Accidental Horror

I’ve never set out to write horror. It’s not a genre I read, nor do I want to read it, so when I have a reader inform me that I’ve written it…. I assure you, it’s quite by accident. Nonetheless, life is sometimes horrifying. What I do set out to capture in a story is life, human nature, and the way we react to one another. When I wrote Memories of the Abyss, Sarah Hoyt had suggested to me that I was pulling my punches when it came to emotion in storytelling. You have to bleed a little on the page, she told me, so go write that. When she had read the story, at a writing workshop if I recall correctly, the weekend I joined the Mad crew here in the blog, she handed it back to me. With a shudder, she informed me I’d opened a whole damn vein into it.

I took the hint and dialed it back. I’d already written Twisted Breath of God at that point – it’s one of the first stories I ever finished. (Note the operative word finish, there.) It simply explores first contact with aliens, and an outcome thereof. Miscommunication, cargo cults, and human nature, once again. And yet… readers tell me it is horror.

Much later I wrote Snow in Her Eyes, knowing that there was going to be an outsize emotional impact in what I was writing. Any time there is a child involved… much less what I’m not going to spoil for the denouement of the story and investigation contained within it. Let’s just say some of what I wrote into that fantasy story was pulled from the real world. Which is, after all, the most horrifying of all possible places. Most of the time, I’m writing escapist fun stuff. Once in a while, though, I write reality into my stories and that’s when the icy fingers of horror seem to stroke the cheek of the reader.

Even the latest release, although it’s my Halloween story, and the title alone is making readers vocally recoil from the idea of buying it – with one telling me they would have nightmares just off the title – is not horror. Zombie Maggots is two stories, in one novella-length package. Both of the stories follow humans choosing to fight against the consequences of someone else’s actions. Both of the stories end on hope.

Thing is, when I wrote the first story ten years ago, I wasn’t exploring the idea of the horror. I was chasing a hard science fiction bent into the zombie apocalypse. I was also reliving my first great SFF con experience, through exploring human characters as they reacted to being caught away from home and unprepared for what was coming at them. Using flies, and maggots? Seemed perfectly normal to me. What better way to deal with decay than the ecosystem of scavengers extant?

I do get the visceral repulsion people feel towards maggots. Having grown up on a farm, I’ve dealt with them myself. And they don’t really bother me. But again, I think we’ve established that I’m not normal. So for me, Zombie Maggots was not the horror. The terror in the story was intended to be more about navigating home again, reconnecting across a land locked down in pandemic panic.

Which was the odd part about editing that decade-old story for publication. I had made some predictions in it, and brother let me confess now: I was wrong. I did not foresee the reactions that would come about eight years later. When I wrote the second story, early this year, I had been through a pandemic (albeit one much, much milder than what I was writing about) and had a whole new perspective. I had to do some serious editing on the first story to align it with reality… and that had nothing to do with the science involved. Only the human reactions.

I suppose that is where the horror lies. Not in the parasites and scavengers who rustle at the edges of our perceptions. They may make us shudder at what comes after life. The real horror, though, is what life brings to us.