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What elements / aspects of Horror do you admire and like to write?
How did you realize you liked Horror?
What are your thoughts on thrillers?
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Before I answer this question, it's worth taking a moment to clarify what Dark Fantasy is. According to the font of knowledge and copy-paste answers that is Wikipedia, Dark Fantasy is "a subgenre of fantasy literary, artistic, and cinematic works that incorporate disturbing and frightening themes of fantasy." Loosely speaking, it's a Fantasy-Horror cross. For all intents and purposes, then, I'll be lumping it in with Horror for the sake of this answer: the two overlap significantly, and I hybridize them all the time.
The Horror genre and I go back a long way, but not in the way most people would imagine. As a kid, I was (and still am) chicken-shit about reading pure-Horror books or watching Horror movies. Part of this is down to the fact that I don't like watching movies at all, but the fact remains that I was the kind of kid who'd sooner ask for a night light outside the bathroom to scare away ghosts than read a Horror book for fun. I spent years claiming it as one of my least-favorite genres. I don't think that changed until 2021... and even then, it only happened because my interest in the genre was kindled via my own writing, not the other way around.
2021 wasn't the year I miraculously fell in love with Horror, though. It was the year I realized I'd been writing it all along.
Most of the books I've ever written fall into or adjacent to Dark Fantasy or Horror. I love post-apocalyptic settings, world-ending stakes, claustrophobic dangers, and drowning my characters in fear for their lives, their loved ones, and everything they hold dear. I'm a character killer. I sometimes can't answer terrified comments on my books because they bring me so much glee that I can't stop laughing. (If this sounds evil to you, I regret to inform you that most Dark-Fantasy authors are this way! If you ever read a book and suspect the author is doing something just to screw with your fears, they probably are).
And this pattern isn't limited to my newer books. The first book I ever wrote was the first book of my oldest series, which is Dark Fantasy all the way. By the end of the sixth and final book, it edges towards grimdark and racks up the highest named-character body count of any project in my repertoire. I started it at age 15, smack in the middle of my Horror-hating years.
As you can probably tell, it took me an entertainingly long time to cotton on to the fact that I was, in fact, writing these genres. In my defense, there are a few reasons for this. The biggest is that Horror (like any genre) has its stereotypes, and I happen to dislike them tremendously. I can't stand gore, grossness, or excessive violence as core tenets of a Horror story—if they're what's meant to scare me, I'm closing the book. The same goes for social aberrations. Serial killers, kidnappings, sex crimes, gender-based violence, and demonization of mental health all run rampant in Horror, and while they all have their audience, I'm not it.
I also get bored with highly moralistic stories, and those that take a well-known thing that humans fear (like spiders, or aliens) and simply make it bigger, badder, and more dangerous than before. Haunted houses aren't my jam unless the people who stay in them pick up a page written by their loved one and find it covered in nothing but a single phrase, repeated over and over. Monster stories need a twist: I'd take an alien that hunts by sound in a silent world over an alien that stalks a crew through their own spaceship and kills them one by one, but the truth is, I'd probably only read or watch the first one to study it anyway.
Stephen King has a quote that I love, so I'm going to steal his words for a moment:
"The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worst one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there..."
I am, unabashedly, a Terror writer. I am also a Terror reader. The type of Horror I like is the type that plays games with my psyche and freaks me out because I don't understand it, not because I understand it and am scared of the implications. My favorite questions to have flash through my head while I'm reading are the likes of, "What are they up against?" and "What the hell happened here?" My favorite books to write are those where disaster could strike at any moment, but most of the time it doesn't, until suddenly it does.
In short, I'm drawn to fear of the unknown. But the other thing that drives me to these genres is a sense of awe.
Things I don't understand scare me, but I also admire the hell out of them for being beyond my understanding—or, as the case may be, beyond my human control. This goes double if they're bigger than I am. When I say Horror and I go back a long way, I'm not talking about books or movies. I'm talking about my childhood fascination with natural disasters, deeply unknown parts of our world, and cataclysmic change: earthquakes, tornadoes, tsunamis, hurricanes, volcanoes, supervolcanoes, volcanic winter, nuclear winter, mass extinctions, pandemics and plagues, climate change in either direction, solar flares, multidimension and multiverse theory, exoplanets, cryptids, and the bottom of the sea.
I'm also fascinated by the many ways delicate social structures can go to pieces at the slightest provocation. It's no surprise that two of the three books I've started this year center, respectively, around mutiny and societal collapse. By this point, my love for apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction should also make sense. I'm ambivalent towards Horror vs. Thriller because what matters isn't how fast a book makes my heart rate go—it's what made it pick up in the first place.
All this together has meant I've spent the last nine and a half years sliding steadily towards the Horror end of every genre I write in, be that Fantasy, Sci-Fi, or Horror on its own. I've always loved it, in some form or another. It just took me a while to figure that out!
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Questions for anyone stopping by!
Is there anything that scares you that you also enjoy reading?
If so, at what age did that start? Was there ever a time when you didn't enjoy it?
There's an old saying that truth is stranger than fiction. Do you have any freaky real-life experiences (or just things you've learned, historical or present-day) that feel like they could have come straight from a Horror story?
