How does horror short-circuit fiction writing?

Part of the challenge horror writing faces relate to defenses brought by modern readers genre fiction. Like almost every other genre, horror only came to have its own style as a separate style of fiction. great literary branch This happened in the modern era of publishing. But we see elements of “horror” pervasive throughout world literature—not just the nearly ubiquitous tradition of ghostly folk tales, but also the canon. How else could we explain Pentheus’ disintegration at the hands of his own mother(!)? Bacchae the outcome, or the myth of Perseus’ confrontation with the hideous Medusa, or Beowulf’s battle with Grendel’s mother deep underground, both erotic and terrifying, or Macbeth’s encounter with three witches in a nightmarish version of the Scottish Highlands, and so on. “Splatterpunk,” the bastard subgenre of horror, is particularly famous for reveling in graphic depictions of torture and murder, but I doubt there’s much here more chilling than Dante’s depiction of the cannibal Count Ugolino gnawing off the head of his own murderer, the Archbishop. Ruggieri, forever.

When it comes to written horror, the shorter the better. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” wrote TS Eliot in his famous work. Wasteland a century ago. That poetic line still retains its fear-inspiring power. Much of its effectiveness stems from this. economyThis creates a deep sense of eeriness. The most effective horror writing shares something of its uncanny compactness. In fact, horror as a genre has always been best represented by short stories and novellas.

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Full-length novels can only rarely sustain the sense of dread and dread over the long term; a sense of familiarity emerges, and I also suspect writers are less willing to give their characters a truly bad outcome at the end of the book. It’s more of a novel than a short story. Whether or not familiarity breeds contempt, the length of the novel tends to normalize the uncanny. To maintain this feeling of uncanniness, mistakeIt’s like telling an hours-long joke over hundreds of pages. You can see this effect on the doorstop. novels related to Stephen KingAlthough he is by far the most popular writer in the genre, he rarely manages to be truly scary.

standAlways high on popular lists of the best novels of all time, and at a whopping 1,200 pages (in the uncut version), this book is as good an example as any. The first third, which details the collapse of American society as most of its population is wiped out by a bioengineered disease, is nightmarishly effective. But the whole world can only be killed so many times and tall It settles in after a while. That’s not to say that King never failed to do this, but many of his scariest works are found in short stories where characters don’t have a chance to disturb the reader and the author demonstrates a genuine delight in his imagination. dirt. (Check out “The Jaunt” if you don’t believe me.)

True, there are longer novels like Peter Straub’s that manage to sustain the impact. Ghost Story and Clive Barker Curse Game. But these are very few and their formulas are difficult to distill. Ghost Story It features a very Kingly mix of the mundane and the supernatural, but maintains a strong sense of the uncanny as it hurtles towards something believably terrifying. (It also has one of the more subtle and confusing opening passages in any work of genre fiction.) Meanwhile, Barker’s particular brand of eroticized horror tends to be, shall we say, mostly like this. -pretentious and stupid, but somehow he pulled it all together for his first novel; Not only is this very, very well written, but it’s both sad and scary. This is a wonderful twist on the devil’s bargain scenario, and the real twist is delivered with remarkable subtlety.

At the other end of the spectrum are the two-sentence horror stories that are a Reddit phenomenon – for example: “The last man on earth was sitting alone in the room. There was a knock on the door.” But these aren’t so scary Zen koans, but a kind of kitsch in which the effort for effect trumps the demands of an internally compelling narrative.

The short story (and novella at best) thus manages to hit the Goldilocks sweet spot. Everyone (rightly) knows Poe, the enigmatic master. But just consider the cycle of strange tales collected in “Wendigo”, “The Great God Pan”, “Pretending the Runes”, “Veldt”, “Summer People” and “The King in Yellow” (which is a surprising conclusion). new audience as its motifs came to the fore in its debut season. True Detective). Or consider how Robert Aickman’s elegant living room arrangements become increasingly spooky until the bottom half disappears entirely. In this regard, look at Kafka’s terrifying yet pathetic “In the Penal Colony”. And not to mention Borges, whose “Book of Sand” serves as a metaphor for the thesis of this article. One can continue.

Why does it seem to work this way? Part of this is that any setup is a balancing act that becomes more difficult the longer the tightrope walker progresses. And horror, in particular, always runs the risk of being simply ridiculous, making nightmares appear in the light of day requires extraordinary control over style and tone; so much so that the reader is led almost unawares to the point where the fantastic comes into play.

Because fear is based on what academics say. exformation – that is, information that is clearly thrown out. These days, we’re positively bombarded with prequels and backstories in every universe of creative fiction. Lord of the Rings with Star Wars with Harry Potter with Batman. Their comprehensive approach to mimetic fictional world-building strips away all the magic. But as Patton Oswalt said when he was funny: We don’t care where the things we love come from; We only want the things we love.

Therefore, in Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” it makes no difference what Fortunato did to the mad narrator to deserve his terrible fate, and a thorough explanation would only unravel the story’s insidious sense of dread. What is the origin of the mysterious iridescent substance floating on the surface of the lake that gruesomely kills the heroes in King’s “The Raft”? Who cares! It’s enough that these and other stories have both delighted and terrified (and vice versa) generations of readers seeking the masochistic thrill that horror fiction uniquely provides.

And that’s true to some extent in fiction, too: There’s no substitute for a story that seems like it wants to be told. This is why George RR Martin has been able to produce endless pseudo-histories of Westeros without creating the magic that the first books of his series created for their readers. Like Agent Mulder The X-FilesWe just want to believe.

In other words, the “horrible” is an inevitable part of existence—similar to but distinct from the tragic—and duly represented in human art. Like fantasy, science fiction, romance, thriller and so on, we have embodied this into a genre that the conscious reader can experience with all the conditions and expectations that come with it. The short story form short-circuits some of this cognitive process and infects our consciousness before we have time to raise our mental defenses or break its spell. And isn’t a good scary story a form of witchcraft?

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David Polansky is a Toronto-based writer. Find it at: weirdfrekanslar.co.