Who’s Afraid of a Horror Book?
It's October, people, and almost All Hallows Eve, so this month's letter is devoted to what's scary. Because of my taste for disaster, I read a lot of books and stories that are intended to be scary, with mixed results. Gore is not always scary and neither is violence and cruelty unless you know how to pair it with elements of circumstance that evoke horror. So if you want to write scary, if you want to trigger a horror response in the reader, you should read writers who really know about horror.
Let's start with Wilkie Collins who wrote The Woman In White which was published in 1860. Wilkie knows that hysteria is scary. Hysteria is that unrelenting feeling of terror that slowly takes hold as we realize that we are in an inescapable situation with a powerful person or people who intend to take whatever they want from us no matter how much we suffer or even if it kills us. The hero, Laura Fairleigh, finds herself in exactly this situation when she marries the man her father picks out for her, a man who manipulates her into signing over her fortune, cuts her off from her beloved half-sister, and commits her to an asylum under a false name.
Another very scary story is one by Anton Chekhov from 1900 titled "In The Ravine." This time, the hero is a 13-year-old bride named Lipa who has been persuaded by her mother to marry the rich eldest son of a corrupt family dealing in bootleg vodka and stolen merchandise. Her trouble will actually start with the family's other daughter-in-law, Aksinya, who has a knack for making money but has produced no children. Then Lipa's husband will be arrested for counterfeiting and sent to Siberia. Then she will give birth to a son, Nikifor, who will become the immediate favorite of Lipa's father-in-law, who will begin retitling all the family's holdings in Nikifor's name. Lipa's one failing, the one that causes her downfall, is being 13, too young to see what a person like Aksinya is capable of doing to protect her place in the hierarchy.
One last story that continues to mortify many years later is Capote's In Cold Blood about the Clutter murders in small-town Holcomb, Kansas at the tail end of the American prosperity of the 1950s. The culprit here is again hysteria, the kind produced when a mass murder takes place far from an urban area. Though the hysteria starts from an unexpected source, from two small-time crooks named Perry Smith and Dick Hickok, who are just out of jail and following down a piece of cell-block hearsay about a safe located in the Clutter home believed to contain thousands of dollars. Some of the book's horror is in the massacre itself. But much of it comes from watching Perry and Dick -- suffering delusions caused by a terror of returning to prison and never escaping this uniquely American nightmare of an existence -- as they break into a house, discover the money was only a fantasy, and fly into a homicidal rage.
This time I’m recommending FREE GUY because it combines concepts from GROUNDHOG DAY, THE MATRIX, EDGE OF TOMORROW, SOURCE CODE, and THE TIMETRAVELER’S WIFE, movies that are all about characters who have figured out that they can step outside their unpleasant reality at certain moments, move around in time, and make changes that will alter the trajectory of events and end their unfair oppression and/or the oppression of the innocent by selfish overlords.
For any new readers: My new novel, Tania the Revolutionary, is available on Amazon for Kindle and paperback or Barnes & Noble for eBook.