Why horror?

Every writer who concentrates their efforts on a particular genre gets asked this question, I imagine. Certainly, people who write romance novels, or mysteries, or techno-thrillers, they must all encounter their share of curious questions, polite inquiries, from others who wonder what drew them to their particular muse.

But I imagine they don't have to contend with the look.

There's a slight shudder that comes with asking “Why horror?” -- something between delight and revulsion. You can tell, when someone asks you, that they're looking to your face for an answer before you can speak -- for some unsuspected deformity, some outward sign of your barely-hidden perversion. Something that marks you as Other.

The question really means, “What's wrong with you?”

It's all right. I don't mind. Look closer, if you like, watch my face and eyes, make sure you know where my hands are as I try to answer that.

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The earliest horror I can remember is the comic book.

I can remember the artwork, the style of the writing. I couldn't tell you the title, but I feel sure it must have been a classic EC Comics reprint -- Tales From The Crypt, perhaps, or one of its close cousins. There was more than one short, garish little story in it, but I only remember one. The one that gave me nightmares.

I don't know how old I was. Five? Six? I don't know where the comic had come from or who thought it would be a good idea to give it to me. I don't remember any of these little details. I just remember the comet.

There was a man, you see, a criminal, who by some circumstance found himself at an amusement park while running from the police. He hid for a while in a fortune teller's tent, and she told him his fortune -- he would be killed by a falling comet. Disbelieving and angry, he kills her, he runs, he's quickly killed -- by a falling car that slid off the tracks of an amusement park ride.

I don't think I need to tell you the name of the ride.

You can go ahead and laugh, now, if you need to. It was only a comic book, you tell yourself, and that's true enough. You can laugh, so long as you keep in mind just how potent and primal, how powerful the simple combination of words an pictures was to my child's mind, how sharp and how easily this simple story cut deep and buried itself in my dreaming mind.

I had bad dreams that night and I couldn't sleep and I remember, curled up and terrified and crying, recounting the story's events to my mother, whom I'd woken up in the middle of the night to comfort me.

It seems, as I think back on it now, that the amusement ride car had a face emblazoned on the front, and it was that leering face that would not leave my mind and let me sleep; that face that waited for me each time I closed my eyes.

But at a deeper level, it wasn't that terrible smile or the fortune teller's death or the criminal's death or any of the story's lurid details that terrified me so deeply. It was just simply fate. If I had been exposed to the idea of fate before at such a young age, it had never been so simply and powerfully. My mind was stuck on the idea that death was certain and inevitable; that the manner of one's death might be pre-ordained and unavoidable; that waiting somewhere for me and for everyone I loved there was our own private, leering comet. Indifferent and implacable, smiling its contempt.

I remember that there was some debate between my parents, unsmiling, about whether I should be allowed to have comics that gave me nightmares. In the end, I don't remember what their final decision was. I got rid of the comic book myself, in a manner that would only make sense to a child: I dropped it down a hole -- slid it into the tight space between my bed and the wall and let go of it, let it fall down into dark. Made it go away.

Months later, when it was time for me to clean under my bed, I remembered what I'd done with the comic book and realized it had to still be there. I could bring it back into the light, and maybe (I didn't understand this impulse, or why it thrilled me the way it did) -- I could read it again. I could see if it was still just as scary as I remembered.

It wasn't there.

I don't have an explanation for that. The simplest answer, I suppose, is that my mother found it and threw it away. (Although I can't imagine what she'd been doing, cleaning out just one item from under my bed.) That's the simplest explanation and I've never asked her to confirm it. Sometimes I imagine that somehow I really did make it go away -- that I somehow willed it out of existence. Unlikely, I suppose. In my more whimsical moments, I like to assume that it simply left -- that the comic itself went off in search of other children to terrorize and to infect with a lifelong interest in horror. That's the least plausible answer of them all and the one that delights me the most, and so I keep it close to my heart and think about it some mornings when I'm believing six impossible things before breakfast.

I have no idea what comic book that was; I've found no trace or mention of that story anywhere in the literature since. I would dearly love to track it down and own a copy of it again, now that I'm allegedly an adult. So that I finally could -- dare I think it? -- read it again.

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My childhood was filled with monsters.

I don't mean that I was, as many children are, besieged by creatures of the imagination, unbidden and unwanted -- the thing in the closet, the lurker under the bed. My monsters were different. I sought them out. Vampires and Frankenstein's creations and werewolves and creatures from the swamps -- any horror that had captured men's imaginations captured mine.

I couldn't tell you why. Maybe, like I said, that first taste of horror had infected me with it. Maybe I looked around at other children my age and just knew that I was, quite simply, not like them, and I was looking around for some viewpoint other than human. (This was probably the same impulse that led me to a period when I was about six or seven years old when I was insisting that I was not human but was, in fact, a wolf.)

Whatever the reason I went looking for monsters, I did. Book after book of them from the library. Not much fiction, curiously enough, but non-fiction -- accouts of legends and lore, books about movies, books about books, books about costumes and makeup to transform yourself into a monster. I read widely and voraciously and even wrote reports for school about werewolves and the like.

I remember, at a tender age, deciding that I was tired of reading about vampire novels and wanted to read one for myself for a change. I tried reading Dracula but couldn't get into it, and went in search of something a little more contemporary. So I read Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot.

'Salem's Lot is, arguably, not for children.

The book scared the hell out of me and turned me into a lifelong King fan. It opened my eyes up to a broader world of horror fiction and, as I got a little older, turned me on to the harder stuff -- H.P. Lovecraft, Clive Barker.

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As far as I know, I've been writing stories nearly as long as I've known how to read. I don't remember a time when I wasn't writing. So you think that with all of this in my background, I would have started writing horror from a very early age.

But I didn't. It simply never occured to me, any more than it would occur to a fish to write about water. I did try to write at least one vampire tale during my junior high years, I recall, but the idea of being a horror writer didn't cross my mind.

I knew what I was going to be when I grew up -- I was going to be a science fiction writer.

Science fiction and horror are close enough cousins. They're both examples of speculative fiction, of writing about the world as it isn't. Science fiction became the overriding obsession of my youth. I think at some level, I had set aside my interest in imaginary monsters as “childish,” in the way that only children really can, and turned my attention instead toward aliens (who might exist, after all).

Science fiction writers were my heroes, and I was going to be one, so I wrote science fiction.

The only problem is that I wasn't particularly good at it.

I wasn't bad at it, I suppose, but the main problem that I had -- and the main reason that magazines kept rejecting my journeyman efforts -- was that elements of the fantastic, the inexplicable -- in short, the unscientific kept creeping into my stories. Yet it never quite occured to me to simply give it all up and start writing stories of the fantastic.

What changed all that was a game called Vampire: The Masquerade.

If you're not familiar with it, it's a role-playing game; and if you're not too familiar with those, well, ignore for a moment the dice and the rulebooks and the miniatures and all the geeky little trappings. Running a role-playing game is, at a basic level, just telling a story, as pure and simple we've been doing around campfires for thousands of years. There's a little more to it than that, and it's a little more collaborative than that, but in the end, the success or failure of it comes down to how well you can spin a tale and make your players believe it for a little while.

I was very good at it.

In other words, I scared the hell out of them.

I didn't even mean to, not really -- I was just telling a story and leading my players deeper into a world of vampires, and I could see their wide eyes and uneasy expressions in the dark and I knew I had them. I had the same power over them that Stephen King had had over me all those years before, and I loved it.

It didn't take too long from there for me to start thinking, “Well, if I can scare the hell out of my players, then could I do it to readers . . . ?”

And with that -- with simply giving myself permission to start thinking about writing horror -- the ideas started to come. Ideas for science fiction stories had always come few and far between, but ideas for horror stories were coming almost faster than I could write them down, and there were so many of them that I had to write them down so I didn't forget them, notebooks and electronic files and scraps of paper, like trying to catch a rainstorm in a paper cup.

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One last point.

In my late teens, I started having anxiety attacks. I still have them, sometimes. I don't like to talk about it much.

I don't honestly believe that everything in life happens for a reason. I don't think there's a master plan. My anxiety attacks took me to a very dark place, showed me just how deep fear can go, and I don't even have the comfort of believing it happened for a reason.

But I can make a reason.

I can be Prometheus, bringing darkness instead of fire. If I had to go to that place, I can come back from it. And tell you what it was like.

+   +   +

All I've done here so far, admittedly, is to tell you about my experiences with horror, and how I came to it, and that all seems like a very fancy way of avoiding the central question. Like I've been distracting you with the specifics to avoid talking about the universal.

So: why horror? When you ask me that, you're not just asking what draws me to horror fiction -- but why would anyone be interested in it?

(Maybe, whether you want to admit it or not, you'll be hoping that I'll explain why you're interested in horror. It's all right -- I won't tell anyone.)

I think before we can even start on that one, we need to take a step back and look at an even larger question:

Why fiction?

Seriously. Why fiction? Why stories? The storytelling impulse is as old as the human race itself -- I'd argue that it's a defining characteristic of the human species. But why do we do it? Why do we tell the lives of people who never existed and places that never were? And why are other people so interested in these lies?

Brian Eno, musician and producer, once said in an interview:

“The whole point of art, as far as I'm concerned, is that art doesn't make any difference. And that's why it's important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they're not real. You know they've been put on for you. And you know that you've agreed to participate in them. Artists deal in this rather nebulous area I call 'the rehearsal of empathy.' You're rehearsing a repertoire of feelings that you might have about things, of ways of reacting to things, of how it would feel to be in this situation. How it would feel to be in that person's place? What would I have done? Such questions are the most essential human questions because they deal with how we negotiate as mental beings through a complicated universe.”

The “rehearsal of empathy” does seem to me to be an important point of fiction. Maybe, for all I know, it's really the only point. It's an idea, anyway. It works for me.

There's a lot to be frightened about in the world. I don't need to trot out any list of bogeymen here -- you have your own, I'm sure, your own personal list of fears and terrors that you build up and reinforce when you watch the news, when you walk down a city street, when you send your child off alone to school. All of those leering comets.

Frankly, I don't know how we get through the day without curling up in a corner and screaming.

But stories help. If you'll indulge me in another quotation: G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

I am a writer. I write about horrors and leering comets and I am a maker of dragons, and I unleash my dragons for you to fight and walk away unharmed. It may be a crude form of magic, but it's the magic I have.