What I Write About When I Write About Horror

In an effort to stem my new-found enthusiasm for writing short horror stories I have imposed a time-out on myself. What you are currently reading are the results of that time out. I’ve taken a step back to take a long hard look at myself and ask the question, what the hell am I doing?

Because I was never meant to be a horror writer. 

Horror’s not my genre; I’m way too pretentious for that. I’m all about tedious sagas of middle-class families weathering the humiliations of minor discomfort or state-of-the nation-epics which only come along once in a generation. Yeah, all of that good Times Literary Supplement shit. And yet I still fail to get beyond two or three pages.

So when a friend linked me to Twisted50’s webpage I cast an eye over its gleeful imagery of scary clowns and blood-drizzled screams and thought, ‘I’m not vibing. No vibes are being had right now.’

My friend challenged me to see if I could do it anyway. Of course I could do it. Horror is easy. Stab someone in the eye, call it a day. 

And so I sat down in my big writer’s armchair and thought ‘how do I make a person who I’ve never met feel choking panic, disgust, and dizzying existential dread?  And how do I make them grateful for the experience?’ My previous attempts at writing have all been about getting people to scratch their chins so loosening their bowels was perhaps a more challenging objective than I had at first appreciated. 

Happily, most readers are massive perverts and more than willing to indulge.

But if there’s anything I’ve learnt through this process of writing short horror stories, it’s that writing to horrify is not at all straightforward. Like a vampire needing to ask if she’s got anyone stuck between her teeth, we need other people to let us know what’s going on, at least in the early stages. 

And that’s why Twisted50 has been such an eye-opening experience for me. The comments of other writers have been invaluable. That, and being able to read their first drafts. Through evaluating the works of others you can better identify where your own work needs more attention.

You also get a better sense of the breadth of the horror genre. We’ve got tales of creeping dread to outright fucked-up gore fiestas. Choose your poison.

I’m far from finding any voice to call my own as yet. Each effort so far has been an experiment across the axes of anxiety. I’m really in no position to dole out advice to anyone else, but these are a few things I’ve picked up along the way. Some of this can be generalised to all fictional writing, of course, but it’s helped remind me of what motivates good (hopefully) writing. 

• Let’s start with the obvious. If we don’t care about the protagonist then we certainly don’t care about what happens to them. And that doesn’t mean your main character has to be a good person. We can like someone simply because they have a clear objective, even if they’re human garbage. Having a goal makes them relatable, even if that goal is simply to get the hell out of dodge.

• When we start reading a horror story you know that something bad is going to happen. That simple knowledge should be enough to coax your reader into your world. That’s the promise you make as a writer, that things are going to go to shit. With that power, tension is something you can play with. Your reader will be constantly alert to any hints of what might be behind the next door or lurking in the recesses of your hero’s mind, poised to manifest in the most dreadful ways. You have to torture your hero and your reader. But if you don’t come up with the goods your reader will hate you.

• Death shouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen. Death is bad (I’ve been told) and often considered the ultimate ‘bad’ but the threat of death isn’t enough. What sets horror apart is the gulf of unknowing – that things could get a lot worse and in ways you wouldn’t want to imagine. And that’s where we need to take our readers.

• Short stories really do demand a reason for being. They have to achieve in a few pages what a novel has the leisure to do in a few hundred. And so they need to be punchy, like really punchy, like bolt stunner between the eyes punchy. How you achieve this is tricky. A fail safe is a neat twist but good luck finding one that hasn’t been done and therefore predictable. Failing that, I tend to find escalation can be quite effective: “You thought things were bad but, guess what, they’re so much badder than that.” This could arguably be a twist that doesn’t necessarily rely on a reappraisal of events up to that point, it’s just shit going south. Short stories can also be the perfect vehicle for making strong statements. Also, If a story leaves us with a comment on the human condition, something that’ll keep us ruminating, we have something that will stay with us long after we’ve finished reading.

• The final and possibly most important thing I’ve learned is that you need to be brave. You cannot pull your punches. You cannot be too subtle. You cannot worry about who you offend. Free speech is a marvellous thing, as is a reader’s freedom to stop reading. It’s better to take things to the extreme and rein it in than to self-censor. 

I challenge you to truly disgust yourself. 

From the Twisted50 team… You can sign up and read all Randolph’s stories and all the others, and also submit your own too. You can do that HERE.