I’m a mystery writer and reader, but for a couple of weeks every summer, I read a bunch of horror novels. Horror novels don’t really scare me, but they do help me scare myself, and that stimulates my writing. Yesterday, I was reading Elizabeth Hand’s Wylding Hall in bed. I was about a third of the way through when I decided to grab a quick nap, so I put the book aside and rolled over. That’s when I felt a little twitch above my left shoulder blade. It was, of course, a minor spasm from shifting position, but the first thought that came to my mind was: Someone with tiny fingers is tapping me on the back. I don’t know how you would respond to that possibility, but I grabbed my bedside notepad and wrote that down. I may never use that image, but the feeling will creep into my prose. For me, horror and mystery are co-dependent roomies who live in the same icky basement apartment of the psyche. They steal each other’s clothes and bicker about the nature of the cosmos.
You can skip this part:
That tension between the genres is interestingly (said the English Professor) demonstrated by Arthur Conan Doyle when he attempts to re-write Poe’s moody and sinister “The Cask of Amontillado” as a story called “The New Catacomb.” Doyle replaces the mad, monologuing Montressor with the dishonored, hyper-rational Julius Burger, thus transforming the horror story into a crime story (that he wishes was a horror story). I would say it’s ironic that the “Cask” is more mysterious than “Catacomb,” but it’s not ironic when one writer is just better than the other. Oh, and can we talk about how weird it is that the most hyper-logical sleuth in the world, Sherlock Holmes, was created by a guy who was deep into turn of the century Spiritualism? I’m talking ghosts and fairies, people.
Okay, come back:
Last week I devoured a horror novel narrated by a man revisiting dark and confusing childhood memories, trying to make sense of them in ways he couldn’t when he was six years old. I found the novel riveting and read it in a single sitting. However, because I suffer from generalized imposter syndrome, I punished myself for enjoying the book by reading its bad reviews.
And wow, there were a lot of bad reviews. Most of them said, “This book isn’t scary.”
I had to think about that. The story was definitely disturbing, but it didn’t raise my heart rate.
“Scary” is a curious and limiting standard. When someone’s writing is considered scary, does that mean the people who read it are genuinely, viscerally afraid? Because that’s what I think scary is, but when I read the blurbs on horror novels (“You’ll be sleeping with the lights on for weeks!” “Get ready for a non-stop tour of Terror!”), I begin to wonder if I’m not really in touch with my feelings. (Related: Is it wrong that my response to an especially intense scene is to laugh in appreciation? Not a giggle laugh, but a point in the air ha-HA! laugh.)
When reading horror, my pleasure comes from picking up clues and grasping the sense of what’s happening at the book’s finish. I always do that. In other words, I read horror like I read mysteries, which means I’m probably missing the point. People don’t ride roller coasters as a form of transportation.
What I do get from horror is an airing out of my imagination. It’s not a coincidence that my horror jags occur in the summer. That’s when I do most of my writing, as well. Mystery writers create puzzles and create sleuths to solve those puzzles, and that mindset can be a bit solipsistic. Horror is a good reminder that not everything has to be knowable or controllable to make a good story.