Category: Philosophy of Horror
-
Am I a Horror Writer?
When Jack Tyler invited me to join the rotation here, my first response wasn’t excitement. It was hesitation. “I don’t know,” I told him (at least in my head: never trust a fiction writer). “I don’t really think of myself as a horror writer.” That probably sounds strange to anyone who’s read my fiction. Death…
-
Embracing the Fear
Horror: Noun. A strong feeling of fear, shock, or disgust, or a category of art and fiction meant to cause those feelings. [Cambridge Dictionary] Good day, gentle readers. My name is Jack, and I’m the admin of this oh-so-lovely website. As a former writer who’s been blocked for the better part of a decade, I…
-
The Changing Shape of the Monster
The monsters we create have become us. It sounds like a dramatic statement, but the monsters of the past threatened our bodies. Today, they are much closer. They disturb our minds, our identity, our memory, and even our own perception of ourselves, almost sounding like our thoughts. As horror authors, we extract elements and ideas…
-
Women Were Always There
I write horror — dark, visceral, graphic, psychological horror. That still surprises people. Not because the work is unusual, but because a woman wrote it. Horror is strongly associated with men. That association stuck long ago, but it doesn’t reflect reality. The genre didn’t start loud, it started cold. Mary Shelley and the Birth of…
-
From Blood to Whispers: The Appeal of Quiet Horror
I used to live in the guts of horror. By that, I mean the kind of horror that stains your palms and tastes like rust. My other books — especially the Bloody Series with its love for graphic detail, human monsters, and the unforgiving anatomy of violence — live in the places where flesh tears,…
-
The Nihilistic Void of Lovecraft’s Cosmicism:
Art, Indifference, and Ironic Immortality The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each…
-
Lying for a Living
“Literature was not born the day when a boy crying ‘wolf, wolf’ came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels. Literature was born on the day when a boy came crying ‘wolf, wolf,’ and there was no wolf behind him.”~ VLADIMIR NABOKOV Lies are funny things. The smaller…
-
I’m Not Normal
There’s something wrong with me. There must be. I mean, other than writing horror stories – in both senses as I’m not much of a writer – I look and act, for the most part, relatively normal. Well, as normal as normal goes I guess. I’m quite boring. Ordinary. You’d find talking to a lump…
