Why I Don’t Write Horror

Toe-curling tales of the macabre will not spring from these keyboard-loving fingertips any time soon.

It’s a shocking statement, perhaps, to most anyone who knows me, especially childhood friends who’d ever visited my house and stared, slack-jawed, at the Freddy Krueger posters and Fangoria pull-outs plastering the walls and ceiling of my room (ignore, for my sake, the fact that Freddy started getting shoved toward carnival-like hucksterism by the time the fifth film rolled around, though he received some long overdue redemption later).  I must note here that I’m referring to supernatural stories, because real-life fiends are a whole different category of creepy.

But the reason I don’t write serious booga-booga horror is because I suck at it, plain and simple.  I cannot give it the solemn attention it deserves.  Any such effort would yield something akin to the movie Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, which is absolutely fine, but not what I’d be going for.  I’d start with visions of quiet, crawling things tapping at your window at midnight, only to end with having the moonlight reveal Jerry Lewis in a bad wig, whispering, “Hey, Lady!”  (Honestly, that would raise the hairs on the back of my neck, but for a totally different reason.)

I know that the only way any story of mine might come out scary is if I dug far down and wrote about what truly terrifies the living sh*t out of me, because it would surely put me in touch with the same deep-seated fears shared by many others.  And I’m not sure I can come back from that.

Not to say that I don’t have to plumb the depths of some pretty dark emotional wells for my other writing (yes, despite the frequent humor, there are those moments), but I don’t have to dive into that particular well.  That’s the kind that the dead chick from The Ring crawled out of, and I am just not going there.

See, here’s the thing:  I have the unsettling feeling that what I find in the unacknowledged recesses of my mind may not be based in imagination at all.  There’s a reason why I still don’t hang my foot off the bed at night.  Go ahead and snicker away, but I wake up every morning with all of my toes.  Call it superstition, if you must, but I call it surviving your psyche.  I’m not one to risk that what I take as “fancy” is actually “truth.”  That’s what gets your toes eaten.  And the arrogance in ignoring that possibility could be exactly what invites that unwanted presence into your room at 3:46 a.m. and makes that mysterious shadow in the doorway very real indeed.  So even the most outlandish yarn containing all manner of monster could have a toehold in reality.  (Sheesh, what is it with me and toes today?)

Which is why I admire those who can pen the disturbing fantasies of a fevered and much braver brain than mine.  I firmly believe that those who write horror have a special ability to examine themselves and discern what it is that paralyzes them or, at the very least, gives them the screaming heebie-jeebies.  And then they mold that anxiety into a meaningful and resonating narrative that makes readers keep the lights on.  But hey: On their own heads be it, when one of their “characters” is crouching unseen against that lonely oak tree out in the backyard one moonless night, just silently watching their house . . . and waiting.

But I love those masters of fright.  It’s humbling to think that as I’m tunneling into the core of my own psychology right alongside these authors—so as to draw from those empathetic emotions of love, heartbreak, glee, pleasure, sorrow and angst—my creative peers are producing demons while I’m rooting around for a fight scene segue or a rarely used fart joke.  The distinction could not be more crystallized.  I’ve faced the facts:  I don’t have the lust for losing my mind inside a nightmare that could come true.  Even when I wake up from a violent dream, I have to shake myself and immediately think, “Hey, remember that skit on Kids in the Hall?  Yeah, that was funny.  ‘I’m crushing your head!’  Yeah, focus on that.”  And, should that fail to ease my nerves and I go to splash water on my face, I have also learned not to stare steadily at my reflection in the mirror for too long, because there’s always the chance that the “other” me will move just the slightest bit to the left or, worse, start to smile as if she knows I’m testing my courage.  Hello, mental breakdown!

Just to be clear:  I can pop off the odd tongue-in-cheek scary story, now and again, but that’s because it is always meant to be taken humorously.  But dig-your-fingernails-into-the-sides-of-your-Kindle kind of horror?  No.  So you won’t find me forcing my way into that genre in the near future.  Now, if someone sauntered up to me tomorrow and handed me a big bag of money, asking, “How ‘bout now?,” then sure, I’d take a stab at it (and it’s precisely those types of puns that would flow from it).

But I’d have to hope like hell that there was enough money in that bag to pay for all my therapist bills to come.