My Horror Novelist Crisis

From a young age, I had a keen interest in scary stories. I devoured books like Bunnicula, The Hounds of Baskervilles, and Frankenstein. I read the entire collection of Hans Christian Andersen and The Brothers Grimm. That curiosity never left me, as I digested every Stephen King book and dived into Shirley Jacksons' unsettling creations. Recently I came to terms with what my dream is, to write horror novels.

I am not talking about thrillers; I am talking about books that terrify you. When you read a thriller, it is a lot like a roller coaster; there are ups and downs and scary moments and then some relief, but when you read a horror novel, you get on the roller coaster, it flys off the tracks, and you die a horrible, gruesome death that is remembered forever.

I am mostly concerned about what people might think. I imagine the moment I tell friends and family that I finally finished my first novel, and they ask the obvious next question;

“what is it about?”

I sit there, silent, and blurt out, "five girls go into the woods, and only one comes back."

“Oh, is it a mystery?”

"nope. There isn’t a mystery, there are cannibalistic witches in the woods, and they capture and cook the girls, but the one escapes..."

“ Oh…” silence. “Well, thank goodness one gets away.”

“ Well…she is actually now cursed, and she is doomed to eat her firstborn. She doesn’t know it yet….she finds out the hard way.”

Dead…silence.

I love reading all the genres, but If you give me an idea that begins with the image of sweet children playing in the forest, I imagine something evil is lurking in the trees, and it attacks the little sweeties with its sharp claws and blood is everywhere….picnic ruined!

Does that make me a psychopath? No. Do you know if you are a psychopath if you are, in fact, a psychopath? Hmmm.

Growing up, my older brother woke me in the middle of the night and let me watch late-night scary movies on television with him. This was in the ’80s, so there were some really juicy and inappropriate movies for us to watch. My brother is five years older than me, and he is, to this day, a huge horror fan. When I watched movies with him ( nope, my parents didn’t know), he would talk about how cool the kill scenes were and how they must have used special makeup for blood, and those intestines might be a hose and pea soup for that projectile vomit. We marvelled at the behind-the-scenes possibilities. My love for all things horror grew the more I saw. I wasn’t afraid of what was happening because I could see the dress-up and theatrics of it all.

Halloween was our Christmas growing up. One Halloween, we were obsessed with Children of the Corn, so my brother dressed up as Malachai, and I was the sinister leader Isaac. We would haunt our neighbourhood, and all the other kids would steer clear of us. My brother was 6ft tall by the time he was 14, and he made a cardboard scythe and painted it black…good times.

When I was a teenager, my best friend, a scaredy-cat, would never want to go to the theatre with me to see horror movies. When Scream came out, I told her it was a comedy she didn’t talk to for a month. I also remember bringing my boyfriend at the time, also a scaredy-cat, to see The Blair Witch Project, again misleading him by buying the tickets ahead of time. He slept with a baseball bat and the lights on for several days; he might have even cried a little...he deserved it.

I will end with this mission statement that I wrote in honour of my chosen writing path:

“On my path, there are adventures to be had. Words are all around, swirling, begging to be shared, and put together to tell a story. The night is favoured on this path. A forest of trees stands tall with fall leaves blanketing the ground. There is a coolness in the air, and the moon is full, exposing the things that go flying in the night. I see caves that want to be explored, tunnels with unknown destinations, old houses with too many rooms. Witches live here; some are good, some are bad. Creatures lurk, and devils try, but my words expose them, and they wince, and they hide. This scary place is my happy place, a funhouse of sorts, a haunted house that I built on my own, with nothing but my imagination.”