October 24, 2019

Scary Stories to Tell…

Pop culture reference. Haven’t done one of those in ages…

I’ve blathered on about different genres a bunch of times. It seemed like this might be a good time in the year to revisit one in particular that I haven’t talked about in a while. On the off chance you haven’t noticed the sudden rise of bats, pumpkins, and scarecrows in your neighborhood, we’re going to be talking about horror.
Maybe it’s just the particular bubble I’m in, but it feels like horror’s finally, truly inching its way out into the mainstream. Even just ten or fifteen years ago, a lot of folks still viewed horror as this big, general bin filled with Satanists, slashers, and screaming people. And, let’s be honest, anyone who wrote horror clearly was just working through tons of childhood issues, right? Probably didn’t help that for years there were some folks who loudly insisted you could only write horror if you’d gone through something traumatic…
Simple truth is, just like sci-fi or comedy or romance, horror stories get broken down into many different sub-genres.  Us is horror, sure, but that doesn’t mean we immediately lump it in with the new Halloween reboot. Cherie Priest’s The Toll is horror, too, but that doesn’t mean it’s doing the same things as Wesley Chu’s Walking Dead tie-in book, Typhoon. And none of these are like my story Dead Moon.

I’ve mentioned once or thrice before that sometimes things get the wrong genre label hung on them, and it creates a clash of expectations. We went in told we were getting a story that would do this and this, but got one that did that by using that. And, personally, I think this is true with sub-genres, too. If I tell readers they’re getting a slasher story and it turns out to be much more of a monster story, there’s a good chance a lot of the story is just going to feel off balance to them. It won’t hit a lot of the “correct” benchmarks my audience is expecting.

That said, I wanted to toss out a couple different sub-genres of horror to think about. Some of them are well established and have been discussed (and debated) to death.  Others are just things I’ve noticed and named on my own that I feel are worth mentioning. I’ve brought up a lot of them before.

Supernatural stories
This one’s easy. It’s pretty much the classic spooky story. The pale woman out hitchhiking alone in the middle of night.  The awful-smelling thing down in the lower berth. That creepy guy in the elevator letting you know there’s room for one more…
There are a few key things about these stories.  One of the biggies is that our protagonist usually doesn’t suffer any physical harm. Their underwear needs to go through the wash three or four times and they may not sleep well for years, but overall they tend to come out okay. If anyone suffers in a supernatural story it’s usually the bad guy or a supporting character. Also, these stories tend not to have explanations– they just are. There aren’t any cursed objects or ancient histories at play.  This is just the kind of stuff that happens in a supernatural world.
Thrillers
Thrillers stand a bit away from the pack ‘cause they tend to be more grounded than most horror stories. Very few vampires, no demons, not a lot of machete-killers. Even if they have a supernatural element, the horror rarely comes from that element. They’re very real-world horror stories, for the most part.
The key thing is that a thriller’s all about right now.  It’s about the ticking clock, the killer hiding behind the drapes, or the foot that’s just inches from the lethal booby trap. There’s a lot of suspense focused on one or two characters and it stays focused on them for the run of my story.  A thriller keeps the characters (and the reader) on edge for almost the whole story.
Giant Evil stories
These are the tales when the universe itself is against my characters.  Every person they meet, every object they find, everything they do–it all serves some greater, awful evil. It’s just so big and overwhelming. You may have heard the terms “Lovecraftian horror” or “cosmic horror” too.
I think a lot, if not most, post-apocalyptic stories fall here. The ones that lean towards horror over sci-fi, anyway. The entire world now belongs to the zombie hordes, the cannibal gangs, the killer virus, whatever. I’d probably toss a lot of haunted house stories in here, too, because the haunted house (or ship, or insane asylum, or spaceship, or whatever) is essentially the universe of the story.  There’s nothing else for us or for the characters to interact with. 1408, The Shining, and Event Horizon could all be seen as supernatural stories, but their settings really elevate them to giant evil stories.
Slasher stories
When you get right down to it, these stories are just about body count. How many men, women, and teenagers can the killer reduce to cold meat? Point to note–almost never children.
One of the big things with slasher stories is there’s usually a degree of creativity and violence to the deaths, although it’s important to note it’s rarely deliberate or malicious. It’s just the killer using the most convenient tools at hand for the job. They’re pretty much a parkour of death. The original Friday the 13th franchise pretty much became the standard for slasher stories, and it’s what most people tend to think of first when  the term comes up.
A lot slasher stories used to have a mystery sub-elementto them, trying to figure out who the killer was. Then it kind of morphed into being a (usually) weak twist. Slasher stories also developed a bad habit of falling back on using insanity as their only motivation and got stereotyped as “psycho-killer” movies. Which is a shame ’cause some of them are very clever and creepy.
Torture porn
I’m not sure if Stephen King actually coined the term “torture porn” in his old Entertainment Weekly column (does he still do that?), but that’s the first place I remember seeing it.  At its simplest, torture porn is about making the reader squirm.  If I can make them physically ill, that’s a big win. 
The characters in torture porn are almost always underdeveloped, going with the idea that we’ll just relate to them and what they’re going through on a basic human level. More than any other form of horror, torture porn isn’t about characters—it’s about the visceral things being done to the characters.  They’re getting skinned, scalped, boiled, slowly impaled, vivisected… and we’re getting every gory detail of it.  Somebody I used to work with once told me “porn is when you show everything,” and this sub-genre really leaves nothing to the imagination.
A key element to torture porn is the victim is almost always helpless. They’re bound, drugged, completely alone, or vastly outnumbered. Unlike a slasher film– where there’s always that sense that Phoebe might escape if she just ran a little faster or make a bit less noise– there is no question in these stories that the victim is not going to get away.  That hope isn’t here, because that’s not what these stories are about.
Worth noting there’s a few distinctions between a slasher story and a torture porn story, and one of the big ones is the sheer number of people killed. Slashers are about the body count, but (as the name implies) torture porn is about how long single deaths can be drawn out.
Monster stories

The tales in this little sub-genre tend to be about unstoppable, inescapable things that mean the protagonist harm. Monsters are rarely secretive or mysterious, but they do have an alarming tendency to be nigh-invulnerable. The emphasis here is that there’s nothing my heroes (or anyone else) do can that’ll stop this thing’s rampage, and any worthwhile rampage tends to involve people dying.

I just talked about monsters a few months back, so I won’t rehash a lot of that here. You can just go read my birthday post.
Adventure Horror stories
To paraphrase from the original Hellboy movie (which fits nicely in this category), adventure horror is where the good guys bump back.  While they may use a lot of tropes from some of the other subgenres, the key element to these stories is that the heroes are fighting back. Not in a desperate, flailing way, but in a trained, well-equipped, locked-and-loaded way.
I’m not saying it won’t go exceptionally bad for them (and it often does), but there stories are about protagonists who get to inflict a bit of damage and live to tell the tale.  For a while, anyway.  To quote an even wiser man… even monsters have nightmares.
So there’s a couple of subgenres we could break horror down into.  And like I said before, there’s many more.  It’s not a complete list, and you can probably think of some others we could talk about. Feel free to add ‘em down in the comments.
Also, why are we talking about this?
When most of us start off as writers, we flail a bit. We attempt to copy stories even though we don’t quite understand all the mechanics of them.  We’re not sure where our own stories fit under that big horror umbrella (or sci-fi, or fantasy, or…).  We’ll begin a tale in one sub-genre, then move into a plot more fitting a different one, wrap up with an ending that belongs on a third, and have the overall tone of yet another. 
Y’see, Timmy, it’s important to know what I’m writing for two different reasons.  One is so I’ll be true to it and don’t end up with a sprawling story that covers everything and goes nowhere.  Two is that I also want to be able to market my story, which means I need to know what it is. If I tell the editor it’s not torture porn when it plainly is, at the best I’m going to get rejected. My readers may toss it aside.
At the worst, they’ll all remember me as “that idiot” the next time they see something of mine.
Next time… well, next time it’s actually Halloween. But it’s also the day before November begins. And for a lot of writers November means NaNoWriMo. So I wanted to toss out a few quick thoughts about that.
Until then, go write.
June 6, 2019

…Versus the World

As most of you know, I watch bad movies. I’m kind of a fan of them. I also think you can learn a lot by reading and watching the not-as-great stuff and figuring out how and where it went wrong. Read the good stuff too, absolutely, but don’t avoid the bad stuff.

Anyway, I was watching one particularly bad movie a week or three back, and it hit a problem. It hit a bunch, really, but we’re just going to dwell on the one. And that problem involved a television psychic.

Y’see, we’d clearly established the supernatural existed in this world.  I mean, I’m pretty sure we weren’t supposed to think  demons and ghosts had never existed before this moment in time.  And since we’re dealing with demons and ghosts, a psychic isn’t exactly out of the question.

So… problem. Was this a real psychic or not? I mean, the character existed, yeah, but were they supposed to be a real psychic who had a TV show?  Or were they a fake psychic who performed in a world where the supernatural was real? The directing, acting, and special effects didn’t really help clarify this vagueness. As story choices went, it needed a lot more thought and attention than these filmmakers gave it.

It reminded me a bit of an essay I read a few years back. I wish I could give proper credit on this but I’ve never been able to find it again. I thought I’d read it in the introduction of a Lovecraft anthology, but I’ve gone over my library a couple of times trying to find it. Point is—this isn’t my clever observation.

To paraphrase, this essayist pointed out that we couldn’t really have supernatural stories until the late 18th or 19th century. According to them, it made sense this was when the first names of the genre began to appear.  Why?

Well, until then we hadn’t really defined what “natural” was, and that knowledge hadn’t been widely distributed, either. Sure, we can look back at tales from the Middle Ages and label them as ghost stories, folklore, or what have you, but at the time most people took these as… well, historical record. These were non-fiction. You didn’t put a horseshoe over your door with seven nails because it was a quaint tradition—you did it to keep the damned witch out.

(…and. prithee, we all know of who I speak when I sayeth “the witch”– Goody Lesswing! We all knowest this, I am just the one who sayeth it! Her evil eye did make my beans and corn shrivel up!)

In a way, this is the context issue I mentioned a few months back. Y’see, Timmy, if I don’t know what’s natural in a setting—what’s normal—I can’t tell you what’s unnatural. I can’t define an equation without having at least some idea what both halves of the equation are.  It’s like me asking “are you faster than Phoebe?” How can you answer that if you don’t know who Phoebe is? Maybe she uses a cane.  Maybe she’s my two-month old niece. Maybe she’s an Olympic sprinter.  Hell, maybe she’s a racing greyhound.  Likewise, how can I tell you a not-real story if I don’t establish what’s real and possible in this setting?Now, I brought that up so I can mention this…

I can write an amazing world.  It can be a world at peace where nobody wants for anything. It can be a world of constant conflict.  It could be a secret, magical world or a widely-known sci-fi one.  One of the joys of fiction is we can create worlds where absolutely anything is possible.  Turing-tested artificial intelligence.  Dragon scales as currency. Space elevators. Zombie plagues. Swamp witches who keep you up at night tapping on your window.

But no matter what kind of world it is, no matter how wild things seem, for the people living in it, it’s normal.  If aliens have invaded and we’ve been at war for the past six months and a third of the human race is dead… this is just the way things are. This is an average day. And no matter what kind of world they’re set in, average days are boring. Because they’re, well… average. They’re just part of the daily grind. Even if the daily grind is mashing moonberries into juice that we use to keep the gorgons calm while we milk them for antivenin.

Y’see, Timmy—yep, a double y’see Timmy. I know, it’s been awhile—this is why worldbuilding isn’t plot.  It’s just setting.  No matter how fantastic or dynamic the world might be, it’s still just the backdrop. That’s it. It’s the world my story’s going to happen in—not my story.

Plot is when something changes in my character’s world. It’s when the norm gets disrupted—no matter how amazing or horrible or routinely frustrating that norm might be. It’s the thing that stands out to them, that drives them into action, that makes today not an average day.  When plot happens we should know it because our characters will know it.

When I’m planning my story, I need to be keenly aware of this. No matter how fantastic my world is, for the people living in it… its just the world.  It’s just the way things are. We want to see people deal with the change, to rise to the challenge of situations that are new to them.

Not deal with an average day in their world.

Next time…

I really need to get these edits done, and this weekend is the Writers Coffeehouse at Dark Delicacies, and the Dystopian Bookclub at the Last Bookstore, so getting something done for next time might be a bit of a challenge. But I’ll try to do something.

You do something, too.

Go write.

July 11, 2018 / 2 Comments

Some Shameless Self Promotion…

            San Diego Comic Con is next week, and if you’re going it’s possible you’ve got time to kill in a car or on a plane.  Might I humbly suggest pre-ordering a shiny new audiobook to make the journey more pleasant…?
            Eight years after its original paperback release, The Eerie Adventures of the Lycanthrope Robinson Crusoe is finally available in audiobook format.  The folks at Audible have done an absolutely fantastic job with my long-ignored “middle child,” and they even got Tim Gerard Reynolds to narrate it! How cool is that?
            It’s up for preorder now, available next Tuesday.
            You  know… travel day.
            Historical reference! It’s like a pop culture reference, but it lets you pass tests…
            I’ve talked about different genre issues a few times in the past.  With the upcoming holiday, though, I thought it would be nice to revisit one that’s near and dear to me.  To be more specific, I thought we could talk about the different forms of horror. 
            Anyone who’s dabbled in horror knows that, when we tell folks this is our chosen genre, our work tends to get lumped into this vague slasher/vampire/Satanist category.  Either that or we’re tagged as someone working through a collection of childhood issues.  Most folks don’t realize horror can be broken down into many different sub-genres, just like drama or comedy or war stories.  Just because Resident Evil is under the umbrella (no pun intended) of horror doesn’t mean it’s anything like It Follows, and neither of them resembles Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  Or Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot.  Or Craig DiLouie’s Suffer The Children.
            So, here’s a few different panels of that umbrella.  Some of them are established sub-genres which have already been debated to death.  Others are just things I’ve noticed and named on my own that I feel are worth mentioning.
            Also, you may notice I’m defining a lot of these by how the characters in the story react/interact with the scary things.  That’s deliberate. All stories are about characters, and horror stories hinge on that.  One of the most common complaints we all hear about horror—to the point that it’s almost a joke—is when the characters do something that makes no sense.  So how my characters act and react is going to have a lot of effect on the story I’m telling…
Supernatural stories—This is one of the easiest ones to spot.  It’s your classic ghost story.  The phone lines that fall into the cemetery.  The pale girl out hitchhiking alone in the middle of night.  The foul-smelling thing in the lower berth. 
            There are a few key things you’ll notice about these.  One of the biggies is that the protagonist rarely comes to harm in a supernatural story.  Their underwear will need to go through the wash three or four times and they may not sleep well for years afterwards, but physically, and even mentally, they tend to come out okay.  If anyone suffers in a supernatural story it’s usually the bad guy or some smaller character.  Also, these stories tend not to have explanations– they just are.  There aren’t any cursed objects or ancient histories at play.  Things happen because… well, they happen.
            The Sixth Sense is still a great example of a supernatural story, as is “A Christmas Carol” by that populist hack Charles Dickens.  Even the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is more supernatural stories than anything else.
Giant Evil stories—These are the grim tales when the universe itself is against my characters.  Every person they meet, everything they encounter–it all serves some greater, awful evil.  H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Howard wrote a lot of giant evil storiesThe Omen is another good (so to speak) story of the universe turning against the protagonist.  Any fan of Sutter Cane will of course remember the reality-twisting film In The Mouth of Madness.  In a way, most post-apocalyptic stories fall here, too—the world belongs to radioactive mutants, the killer virus, or the zombie hordes.
            Personally, I’d toss a lot of haunted house stories in here, because the haunted house (or ship, or insane asylum, or spaceship, or whatever) is essentially the universe of the story.  Not all of them, but a decent number.  The reader or audience doesn’t see anything else and the characters don’t get to interact with anything else.  House on Haunted Hill, The Shining, Event Horizon, and most of the Paranormal Activity films could all be seen as supernatural stories, but their settings really elevate them to giant evil stories.
Thrillers—Thrillers also stand a bit away from the pack because they tend to be the most grounded of horror stories.  Few creatures of the night, no dark entities, far fewer axe-wielding psychopaths.  The key thing to remember is that a thriller is all about right now.  It’s about the clock counting down in front of my heroine, the killer hiding right there in the closet, or the booby trap that’s a razor-width from going off and doing… well, awful things to my characters.  There’s a lot of suspense focused on one or two characters and it stays focused on them for the run of my story.  A thriller keeps the characters (and the reader) on edge almost every minute.

Slasher stories—These are really about one thing, and that’s body count.  How many men, women, and fornicating teens can the killer reduce to cold meat?  Note that there’s a few distinctions between a slasher story and a torture porn story (see below), and one of them is usually the sheer number of people killed.  There’s also often a degree of creativity and violence to the deaths, although it’s important to note it’s rarely deliberate or malicious.  Often it’s just the killer using the most convenient tools at hand for the job—slasher tales are pretty much a parkour of death.  The original Friday the 13th film series has pretty much become the standard for slasher pics, and it’s what most people tend to think of first when you mention the term.

            A lot slasher stories used to have a mystery sub-element to them, and often it was trying to figure out who the killer was.  Then it kind of morphed into being a twist… alas, often not a very well-done one.   Slasher stories also developed a bad habit of falling back on the insanity defense and got stereotyped as “psycho-killer” movies.  Which is a shame because some of them are actually very clever and creepy.

Monster stories—The tales in this little sub-genre tend to be about unstoppable, inescapable things that mean the protagonist harm.  They’re rarely secretive or mysterious, but they do have an alarming habit of tending toward nigh-immortality.   The emphasis here is that nothing my heroes (or the villains, police, military, or the innocent bystanders) do can end this thing’s rampage, and any worthwhile rampage tends to involve people dying.  There may be blood and death, but the focus with a monster isn’t finding it or learning about it– it’s stopping it.  Or at least getting as far away from it as possible.  Of course, how far is far enough with something that doesn’t stop?
            The original monster story is, of course, FrankensteinGodzilla is a monster, in a very obvious sense, but so are zombies, Samara in The Ring, and even Freddy Kruger.  I still hold that the reason Jason X is so reviled by fans of the franchise is that the filmmakers turned it into a monster movie, not a slasher film like the ones before it.
            My lovely lady also made an interesting observation recently.  In monster stories, you almost always have a moment when the audience feels a twinge of sympathy for the monster.  Look at any of those named above, and you’ll see there’s a point when we empathize with Frankenstein, Godzilla, and yeah… even super-killer cyborg Jason (who seems to settle down once a holodeck dumps him back at a deserted and lonely Camp Crystal Lake and you realize he just wants to be left alone).
Adventure Horror stories—To paraphrase from Hellboy (which would fit quite well in this category), adventure horror is where the good guys bump back.  While they may use a lot of tropes from some of the other subgenres, the key element to these stories is that the heroes are fighting back.  Not in a weak, flailing, shrieking cheerleader way, but in a trained, heavily-armed, we’ve-got-your-numberway.  Oh, it can still go exceptionally bad for them (and often does), but this sub-genre is about protagonists who get to inflict a bit of damage and live to tell the tale.  For a while, anyway.  To quote an even wiser man, even monsters have nightmares.
            The Resident Evil franchise is horror adventure with zombies, just like my own Ex-Heroes.  Jonathan Maberry’s definitely dabbled in it as well, with some of his eerier Joe Ledger books. The Ghostbustersmovies could fit here, too.  There’s long-running shows like Grimm and Supernatural, and some of you may have seen a fun little cable series called Ash vs. Evil Dead
Torture porn—Director Paul Verhoven once commented that the reason Murphy is killed so brutally in the beginning of Robocop was because there wasn’t time at the start of the film to develop him as a character.  So they gave him a horribly gruesome death, knowing it would create instant sympathy for him, and then they’d be able to fill in more details about his life later on in the film.  That’s the general idea behind torture porn.  Minus the filling in more details about the characters later.
            I’m not sure if King himself actually coined the term “torture porn” in his Entertainment Weekly column, but that’s the first place I remember seeing it.  At its simplest, torture porn is about making the reader or the audience squirm.  If you can make them physically ill, power to you.  The victims are usually underdeveloped, unmemorable, and doomed from the moment they’re introduced.  It’s not about characters, it’s about the visceral things being done to the characters.  They’re getting skinned, scalped, boiled, slowly impaled, vivisected… and we’re getting every gory detail of it.  A film industry co-worker once told me “porn is when you show everything,” and this sub-genre really is about leaving nothing to the imagination.  They are the anti-thriller, to put it simply.
            A key element to torture porn is the victim is almost always helpless.  They’re bound, drugged, completely alone, or vastly outnumbered.  Unlike a slasher film– where there’s always that sense that Dot might escape if she just ran a little faster or make a bit less noise– there is no question in these stories that the victim is not going to get away.  That hope isn’t here, because that’s not what these stories are about.
            So there’s seven subgenres we can break horror down into.  And there’s many more.  All fascinating stuff, right?
            Why are we talking about it?
            Y’see, Timmy, when a lot of us start off  as writers, we flail a bit, usually in the attempt to copy stories we don’t quite understand the mechanics of.  As such, we aren’t sure where our own stories fit under the big horror umbrella (or sci-fi, or fantasy, or…).  We’ll begin a tale in one sub-genre, then move into a plot more fitting a different one, wrap up with an ending that belongs on a third, and have the tone of yet another through the whole thing. 
            It’s important to know what I’m writing for two different reasons.  One is so I’ll be true to it and don’t end up with a sprawling story that covers everything and goes nowhere.  I don’t want my thriller to degenerate into a slasher, and if I’m aiming for cosmic-level, Lovecraftian evil it’d be depressing to find all the earmarks of a classic supernatural story.  I also want to be able to market my story, which means I need to know what it is.  If I tell an editor it’s not torture porn when it plainly is, at the best I’m going to get rejected.  At the worst, they’ll remember me as “that idiot” when my next piece crosses their desk.
            In closing, I’ll also toss in the free observation that it’s difficult to merge two of these subgenres because a lot of them contradict each other by their very nature.  Not impossible, mind you, but difficult.  Probably one of the few exceptions I can think of in recent times is The Cabin In The Woods, which does an amazing dancing back and forth between being a monster movie and a giant evil movie.
            So, that’s enough of that.  Feel free to dwell on these points over the weekend while you’re drinking, watching some scary movies, and sneaking Kit Kats out of the candy bowl (seriously—feel ashamed about that. Those are for the kids!)
            Next time… I thought we could talk a little bit about democracy.
            Happy Halloween.  Don’t forget to get some writing done.

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