in the story, while dazzling the reader with the competent and artistic handling of language.

This does in fact mean that some books are Literature but which are unrecognized as such – at least they are not yet. But it also means that we need to look at prose the way we’ve learned to look at poetry: it can be read for simple enjoyment, or it can be dissected and impress language technicians with double-meaning, allegory, metaphor, analogy and pure genius. The level to which you as a reader or you as a writer wish to enjoy fiction is up to you. But being willing to get down and dirty with the dissection business (something Horror writers and readers should be familiar with) can open amazing windows to understanding how great fiction is constructed.

So to learn how to write better Horror fiction, we have to do what engineers do: we have to deconstruct prose to see how the pieces came together and rendered success.

As Francine Prose (ironically surnamed as she is) states in her book Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them, you have to discover how to read analytically: to become “conscious of style, of diction, of how sentences were formed and information conveyed, how the writer structures a plot, creates characters, employs detail and dialogue” because writing “is done one word at a time, one punctuation mark at a time” (3).

One of the best ways to do this is to sit down with your favorite book or short story, and start copying it word for word. This slows you down, forcing you to notice every phrase, sentence and punctuation mark. It reveals how you were manipulated by the rhythm of the author’s own choices, why you as a reader gave emphasis to certain passages, were susceptible to others. You notice vocabulary choices, perspective, the intimacy or distance gained by wording and grammatical emphasis. These are your tools – your paints, your canvas, your textures, your lighting. This is the writer’s version of art school.

And because you are also a writer, chances are there is already a bit of the academic in you… As such, you have merely to access that natural curiosity about “memory. Symbol. Pattern. [because] These are the three items that, more than any other, separate the professorial reader from the rest of the crowd.” (Foster xxvii)

Since writing is the creation of patterns, reading is the logical reverse engineering of them.

Like art, writing is all indeed about patterns – everything from plot (of which there are various estimates as to the actual number of available “master plots” from two to twenty or more) to motifs and themes. Decoding these patterns is like deciphering a riddle the author consciously or subconsciously embedded in the text ( Prose 4-5)…

This is what close reading is all about. For example, Prose recounts and old English teacher’s assignment to read King Lear and Oedipus Rex and “Circle every reference to eyes, light, darkness and vision… Then draw some conclusion” upon which to write an essay (4). This is where Literature tends to stand out: these hidden gems lie awaiting discovery and assessment. Literature then, invites the reader back into the text multiple times, to explore potential meanings and relevances, to form opinions and make discussions.

Fiction today is really not much different. We just don’t feel as free to criticize, fearing offense or even attack by fans of the author, if not the author… Yet this is what is meant to happen to fiction. It is meant to be discussed and re-read, and even judged. That doesn’t mean that accepting criticism is easy, or that criticism is just or warranted every time. But unless you write in a vacuum, readers will find you. And they will judge, each and every one. Doesn’t it make sense that writers would write with the intent of surviving that criticism?

The fact is everyone has an opinion, for good or ill, correct or not, graciously delivered or accompanied by obnoxious and illiterate venom.

As writers, we have to detach ourselves from our own work, allowing our “children” to grow up and go out into the cold, cruel world.

We must realize that they will be judged and sometimes justifiably found wanting, but that it is ok to love them anyway.

This is the way fiction becomes Literature, the way writers test and challenge themselves to become better writers, the way good Horror becomes great Horror.

Are you up to the challenge?

References

Adler, Mortimer J. and Charles van Doren. How to Read a Book: the Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading. New York: Simon & Schuster, c1940, 1972.

Foster, Thomas C. How to Read Literature Like a Professor: a Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines. New York: Harper Perennial, c2003, 2014.

Prose, Francine. Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. New York: Harper Perennial, c2006