Since boyhood, I’ve emotionally connected to horror easier than to any other literary genre. There’s something visceral and alluring about it – the creature waiting patiently under your bed, the slasher tale’s underlying whodunit structure, the psychological thriller’s understanding of what repulses and enraptures us.
Yet, in all my attempts to write a “serious horror story” (an endeavor that’s crossed the 100-piece mark this year), I still haven’t been able to capture it. True darkness eludes me: The Poe-esque descent into madness, the Lovecraftian inexplicable otherness, even the Rice-ean sexy vampires who get both booty and reverence… For me, horror is a wonder to read, but tough as hell to replicate. I could never write something as dark and grief-stricken as Pet Sematary, the first horror novel I sneak-read as an impressionable twelve-year-old. Even now, at forty-one, I haven’t lived, loved, and lost enough to do that kind of story justice. 
So, what do I write instead? As an author of dark, horrific, and speculative fiction, I’ve actually turned towards the light. I’ve found that playing on contrasts really helps me deliver a narrative that, while grazing the dark abyss, keeps my sanity (mostly) intact by focusing on what good there is worth preserving. When I write a character, I’m rooting for that person to succeed. Now, most of my narratives being what they are, the odds are, that person is in for an unfortunate run. They will likely suffer some sort of trauma that ups their future therapist bills, even if they survive the ordeal. But in my opinion, they have to have a fighting chance. A hope glimmering in the distance, which sometimes they get to grasp and achieve. After all, isn’t that like life itself?
I’m getting all philosophical now, I know. But this is one value that as a writer I hold as true. Grim-dark horror has never appealed to me; neither has the extreme horror or splatterpunk subgenres. There’s an undercurrent of chaotic, nihilistic energy buzzing through them that tends to repel me. At first I thought it was because I had a weak constitution (where’s my Victorian fainting couch?), but in time I figured it out. I feel for the characters I read about, and likewise, I feel for the ones I create myself.
If I’ve written a married couple whose relationship is struggling to find its footing, I want to see them talking and resolving their marital issues. So more likely than not, the break-in from the alien intruder they’re about to endure will somehow lead to a cathartic breakthrough, one where the couple will work through their true feelings about each other. Sure, one of them may perish before the night is over, but dammit, it won’t be before their relationship woes are resolved and they die knowing how truly loved and seen they were!
This may seem silly to some authors, and I get it. After all, our characters are just fake people we’ve made up, dealing with fake problems we’ve thrown at them. And yet… there is a kinship I form with every character who appears on my page. I wonder what they’ve been through: their upbringing, their favorite movie, their most embarrassing first date story. Sometimes the answers to these questions bubble up in the dialogue or as a flashback scene, and I’m happy to see my characters grow more three-dimensional before my eyes. Maybe they’ve developed a tendency to swallow their true feelings because they were bullied in middle school and were too ashamed to tell a grownup. Maybe they’ve lost a significant other, and now they’re too afraid to open up emotionally to a partner, terrified that they’re doomed to ad infinitum rejection. Whether they hide or act out on their pain, insecurity, and inward desires, I’m rooting for them. I really am.
This doesn’t mean they’ll make it through the story and emerge as the victor who’s bested the villain (literal or metaphorical). But they will likely have a moral victory, or reach some precipice of closure, or overcome a deep-seated character issue along the way. Even if the story ends in their gruesome death, it won’t necessarily be a doom-and-gloom conclusion that leaves the reader squirming in discomfort and contemplating how absolutely awful life can be. I hate to bum out my readers, to leave them stewing in a sense of their own meaninglessness. Mostly because I dislike feeling that way myself, so why spread the misery?
There are plenty of slice-of-life stories out there whose authors love to wallow in the darkness, the all-consuming nothingness, the incestuous-cannibalistic-sexual-assault-and-child-death depravity of it all. But I’m not one of those authors, and I have no interest in being one. My one cannibal story, “Red Meat Diet” involves a young woman who has infiltrated a high-society dining club that enjoys human-based cuisine, and though the narrative lingers on social discomfort and creeping dread, there are also puns about eating body-parts and a healthy dose of social commentary, to lighten the reader’s load. The story also doesn’t end quite where one might expect a cannibal-club story to end, and it’s not because I shy away from killing off my characters. I just can’t bear to see them die meaningless deaths, or suffer difficult events in vain. It has to mean something, or else why put them through it? I’m not a sadist, after all. (Or am I?! God, I hope not.)
When I was making my author website, the WordPress template asked for my tagline. I waffled for a long while. What tagline could encompass the totality of my work? Maybe something like “Horror, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Comedy… I do it all!” But that felt cheesy and disjointed. I had to examine my body of work. What themes run through it? Good versus Evil, confronting the pain and trauma from one’s past, breaching relational misunderstandings, friends coming together to defeat unspeakable forces… I realized that when I write, I’m not aflutter about the cool monsters or graphic death scenes I’m about to conjure up. Instead, I lead with empathy. I aim to understand my characters’ needs and desires, to see who they are in the moment I meet them, before I curse them with whatever unfortunate events will befall them.
I finally wrote out the tagline for my website, and it’s there to this day. “Horror with Heart… and Teeth.”
We must remember that all our readers carry a weight within them. A broken heart that speaks of love and rejection, pain and misunderstanding, deep hurt and slow healing. I don’t ever want to heap on top of their existent burdens and struggles. Therefore, my stories acknowledge the dark (the Teeth) of it all, while giving my characters – and my readers – the dignity (or the Heart) they are due. That we’re all due.
As dark fiction authors, we can’t forget about the teeth, or else it isn’t horror anymore. And yet, if there’s no heart, no emotionally grounded core… then who gives a damn about the teeth which are about to shred our characters apart? It’s the difference between Jason Vorhees machete-ing hundreds of replaceable teens, versus Reagan and her mother’s heart-rending journey in The Exorcist. The difference is human empathy. An intentional balance of both teeth and heart is crucial. I try to attain it by adding a pinch of humor and a hopeful affect to some of my stories, although not all my endings mirror Darcy Coates’s famously all’s-well-that-ends-well third acts.
What about you, and the people you create on the page? Have you ever stopped to wonder, what are your main character’s favorite songs? Maybe you can put together a playlist on YouTube Music or Spotify to get into their mindset. Was there a book that rocked their world back in college, but now that they’re in their fifties, they’re disaffected by life and remember that book with nostalgia-tinged cynicism? These and other personal details are worth thinking about just as much as our inciting incident, narrative style choices, and carefully plotted outline.
My last word of advice to you as a fellow author: mind the teeth, but don’t neglect the heart. Always aim for the heart, and the teeth won’t be too far behind. Grinding away in the darkness, waiting to tear that heart to pieces.
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Excellent, helpful advice that speaks to me as a fellow horror writer. Love your tagline!