Horror Fiction

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Quite recently I watched THE SHINING, Stanley Kubrick's screen adaptation of Stephen King's novel. I like the movie better than the book. Even King says Kubrick was a genius at giving a good tale a lethal cutting blade. Kubrick did.

But the book and film made me think about writing horror. I write plenty of slasher/murder stories but never any horror until now. I'm surprised at how quickly I wrote 5000 words. The plot is good, the prose is tight, and the story is entirely plausible. It certainly satisfies King's requirement that the story give the reader just enough information to unleash the imagination and scare her shitless.

This story is about a dead child. I believe children touch adults in their most vulnerable places, and remind adults about what grownups know is lurking in the closet at night.

Oh! Horror stories pay about $250 for good ones.

 

[DeeZire]

Links? I recall you mentioning some of your work as being a bit dark. Can we find it somewhere?

Are the $250 stories for print?

 

[CharleyH]

The plot is good, the prose is tight, and the story is entirely plausible.

Yes - good. You did not mention suspense.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

CHARLEY

What makes my story work, I think, is how most of the significant events and phenomenon have double meanings. Viewed one way its one thing, viewed another way its something else. There's a name for this sort of thing, but the word escapes me. The reader is never certain if she's reading about a deer taking refuge from a fierce winter storm, or a dead child come back to haunt her father. Or maybe daddy has a depressive psychosis.

The father is an alcoholic and morphine addict, and he doesnt know; and the physician treating the father isnt certain, either.

The suspense comes from the ambiguity of the experiences. The players are never certain that their experiences arent colored by fatigue, alcohol, natural phenomenon (like the wind), etc. At the end the father disappears in a snow storm at night. His tracks are easy enough to follow across open fields where the snow is heavy and the foot-prints are deep, but when the trail enters a forest the snow cover grows thinner and the tracks are filled sooner. He told his wife he was chasing a burglar, but he may have gone after the child spirit or was hallucinating or was suicidal. All these motives are in play.

DEE ZIRE

The $250 payment is for magazine print, the author keeps all rights after publication.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

You can make horror out of anything...a school bus, for example. Or imaginary playmates. Or mom's nice art teacher down at the recreation center who's a marvel at drawing pictures of little kiddies. Or teens vandalizing the Civil War tombstones at the Gaybor City Cemetery. Or the sweet young social worker who picks your kid up from daycare and puts him in a foster home.

 

[manyeyedhydra]

Japanese horror films are very effective in their use of sinister children. Koji Suzuki's collection 'Dark Water' is a good read.

Mainstream horror fiction is a bit sick though. Overloaded with vamps, weres and formerly good writers that are long past putting out to pasture. If anyone has recommendations of some good new blood to try out I'd love to hear it.

Oh, which magazine did you get accepted by? I can only think of a few that offer that kind of money and I always used to think they were pretty much closed shops.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

HYDRA

I didnt get accepted; I'm not done editing the ms. I just found the magazine and just wrote my first horror story, though I've written plenty of murder/sadist/sex stories. Slasher stories are easy to write, but classic horror isnt. Classic horror is all inference and suggestion and little kids with fluorescent eyes who stand at the foot of your bed feeding on your baby or new puppy as you rub the sleep out of your eyes and say "Dear, youre not gonna believe this".

I came across a new horror twist today. Post mortem portraits of parents and their dead children. They were very popular around the turn of the century. The typical photo features Mom & Dad, Jr and Sis, and the dead twins in their tiny caskets. Or, better yet, the dead pre-schooler on his hobby-horse. He was likely cinched to a post located behind the saddle.

I read that SCI-FI and HORROR pay much better than other venues, and it appears to be true.

 

[manyeyedhydra]

Classic horror is getting the fingernails right under the skin and scraping down the raw nerve endings.

The top end for horror and sci-fi pays well, but it's a bitch to get into. A lot of the stories are coming from writers that already have a couple of novels under their belt. Mostly it seems like name recognition matters more than anything else.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

HYDRA

I agree about the name recognition thing...it sells books, but I dont see THAT many authors of high quality horror. Its hard to scare people, and its hard to give them boners. Hell, its hard to make them laugh.

But I discovered something 15 years ago, and its true.

I wrote a humor piece that is pretty funny, and it took on a life of its own. I wrote the script, a friend put it on audio-tape doing a Michael Jackson impersonation, and people went crazy for it.

The trick to anything is to find the buttons that always work (because their instinctual NOT a cultivated taste), then push them hard.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

I spent the day reading several stories by H.P. Lovecraft. He was 'The Man' according to many, but I didnt read anything that made my socks fall off my feet.

I'm re-reading Stephen King's IT. I didnt care for IT the first time, and IT hasnt improved. IT looks like King wanted to write an epic monster tale "a la Tolstoy," but couldnt pull it off.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Lovecraft was tops for his day. No one was writing truly imaginative fantasy horror when he was writing, so he pretty much defined the field with his Cthulhu Mythos. He was a Fantasy Horror writer though, not a true Terrorist.

The Spooky Kid is kind of a cliche now. The Spooky anything-that's-supposed-to-be-benign is a cliche. Bradbury had the right idea for the future of horror in his story "Bones" back in October Country in the early 60's, about a man terrified of his own skeleton who tries to remove it by self-surgery.I just remember the part where he's sitting there at his kitchen table with a straight razor and a pliers, crushing the bones in his fingers so he can pull them out.

Another great horror writer was Charles Beaumont, who dealt in psychological horror kind of like Robert Bloch, the guy who wrote Psycho. Beaumont wrote such disturbing stuff I don't even want to talk about it here. Featured a lot of cruelty to animals and children. Sick stuff.

A horror writer for grown ups is Hubert Selby Jr. who wrote Last Exit to Brooklyn, stories of urban blight and despair that are pretty terrifying and totally real.

Ugh. Now I'm all depressed.

 

[Guest]

The Spooky Kid is kind of a cliche now. The Spooky anything-that's-supposed-to-be-benign is a cliche. Bradbury had the right idea for the future of horror in his story "Bones" back in October Country in the early 60's, about a man terrified of his own skeleton who tries to remove it by self-surgery.I just remember the part where he's sitting there at his kitchen table with a straight razor and a pliers, crushing the bones in his fingers so he can pull them out.

Bradbury also did a superlative job of evoking childhood fears in his fantasy "Something Wicked This Way Comes." One of my favorites, despite (or perhaps because of) the happy ending.

 

[DeeZire]

I predict there will be a glut of new horror stories with Sarah Palin as the evil monster with the devil-wink.

 

[xssve]

I've suddenly become interested in erotic horror myself, for some reason, probably the economy, that shift towards magical thinking.

Lovecraft is definitely still the man when it comes to Gothic horror, even though Poe probably wrote better horror stories - Bierce was another horror writer in the vein, although his war stories are more terrifying by orders of magnitude than his horror, which is kind of formulaic and derivative.

By the same token, Golding's Lord of the Flies is far more terrifying than say, Hell House, even if it does punch all the right Gothic buttons, I think it was the inspiration for Poltergeist.

Manly Wade Wellman wrote some good stuff, Western horror, which is a fairly underrepresented genre.

And yeah, the dead kid thing works well, almost too well - it's become a genre of it's own in Japanese horror, The Ring, etc., perhaps inspired by that single scene in The Shining, the dead twins was an extremely shocking image for some reason.

Part of it is that it's a big taboo - It's Alive! created a stir far beyond it's value as a cinematic experience, simply due to the underlying psychological theme of the lethal infant, it plucks a number of strings at the same time, the fear of being tied down and the fear of losing a child, and then there is the somewhat primal and barbaric nature of children themselves at work, they are basically only partially enculturated humans - there is huge territory to explore there.

 

[lesbiaphrodite]

Technically speaking, James M. Cain would not be considered a 'horror' writer, but his books are totally noir. What is horrifying about Cain's works is the way that characters just kill other people and do so for a host of reasons, usually involving a beautiful woman. "The Postman Always Rings Twice" still freezes my blood and so does "Mildred Pierce." Also, Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood," though technically a true-crime novel, scares me to death.

 

[manyeyedhydra]

Lovecraft influenced a lot of modern horror writers. I think he's probably most effective when encountered in the teens though. The fantasy elements of it might not seem as horrifying as the all-too-real serial killer who hacks up the pretty young girl next door, but he managed to create a very bleak universe where nothing we do matters as one day the gods will wake up and devour us all.

 

[xssve]

King's Early work is very derivative of both Poe and Lovecraft, but his strength is that he subsequently leaves no stone unturned in his quest for horrific imagery - machines, clowns, rabid fans, even pies - he never stops looking for new twists, and tat helps overcome his often turgid prose.

Never read Cain, I'll have to look for him, but I'm a big fan of Ruth Rendell, she writes stuff that Alfred Hitchcock would have loved.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

DOC

I have maybe 1000 pages of weird shit I've plucked from old newspapers and magazines. I just added a few pages of recollections about amputations.

The 19th Century was a wild world, and a large anount of my material involves wild animal attacks, but people also made and used high explosives, and a few of them had horrible wounds and injuries resulting from the use of explosives.

I have many snake stories. One of them is hilarious, but the others are horrible.

I use this material as props in my own stories.

Child marriages were legal back then, so I want to work this into a story, without being explicit.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

XSSVE

In the beginning King wrote tight stories that didnt wander off the reservation. After 1982 or so his books get bigger and fill with digressions.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

LESBIANAPHRODITE

You'll enjoy Harold Schacter's true crime restorations. Many of them involve the murders of children by serial killers.

Jane Tappan, for example, was a pediatric nurse who poisoned kiddies then snuggled with them in bed as they died. Parents loved her caring and affectionate ways with their sick kids.

 

[cloudy]

Lovecraft is the only author who has ever truly terrified me. The Dunwich Horror has never left my memory, even though I was probably around twelve or so when I read it.

*shudder*

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

CLOUDY

Then I need to read it again. I read it yesterday and had an I DONT GET IT moment.

 

[ellynei]

I spent the day reading several stories by H.P. Lovecraft. He was 'The Man' according to many, but I didnt read anything that made my socks fall off my feet.

I'm re-reading Stephen King's IT. I didnt care for IT the first time, and IT hasnt improved. IT looks like King wanted to write an epic monster tale "a la Tolstoy," but couldnt pull it off.

No dissing IT !

I love IT. On average I read it once a year (some years zero times, other years twice). Have been doing that for some 14+ years.

Taste varies. Sure.

But considering how true IT rings with its audience. Why would you start thinking "couldn't pull it off" ?

So, it's not your thing. But, trust me. IT is certain other peoples "thing".


Sorry if I sound aggressive

Agnostics like me, I mean, sometimes we just have to go:

BLASPHEMY!!!

about something. Sometimes defending a favorite story is the only chance we get

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

ELLYNEI

IT is 50% genius and 50% waste of good paper. The book shoulda been over when the Losers made a stand against IT the first time, as kids.

I woulda plotted it differently and kept the action tight as a guitar string until the end.

IT suffers from no editing.