Why Do I Write Horror? Part Two
This is me making the familiar unfamiliar.
Continuing on with the whole “Why do you write horror, Tobin, you sick fuck!” topic.
In Part One, I talked about horror being about confronting the things that are uncomfortable. Cruelty. Helplessness. Death. So I write about the things that hopefully open doors in your head that don’t quite close again.
And I talked about humans being the worst monsters. Yeah, go ahead. Tell me I’m wrong.
So, today, let’s talk about some of the other aspects that draw me to this genre, shall we?
You say I’m crazy.
I got your crazy.
Britney Spears - Womanizer
Making those familiar monsters unfamiliar
In my six-book horror series, The Aphotic, I dig into Lovecraftian demons, vampires, and werewolves.
And yeah, yeah, everyone tries to put their own spin on the classic supernatural beasties. Of course they do. I’m no different.
But I don’t change them just to get my stink on them. I want to make them cool. I want to make them fun… and I want to make them horrifying and dangerous again.
If you’re old like me, you may remember the feeling of watching the first Alien movie—”In space, no one can hear you scream.” Remember that?—but think back to the first time you experienced that movie. That xenomorph.
Remember when you found out it could pretty much fold itself down and hide?
Remember when you watched it open its mouth the first time, and instead of a tongue, that thing had a bolt gun in its mouth… with teeth on the end of it?
Remember when the baby exploded out of Kane’s (John Hurt’s) chest?
Remember that you’d never seen any of that shit before, and you wondered what other horrors it still had to show you?
I could say the same thing about the first Hellraiser movie. Or a string of others. They’re classics, because they either created new monsters, or they subverted classic ones. Either way, they made monsters scary again.
Until Stephanie Meyer came along and fucked it all up.
Come on, we went through a very bad time there where the fucking vampires sparkled and the werewolves bonded with kids. Fuck that. There’s no romanticism in my monsters.
My goal is not to change them and make them unrecognizable, no, instead I’m going for more of a grounding of them in the real world. I still want them unreasonable—because the physics just doesn’t work for a human to switch to a werewolf, and vampires, when you get right down to it, are kinda silly.
But what if the werewolves are only a half-step away from feral? What if their packs are delicate things that can fall into chaos with one wrong move? What if the vampires are not refined like Count Dracula, and not feral like the wolves, but quiet, calculating, and there’s a constant environment of dread whenever they’re around… because they more suffer a human’s presence than they consider them food?
Then there’s the monsters I co-write with Robert Edgar Walton. We’ve taken Frankenstein’s monster and pulled him away from the skulking social outcast intent on revenge, to a thing that remembers his humanity, but has lost it in a single-minded pursuit against death—or Death. He’s fiercely intelligent, but he’ll still throw all humanity away if it gets him closer to his goal.
And speaking of Death, what about those Four Horsemen? We’ve messed with them as well, because, quite frankly, they’re rich characters when you throw them up against the God that made them. What if they understand their roles… but they don’t agree with them? What if God’s creation holds more that God Himself considered, and the Four Horsemen choose to exploit that?
I’m sure I’m nowhere near the only author with this aim, but for me, the goal is to let the reader recognize the monster, but realize that all their assumptions don’t apply in this case.
So, they don’t feel safe around this monster. It walks and talks like the one they know, but underneath the surface, there’s this whole unpredictable aspect that subverts their expectations. The old monster has been made new, different, and scarier.
Making your familiar world unfamiliar
I have a lot of stuff going on in my stories. The aforementioned monsters. Universe-ending plots. Different dimensions. Time travel. Biblical Armageddon. An almost-immortal Frankenstein monster. Crazy things that simply can’t happen.
Once again, I’m hardly the sole peddlar of these whackadoodle stories and plots. Nor am I the only one that sets them in a very recognizable real world.
But it’s the sandbox I’ve chosen to play in, and I have a hell of a good time doing so.
So yes, to quote Britney Spears, “you say I’m crazy… I got your crazy.”
But the crazy is mitigated with a lot of grounding in logic, in consequence, in realism. I go for the intentionally familiar, the guy that works in a fast food restaurant, the woman that runs a small-town bookstore, the single mom barely holding things together, the kid with the shitty homelife that spills over to his school days.
No rich, morally ambiguous corporate types to be found here.
And every action has a reaction. I’m very careful with my cause and effect, because boys and girls? Yeah, I’ve lived that shit. And in these days we live in now, where there’s a whole lotta cause and effect, but very little consequence?
Yeah, I build in the consequences too. And they’re rarely good.
The other thing that I push hard for is the relationships between my characters, as well as how they speak. I’m not kidding when I tell you that I don’t write my characters’ dialogue. Nope. Those characters speak it to me. I hear those conversations. They’re real.
And I’m glad they do, because holy mother of god, there’s not much worse than reading stilted dialogue.
But it not just how they speak… it’s what they say when they speak.
There’s an old saying that says you should chase your characters up a tree, then throw rocks at them.
Yeah, sorry, that’s amateur hour bullshit.
I drop my characters in the desert with no water, no food, no sunscreen, no map, and no sympathy. You want out? Get going. It’s a long hard walk and, by the end of it, you’re gonna be burnt, thirsty, hungry, and damn near dead.
So yeah, my horror is often the horror of characters that feel very real, very familiar, but they’re going through crazy shit… but they react realistically.
This is the real world—this is your world—only it’s even more broken than you’re used to.
That’s the horror I write.
Stay tuned for part three.
Thanks for stopping by
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That insight into how you frame your characters/monsters is very interesting, indeed. Thanks for sharing this, Tobin.