I came to horror the same way I came to Rihanna—later than most, but with the commensurate fiery passion of a true convert. Crime and horror have, after all, been slowly converging for many years, as domestic suspense transformed into the New Gothic, and psychological thrillers took over from procedurals as the dominant trend in the genre. And yet, despite my newfound fandom, I’m about as poorly informed a horror reader as one could be (I’ve only read one Stephen King novel and it was Mr Mercedes). So I invited a whole bunch of authors with horror novels out in 2021 to join me for a roundtable discussion on the genre and its appeal to crime fans, and in which I could stealthily attempt to figure what exactly horror is—and why we’re all enjoying it so much during the pandemic.
I reached out to a number authors whose works speak to both horror and crime readers. I am thankful to the following folks who were kind enough to contribute, listed below alongside their most recent titles:
V. Castro (Queen of the Cicadas), Rachel Harrison (Cackle), Grady Hendrix (The Final Girl Support Group), Gabino Iglesias (Both Sides of the Border), Stephen Graham Jones (My Heart is a Chainsaw), Alma Katsu (Red Widow), Cassandra Khaw (Nothing But Blackened Teeth), Jess Lourey (Litani), James Han Mattson (Reprieve), Josh Malerman (Pearl), Gus Moreno (This Thing Between Us), Riley Sager (Survive The Night), Cadwell Turnbull (No Gods, No Monsters) and Catriona Ward (The Last House on Needless Street).
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WHAT DOES HORROR MEAN? WHAT ARE THE ESSENTIAL QUALITIES?
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V. Castro: Horror is like sexuality, personality, and gender. It can be anything we want it to be because we all come from different places, born as unique individuals, and have experienced life differently. I think the age of hard definitions should die because who makes up all these rules anyway? Surely not me or the place I come from. I don’t want anyone else to define me or my unique take on horror.
If I had to name one essential quality, it would be that it should address fear. Fear is one element we all experience regardless of anything else.
Jess Lourey: For me, horror is the most visceral of the genres, and it must make me feel empathy, dread, and suspense. Bonus points for getting a whispered “holy sh*t, what just happened?” from me when I’m reading or watching it.
Grady Hendrix: Nazi leprechauns? Bigfoot on a flying saucer? Zombified aborted fetuses with telekinesis? Evil clown dolls? Killer mimes? Jellyfish who hate humanity? Orgasms that melt women’s brains? Does all that add up to a thesis statement? Horror is what horror does, and if you want to wear the badge and belong to this disreputable club then whatever you write is automatically horror, whether you’re Toni Morrison writing a searing ghost story about slavery in 19th century America, or Shaun Hutson writing about carnivorous slugs.
Josh Malerman: Horror is partially a chosen arrested development for me. The imagination unchained. A big, precocious kid sitting cross-legged before his atonal toy orchestra, eyebrows arched, the bedroom lights dim, thinking: how will this song make Mommy and Daddy feel?
Gabino Iglesias: The beauty of horror is that it exists above and beyond its most basic definition. We usually define horror fiction as literature that makes readers feel fear or disgust, but it’s much more than that. Horror is something that can make you feel strange, unsettled, uncomfortable. For some, horror is the genre of zombies, witches, aliens, vampires, ghosts, and werewolves, but for others it’s the genre of the ineffable. For some of us, things like loneliness, cancer, and poverty are scary while all the aforementioned creatures are just fun to read about. Ultimately, each author (re)defines what horror is and what it does.
Alma Katsu: An interesting question, in light of how horror literature seems to have expanded the past few years. Does a book about a killer on a spree qualify (as it does in the movies?) or should those books be shelved under ‘crime’ or ‘suspense’? Or by author—does anything written by King or Koontz qualify? I’m looking here at the genre through readers’ eyes; at events, I often run into people who say they never read horror but will admit to reading psychological suspense and true crime, for instance.
For whom is definition of horror a problem? The reader? The publisher? The bookstore owner? The librarian? Or the writer, most of all? Should the firm idea that ‘this is a work of horror’ be established in the writer’s brain first, figuring that the rest will follow? I’m not naïve enough to think we don’t need definitions and categories, but it does seem that rigid adherence to definitions might make it harder for creators to make those dreamy slipstream flights of imagination that readers often find the most satisfying. The fairy tale, for instance: many abound with elements of horror such as killing and maiming of innocents, witches, and demons.
Horror is not a genre but a feeling, it’s often said. If a story scares you, it can be considered horror. It’s a universal feeling, not limited to the supernatural or mindlessly violent. I just read a WWII historical with a horrific and vivid passage showing adults sending unsuspecting children to die in concentration camps. I often say horror is personal. It can only be defined by the individual for the individual.
Cadwell Turnbull: For me, horror is when normal people hit up against something squirming underneath the surface of our world. This might be supernatural, individual human darkness, or societal ill. Or an unforgiving part of the natural world. Or, it is when people remember that those places exist.
I think what makes horror amazing is how difficult it is to break the genre down into essentials. A dark empty road can be scary or mundane. And some of my favorite horror scenes have happened in broad daylight. Midsommar is mostly daylight and it is still scary. Maybe the one essential is a terrifying unknown and the creeping dread of that unknown’s arrival.
James Han Mattson: What horror means to me, very plainly, is any form of entertainment that’s meant to elicit dread. Usually the dread stems from an external element—namely, some source that’s trying to harm or kill the characters—but sometimes it’s more internal, a descent-into-madness type of story like the movie Jacob’s Ladder or the book The Vegetarian. When the dread stems from an external element, it often involves monsters, apparitions, psychopaths, or cults.
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THERE SEEM TO BE LOTS OF AUTHORS DECONSTRUCTING AND REINVENTING PULP HORROR TO BE A COMMENTARY ON THE GENRE. HOW CAN AUTHORS BALANCE APPRECIATION OF THE GENRE WITH THE NEED TO CORRECT ITS MORE PROBLEMATIC ELEMENTS?
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Grady Hendrix: The same way the genre of literary fiction corrects its problematic history of celebrating sexual harassers writing novels about dudes who are obsessed with their dicks. By welcoming new, younger, and more diverse voices. The best publishing news in about the past 50 years is that nowadays non-white, non-male, and non-straight authors get books deals, in part, for the very qualities that would have gotten them shut out in the cold a few years ago. But for me, beyond the moral argument, it’s all about new stories. If I want to hear what an old white dude has to say, I’ll talk to myself. If I want to hear what a Blackfoot werewolf story sounds like, what a trans body horror story sounds like, or what an East Asian haunted house story sounds like, all I have to do these days is pick up a horror novel.
Gus Moreno: I think it depends on the author’s intent when it comes to making a commentary on the genre. Some people just want to play in the sandbox, while others want to create a different shape altogether, while keeping the elements of the sandbox intact. I think you have to recognize what’s so horrific about your novel, not the genre tropes it employs, before you can comment on the form and reimagine its problematic parts.
“What I love about modern horror as a consumer is that you can see the love even in the deconstruction. Respect is there, even as things change.” –Cadwell Turnbull
Stephen Graham Jones: With the slasher, say, which is always closest to my heart. But, man, it’s for sure got a bad history, doesn’t it? So many times out, it’s exploitative in all the usual ways. Which is the trick with writing a slasher, nowadays. I’m completely tuned into all the bad inherent to the genre—it’s kind of like these icky barnacles the genre’s picked up, over the years—but I love the hope built into it, too. I love the part of it that’s about standing up to bullies. The part that’s about insisting on your own life and screaming that true. It feels right to me. So, when I write a slasher—when I right a slasher?—I have to come head-on at the stuff I think’s slowing it down. In The Only Good Indians, say, instead of high school cheerleaders or some other “Top 10” getting the blade, I figured . . . what if it were dudes in their thirties, say? How might that change things up? Or, in My Heart is a Chainsaw, what if it’s a bunch of fifty-plus rich dudes catching that sharp edge? Or, with Night of the Mannequins, what if we had a really good handle on why all this is happening? What I want to push back against in the slasher is this notion that women, or women’s bodies, are disposable, or are only there as objects, that they’re a currency the story spends. Who knows if I pull it off, but I hope I don’t ever, in any way, reinscribe that kind of stuff, anyway.
Cadwell Turnbull: We’re always doing this in all our genres, right? Deconstructing, reinventing. I lightly dabble in horror, but even in other speculative genres, like science fiction and fantasy, there’s always conversation with what came before, the genre changing as the world changes, making room for new perspectives. Loving a genre creates opportunities to see it differently, to talk with it, and add to it. The balance comes from the love. What I love about modern horror as a consumer is that you can see the love even in the deconstruction. Respect is there, even as things change.
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IT CAN’T POSSIBLY BE A COINCIDENCE THAT HORROR FICTION AND HAUNTED HOUSES HAVE BEEN SO POPULAR DURING THE PANDEMIC. WHAT DOES HORROR MEAN IN THE AGE OF COVID?
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Alma Katsu: Covid has shown us that we can’t trust our understanding of the world, that our lives can be turned upside down in an instant and change in important, unforeseeable ways. Even if you’d studied up on the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 it wouldn’t have prepared you completely for what we’ve gone through with Covid.
Loss of control is the worst thing that can happen to many people (never mind that the idea that we can control anything is an illusion) which means they’ve been living in unending terror for the past 20 months. So, people have been seeking out horror, whether in books or movies, as a way to comfort themselves or to make sense of the confusion and turmoil they’re going through.
Josh Malerman: So, I was set to blurb Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers a few months into lockdown and I was totally nervous about diving into seven-hundred pages of pandemic story. But the most wonderful thing happened: pretty soon into it, the world he imagined mirrored the world we were actually living and I thought: well, if we can imagine this scenario (and we can and we have) then we can probably solve it, too.
Cassandra Khaw: I can’t speak for everyone but for me, at least, it means gaslighting. It’s hard not to live in the age of Covid and not feel constantly gaslit. Everywhere you turn, there are people swearing up and down that Covid isn’t any worse than the flu, that it is all overblown; that it is nothing but hysteria. At the same time, you can’t go online without running into another account of doctors burning out, of people dying horrifically, and it’s such a disorienting space to occupy.
Jess Lourey: Horror is part of the human experience—unexpected shame, disease, loss, death. Horror fiction makes those abstract experiences solid, and there’s something cathartic about that. It makes sense, then, that there would be a surge in interest in the genre during a global pandemic. Beside the obvious job of giving voice to our fears of helpless death, the best horror also tackles the drowning powerlessness we feel when our family/community doesn’t take a lethal threat seriously. I have a sense that seeing that powerlessness play out on the page or the screen—yelling “what are you doing??? don’t go in the basement/unlock the mall door/bring the alien pod onto the ship!!!” makes us feel less alone, and in the best worlds we can take that allyship and draw on it to speak out in real life.
Catriona Ward: Horror has always used the home, the one place where we are supposed to feel safe, to unsettle. Being frightened in your place of refuge is doubly frightening. Gothic literature leans on this heavily—it uses all these binary oppositions of domesticity and savagery: house in relation to landscape, inside and out. Containment, captivity and imprisonment are all strong gothic themes too—perhaps the idea of home as prison, a place of containment, is particularly vivid to us at the moment. Maybe we want to read about haunted houses now because the haunted house both parallels and takes us out of our own experience. Collectively, we feel eerie—we’ve been confined to home, unable to engage with life or other living beings. I think we’ve all felt like ghosts at times during these past few years.
Gus Moreno: I wonder if it has to do with a feature of the haunted house subgenre, which is that no one believes your experience, and you feel stuck in a silo with something you can’t comprehend. Maybe people need to have that feeling trivialized or dramatized to begin to recognize its presence in their own lives. What sucks about the age of Covid, in terms of art, is that it provides low-hanging fruit. For the next couple years, we’ll probably have to deal with horror books/films about a deadly virus, lockdowns, mass hysteria, neighbor turning on neighbor, and on and on, misery porn playing on already heightened fears for a quick buck. But there will also be works that deal with these same themes and elements in a deft way that will disarm us, which is what we look for in every great story.
“Horror fiction has always been controlled chaos.” –Gabino IglesiasGabino Iglesias: Horror fiction has always been controlled chaos. At any moment, a reader can stop reading. That power to control things—you know, to an extent—feels better than reading the news and feeling powerless. Also, we all know that people aren’t afraid of being alone in the dark; they’re afraid of not being alone in the dark, and the pandemic forced us to spend more time with ourselves and the things we think might be hiding in the dark. Horror is the proverbial hair of the dog. Horror has always done a great job of speaking about contemporary fears, and now we’re starting to see horror films and books that echo the things that filled our lives for a while: isolation, fear, Zoom meetings, etc.
Grady Hendrix: I think everything means something different depending on who you’re talking to, but I do see a lot of people who are ready to move on. There are a lot of folks who, very understandably, want to forget about the lockdowns, the mask mandates, the mass graves, and the hundreds of thousands of grandparents who died alone in rooms, struggling to breathe as their lungs shut down. It’s the job of every single horror writer to say, “Not so fast.”
Riley Sager: Covid, in many ways, is a horror novel come to life. Just beyond the real-life terror of fighting a disease that works and evolves in ways we’ve never seen before, there was this sense of invasion. It was everywhere, and that was terrifying. Then it became a different kind of horror story. Is it in our house? Who can we trust? Who might have it but not know it? Why does an alarmingly large number of people refuse to do the most basic things to protect themselves and others? Nothing felt normal or safe anymore, which is horror in a nutshell.
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WHAT DO YOU THINK IS RESPONSIBLE FOR HORROR FICTION’S GROWTH AND PRESTIGE OVER THE PAST FEW DECADES?
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Alma Katsu: There are a lot of theories. Maybe it’s generational, as kids raised on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other popular TV shows and movies have projected their tastes on their own children. R.L. Stine and his series of horror books for children also contributed to raising a generation of people who appreciate horror.
Stephen King has a lot to do with it, of course. The movie versions of his early books modernized horror (it wasn’t just Hammer films on Saturday afternoons anymore) and brought it into the mainstream. He showed that horror can be great storytelling.
The opening up of horror is another factor, I think. It’s not just about women and minorities as victims, it’s not knee-jerk misogyny and racism, it can be a place where we can see ourselves represented. Where we can have a voice. When I first approached horror in the 2000s, I didn’t feel welcome. It was dominated by a homogenous set of gatekeepers who upheld a rigid definition of horror. That’s not the case anymore.
James Han Mattson: This is a tough one. Horror has been popular for a long time, but it certainly seems to be more ubiquitous as of late, and I’m sure there are a number of reasons, one being that we’ve had a series of really horrific years. And while it seems odd that we’d seek out terrible things on screen during terrible times, it’s not all that surprising. I think (and I apologize for citing another panelist but it’s just so good I can’t help myself), Stephen Graham Jones articulated it so well in his recent New York Times piece. He said that we love horror because it ends. When we’re surrounded by actual horror every day, and when it seems so endless, we can turn to horror entertainment for comfort. In those stories, we see a series of surmounted obstacles and think maybe the horror we’re living will eventually subside.
Cadwell Turnbull: Part of the growing popularity might be in how emerging horror writers have used horror to explore social and political systems. We’ve seen the lone horror, the thing that can’t be known or named stalking victims. But that also exists in society, too. Invisible forces that alter the lives of individuals and communities. Hard to define forces like culture and fear and how they act upon people and within people. Our histories are filled with horrors and they are horrifying because often they can feel like monsters hiding under the surface. Modern writers are looking at systems, using horror to explore them. That interrogation is attractive.
Alongside a broader view, horror has also turned very introspective. It isn’t a mistake that some of the best horror movies of recent years have been deep character studies. Modern protagonists are messier, the monsters praying on them are messier, too. And there’s more gray between them. The VVitch is terrifying and empowering at the same time. Who is the monster there? One person, a great faceless evil, or the society that pushes one person towards it? I think horror is getting more comfortable with leaving things uneasy and unclear. No simple answers. I’m excited by that.
Gabino Iglesias: Horror has always been popular. The thing we’re seeing now is that it’s finally okay to say you like it because we’ve had huge mainstream explosions. The work of Stephen King has been there for decades, but recently we’ve seen things like the success of Josh Malerman’s Birdbox that bring in new readers. As for prestige, that comes from the quality of the writing. From ridiculously talented New York Times bestsellers like Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Stephen Graham Jones to influential voices like Kathe Koja, Brian Evenson, Thomas Ligotti, Tananarive Due, Alma Katsu, Carmen Maria Machado, Paul Tremblay, and many others, horror can go toe-to-toe with every other genre out there in terms of quality, and readers are discovering that every day.
Rachel Harrison: There’s a lot of room for experimentation in horror. For a genre that’s all about fear, horror creators are pretty fearless! There’s a general mindset of “let’s take risks, let’s try this. Let’s run with this wild idea and see what happens.” I think it’s because of that creative courage and the support and camaraderie within the horror community that the genre is thriving. It’s inspiring.
“Genre has been walked out of the corner and accepted at the dance.”–Josh MalermanJosh Malerman: A couple things come immediately to mind: 1) a lot of us current writers grew up in the “golden age” of the 1980’s, and we’ve never looked down on the books and movies from that era, not even into adulthood. In fact, the opposite has happened: we revere them more than ever now. And now we’re the ones writing the books and movies. 2) Artists like Quentin Tarantino began presenting “genre” just as viably as what people once considered “literary” or “higher” art. Genre has been walked out of the corner and accepted at the dance. Obviously I love that this has happened, but there was a certain thrill about loving this stuff when it was kept in the shadows, too, when it was borderline taboo to even like it, let alone love it. Used to feel like you were visiting a corner of existence. In a sense, a lot of us from this modern era have gotten to live with horror both ways: as an outsider weirdo and not. And I’ll take ‘em both.
Riley Sager: Lately, life has been more frightening than fiction, which always breeds interest in the genre. During scary times, people seek out scary stories, either to escape the real world or to see the real world reflected back at them with the hope it will help them make some sense of it.
Gus Moreno: I think part of it has to do with the glut of horror from the 80s and 90s. So many of us grew up watching or reading filler programming, either knockoff or low budget horror films filling the shelves at the local video rental place, or choosing a book out of the daunting Scholastic school catalog strictly because the cover looked cool (I once convinced my fourth grade class to choose a horror-thriller set in a snow storm because the cover had a snowman with its face partially removed, revealing the dead guy buried inside it). Cable plays a part in this too, constantly running flicks during the day that maybe didn’t hit the highs of their genres, but were still palatable to latchkey kids like me. So when we got older and were able to now appreciate the finer films and literature, we sought to combine our two loves, genre and stories that were ripe for interpretation and meant to be dissected.
Grady Hendrix: Get Out and The Walking Dead. TWD convinced gatekeepers and checkwriters that there was a mainstream audience hungry for straightforward tales of dead people chewing out the guts of the living. It was gory, pulpy, often ridiculous, and very, very lucrative. Then Get Out came along and showed that smart horror that stuck its fingers in our racial sensitivities and wiggled them around could make people rich, too. Not to sound crass, but the sound of progress is often the sound of a cash register, and in this case you had two wildly divergent horror properties that staked out either ends of the spectrum and showed that there was still plenty of gold left in these here hills (that have eyes).
Cassandra Khaw: I suspect it’s one part capitalism and one part ‘the world is on fire and it’s a relief to immerse yourself in a carefully architectured nightmare that you know will eventually end.’
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THERE’S A NEW WAVE OF SLASHER THRILLERS LATELY. CAN YOU TALK ABOUT WHAT SLASHER CINEMA AND TROPES MEAN, AND HOW THESE TROPES ARE EVOLVING?
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Riley Sager: Slasher cinema is often seen as, to paraphrase Sidney Prescott in Scream, a masked killer stalking some big-breasted woman who is always running up the stairs when she should be going out the front door. For many years, that was indeed the trope. And there’s comfort and, yes, fun in that familiarity. As a writer, it’s also fun to turn those tropes on their ear and give the reader something they’re not expecting. Let’s make the masked killer more nuanced. Let’s give those girls he’s stalking more depth and character-based reasons for running up the stairs instead of heading for the front door. Enough of us have done that—in both fiction and film—that the tropes have evolved. I don’t think there can be a slasher book or movie anymore that doesn’t feature strong female characters. Nor can writers simply rely on those old tropes. They are now required to offer something fresh, which is a good thing.
V. Castro: Slashers are all about survival. Survival is about instinct and has the ability to really get your adrenaline pumping. It can also attache you to the story of certain characters. The biggest issue I have with slashers are the same characters are chosen to survive time and time again. They have leaned towards problematic non inclusive stereotypes. And this is coming from a woman who has seen them all and loves them. However, I do feel it is time to pass the stories to people from other backgrounds to breathe fresh air into the trope.
Stephen Graham Jones: The slasher grew up on the movie screen. And then it came of age there, and then, for a while, it died there as well, under the weight of its own sequels and genre fatigue and competition from thriller-land. But we’re back now and have been for a while. The trick with the slasher, though, it’s that, since most of its convention-set is associated with film technique . . . how to render that on the page and still deliver to the reader that good old slasher feeling they know and love? Writing The Only Good Indians, I immediately ran into the problem of how to do slashercam—how to look through the killer’s mask, through the killer’s eyes? My workaround was a cut to what feels like second-person. Then for My Heart is a Chainsaw, of course I couldn’t pull that same trick, so, to get that immediacy you feel from film, I dialed over to present tense, and locked everything over the shoulder, and in the head of, a single character, and then tried my best to disguise all the camera angles and cuts—or, I tried to still get them into the reader’s head, but without ever saying “CUT TO” or “ANGLE ON.” Which is fun. But, as you say, the slasher’s forever mid-molt, it’s always changing into some new and even more dangerous thing. Scream wasn’t the first to have either itself or its characters know the slasher formula, but it was the one that wrapped it up in an entertaining enough way that it spawned a whole generation of clones, each of them tinkering with the ingredients and recipe in new and interesting ways and changing the slasher’s DNA even more. Which is wonderful. Each new mutation, I mean, it’s so hard to even want to look away from. And, as it happens, I want to play with that DNA as well, while still paying homage to all that’s come before. Look at Jason Voorhees from the original Friday the 13th all the way up to the 2009 version, right? He’s never stable, is always changing. Twice he’s a kid, once he’s a worm, and sometimes he’s a zombie, sometimes he’s an ambulance driver, while other times he’s in space, or in a title fight with Freddy—and that’s how it should be, that’s what the slasher is. It’ll never stop changing, it’ll never stop shifting. It’s what keeps it alive.
Grady Hendrix: The tropes are the same they’ve always been: a young girl in a remote place encounters an overwhelming physical presence, usually male, and has to use her wits and cunning to survive. That’s been the slasher template all the way back to Little Red Riding Hood and all the way forward to now. How we interpret that changes as the times change, however: it’s moved from being a cautionary tale, to being a tale of male violence, to being interpreted as a story of female resilience, and I’m pretty sure that before I die it’ll be interpreted as something else. But maybe it’s been all of those things at the same time all along? Maybe when we try to boil the slasher down to a thesis statement it gets soggy and falls apart in our hands? I like to think that a pack of teenagers watching Friday the 13th Part 2 on opening weekend in 1981 were all seeing the same images but getting different messages—inspiration, empowerment, exploitation, fear, horniness, adrenaline, nausea—all at the same time. Every generation thinks they invented sex, and the same could be said about the slasher movie.
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BODY HORROR SEEMS TO HAVE ORIGINATED AS A DESCRIPTOR FOR FILM, BUT HAS SINCE MIGRATED TO LITERATURE. WHAT DOES BODY HORROR MEAN TO YOU? HOW CAN THE GENRE BE USED TO DISRUPT GENDERED AND BODILY EXPECTATIONS?
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Grady Hendrix: Body horror has been part of horror literature ever since Mary Shelley’s gag-inducing descriptions of Victor Frankenstein’s extra credit project coming to life reached the printed page. Whether it’s the fears of filthy disease seething through the necrophilia fest of Dracula in 1897 or Lon Chaney’s particle accelerator pubic hair explosion in The Wolfman in 1941, horror books and movies always locate the worst possible betrayals as the ones our bodies carry out against us every day as they grow warts and pimples and ulcers and tumors and provide food and lodging for all kinds of viruses and bacteria and botflies until, ultimately, they’ll provide food and housing to maggots and maybe wild dogs. Horror’s been singing the same song for a couple of hundred years: nothing is stable, everything is transitory. At a moment when people are saying that race and gender aren’t stable concepts either but just another construction, horror is right there waiting to welcome that deconstruction with open arms.
Gabino Iglesias: Body horror takes the concepts of fear, disgust, pain, and evilness and makes them reside in the body. You can move out of a haunted house, but out physical form is something much harder to escape. The way trans writers are using horror to talk about their positionality is a perfect example of that the subgenre can do. For me, body horror is the perfect way of telling readers that stuff they can exorcise or shoot might be scary, but that thing growing inside you or slithering right under your skin? Yeah, that stuff can make you a lot more uncomfortable.
“We are alone in our bodies. There’s an isolation of experience.” –Rachel HarrisonAlma Katsu: I haven’t been widely exposed to body horror (yet) but I’m fascinated by it, because like most women, I have a complicated relationship with my body. Especially as you age, it seems bound to conspire against you or betray you. And Frankenstein—is that the original body horror story? I think it’s probably better suited to literature than film because it’s easier to explore very complicated feelings and emotions when you completely control point-of-view.
Josh Malerman: Sometimes, late at night, I think the two most frightening concepts are: loss of you mind and/or an unknown change to the body. This could be as simple as a bad LSD trip and/or puberty or as imaginative as an outside agent, a creature, propelling these circumstances. I love it all, because it’s beyond relatable, right? And what better place to examine a new state of mind, a new body, a new sense of identity, and discovering you may actually relate more to the new you than the old, than horror, that initial horror of change?
Rachel Harrison: We are alone in our bodies. There’s an isolation of experience. Only you know what it is to exist inside your body, to experience life in your body. If you suffer in your body, whether it be from something internal, such as an illness, or from something external, such as violence, it’s suffering you endure alone. It’s a profoundly difficult thing to grapple with. Art that acknowledges and confronts that can be very cathartic. It offers perspective and broadens our understanding of other’s experiences and our own. There’s a lot to explore in body horror. It can be written off as gore, but there’s way more to it and I’m optimistic about the future of body horror.
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WHAT BOOK/MOVIE/AUTHOR FIRST GOT YOU INTO READING HORROR?
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V. Castro: My culture was the first place I encountered horror with all the folktales and urban legends I grew up hearing about in Texas. But that also what drew me to storytelling. At the time I only knew Stephen King. There were no Latinas writing horror.
James Han Mattson: I’m going to be completely unoriginal here and say Stephen King, because, well, he really did introduce me to the genre. The reason I gravitated toward him, I think, is because he often showcased outsiders—the geeks and the nerds and the victims of bullying often became the heroes in his books, and since I was all three growing up, I really loved witnessing this reversal. The first horror movie I ever watched was Terror in the Wax Museum. It was at a sleepover, I remember, and I was transfixed and horrified, so much so that after the movie, when my friends wanted to play a game, I sat out because I couldn’t get the images out of my head. It was the first time that something I’d seen on TV genuinely scared me, and though I didn’t particularly love the feeling at the time, it piqued my curiosity something fierce.
Gus Moreno: Looking back, there were so many influences as a young child: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Mr. Boogedy, the Goosebumps books. I devoured horror films as I got older, but the writer who got me into reading adult horror is, oddly enough, Chuck Palahniuk. At nineteen, his novels were like nothing I had ever read before, so transgressive and seemingly without rules. After I had burned through his works, I started on his influences, one of them being Stephen King, who I thought was too commercial to really be scary. Reading The Shining, I realized how wrong I was, and only fell deeper into the genre from there.
“The editors of Fangoria and Famous Monsters of Filmland have a lot to answer for.” –Grady HendrixGrady Hendrix: The editors of Fangoria and Famous Monsters of Filmland have a lot to answer for. I wasn’t allowed to see R-rated movies, so I’d read about them in these magazines at the drugstore or gas station. The over-the-top splatterific photos, the groan-worthy punny captions, and the breathless descriptions of movies I’d never even heard of all tumbled over each other like a bunch of undead puppies, collapsing into a surreal gumbo of high concepts, dumb plot twists, and reality-warping gore gags that was all the come-on I needed to run away from home and join the circus.
Stephen Graham Jones: When I was twelve or so, I somehow saw The Howling, which terrified me enough to want to look away, but I was also so fascinated that I had to keep watching. My heart was changing, I mean, and my brain was writhing around into some new configuration. That same year, and probably because of The Howling, I got my hands on Whitley Strieber’s The Wolfen, and, all these years later, all these books later, I’m fairly certain that what I’m still trying to write, each time I set pen to paper, are the grandfather-wolf chapters from The Wolfen. In The Howling, I got to watch Eddie Quist bubble into a werewolf, which blew my mind and made the world at least three clicks bigger for me, forevermore, but those chapters in The Wolfen in the grandfather-wolf’s voice, they showed me the interior of one of these . . . these people. And that’s something I’ve never let go of, that, underneath the fur and the fangs, the hunger and the snarling, there’s a voice, there’s a thinking mind, there’s intention and regret and hope and failure and all of it. Yes, fiction works our empathy muscles out, that’s one of the things it does best. What horror fiction’s done for me is it taught me to always look past those fangs. Because there might be someone in there, saying something that needs to be heard. That won’t stop me from getting mauled—it’ll probably guarantee I get mauled, really—but, mid-maul, I might feel like I’ve made a connection, anyway. And that, as near as I can tell, is what life’s about.
Jess Lourey: It’s the easy answer but it’s the true one: Stephen King. I was thirteen years old when I picked up a copy of Night Shift at a garage sale, and I can still activate the horror pockets it created in my body by simply hearing the words “Graveyard Shift” or “The Lawnmower Man.” There were stories in there that might be called sci fi, or history, and definitely horror, but what they all did for me is scoop up my childhood fears and confusion and give them a container. There’s something powerful in that.
Josh Malerman: First horror novel I ever read was The Face of Fear by Dean Koontz (penname Brian Coffey when he published it). It was the one setting (an office building) that changed my idea of story. If an entire novel could take place in ONE location… and there are seemingly infinite locations… wouldn’t that mean there are endless stories to tell? Yeah, this blew my lid.
Cassandra Khaw: I think it was Clive Barker’s Weaveworld, which was so strangely sensual and terrifying and weird that it just stuck in my head.
Catriona Ward: When I was thirteen I began to dread going to bed. Every night, I would wake up in the dark with a hand in the small of my back, pushing me out of bed. I could feel every individual finger on the hand. It was probably the most terrified I have ever felt, before or since. It’s called a hypnogogic hallucination—they happen on the cusp of sleep and waking. But this all happened before google, and I didn’t know that. Not knowing what to do with such a strong, frightening experience was frightening in itself—what did it mean? If this was a normal occurrence why did no one talk about it? If it wasn’t a normal thing, what did it say about me?
When I read my first ghost story, The Monkeys Paw, by WW Jacobs, I realized that there was a place to put that fear. It could be channelled, pinned down and examined by words. I felt that fear again when I first read The Haunting of Hill House—I was paralyzed with terror while reading it at ten am on a sunlit weekend morning. But it was immensely comforting, to know that this fear was something that others had experienced, that they had made stories out of it.
Riley Sager: Definitely Stephen King. Growing up in the eighties, his books were everywhere, and each time I saw one of them in a bookstore I got scared just looking at the cover. That cat face on the cover of Pet Sematary haunted my childhood. But I also very much wanted to peek inside those books and see if they were as scary as I imagined them to be. It was both scary and tantalizing. Eventually, I worked up the courage to read The Shining. I couldn’t finish it because it frightened me too much. But by then I was hooked.
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WEIRD FICTION CAN OFTEN CROSS OVER INTO HORROR, AND BOTH FIT THE IDEA THAT “ART SHOULD DISTURB THE COMFORTABLE AND COMFORT THE DISTURBED,” YET HORROR IS ALSO BLAMED FOR EMBRACING FEAR AND DISCOMFORT FOR THE SAKE OF FEAR AND DISCOMFORT ALONE. HOW DOES ONE WRITE A RESPONSIBLE HORROR NOVEL? AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR THE PRIVILEGED TO SEEK OUT FEAR AS ENTERTAINMENT?
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James Han Mattson: This is a really good question, and one that I thought about a lot while writing my last novel. On the one hand, I think horror often embraces gratuitousness—in many ways, it’s pretty much camp. But even camp should be responsible in its depictions, meaning that though we as viewers have to dissociate when watching horror (unless, of course, you’re actually sociopathic or sadistic), the implicit messages about human life still resonate, and if it’s clear that a movie or book is heralding a particular life over others (for example, refusing to give a person of color any sort of agency before they’re slaughtered), then it becomes problematic. In order to write responsible horror, then, I think it’s important to understand the implicit messages you’re conveying while you write, and do your best to imbue your characters with complexity, even if they are all marching to their grisly demises.
:I think it’s important to understand the implicit messages you’re conveying while you write, and do your best to imbue your characters with complexity, even if they are all marching to their grisly demises.” –James Han MattsonCassandra Khaw: With an active interest in being responsible, I think. There isn’t a magic formula. It’s up to each author to look at their medium of choice and understand the shorthands that it uses, and to do the work of rising above those tropes. You have to be aware of who your genre hurts. You have to research and analyze why it hurts those people, how it hurts those people. And then you have to break away from the comfort of those problematic shortcuts.
As for what it means for the privileged to seek out fear as entertainment, I can only speculate.
Rachel Harrison: What scares each of us is very personal, but fear is universal. Fear is one of the most powerful emotions, and horror provides an opportunity for us to explore our fear, to better understand what we’re afraid of and why. I don’t believe horror is ever just purely entertainment, I think, like all art, it invites necessary introspection, and inspires empathy. As horror creators, I do think it’s important we’re intentional about what we’re inviting our audience to reflect on. Horror gets a lot of flak, but I really believe it’s an incredibly forward-thinking genre that’s constantly challenging the status-quo.
Catriona Ward: I think, whoever we are, we seek out fear. Sometimes it’s under the guise of entertainment – I wonder if we deliberately seek out versions of our fears that are cartoonish or over the top, because it’s reassuring. It tells us our terror can be parodied, reduced to manageable size. As I said earlier, I think horror that shares fear or discomfort should be performing an act of empathy. It should tell us we’re not alone. While I was writing The Last House on Needless Street I wanted to use familiar horror conventions to subvert some of the less helpful horror tropes that can sometimes be found in the genre—in particular depictions of trauma and mental health. It’s a living, breathing thing, this genre, and its brilliance lies partly in its ability to self-examine. Horror is in constant conversation with itself.
In my opinion all writing, horror or otherwise should be held to the same standards of responsibility. Tell a deeply felt story as honestly as you can—cast a new, weird light on the world.
Gus Moreno: I feel a responsibility to the characters. I just don’t want to get them wrong. The “get” part is the hardest thing about writing, because I don’t know if you ever really “get” who your characters are, but the more you put into them, the realer they become. And this doesn’t necessarily equate to words on the page. Just knowing the backstory of a character–even if it’s a story you tell yourself, or maybe an anecdote you feel captures the character’s spirit–helps with the story that’s filling up your pages. It may sound like extra work, but it’s really just you deciding not to take shortcuts. I don’t think the privileged hold a monopoly on seeking out fear as entertainment, or fear and discomfort for the sake of it, but I do believe horror acts as a sort of Danger Room, where we can experience our deepest fears and anxieties in a fictional space. Maybe we’re so dulled by the comforts of modern living, horror helps sharpen our senses again.
V. Castro: Writing a responsible horror novel means allowing people who have experienced real horror to write about it. Many times you see gratuitous sex, torture, ect. as titillation. Don’t use other people’s pain for your own gratification or benefit. I’m tired of women being portrayed as victims by men who have zero clue what we go through day in and day out. You want the real story? Step aside.
“Writing a responsible horror novel means allowing people who have experienced real horror to write about it.” –V. CastroAlma Katsu: A great question. There’s a place for horror in our literature because there’s plenty of horror in everyday life. Reading or watching horror helps us make sense of it when we experience it.
I’m not a fan of horror as pornography, existing merely to provide titillation. Of course, you quickly get to the slippery slope of questioning what’s the point of art, when do you cross the line into censorship, and who gets to say what’s okay and what’s not. Does the writer have an obligation to write moral fiction?
With horror, I think you must consider your responsibility as an author. The question I ask myself is, what is the lesson you want readers to take away from this story? It doesn’t have to be falsely uplifting or even necessarily constructive. It might illustrate the horror of an intractable situation. The point of a story can be to elicit sympathy. At the end of the day, art should make us better people, not provide an excuse to wallow in the worst of human nature. It shouldn’t be an excuse to celebrate violence or terror but to examine and understand it.
Grady Hendrix: I’m with John Waters who said, “Good taste is the enemy of art.” I don’t know if what any of us do is art, but I do know that the idea of a “responsible” horror novel gives me the cold sweats. I wish more writers would let their hair down and leave blood on the page. It’s easy not to be a racist, sexist transphobe but that also doesn’t mean you have to tone it down to avoid scaring the horses. I hope most writers start their day turning their Asshole Meter to zero and then dive into the yuckiest and most embarrassing parts of themselves and smear that goop across the printed page. Horror is entertainment, and its first job should be to entertain, but it does that best when it’s so personal it scares the person putting it down on paper.
Josh Malerman: I’ve heard people say there’s a sense of having survived a horror story, a cathartic, triumphant finale. And I get that, but I’ve always been more of a sensualist. In almost all ways. With music… how does it feel? With relationships, conversations, food, drink, books… how does it make you feel? And from the get, horror has made me feel alive, like I’m rising above the ordinary, in mind/body/soul, and for that? I don’t’ love to examine the why of it. As Berry Gordy used to say of the late-night mixing sessions going on in Motown studios here in Detroit, “Are the janitors tapping their toes? Then we’re done here.”
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WHAT’S THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE WHEN IT COMES TO CRAFTING A TERRIFYING NARRATIVE?
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Gus Moreno: Being patient. So much of terror/horror relies on dread, escalation, rhythm, pace, and this all takes time. And time allows those pesky questions to seep into your brain: am I taking too long? Is it painfully obvious where the story’s going? Is this even scary? Managing my inner monologue while trying to maintain patience as the plot unfurls is my biggest challenge.
Riley Sager: Not everyone is frightened by the same things. The trick is to find a way to make the horrors specific to the characters you’re writing about but universal enough for the reader to also be scared.
Cadwell Turnbull: I think the biggest challenge is maintaining tension. This goes beyond just the threat of harm to characters. It is the sense of harm: what a character thinks, feels, fears when they’re not in immediate danger. Or what the reader feels even in the quieter moments, when action is accelerating or decelerating. In my mind the scariest stories maintain dread throughout, at least on the psychological level. There’s a sense of borrowed time, the anticipation that something will happen even in quiet or light moments. If I am sitting at the edge of my seat or standing up, I know the story is working for me on a gut level. There’s tricks to building and keeping dread, but a lot of it is intuitive, which makes it hard to emulate.
Rachel Harrison: When it comes to horror, the instinct is to prioritize the scare. But what terrifies me may not terrify my reader, and it can be easy to get stuck speculating about what is scary, to wonder “is this scary enough?” However, the experience of being scared is something that everyone can relate to. The challenge is to create a compelling narrative, a killer atmosphere, and characters who feel genuine and lived in, and to absorb the reader into the world, blur the line between what the characters are feeling and what the reader is feeling, to get the reader to share in the character’s experience of fear. It’s getting the readers that invested that’s the challenge.
“I like to imagine a single low note played on a synthesizer as I’m writing a novel.” –Josh MalermanJosh Malerman: I like to imagine a single low note played on a synthesizer as I’m writing a novel. And the moment I hear two notes, I need to pause and examine if that change, that lift, was worth it or if it’s going to break the mood, the tension, that I had going. Like a song, right? You could have a tremendous, tiny groove going, and maybe a big explosion will do wonders for the song, but maybe never getting any bigger than what you had works best, too. So, it’s that awareness for me, where I like to make sure I’m not just adding notes to add notes.
Grady Hendrix: Sitting down to write the thing in the first place. There are thousands of horror movies and books and comics and games out there that already do so much with the genre you have to either have a wildly inflated ego or a pathological inability to shut up to think you have anything to contribute. I have plenty of both.
Gabino Iglesias: Writing horror has the same challenges every other kind of fiction has…and then one more. The question here includes the word “terrifying,” but what is that? Zombies make me laugh. Cancer scares the shot out of me and stays in my head every time a friend or acquaintance dies from it. I love reading about ghosts, but nonfiction narratives written by folks who have experienced sexual abuse devastate me. Terrifying is subjective, and learning that is something that takes new horror writers a while to find out.
Catriona Ward: For me, horror writing is based on sharing my fears, making myself vulnerable. If I’m not afraid of something I can hardly expect a reader to be. It’s an empathetic exchange—I’m holding out a hand through the page, as it were, asking the reader to walk with me through the dark. I think mining oneself and one’s feelings like that can be difficult. Trying to cage fear, to contain it in the architecture of writing is a delicate, precise business. You can’t just pour feeling onto the page—you have to channel it, into a fully realized world, into characters and plot and stakes. You have to give it life outside your experience. While writing The Last House on Needless Street I wanted to take the reader so deep into the characters’ point of view that they felt they were wearing them like a skin. I think there’s something frightening about that, in itself, to be so tightly contained in someone’s consciousness.
Stephen Graham Jones: Just having the nerve to even write it. That’s always my problem. I think of an idea, a character pops up to process through that meatgrinder, and . . . everything’s there, we’re ready to get started, Steve. Except, I get too scared. I don’t know how else to write fiction other than to completely invest it, emotionally and intellectually. These are never just chess pieces I’m sliding around a storyboard, I mean. If I’m writing a haunted house thing, then I’m in that house, and it’s for sure probably haunted. I mean, I get the tension-tension-release mechanics of a scare—they’re also how laughs happen—but that doesn’t mean I don’t get creeped out. A lot of the stuff I write comes from nightmares, too. Early on, way back, I had the idea that I could give those away, I could trap them on the page, that I could get them out of my head. Not the case. Writing them down just gives them higher resolution. And, now they’re this much closer to being real. At the same time? The way I know I’m writing something that might have a chance of being good, it’s if I’m scared. So, it’s a horror catch-22: the only way to get something decent down on the page, for me, is to get all terrified. And the effect of that, man, it’s that I do that thing we all do when we get thoroughly creeped out in some lonely place—I run. I race for the end of the story. I want to get back to the light, please. All this darkness, man, it’s not a good place to have to live. Give me the sun breaking over Woodsboro, please. It won’t make the long night before in any way worth it, but it’ll at least mean we’ve got a few hours of light, now. And that’s all you can really hope for.
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WHAT’S YOUR ADVICE FOR AUTHORS JUST STARTING OUT IN THE GENRE?
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Cassandra Khaw: Always choose the weirder option, the more authentic one, the one that makes you go ‘but will anyone buy this?’
James Han Mattson: Know that horror is much more than just blood and guts. What you write and how you craft your work says a lot about how you interpret the world. Understand that when you write horror you’re given this immense opportunity to spotlight character: the immediacy of a life-or-death situation reveals one’s true emotional composition, and this can often surprise a reader, which is, in my estimation, a very good thing.
Stephen Graham Jones: Read all the horror, of course, which I assume you’re already doing, and won’t stop doing, but, just as important, read well outside your home field, too. Go walking in historical memoir. Read some botany stuff. Try a romance on. Dive into the political waters. I feel confident that horror made by people who only interact with other horror can end up being insular, and if that happens, then we’re just this weird, dark carnival happening way out on the periphery of things, and nobody’s got to pay attention to us, no matter how loud and bloody we get. And anyway, you reading botany, and then infusing your work with that, that’s good for all of us. It’s strange and unexpected DNA that keeps horror vital. Yes, our bones are made of Poe and Jackson and King and Straub, Psycho and Dracula, but, over the decades, the eras, we re-flesh that skeleton over and over again, and find out that it can move in completely unexpected ways. I mean, Studs Terkel’s oral history method of getting a story told, who’d have ever thought that might be the perfect delivery method for the zombie apocalypse, right? Well, none of us suspected that, at least not until Max Brooks did it, with World War Z. And, even Dracula itself—it’s epistolary, which is another kind of out-there form. But man if it doesn’t work just perfectly. So, go out there, find those strands of alien DNA, and then smuggle them back home, see what kind of better monster you can build.
Gus Moreno: Read all different kinds of writing. Yes I’m talking about all the different horror subgenres, but other genres too. Don’t sell yourself short by deciding your book exists strictly in this one category. You’re writing a book, period. Reading a wide variety of books will help you find tools to use in your horror that someone only focused on horror books might not be exposed to.
Catriona Ward: Firstly, read read read and secondly, write write write! There’s a sad truth, which I have discovered over the years—no one can read the books you didn’t write. And no one can write them for you. It takes endless practice, deep concentration, the persistence to keep coming back to the page time and again even when you don’t feel like it. Other authors are your best teachers, so read widely and voraciously, not just within your own genre but everything. Reading is never wasted, in my opinion. Everything, somehow, feeds the weird engine within. Try not to think too much about what agents and publishers might want—the only part of the process you can control is what you write. So write the strange, passionate book of your heart.
Grady Hendrix: Make it personal and swing for the fences. What you think the market wants is wrong. What your editor or agent thinks the market wants is wrong. Writing what you think will win you readers will only get you ignored. Dig down into the most embarrassing, grossest, most shameful parts of yourself and find a way to get them on the page in a way that’s fun, and readers will respond because chances are they have similar secret shames and they’ll feel compelled to buy your books from a sick fascination at seeing someone just like them only without the good sense to bottle all that stuff up inside show their mess in public. As a back-up plan, make it big, make it wild, and make it uniquely yours so that even if you fail, people still won’t believe a book that bonkers exists.
Josh Malerman: To get rid of the words “good” and “bad” in your rough drafts. Rough drafts are made to be broken and they’re made to prove to yourself that you can get this big work of art done. The rewrites are hell, but they’re also where you actually see, where you literally see the story getting better. I’m not big on “bests” and “worsts” but there’s the best thing you ever read and the worst thing you ever read and chances are whatever you sit down to write will land somewhere on that spectrum. And if you bust either end of that spectrum? Legendary.
V. Castro: Find your voice and don’t be afraid to express it. You don’t know who will benefit from your message or you just being an author. I truly feel horror digs deep into places that other places cannot. That is probably why when you’re a fan it’s until death! There is a freedom in horror so take advantage of that.
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WHAT DO YOU SEE AT THE FUTURE OF HORROR FICTION?
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Grady Hendrix: More.
V. Castro: I want the future of horror to be an explosion of stories by and about people from marginalized communities. If not now, then when? We all have amazing tales to tell so let us tell them as other people have been allowed to express so freely.
Gabino Iglesias: The future of horror fiction is more of what we’re seeing now: more diversity in every sense. The future is more fearless narratives that unapologetically engage with identity, history, bigotry, cliches, politics, etc. The future is more horror from marginalized voices and from writers who were fearful of writing it before because they thought it would mean a career spent in obscurity. Horror isn’t going anywhere except new places, and readers will happily go wherever it takes them.
Josh Malerman: I think something happened when the internet descended like a dome above us, where there is no obscure anymore, and there is no singular path for fashion, art, books, genre to follow. So I see the future of horror being multiple scraggly paths, one is serious and dark, one is explosive and colorful, one is heavy, one is fun, another is reconfiguring time-tested horror stories, and another is being so imaginative as to erode the walls of reality. And I think all these paths can and will co-exist at the same time and if any one thing feels “hot” for a minute, well it’s just a minute before the other paths catch up again and horror continues into all directions together again.
Cadwell Turnbull: More voices and perspectives. And an expansion of what horror is because of it. There is a lot of human experience that hasn’t made it to the page or seeped into popular consciousness. There’s still so much room to explore, so many terrifying things to poke at, or glimpse between our fingers. And many many more monsters to follow us into our dreams.
Riley Sager: I think the future of horror is already here. We’re seeing more stories that address racism, economic inequality, and injustice. The world isn’t solely populated by rich, straight, white people. There are other stories to be told, and horror fiction is doing a fantastic job of telling them.
Jess Lourey: There’s no better vehicle than horror for calling out social injustice. When it comes to film, Get Out is the gold standard today, but before that, there was the original Candyman calling out racism, The Stepford Wives (film and book) calling out sexism, Invasion of the Body Snatchers calling out conformity/government control, and so many, many more examples. I hope that continues to be the role of horror in film and fiction, that and flat-out terror.
Rachel Harrison: More! An abundance of horror! An all-you-can-eat horror buffet! I believe the genre will continue to expand and innovate. Exciting things ahead.
Cassandra Khaw: More diversity, I hope. More people taking chances. More acknowledgement of work from countries outside the Global North. More respect for works from the Global South.
