It's alive! Tapping the rich vein of horror

Before you head behind the sofa, let me say this isn’t a blog about horror fiction. I’m not the best exponent of that, as I don't read or write much in the genre. Instead, I’m going to blog about horror as a flavour, a spice to add to the mix of any fiction you may be writing or contemplating writing.

Adding a dash of horror is a worthy tradition in literature; the Brothers Grimm were writing about cannibalism a century before Thomas Harris gave us Hannibal Lector, and it’s hard to beat the Room 101 rats in Orwell’s 1984 for nail-biting nightmare potential. Crime writers have known this trick for decades: how to season their stories with a dash of darkness. Arthur Conan Doyle served it up in spades: from The Hound of the Baskervilles to The Creeping Man.

Contemporary crime writers use horror to great effect. Mo Hayder’s Tokaloshe in Ritual and its sequel, Skin, is a great example of how a skilled writer can weave a disturbing sense of the supernatural into hard-hitting crime stories.

Fred Vargas has given us immortal ghosts, werewolves, plague rats and vampires. Enough supernatural horror to satisfy any aficionado, but Vargas does a very neat line in explaining everything in rational terms in the end.

Horror tends to work best when it’s used sparingly, to make a moment visceral, bring it off the page. Try to sustain this sort of shock value and you run the risk of numbing your reader’s responses. It’s the way we’re made. Our brains filter out familiar scents to keep us alert for the smell of danger. A surfeit of horror tends to force the reader to look away or worse, to laugh in order to relieve the tension.

The best writers know this and will provide a little light relief along the way so that you laugh in the intended places (usually right before they make you jump a foot in the air). The very best exponent of this is not a writer but a film director: George A. Romero. Zombies can be funny, but watch out for your feet and elbows.

It’s the same rule that applies with pacing, or erotica for that matter. A glimpse of the monster under the bed (or in it) is more effective that a lingering twelve page forensic examination. Plant a seed, refer to it often enough to make sure it doesn’t die in the reader’s mind, prepare them just enough for the moment when it will bear fruit. Then – let them have it.

It doesn’t need to be raw gore, either. In fact some of the best horror only hints at what lies beneath, letting the reader’s imagination do the rest.

There’s a little horror lurking in everyone’s imagination and the reader’s imagination is among the most powerful tools a writer has – learn how to engage that (and to manipulate it) and you’ll be onto a winning formula.

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