Advice for Horror Writers

Here is a question posed by someone who wanted advice for a friend trying to write a horror story. My reply given below attracted a lot of interest from the gothic community. See what you think:

Question from S.H : "My writer friend sent me a short story of hers for review. However, it had striking similarities with a Lovecraft story called The Music of Eric Zann and I have no clue as to how to help fix this or keep her from scrapping the story.

"It isn't perfect, English is not her first language and it was written about two years ago when her English was much worse. I still think there is hope for her story, I just don't how this can be fixed."


Answer: Hi, S.H. I see two issues here, neither of which is a problem.

Firstly, let me say that there is nothing wrong with a story that has striking similarities to another. As long as it’s written with passion and skill, no one should care.

Watch John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven and then follow it up with Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. The first film is a direct copy of the second, adapted from the feudal rigor of old Japan to the violent wilderness of the early American West.

Both are phenomenal works of cinema that have stood the test of time. Are they two stories or one? It doesn’t matter. If you can rewrite Beowulf, so filled with adventure and power that it seizes a modern audience by the throat like the poisoned bite of an earth drake, then you are a great writer who deserves to be read and enjoyed.

Dan Millman’s wonderful book Way of the Peaceful Warrior is clearly very heavily influenced by Carlos Castaneda’s first work: The Teachings of Don Juan. My feeling is that Millman could have entitled his bestseller: I Wish I’d Had A Teacher Like Don Juan And If I Had This Is What It Would Have Been Like .

As a man who has read so much Castaneda that when I close my eyes, I can sense the beating of his heart, I loved Millman’s attempt on that same summit by an only slightly different route. My familiarity with the master helped me to fall in love with his shadow.

Pablo Picasso once said that bad artists copy, good artists steal. Originality is a fine thing, but it is not the hallmark of creativity and a work should never be judged on that alone.

This brings me to the second point, and that is the quality of the writing.

I am assuming that your friend loves to write. If this is true, then she must be addicted to reading her own work, and thus be a slave to the urge to reread and rewrite, to beat and to burnish her own words until they shine with the fevers that consume her heart.

This is the hunger that makes us what we are: the need to breathe so much life into the words on the page that they become alive, dancing in the minds of our readers, suspending eternal moments in their brains in which the secrets of our souls are whispered and screamed for the rest of their lives.

Her English is improved, she has the fleshy bones of a story already crafted by her own imagination. How can she resist the yearning to take hold of it and carve the possibilities of her hopes and dreams into it? She has an opportunity in front of her that should set her thoughts ablaze with inspiration.

This story is not a broken thing to be fixed. It is an unfinished thing to be made whole, an embryonic stream of thoughts to be fed, nurtured and thickened until its heart beats and its lungs crave the fresh, cold air of the big, wide world.

Tell her to rewrite it. Not this way, or that way, but one page at a time, and the devil take any passing resemblance to anything written by another.

Let it grow and change like a human mind evolving with the pressures of life and time, until it is the biggest, the best and boldest it can be. Until she feels from cranium to womb that she has nothing left to give to it. That it is a lover spent of all further joy and surprises, and just a fond memory to be enjoyed while she skips enriched to pastures new.

And it will be then that she looks back on that nascent tale, written in less than perfect English, and wishes with all her might that she had one more just like it: another perfect spark to fire the deepest joy a literary being can feel.

Hope that helps. Sometimes I miss the point because I am insane. I apologise if I have done this here.

Peter

A Curse on the Whole World

What is it with vampires these days? I don’t know about you, but from my point of view, things have been getting a little bit silly since Buffy & Angel kicked their dead butts back into the mainstream.

On the one hand, we have what I call the “Blade” disease, where the sons and daughters of Dracula have all turned into ninja mafiosi who won’t venture outside unless they’re fully dressed for fetish night at a Dutch nightclub. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed Underworld and Van Helsing and I will always treasure those memories of Kate Beckinsale’s jumping spinning cyclone kick in a leather catsuit, but I think that any more of this flagellatory, bestial necrophilia would just be flogging a dead horse.

At the other extreme, I recently saw the teen movie Twilight for the first time, and was amused to witness the hitherto hideous curse of the undead metamorphosed into some kind of positive lifestyle choice. Far from sticking to his traditional role as the immortal nemesis of an increasingly culturally irrelevant Christian church, in this film, one trendy bloodsucker had triumphed over the twin handicaps of an insatiable thirst for human blood and a fearsomely erect haircut to become the ultimate high school jock.

Return of the King

Yet, gently engaging though the Twilight saga is, it has no power to frighten or truly interest me. It has diverged radically from what viscerally fascinates me about the curse of the vampire. To worm our way back down into the truly rotten, poisonous core of that enduring myth, I say we need retrace our steps no further than Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. A beautiful book and an equally appealing TV miniseries, the vampires within it establish a nest in the eponymous town and set about infecting as many hapless victims as they can, each human meal reanimating from the grave to become another nefarious vector for the supernatural plague.

Brother eats sister, pupil murders teacher, mother feeds upon squealing child.

King’s vampires are not the slightly embarrassed, superior companions of humanity: they are the potential agents of its complete destruction. Ultimate  predators that left unchecked, would exponentially eradicate the warm mammals upon which they feed in an escalating orgy of senseless greed.

In my darkest dreams, this is what vampirism represents: a ferocious disease transmitted by a ghastly species of cannibalistic, total rape in which the body and perhaps even the very soul itself is stolen, corrupted and twisted into a voracious simulacrum of the human host. And what of the prey, those of us who are condemned run like rabbits beneath the talons of the immortal raptor scourge? We are entranced: in sexual thrall to the beasts that lust after the pain of our flesh; in awe of their strength and preternatural beauty, enchanted by the promise of eternal life dangled above the trembling weakness of our fragile, fleeting forms.

I need vampires to be ruthless, starving, mutated beings that can mimic those we love the most whilst harbouring a feverish desire to feast upon our trusting blood. They should be an appalling threat that appeals profoundly to the deep and complex webs of fear and dependence that interweave within our closest emotional bonds. What mother wouldn’t open her window to the prodigal daughter she thought was lost forever? What infant son can resist the arms of the mother risen from a grave that he barely understands? What lover could deny the bite of a lost soul mate that promises perpetual union in an endless night of superhuman passion?

Yet though we might be enticed to jump into the grinning jaws of the assassin masquerading as our dearest love, to do so would be to take a leap into the terrible unknown. When we surrender to the teeth of the killer, do we become more than we are? Or do we die, only to be replaced by a ghost that haunts the echoing chambers and empty veins of a puppet corpse, while what remains of our conscious mind boils in the endless exile of unbearable damnation and pain?

Does anything of the host survive?

Sleeping with the Enemy

Like perplexingly many people, I frequently endure horrifying dreams of a post apocalyptic struggle to stay one step ahead of just such ravening, malignant hordes. These are archetypal nightmares, wrought into the structures of our brains by some synchronistic twist of psychochemical destiny. I love and hate these compelling visions of unbearable horror in equal measure. They revolt and fascinate the deepest, wettest recesses of my cerebellum.

In one recent variant that repeated on several nights, the world’s oceans had been replaced by a planet-wide pool of infectious, intelligent saliva that sought out its victims by sweeping into their cities and homes. Once stung by its corrosive fluids, the human body slowly began to decay, and its mind was gradually and agonisingly digested into the collective unconscious of the carnivorous sea. Yet while its crumbling flesh remained intact enough to shamble in pursuit of the living, it served its watery god as a hunter of men, its putrefying limbs and darkening senses directed to seek out fresh and uncontaminated bodies towards which to beckon the caustic, sentient waves.

“He’s in here” they whispered through rotted throats and peeling grins as they peered through cracks in the door behind which I cowered in the grip of paralysing dread.

Each distinct stripe within this tortured spectrum of my fabulous rainbow of nightmares is coloured by the same wave of unbearable emotion. The terror and exhaustion of an existence which has no meaning other than escape from a threat of almost inexpressible evil: comfortable and familiar people altered into hideous and infectious things.

Over the years, these dreams have recurred often enough to force me to recognise that the beasts that dwell in their depths are seemingly interchangeable. On some nights they are vampires, on others, zombies of one grotesque genus or another. The words may change but the song remains the same. This ogre swapping penchant of my subconscious eventually guided me to understand that the life-cycles of these two famous monsters are remarkably similar: the reanimated bodies of our friends, family and neighbours, hungrily chasing us down to bring us into their unholy fold by eating us alive.

Once this, in hindsight, glaringly obvious parallel had dawned in my waking brain, I began to notice the pattern elsewhere too. The most evidently isomorphic legend is that of the lycanthrope. The werewolf is clearly a vampire with a fur coat and bigger teeth.

Eat me up, Scotty

But the pattern certainly doesn’t stop there. It turns out that our culture is brimming with mutated forms of the transformative plague, and to find some of its most interesting incarnations we must ascend from the hot blood and soil of the horror genre into the cold, inhuman voids of the science fiction tale.

The myth is replicated in its most chilling cultivar in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where it is the tendrils of an alien plant rather than the fangs of a beast that rob the helpless human of his or her most intimate essence, and release an evil double to steal the unsuspecting shapes of its family and friends in turn.

This same ghastly theme is ruthlessly assimilated by the Borg in the Star Trek Universe. Whole planets are infested with an artificial, technological virus that subsumes the infected into a super-consciousness without pity, and lonely holdouts are often confronted by technologically disfigured partners and relatives whose inhuman mission is to convince them that their “resistance is futile”.

Whatever else occurs in the Star Trek universe, for me, the spectre of the Borg looms, often silent but always large against the cold blackness of space: an ever growing, oceanic consciousness of heartless evil that stands poised to one day swallow the last lonely and terrified island of humanoid emotional warmth like a giant, sightless skull bursting a grape between the dry, crushing headstones of its relentless teeth.

All of these vile monsters understand our weaknesses to perfection because they used to be us, and yet they are no longer constrained by the human feelings that might temper the seething hunger that simmers in their immortal veins. This is what makes them evil beyond our imaginations.

Dwelling on these most terrible things is a horror some of us can barely resist: a cliff edge over which we must peek. And in the swirling terror of that abyss roils the hundred million years of madness that lurks like some cold blooded beast beneath the soft veneer of our civilised skins. Freedom, power, and immortality await us. All we need to do is endure a painful death and cease to be everything that we might be proud to call ourselves…

The Next Generation

When I wrote the Shadow of Death, I needed to explore this deep, inner dread of superhuman, parasitic mimicry in a different way.

What if the very forces that create the heavens and the earth could take an interest in us, seek us and hunt us through the people we trust and love? What if a being so old and so cunning that to us it would seem to be none other than the Devil Himself could wage war against us through the stolen flesh of our closest friends? I wanted the reader to experience the malevolent, dark and hungry intelligence of a creature that could spin the fabric of the world itself into evil men and women within a plan to manipulate a single human life to its own savage, unknowable ends.

I wanted to show how when a human being tries to fight back against such a toxic force, he becomes entangled in the claws of the beast, poisoned by the venom that drips from their cunning blades and begins to change until one day he cannot recognise himself as any different from the monsters that he hates with all of his ferocious and now inhuman power.

He himself is now the dealer in black secrets, the taker of life and the servant of death. In this way, man, ascended from the animal kingdom to become a civilised being, evolves anew to become a predator again, in a terrible realm where the safety and boredom of the everyday world is like a distant, fondly remembered dream.

In this expanded vision of creation, he is able to see both sides of the coin: he is the hunter and the hunted, the killer and the quarry, the corpse and the phage that bloats it from within. As the old, sheltered existence he longs for crumbles beneath his feet, he is forced to remake his own melting flesh and shattering bones with desperate hands into a shape whose sole purpose is to survive by violent murder.

By ripping away the living essence of other warm beings, he slowly learns what it means to become the ending of his own world. He comes to understand the very meaning and preciousness of life.

And it is a gift he would give anything to forget.

This is the purpose of that book: to take the agony of my foulest dreams and use it to force open a doorway into the more vast and terrifying, unconscious land that lies all around us, just beyond the sight of our human eyes. I wanted to animate the cadaver that rots beneath the boards upon which we tread throughout our waking lives, and hint at the ghastly truth that haunts so many of our sleepless nights: that we live in a tiny island of illumination in an ocean of perpetual night.

And the darkness is coming for us, one by one.

Sweet dreams,

Peter