I love a good horror story. I even like a bad horror
story far more often than I should. What I don’t like is seeing a talented
writer sabotage the potential of their story. Below are a few things that I
implore all you horror writers out there to please, please not do (or at least
think very carefully if it is really integral to the story that you do so.)
Making the protagonist
[or any key character] a writer. Far and away, this is my number one
pet peeve. Do you know how many careers exist out there? Millions. Do you know
how many people make their living as a writer these days? Few. This smacks of
laziness and self-absorption—more times than not, it’s the equivalent of
inserting the author into the story. Nothing personal, authors, but we readers
don’t care about you. We would like, however, to care about your story.
I mean, seriously. Make your protagonist a software
designer, a gas station attendant, a lawyer, someone running for city council,
someone who drives a street cleaner…anything! Horror is such an imaginative
genre and I fail to understand why writers, after dreaming up fantastic
scenarios and creatures and even entire worlds, stop short when it comes to
their characters’ professions. “Write what you know” is not meant to be taken
literally and honestly it doesn’t apply to the weird tale. There is this
fantastic thing called the Internet that most of us have access to. Five
minutes on it and you can learn enough about a profession to apply it to a
character if the profession itself is not central to the story. You might need
a whole half hour if it is.
This practice made a bit of sense a few decades ago when
being a mid-list writer was something you could make a career out of and still
be free to battle the demon in the sky or under the bed, something that can be
hard to make believable for a person with a 9-5 job and its requisite
interactions. But in this day and age technology has completely changed the
workforce. People work all sorts of hours in all sorts of places. It’s not hard
to adapt this background to your story.
Exception that
proves the rule: early Stephen King. ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining. But Misery and
The Dark Half and seemingly every other book he’s written since 1985? Not so
much. And he’s a master storyteller. Not that I don’t love those books, some
very much so, but it’s gotten ridiculous.
Setting your
story in the world of academia. Hey, academia is a dry world and needs
a bit of enlivening, eh? And all the chances for forbidden knowledge! Look,
many of my friends (authors and otherwise) make their living in academia and I’ve
nothing against the occasional story using it for a backdrop, but like the
protagonist writer, it generally comes off like a lack of imagination, the
writer’s equivalent of a binky. Throw that binky away and challenge your
imagination!
Once more, this made sense in decades past as it provided
an easy way for a character to get in contact with forbidden information. But
technology has changed that paradigm, and anyone with Internet access can do
the same. Truthfully, the nut in his basement obsessing over something weird on
the Internet is a far more believable archetype than the academic obsessing
over ancient texts in a stuffy library. And I love stuffy libraries. But I can’t
say I believe that’s where the door to other dimensions is going to appear, and
few writers have convinced me otherwise.
Exception that
proves the rule: Lovecraft. But that’s because he’s Lovecraft.
Getting all
meta. This is becoming a big problem in a lot of current horror fiction
I read. Making a horror story a commentary on a horror story with knowing winks
comes across arch and too often as a substitute for characterization. If the
writer can’t make me care about his characters, then trying to show me how
clever and aware he is won’t improve anything; it will just make the taste of
the story that much more sour. It’s the worst kind of writerly navel-gazing and
comes across as an incredibly limiting perspective. I want to get lost in the
story, not constantly be reminded that I’m just a dude sitting in a chair
reading the story. As in the other annoyances above, it’s a failure of
imagination.
Perhaps it’s not fair to single out horror stories for
this; it’s a problem of culture (thanks Internet!) And I think it’s sometimes
the result of grappling with the fact that no one knows where exactly the weird
tale can go right now. Technology makes it hard to be alone and isolated, key
components in many a horror tale. But sending up the traditions of the horror
tale doesn’t make for a good story either. It’s like making a comedic horror
film; it almost never works. You are working in a genre of the strange and fantastic;
use your imagination!
Exception that
proves the rule: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. But his subsequent
work makes it appear this was probably a lucky fluke. Fantastic novel, though.
There are other, more minor annoyances but these are my
personal big three. And of course all of this is subjective, as anything is
when discussing art. If you love horror tales with a writer working in the
backdrop of academia while dropping clever asides about the novel he is writing
that just might come true, more power to you. All I ask, is that with the
limitless possibilities of the imagination, writers consider that there is more
than one tale to tell.
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