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 Horror/Scary: June 19, 2019 Issue [#9610] |
 This week: It's Not Safe - Out There Edited by: Kate - Writing & Reading   More Newsletters By This Editor    1. About this Newsletter 2. A Word from our Sponsor 3. Letter from the Editor 4. Editor's Picks 5. A Word from Writing.Com 6. Ask & Answer 7. Removal instructions 
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Horror disturbs the emotions. The target is the darker ones, the ones that leave your reader reviewing their survival instincts. Great writers such as Poe, Lovecraft, Laymon each targeted these emotions. 
Great horror not only targets darker emotions, it wakes them from the recesses of the mind - bringing them to the forefront, disturbing them - this disturbance and awakening till the soil to grow the seeds of horror. We may flinch at the gush of oozing intestines but when we can envision the man in the street wielding the knife, our sense of safety, of community compromised. 
What if you just 'knew' there was someone/thing 'out there' waiting for you - nothing nothing specific, just a vague sense that you'd 'know' this was the perpetrator the instant before he showed his blade, claw, hammer, teeth... The real cunning of the horror writer is to take the reader by the hand and lead him outside (or inside, as the case may be). Create a need to peek through the curtains or open the door where the perpetrator is watching, then when you turn back, finding me with the knife in my hand.
Horror is scary not because we present the horrible, but because we prepare the reader for the revelation. The writer tills the ground, fertilizes and plants the right seeds. Weeds are removed before they appear and the crop is nurtured until ready to fruit. But then, at the moment of harvest, the writer steps aside and allows our imagination to wield the scythe and collect the rewards. 
The scare, the disturbance, is inside the reader. To get that disturbance, the writer must gain access to the reader's inner fears. Good stories and poems invoke images, the product of the reader's imagination that takes the reader from the safety of his/her armchair to a different world. It might look the same, it might even be the very place they are reading from, but it is no longer the mundane ordinary world. It's the creation of the reader's imagination responding to the writer's otherworld. 
The writer of horror plants the seeds with scenes and images that allow the reader to enter the otherworld at the right moment to bloom to full horror. With subtlety and craft, incite the reader to enter on 'a dark and stormy night' - yes, the occasional cliche works to lull the mind onto apparently familiar ground. Also, an urban myth or folk tale can serve to open the reader's mind to one possibility, but your take on that myth or tale will quickly draw the reader into an otherworld he or she didn't see coming, but which incites an image, a sense and taste of believable horror in his/her own mind. Do take care, however, with the cliches or overly familiar images, that something un-expected happen shortly thereafter to keep the reader coming, deeper into the otherworld, so that he or she can't find the way out without reading to the end, if even then ~ so 
