What better way to spend it than talking about horror...writing it that is. I don't try to hide the depressing fact that I tend to think more like a Disney character than a savvy, twisted writer like Dean Koontz or Stephen King. I'm pretty honest with myself: I'm not scary. I don't do scary that well. But I want to!
So I invited The Literary Dark Emperor to grace our presence with his absurdly creepy writing prowess. Nathan Squiers is the author of The Crimson Shadow novels, as well as a whole host of skin prickling short stories and poems that would scare your geek glasses off. And guess what? He's going to teach us how! Nathan has charitably taken the time to actually walk you through a scary short story (one he just, you know, made up on the spot because he's that awesome.) He doesn't just give you pointers--he shows you how they're done!
So enjoy his guest post, and please do drop by his Facebook page to see what he's got. If you look to the right of your screen, you should see a Rafflecopter giveaway. You can enter to win one of any four of his chilling tales. Whichever one strikes your fancy! And I listed the links to each of them at the bottom of this post so you can figure out which one appeals to you most. The giveaway will end on Saturday.
Horror, by and large, is defined as a genre
that is tailored or has the potential to strike terror and fear into the hearts
of the audience. Subsequently, fear is widely recognized as an emotional state
of being in which an impending sense of doom or danger is felt.
But what does it truly mean to write horror,
and how does one elicit a fearful response using only words?
For starters, it’s important to remember that
the amount of fear you’ll be able to spark in your readers will directly weigh
on how attached they become to the story and its characters (after all, you
can’t put them in any real danger, so the element of foreboding danger must be
felt FOR those who are).
And so, as is usually the case for ANY
writing project, we must consider our character(s) and, just as importantly but
often overlooked, our audience. Every writer should remain mindful of WHO
they’re writing for—age groups, genders, races, sexual orientation, and any
other such elements—because this can determine a great deal of how to
appropriately approach any project (and, for this first step, what sort of
character[s] will be most empathized in the course of their journey).
For the sake of this tutorial, we’ll set the
target audience at male and female young adults (this will also allow us to
weed away the need for excessive gore and vulgarity; elements that are often
utilized as crutches in this genre—true horror should never rely SOLELY on such
tactics, because it will often indicate that a story is already lacking enough
depth to do the job on its own merit).
But who do teenagers want to read about?
Like any demographic, the best approach is to
cater to who they are and what they know (adults primarily read about other
adults, children like to read about other children, and teens—naturally—prefer
to read about other teens). So already we know that we should create a teenage
character to carry us through our story. Furthermore, because we’re hoping to
get our audience to fear for the wellbeing of our main character (otherwise known
as the protagonist), then it helps to understand how gender can play a role in
the emotions of our audience. Male readers (by and large) tend to feel a more
emotional attachment to female characters (both because of potential attraction
as well as a natural instinct to want to protect and oversee the wellbeing of
what could be construed as a younger sibling), but heterosexual female readers
(though the attraction element still remains for male characters) prefer to see
male characters who aren’t frail or easily dominated. While the sexual
preference of one’s audience CAN influence these decisions further, the element
of a female protagonist in horror still generates the same sense of
attraction/drive to protect.
Now we have the nature of our protagonist: a
teenage female. So let’s flesh her out:
The techniques for choosing names and
appearance are as broad and varied as the writers that utilize them, so for the
sake of simplicity we’ll name her Megan Parker (the name of my fiancé &
fellow author) and give her the same overall features: blue eyes and
light-brown hair with slightly tanned skin.
Finally we have a character that our audience
can feel akin to and follow through our terrifying tale with a sense of empathy
and awe. Furthermore, now that we have the nature of the character established,
we can begin to work outward from that and create a setting and environment
based on how others like our character live. While it’s possible to incorporate
elements that distinguish and deepen our character as an individual, it’s
important to remember that anything that can potentially distinguish our
character can just as easily make it that much harder for our target audience
to relate to them (definitely something to consider before making them a
one-armed, 400lbs, adopted space alien with telekinetic powers).
Now on to the horror!!
While I typically enjoy opening a story with
a more abrupt hook—something that will INSTANTLY draw the reader in—the realm
of horror is less forgiving about not first establishing a sense of peace.
Generally, it works FOR a writer in the long run to establish a sense of calm
and normalcy so that when the horrific force comes into play there is a greater
sense of comparison and what’s been lost.
So let’s begin by setting some tone and setting
to Megan’s night:
The
sun hung low in the late-evening sky, bathing the quiet neighborhood’s skyline
in a curtain of orange and purple. Blinking against the stunning rays, Megan
adjusted the strap of her backpack on her throbbing shoulder—grimacing against
what she knew would be an impressive bruise in the morning and cursing Rachel’s
cheap shot on her during lacrosse practice—and hurried across the street,
barely getting out of the way of Miss O’Riley’s oncoming station wagon. The old
woman croaked an angry warning in her thick, Irish accent as she sped by, and
Megan rolled her eyes at the old crone and started down the sidewalk towards
her house.
Stepping
through the front door, Megan was welcomed with a wave of warmth and the smell
of her mother’s cooking. Though she still wore the aches and pains from
practice, she was unable to hold back a smile as the promise of a hot meal and
a hotter shower shone in her near future.
Right off the bat we have an opening that is
neither overly saturated in unbelievable pleasantries nor clogged with
blatantly dark or depressing elements. The reader has an almost instant sense
of who we’re presenting them with without resorting to sloppy means (mention of
a sore shoulder from practice tells them she’s athletic and explains why she’s
walking home late and the book bag lets them know she’s a student). The time of
day is clear without any clunky details, and relatable inserts like the cranky
neighbor create a sense of “I’ve been there before” to most readers. Finally,
offering what amounts to the “glimmer of hope” by making mention of the warm
house and the hope for a hot shower and relaxing dinner create a calming
atmosphere that we can soon use against the reader.
Let’s move on:
“I’m
home,” she announced, setting her gear by the coat rack and slipping off her
shoes. From the hall she could hear the sound of activity in the kitchen, and
she shuffled across the hardwood floor on her socked feet towards it. “I
couldn’t get any lime juice, Mom,” she called out as she stepped through the
doorway and onto the linoleum of the kitchen “The corner market was out and I—”
She
paused as she took in the scene. Sitting at the table to her right, her little
sister hummed and poked away at the family’s iPad and ignoring their mother’s
sobs as she leaned against the counter over her cooking.
Megan
shifted her focus between the two before finally turning towards her mother.
“Mom?”
She frowned when she saw her shoulders tense at the sound her voice, “Something
wrong?”
“N-no,”
her mother’s voice was shaky and forced, “I… I’m j-just… cooking supper.” She
turned then, her face red and tear-stained, “It’ll be r-ready s-s-soo…” she
trailed off with another sob and turned back to her cutting board.
Frowning,
Megan turned away and approached her sister, keeping her voice down as she did.
“Marie, what’s wrong? Did something happen?”
Marie
giggled as she moved her finger across the iPad’s screen—launching a chirping
bird into a tower occupied by grinning green pigs—before finally looking up at
her. Megan frowned, caught off guard by the bright, joy-filled blue eyes of the
little girl—eyes that everyone said the two of them shared but, at that moment,
she wanted absolutely nothing to do with—and crossed her arms over her chest, eager
for an answer.
“Well?”
She demanded. Marie giggled again; her eyes, unwavering and unblinking, never
shifting from her own gaze. As the unnerving weight of the child’s stare grew
too eerie to stand, Megan uncrossed her arms and moved to tug on one of her
sister’s pigtails in the hopes of earning a response. “Answer me! Did something
happen to Mom?”
Marie’s
head cocked to one side as the pressure on her hair pulled at her scalp, but
her leering grin and wide, unmoving eyes stayed locked on her. Finally, her
small, pink tongue took a slow across her lips before they parted.
“She
was cutting onions,” Marie offered with another giggle, “Onions.”
Though
Megan was certain that her sister would have returned to her game, she didn’t
move. Her face—her leering grin and wide, joy-filled blue eyes—didn’t shift;
didn’t offer any hint of change. She simply stared back up at her, head still
cocked to one side and her dangling pigtail swaying and brushing her shoulder
with each pass.
“Whatever,
freaker. Don’t drain the battery on Dad’s iPad. You know he hates that.” Megan
cleared her throat and rolled her eyes, taking a step back before turning away
and hurrying out of the kitchen and starting up the stairs.
PAUSE! Things are getting a little weird,
huh? I mean—sure!—onions are a pain to cut, but something doesn’t seem quite
right there. And what’s with Megan’s sister? Granted, kids have their weird
moments, many of which come off a little creepy…
But still, this just seems off…
The element of surprise is an obvious tool in
creating horror. True masters of the genre have earned their titles by creating
a horrific scenario that their protagonists unknowingly step into. Because of
this, horror writers begin to operate on a very similar process as mystery writers,
where they’re fully aware of beginning, middle, and end of not only the
protagonist’s journey through their story, but ALSO the beginning, middle, and
end of what’s shaped the environment they’re falling victim to.
A prime example of this is Stephen King’s
“The Shining”, where a man who takes his family to a closed inn in the
mountains to maintain the property during the winter season comes to find that
it carries a dark (and haunted) history. While the story’s focus is on the
family and their encounter, there is an undeniable amount of back-story that
created the horrific environment that they stepped into.
The same can be said of Alfred Hitchcock’s
film “The Birds”. Though neither the characters nor the audience are ever
offered any explanation as to WHY the murderous flocks of birds are behaving in
such a way, it becomes evident that the winged creatures have developed some
new and terrifying habits that make for a truly horrific experience for all
involved.
So, while explanations are nice, they’re
never required. Let’s see if Megan gets any explanation for her sister’s
strange behavior:
Megan
was nearly all the way upstairs when she caught her ankle against the edge of
the step and fell; banging her knee against the last step and hissing through clenched
teeth at the pain. As she pulled herself up with the railing, she heard Marie
giggle again from the kitchen. Still gritting against the pain, Megan fought
against the urge to let any more pained grunts be heard and limped to her
bedroom. Closing and locking the door, Megan finally allowed herself to exhale
and dropped down onto her bed.
Ouch! We’ve all been there before, huh? Stairs:
the silent killer (and, in this case, another tool to allow the reader to feel
connected to our protagonist). And once again we feel a shiver thanks to the
increasingly creepy sister. But why is that? What is it about Marie’s innocent
antics that are making Megan (and us) feel so uncomfortable? The truth, in
fact, IS the implied innocence. The human mind seems innately prepared for that
which is blatantly dangerous to be dangerous; if we see a big, angry-looking
biker we take a nice, long step around them in the off chance that they might
attack. But what about a single child? What about a
single child standing in the middle of the street? What about a single child
standing in the middle of the street in the middle of the night? Now what if
this child seems not only unafraid in this place, but downright COMFORTABLE?
What happens when you take an inherently
innocent icon and twist it into something blatantly malicious?
The answer: you remove the audience from
their comfort zone.
You create a monster.
The reader can tell that Megan is now seeing
that her sister—somebody that the reader must assume she has known for Marie’s
entire lifetime—is not behaving in a way she has before. We have begun to
introduce a foreign element to our protagonist, and the fear and confusion she
is now feeling becomes the readers’ own.
So what’s in store for Megan (and our
audience)? Let’s find out:
Though
a hot shower sounded like nothing short of Heaven, the soft warmth of Megan’s
bed made pulling herself away from it unthinkable. Instead, she lay—promising
herself that she’d get up soon enough—and embraced the comfort. Between her
tolling lacrosse practice and her still-pounding heart from Marie’s horrifying
stare Megan wasn’t surprised that the moment of peace was as glorious as it
was, but the memory of her sister’s strange behavior.
Groaning,
Megan flipped over on her back, promising herself that she’d get up in ten
seconds. Finally working up the resolve, she dragged herself into a sitting
position and let out another sigh. The image of her sister’s cold-yet-joyful
eyes shone in her mind once more and she shivered, wanting a hot shower more
than ever.
“Jeez!
Creepy little—”
Her
head turned at a meek whimper and she eyed her closet door—decorated and
adorned in magazine cutouts and pages from CD jackets—and frowned. Had her
mother gone snooping in her room and locked the cat in the closet again?
Hearing the scared whimper again, she sighed and pulled herself up and moved
across the room to free the cat.
Nice little moment to catch your breath
there, huh? This momentary interlude in the rising terror represents the
proverbial calm before the storm. In all things horror—books, movies, comics,
etc—there is almost always a moment between the first established sign that
something may be wrong and the inevitable plummet into terror. Though to many
this pause/hold might seem unnecessary, it’s important to remember that a story
operates on a system of rise-and-fall; the degree to which a reader can feel
the outcome of the conflict is to proportionate to how much they feel has been
lost. Much like a roller coaster, you can’t expect to drop any further than
you’ve first been lifted, and if it takes one step to move the audience into
the chaos then they’ve only had a chance to put one step’s worth of investment
into whatever you’re preparing them for. It is in this way that horror
separates itself from many other genres, which can succeed—and often outright
flourish—from being dropped into the action from the get-go. Where a reader can
be given a sense of romance from page one with a passionate scene and then led
into the story thus far with some tactical flashbacks afterwards, a horror
story that starts out with all the potential scare-elements revealed from the
get-go will rob you of much of the leverage that enables you to strike fear in
the first place.
Does this mean that it’s impossible? Not at
all; I actually advocate to all my literary apprentices that ANYTHING can be
achieved in writing, it’s simply a matter of understanding the HOW and, most
importantly, the WHY. If the decision to open a story with the grand reveal
right in the beginning is made, one must be prepared to know HOW they’ll still
offer the reader a climactic plot as well as understanding WHY they chose to
make that decision (is there an unknown detail that, on its own, is more
shocking than the overall outcome—are you setting us up for the next “Luke, I
AM your father” moment?—or is it simply a dry gimmick that will ultimately
force you to scrap the piece and restart from scratch?)
In many cases, horror is like cutting onions:
cut through the layers and pray you can see through the tears to know how it
ends:
Marie
let out a shriek as Megan opened the closet, and as the stunned teenager fell
back at the sight of her terrified little sister the sound of their mother’s
shriek carried up the stairs.
Megan
fought to catch her breath, looking over her shoulder towards her bedroom door
and considering checking on her mom, but finally decided to calm her sister
down first.
“Dammit,
Marie,” she scolded, starting towards the closet and helping her to her feet,
“You scared me half-to-death! What are you doing in there! What’s with you
toda—” she stopped herself, narrowing her eyes. “Wait… how did you get up here
from the kitch—”
“IT
WASN’T ME!” Marie sobbed, burying her face in Megan’s shirt, “IT WASN’T!”
Megan
frowned, “What are you talking about? What wasn’t—”
“It…
it said it would kill me!” Marie’s wide, terrified eyes locked onto her own.
Her
eyes…
Her eyes!
Nothing
like they’d been downstairs…
“It
wasn’t me…” she whimpered again, “That… that thing downstairs.”
There
was a brief scuttle against the bedroom door, and both sisters cried out as
they turned to face it as the knob rattled in the frame and twisted sharply;
breaking free and falling to the floor as the door swung inward and knocked it
against the wall.
The
familiar leering grin and wide, joy-filled blue eyes of not-Marie filled the
doorway as she stepped inside. Megan gasped and fell back as Marie whimpered
and backed against the wall, searching blindly with her hand for the opening of
the closet.
“Onions!”
Not-Marie croaked as her grin grew wider and wider. “Oooooooonions…” a low,
throaty sound echoed from her gullet; her throat convulsing and distending as
every step she took towards them was met with a sharp twist of her joints. Her
shoulders sagged as her forearms snapped and bent, forming another set of
elbows that allowed her elongated, blood-soaked fingers to drag across the
floor. Her legs popped and shifted, allowing her to cross the rest of the
distance in one long, bobbing lurch.
***
Miss
O’Riley groaned at her own good deed as the detective started over with his
questions. Only an hour earlier, she’d overheard the sound of the Parker
family’s girls screaming and phoned in a noise complaint. Had she known that
their cries of bloody murder had been literal she might have rethought the call
and waited until morning.
“No
good deed…” She muttered to herself.
The
detective looked up, “Ma’am?”
Miss
O’Riley shrugged off the officer’s curiosity and shook her head. “Look, I don’t
know anything about anything. I was just settling in for a round of Jeopardy
and those damned kids started howling,” she groaned again. “I figured they were
having themselves a good, ol’ fashioned sister-spat—y’know, kids bein’ kids and
whatnot—and thought having the cops show up at their door would scare some
decency into them.”
“So…
you didn’t know that they were being
attacked?” The detective tapped his pen on his notepad.
“Oh
heavens no,” The old woman insisted, “This is a peaceful neighborhood. Nothing
like”—she stared over the detective’s shoulder at the kaleidoscope of flashing
red-and-blue lights on the side of her neighbors’ home—“Well, nothing like this ever happens. I mean, I haven’t
locked my doors in…” she blushed, seeing the detective’s eyebrow shift, “Well,
in a long time. If I’d have known they were in danger I wouldn’t have dozed off
like I did after I called you.”
“You
fell asleep, ma’am?” The detective frowned, “With the kids screaming?”
“Boy,
when you get to be my age you learn to fall asleep in a hurricane. Mighty fine
sleep, too; probably woulda slept through all that banging at my door if it
hadn’t been for the smell.”
The
detective’s hectic scribbling in his notepad paused then and he looked up, “The
smell, ma’am?”
Miss
O’Riley nodded and wet her dried lips, “Oh yes. Damndest thing! Right before
you fellas came to my door I thought I smelled freshly-cut onions.”
Good ol’ Miss O’Riley! Who knew she’d come
back around to make an appearance, huh? For this wrap-up I decided to offer a
bit of a few different techniques that I’ve found work best in the genre:
For starters, the “Oh sh**” moment. The
readers had enough information to readily know that there was no way that Marie
could’ve made it up the stairs and past Megan without her seeing, so the
realization that she was in the closet had a chance to click in their minds
moments before Megan’s panic-stricken mind was able to grasp that what had been
staring her down in the kitchen had not
been her sister, which allowed for the dawning of possibilities to plague the
mind. In many ways, ending a story on the “Oh sh**” moment offers a reader’s
imagination to run rampant with untold possibilities (but doing that would have
been less fun for me as a writer and, let’s be honest, slightly unfulfilling
for the reader).
Then we had the “Sh** hit the fan” moment.
Between Mommy’s screams downstairs and the chaos at the door—enough to rip the
handle free, huh? Somebody wanted to
get inside in the worst kinda way!—the reader is forced to understand that
whatever we were dealing with from the “Oh sh**” moment was not only dangerous,
it wasn’t finished. Again, we easily could’ve ended there—let the doorknob hit
the floor, door fly open, and the creepy face of not-Marie occupy the readers’
sleepless night—but, again, we wanted to have a little extra fun.
So then we had the “Sh** just got (un)real”
moment. As though establishing that the girl downstairs wasn’t Marie wasn’t enough, we had to go the extra mile and
establish that she wasn’t even human. When dealing with inhuman visuals, the
best advice is to work with what scares you. Personally, the idea of seeing an
already-creepy little girl giggling and croaking as her body pops and distorts
into something else is the sort of thing that’d keep me awake for a few
straight weeks as I rocked about my padded cell in a straitjacket, so I figured
I’d share in that lovely visual (still like onions, though). And, again, we
could’ve just as easily ended there, but… well, you know.
Finally comes the aftermath (what I like to
call the “What was that sh**” moment;
anybody who’s read my short horror prequel “Forbidden Paints on a Wicked
Canvas” would recognize this technique). Basically, this allows the writer to
summarize and create a sense of closure to an event that wouldn’t have been as
clean if “watched” while it had been happening. Furthermore, because a great
deal of horror forces the audience to step outside the perimeters of reality,
offering a taste of the “real world” getting a glimpse at the
aftermath—creating a scene of “Oh, I’ve seen something like that” in their
minds—instills a sense of potential (and, in a genre when personal fear is the
end-goal, getting a reader to believe that—just maybe—what they’d read could
happen allows that extra lingering moment of dread keep hold of their hearts).
On one final note, it’s been said that no
true horror story has a happy ending. The market to scare people isn’t built on
wrapping things up in pretty, clean packages; it contradicts everything that
you create from start-to-finish. This isn’t to say that a horror story isn’t a
horror story if everybody in the world isn’t gutted and maimed by the end, but
if you’re going to scare people with horrific element then it’s always more fun
if they can close the book feeling like it’s still out there.
Just keep that in mind the next time you
smell onions ;-)
Nathan Squiers
Short Stories
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