Earlier in the year, a fantastic horror writer named Kevin Lucia was finishing grad school and, on his blog, presented a fascinating 9-part series on the nature of horror. I fell in love with this series, and Kevin has very graciously allowed me to reprint it here so others can enjoy it, too. Visit me every Thursday through October 18 for the next installment, and on October 25, some of his fiction—free—as a Halloween treat!

Kevin Lucia is a Contributing Editor for Shroud Magazine, and a blogger for The Midnight Diner. His short fiction has appeared in several anthologies. He’s currently finishing his Creative Writing Masters Degree at Binghamton University, he teaches high school English and lives in Castle Creek, New York with his wife and children. He is the author of Hiram Grange & The Chosen One, Book Four of The Hiram Grange Chronicles, and he’s currently working on his first novel. Visit him on the web at www.kevinlucia.com.

Does – Can – Horror Really SCARE? Or Does It Only Disgust?

“Writers who used to strive for awe and achieve fear, now strive for fear and achieve only disgust” – David Aylward

Almost finished with chapter two of Noel Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror, (which I’m reviewing and researching for my Film & Philosophy grad class), in which he’s trying to identify how and why audiences of horror cinema and readers of horror fiction can actually experience any kind of emotional fear of monsters and plots and situations they know aren’t real, and in many cases couldn’t exist in the real world.

I’ll sketch out those basic ideas tomorrow, but this chapter, especially, has provided lots of food for thought, as a reader and writer. For regular readers of this blog, I’ll admit again – I’m probably over-thinking things and splitting philosophical hairs – but I’m basically using the blog to thrash thoughts around about horror cinema and the horror genre in general for a presentation and an eventual paper in my Film & Philosophy graduate class at BU.

Not expecting to reach any grand revelations about the horror genre or why I labor in it, necessarily, but as a writer – even, GASP, an artist – I think it’s important to wrestle often with why and how we produce the work we do.  And doing it for graduate credit just makes it all the sweeter.  So, anyhoo…

Does horror really scare me? If not…then why do I read it?

This chapter of Carroll’s work really set me to thinking, as well as a recent vlog post by suspense novelist Mike Duran. Now, Mike was targeting specifically the genre of “Christian Horror”, discussing how doctrinal constrictions at Christian publishing houses determine that novels end in certain, predictable ways that may undercut any “scariness” they might have. But it really made me think: when was the last novel that really scared me?

And I had to pause.

Because I struggled to think of a novel that really scared me.

In some ways, it goes back to something Carroll said in chapter one, which set me thinking about what it was that I wrote, what I wanted most to inspire in people. Again, keeping in mind that trying to define and hedge borders around genres is sketchy business, here’s what Carroll said that really spun the gears in my brain:

“nevertheless, I do think that there is an important difference between this type of story – which I want to call tales of dread – and horror stories. Specifically, the emotional response they elicit seems to be quite different than that engendered by art-horror. The uncanny event which tops off such stories cause a sense of unease and awe, perhaps of momentary anxiety and foreboding. These events are constructed to move the audience rhetorically to the point that one entertains the idea that unavowed, unknown, perhaps concealed and inexplicable forces rule the universe. Where art-horror involves disgust as a central figure, what might be called art-dread does not” (pg. 42)

By this definition – I most want to write what Carroll calls art-dread, not art-horror. And, in a natural leap, what I READ informs what I write, so most the work I READ falls into the above category, also. (I also like to read and write genre-mixes – see Norman Partridge for my favorite, there – and my current WIP is definitely a genre mix).

Of course, when it comes to how the industry packages horror fiction and film, there’s no distinction. It’s all just “horror”. Charles L. Grant, Ramsey Campbell, T. M. Wright, Norman Prentiss, Mary SanGiovanni, Gary A. Braunbeck, Ron Malfi, Rio Youers, Dan Keohane even T. L. Hines, Travis Thrasher and Dean Koontz (because Peter Straub and Stephen King and Robert McCammon, also my favorites, can kinda do it all)….are all labeled “horror” writers, or writers of “dark fiction”…but their work hinges on – in my experience – more the definition of “art-dread” than “art-horror”. This is the stuff I read, I crave, not necessarily because it horrifies me or scares me, but because generally, in my opinion as a reader, their works often…

“are constructed to move the audience rhetorically to the point that one entertains the idea that unavowed, unknown, perhaps concealed and inexplicable forces rule the universe.”

Of course, certain novels by certain horror writers I enjoy because they do the same thing. For example, I haven’t read all of Brian Keene‘s novels, but the ones I have and have really loved: The Rising, Dead City, Ghost Walk, A Gathering of Crows – have all dealt in these themes.  They had the usual trappings of horror, but they deal with those unknown, inexplicable forces of the universe.

But scare? Horrify?

Hmmmm.

According to Carroll’s definition, very few novels I’ve read have achieved the “horrification” (yeah, I sorta made that word up) he talks about. Certainly, several novels have reached the disgust level – won’t name any names, but I’ve definitely read some novels in my time as a reviewer that have turned my stomach – but according to Carroll’s definition, that’s not good enough, because the work must achieve BOTH.

(are you getting by now how subjective this all is, based on the reader and viewer’s preferences….?)

So, again: what novels have really scared me? (Notice: I didn’t say disturb or fill me with unease and dread or made me cry or filled me with dramatic tension. I said SCARED ME).

I can only think of two, and ironically enough, it was the combination of real life events with the actual reading of these novels that provided that sense of horror:

1. In Silent Graves, by Gary A. Braunbeck – about a man who loses his wife and unborn child, and all the trauma he goes through (of course, surrounded by supernatural drama and trauma), I read this while my wife visited her sister in Colorado Springs for a week. Any time someone takes a plane these days, the specter of 9/11 looms large. So imagine, me reading this late at night in a dead quiet house with the kids sleeping and my wife several states away, having to return by plane, me counting the days until she was on the ground in New York and safe….reading about a man who’d lost his soul mate….yeah. Some definite shivers of fear, with this one.

2. The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty. Again, home alone at night, with Abby and the kids over at her parents. Reading this in a dead quiet house out in the country, of course counting my own faith beliefs….yep. This one did the trick, too.

And, believe it or not…that’s it. I’m sitting here, thinking there was a third one…but I guess not.

So. Only two novels I’ve ever read that have actually scared me. All the rest of the horror novels or quiet horror novels or tales of dread or supernatural suspense or thrillers or what-have-you have definitely had what I’d consider to be highly effective, positive impacts – stories about those unknown powers of the universe – but I can only really say those two novels scared me, and because they both struck me HARD, where it hurts most: at family and faith.

Interest, to say the least…