The genre of True Crime does not seek to compel its audience to transgress legal boundaries. Nor does the Action genre strive to engender an appetite for death-defying leaps from burning buildings with a pet or lover in tow. The Horror genre is unusual then, but not entirely alone, in deriving its namesake from the condition it seeks to establish in its reader.[i] The hallmark of a good horror story—because human beings are uniquely masochistic—is in how much it leaves its audience shaken and disturbed[ii], with horror texts often lambasted for their lack of ability to dampen vertebral temperature.
For me, the story ‘Roudabout’[iii] in New Fears[iv], an anthology of contemporary horror stories, failed in its duty to illicit shivers. Conversely, ‘Dollies’[v] and ‘Shepherds’ Business’[vi] had my innards trembling like a rosewater blancmange in the hands of a chronically-panicked waiter. But what techniques do the latter employ to generate their effect while the former flounders? Why do we run from some stories in horror and others in boredom?
Steven King, the veritable lich of horror, attests that ‘a good horror story is one that functions on a symbolic level’[vii] since ‘humans deal better with symbols.’[viii] This, I argue, is why Lovecraft’s horror fictions are so compelling. His eldritch monstrosities are metaphors for an ‘outside that breaks through’[ix], namely external forces that govern our lives and lay stark the insignificance of our being[x]. A giant octopus-god is more goofy than terrifying, but Cthulhu is a symbol that there are greater things than humankind, and their briefest whims may spell our extinction. That’s true terror. In this way, it could be said that good horror is like a gravestone: it isn’t the presence of well-polished granite that sends tremors to our thoraxes, it’s what the gravestone tells us. It says, ‘Hey, there’s a body of a former human being below me. And one day this earth is going to reclaim you, too.’
I’m not sure what the horse-ghost creature from Afghanistan represents in ‘Roundabout’. It isn’t particularly clear. Therefore, it isn’t particularly scary beyond its shadowlike ephemerality. The baby wrapped in the skin of a dead baby is arguably clearer in what it tells us about Thomas Tulloch’s character in ‘Shepherd’s Business’. This symbol describes a man so void of empathy that he assumes presenting his grieving wife with a new baby wrapped in the skin of her stillborn is a fine and husbandly gesture. Furthermore, it tells us, since this man is a functioning part of his community, about a culture that does not value empathy nor promote it. Thomas, himself, spells this out: ‘It was just, your baby’s dead, get over it, you’ll have another.’[xi] The true horror of this skin-wearing baby is then its status as a symbol for a void of human compassion.
‘Dollies’ also features a dead baby; this one representing the subversion of a mother’s duty to care for her offspring[xii]. As readers, we assume (and this story lays bare our sexism) that a girl should care for her dolls and a mother should care for her child. But when Nolly’s mother says, ‘I let the wrong twin [referring to Nolly] live’[xiii] and Nolly’s Dolls die due to ‘smallpox’[xiv], horror ensues because these events are symbols of a lack of matriarchal instinct. The final and most horrifying manifestation of this symbol comes when Nolly suffocates her own child and places her body on the shelf next to her dead dolls[xv].
There is also much to be said about the revolting aspects of these stories—smallpox, the flayed skin of a baby—in that they add an element of utmost significance[xvi]: disgust. This is because ‘affective reaction to the monstrous in horror stories is not merely a matter of fear. Rather threat is compounded with revulsion, nausea and disgust.’[xvii] King supports this theory, stating that stories ‘dealing with horror always do their work on two levels…the ‘gross out’ level…’ and the deeper symbolic level.[xviii] ‘Roundabout’ had bones[xix], but I don’t think it was revolting enough.
With this understanding of how horror promotes its namesake in its readers, it could be said that writers of horror must dig past the spooky gravestone to unearth the rotting remains beneath.
Metaphorically, of course.
[i] Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror (London: Routledge, 1990), 14-15.
[ii] Guy N. Smith, Writing Horror Fiction (London: A & C Black, 1996) 1.
[iii] Muriel Gray, ‘Roundabout’ in New Fears, ed. Mark Morris (London: Titan Books, 2017), 275-292.
[iv] Mark Morris, ed., New Fears (London: Titan Books, 2017)
[v] Kathryn Ptacek, ‘Dollies’ in New Fears, ed. Mark Morris (London: Titan Books, 2017), 333-348.
[vi] Stephen Gallagher, ‘Shepherd’s Business’ in New Fears, ed. Mark Morris (London: Titan Books, 2017), 29-49.
[vii] Steven King, Danse Macabre (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1981), xi.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater, 2016), 16.
[x] Nathaniel Lee, ‘How Stephen King scares his audience in 3 steps’, Business Insider, 11 Sep 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/stephen-king-horror-books-writing-scary-movies-it-2019-9?r=US&IR=T [accessed 29 Feb 2020]
[xi] Gallagher, ‘Shepherd’s Business’, 34.
[xii] Seminar about dollies
[xiii] Ptacek, ‘Dollies’, 346.
[xiv] Ibid. 333.
[xv] Ibid. 348.
[xvi] Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror,23.
[xvii] Ibid. 22.
[xviii] King, Danse Macabre, 17.
[xix] Gray, ‘Roundabout’, 290.
Horrible Writing 