Horror isn’t the only thing I write, but it may be the genre I love the most. During this past year, I’ve discovered myself gravitating more and more to the short fiction of authors like Ramsey Campbell, Gary Braunbeck, and Glen Hirshberg. These stories seem (to me) to have lived up to horror’s greatest promises to move the reader, evoking a series of intense emotions (regret, revulsion, and grief, to name a few) through rich characterization. Often, the tales deal with the aftermath of trauma. Sometimes, they work because they manage (through the skillful use of language) to create subtext, mood, theme, and atmosphere; to weave dread into otherwise ordinary settings or places (Campbell, in particular, is the master of this variety of neuron-tingling subtlety; check out his World Fantasy Award-winning “Mackintosh Willy” to see what I’m talking about).
I want to see this sort of horror fiction proliferate, but it faces a daunting challenge. A generation of horror authors (my generation of horror authors, as well as those in their twenties), have been raised with movies (foremost) and television programs ( a close second) as their primary literary influence.
I’m not the only one who notices this. If anyone knows horror, it’s the aforementioned Mr. Braunbeck. In his Bram Stoker Award winning memoir/manifesto To Each Their Darkness he writes the following: “most of (the next generation of horror authors) have no influences that existed before 1982, and much of their work doesn’t read so much as horror novels as they do film or miniseries treatments.”
It’s an odd situation. It’d be like a sculptor describing Monet as her primary influence, or an actor basing his performance on the style of a particularly gifted trombonist. Something’s just not right. Film is an art in and of itself, and great things have been done with it. But it’s not writing. Writers should read to help learn their craft, to become familiar with the topography and terrain of language. Language is the primary tool of the trade. It’s so simple it borders on tautology: words are the building blocks of fiction.
Only, something has happened in the last generation. The horror boom of the ’70s and ’80s unleashed a massive wave of film. I don’t think it’s possible to have grown up in that era and not have been influenced (at least indirectly) by Stephen King book-to-movie adaptations. And if it wasn’t King, it was Romero. Or it was Serling in his Night Gallery phase. Or it was any one of the syndicated horror anthology shows (Freddy’s Nightmares, Friday the 13th: The Series, Tales from the Darkside, Tales from the Crypt etc.) Mine was the first generation to be carpet-bombed with horror in a variety of visual media (low budget film, big budget film, network and syndicated television, some good and some lousy but all of them, of course, visually-oriented).
I know the Goosebumps books appeared in the early ’90s, but they came too late to be any good to me. The damage was done. I think that any writer who grew up in that era came to the sacred art of story telling with expectations formed in front of one or another flickering screen. Our brains were changed to filter the idea of horror through a common, televisual/cinematic schema.
At the same time, King evolved into something I’m not quite sure we’ve ever seen before: the horror author as bona fide celebrity and wealthy role model. One can scarcely imagine a skittish Lovecraft hamming it up for an American Express commercial. One can scarcely imagine kids in Poe’s time wanting to grow up to live just like him. But that’s how it was with King.
Thus, a generation of creative kids grew up admiring an author of horror fiction but being most directly influenced by horror film. Together, these two factors created the perfect storm (and we’re still drenched in its rain to this day).
If you think I’m exaggerating, take a gander at this quote from blogger Will Errickson: “I can’t imagine what it must have been like for authors such as Arthur Machen, H.P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, Sheridan LeFanu, et. al., to write horror fiction without having horror film as an influence.” To his credit, Errickson is at least aware of Machen, et al (which is more than can be said for many, these days). And to be fair, it’s entirely possible that he’s read more of their works than I have. But his statement really is an astounding one. [Updated note: see Will's clarification/added context for his remark in the comments section of this post]
I find the idea that Lovecraft was somehow handicapped by not having seen…well, Cujo, for example, (or even Night of the Living Dead) about as far off the mark as one can get. Anyone who reads Lovecraft’s essay Supernatural Horror in Literature knows what it was like for Lovecraft to write without films as an influence. He seems to have done quite well without them. He had scores of writers to influence him (not the least of whom, Poe). Moreover, he had the various trials and tragedies of his own life – the madness and subsequent death of both parents, along with his own bouts of depression and anxiety. He had his interest in astronomy. Lovecraft had plenty to inspire him. He’s far from a perfect writer, but he changed the field forever – paving the way for a new kind of horror focusing primarily on the dread revelation of humanity’s insignificance in the cosmos.
So what are the consequences of all this for fiction? Braunbeck identifies some of these in another passage of To Each Their Darkness, referring to an anonymous “up-and-coming writer I know who cites horror movies and their directors as being her major influence. And it shows. She couldn’t write a good sentence if guns were being held on her family and one of them killed each time she over-used adjectives…you can correctly infer that there is something missing from her work for me.”
I think the influence of film on horror fiction yields even deeper maladies than poor sentences, though.
As an inordinately visual medium, cinema is focused on the world outside the protagonist. As an inordinately linguistic medium, fiction writing (through the device of point of view) allows us much vaster access to the protagonist’s inner life. The author is sketching the character by pointing out what the character is noticing, by indicating what they say (and maybe just as importantly, what they don’t say). Depeche Mode lyrics notwithstanding, words are very necessary. The bounty of language (in dialogue, in the description of heart, mind, room, and landscape, in simile and metaphor) provides a mechanism to set the emotional temperature of a scene to a degree of specificity that image itself can’t match. In horror, this is particularly important because the sensation of fright is dependent on the reader putting herself in the character’s shoes. It’s not enough to see what the character sees. We need to feel what the character feels.
Some of the newer authors I’ve met don’t seem to get this (or, perhaps, don’t even care). I’ve run into one or two who approach writing almost cynically, as a sort of minor leagues of horror storytelling – a proving ground only worthwhile as a route to get their work optioned so they can get involved (however tangentially) in the film business. They want to give birth to multiple film adaptations (just like their idol, Stephen King) and the task of putting words onto paper is, for them, an inconvenience to be endured for the privilege.
I don’t know a lot about the film business, but I know enough to be able to roll my eyes at such fantasies. There are some newer authors who I’m convinced are so film obsessed that they’d be much happier as film makers, but they insist on writing. (I fear their insistence stems from the difference between the cost of film making equipment and the cost of pen and paper. This can’t bode well for the genre).
A book that strives to be cinematic, and only cinematic, is doomed from inception. It ends up as neither sufficiently well-written to be a good book, nor sufficiently visual to be a good movie. At most, it’s (as Braunbeck implied) an unfilmed treatment. That’s great if your audience is potential filmmakers, but it lets down the reader just about every time. Some of the best books I’ve ever read are those that make the most out of being books. They’re the sort of stories that are, at least in places, unfilmable (and I mean that as a compliment). The horrific effect is triggered by particularly effective prose. Thomas Ligotti’s books, for example, have actually been said to trigger something of a depression in some of this readers. He doesn’t do that by adjusting lights or putting just the right makeup on actors. He does it by typing.
One of the reasons I’m so passionate about this is that I have personal experience with it. For years, I was one of those people whose primary ingestion for horror was movies and television shows. As a child growing up in a quasi-fundamentalist home, I wasn’t allowed to bring horror fiction into my home (even an attempt to smuggle the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual into my house was met with parental censorship – D&D or anything at all involving dark fantasy was, in my parents’ eyes, “demonic”). All I had for inspiration were the films and programs appearing on television. By the time I sat down to attempt writing my first stories in my early twenties, I thought that a typical episode of Tales from the Crypt provided the ideal template for plotting and characterization. That’s how clueless I was.
Over time, I discovered the subculture of the horror small press (focused, as it then seemed to be, on a parade of various horror conventions, websites, and print publications). I don’t think that subculture helped. It celebrated film with almost-equal gusto as it celebrated fiction. My efforts to write fiction were filtered through expectations I learned from watching films.
For me, poverty proved the only salvation from this particular range of influences. That is, I went through a period of my life in which I could no longer afford cable television. I found myself selling many of my horror movies in order to pay for groceries and bus tickets. I found myself unable to even rent anything other than the occasional film. I could no longer afford to attend horror conventions. Finances made me quit cold turkey. In that sense, poverty was perhaps the best thing that ever happened to me.
I went years without keeping up with movies. And, when the time was right and I got the bug to write stories again, my palate had been cleansed. I soon realized that if fiction was my art, I needed to get reading. I found myself inspired by advice I heard from Brian Keene – and apparently also said by several authors before him – “read every day, write every day”.
I began reading every day. I began writing every day.
At the same time, I lost interest in visual media almost-entirely. To this day, I probably watch less than two hours of visual media a week (most of the time, either documentaries or cartoons). I would love to see that asymptote toward zero. More time to read.
I found that (subjectively) the quality of my fiction improved the longer I kept my eyes away from the screen and onto the page. Objectively, I found that I started to get my first acceptances to reputable markets. I found that I started to really understand storytelling for the first time. The more I read, the more my fiction changes. I find myself increasingly appreciative of that sort of horror that is called (for lack of a better word) “literary”.
And so here I am – advocating for horror fiction that takes, well, fiction as its primary influence. Perhaps nothing is more indicative of the absurdity of our times than my suspicion that I’m fighting for a lost cause.
