Oh, Horror!

The horror genre is one, I must admit, that has never really appealed to me.   Like any good child of the 1980s I read Goosebumps and then Point Horror to ease myself into the darker world of real horror writing to fuel the torment of my adolescence.  I didn’t really get on with it, discovered Mills and Boon and so fuelled the hopeless romance of my adolescence instead.

Having said that, this is not a genre that I avoid.  I have read some Stephen King novels and found Carrie to be excellent.  I don’t find the concept of haunting frightening, but instead the reaction of people under stress or some psychosis.  What could possibly happen in reality is always worse than something impossible.  Something truly dark, truly horrid that lives within us all, but we do not speak of it.  When it is uncovered and we face it, then I believe horror is seen. In 120 Days of Sodom, De Sade wanted to create "the most impure tale that has ever been written since the world exists."  It tells of rape, murder, kidnap, abuse and torture.  The heroes are the worst that men can be, and the crimes of the book are given in terrible detail.  Generally this book is not classed as horror, but as either Gothic writing or pornography.  I read it as part of a Surrealism course at University and found it very challenging.  It is entirely different and apart from anything else I have ever read and is not a work that I wish to emulate.  It describes real crimes and horrors that can and have happened to real people.  It is a piece of true horror writing.

The creation of tension in a book is a great skill.  I have recently read two horror novels that both work with tension very expertly and both have ghosts.  Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black is a great piece of claustrophobic horror.  The whole book was enhanced by my reading of it whilst my husband was working away.  I would sit in bed alone, un-nerving myself whilst the rat that lived in the loft scrambled and scratched away.  Very atmospheric.   Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger was a different kind of tension.  Because the ghost is not seen by the narrator, and indeed is doubted several times, the reader has to choose whether the ghost is real, or a manifestation of the losses caused to the Ayres family.  But when the ghost is haunting, the tension is wonderfully and chillingly written.

I think that my story will not be a horror.  That is not to say however that only nice things will happen.  If it is to reflect life, then tension, and indeed unpleasantness, will be addressed.