Wait, no, keep your pants on. I’m only being figurative.
Happy Halloween to you, reader! If you like the frightening, the demonic, the monstrous, or the sugary, today is your day. That goes double if you’re into horror fiction. And maybe triple if you write it.
So, as a horror writer, how can you scare the pants off your readers (again, figuratively)? It’ll take more than just ghouls and guts. In this post, we’ll cover three classic writing techniques from famous horror writers. And…go!
Hinting at Future Tragedy
Warning your readers about looming danger creates a nice sense of dread. It’s the literary equivalent of the murderer sneaking up behind the lead character in a movie: You can see it coming, but you can’t stop it.
For an example, look no further than the modern master of horror himself, Stephen King. In his 1983 novel Pet Sematary, King explores the cost of death—and life. When the Creeds move into a new home in Maine, they find an ancient burial ground that magically resurrects the dead.
In this novel, there’s a particularly sweet (and later tragic) scene in which the main character, Louis Creed, flies a kite with his son, Gage. Here’s an excerpt:
“I love you, Gage,” [Louis] said—it was between the two of them, and that was all right.
And Gage, who now had less than two months to live, laughed shrilly and joyously. “Kite flyne! Kite flyne, Daddy!”
There it is. Gage only has two months to live. Here we get a sense of tragedy. This poor little kid is going to die! In addition, the hint establishes that dread I mentioned earlier. We know that Gage will die, so for the next few chapters, we fear that moment. We know it’s going to be bad. We know it’s going to be horrifying. Yet it’s going to happen no matter what.
Inverting Natural Rules
Forget about flying—pigs shouldn’t be able to talk. Yet a pig talks in Clive Barker’s short story Pig Blood Blues. And it’s nothing like Babe: Pig in the City. Check it out:
[The pig] watched them through the slats of the gate, her eyes glinting like jewels in the murky night, brighter than the night because living, purer than the night because wanting.
The boys knelt at the gate, their heads bowed in supplication, the plate they both held lightly covered with a piece of stained muslin.
‘Well?’ she said. The voice was unmistakable in their ears. His voice, out of the mouth of the pig.
“His voice” is the voice of a character named Henessey who hung himself and was subsequently eaten by the pig. Yummy.
Why is this so disturbing? Well, for one, because it’s impossible. In both horror and fantasy fiction, the impossible happens. The key difference, I think, is exactly what impossible things happen. In fantasy, the impossible inspires awe or wonder. Think Rivendell in The Lord of the Rings or Quidditch in Harry Potter. By contrast, the impossible in horror inspires fear and shock. Think the Monster in Frankenstein or Dracula in Dracula.
This is what we see in Pig Blood Blues. It’s horrifying to think that a pig might eat a corpse. It’s even more horrifying to think that the pig might then be possessed by the spirit of the boy it ate.
Turning Narrators Insane
The crazy first-person narrator is a hallmark of horror fiction. Just take the work of H.P. Lovecraft. He often wrote in the first person, and many of his stories end with narrators claiming that they aren’t insane (even when they are). Take his short story “The Rats in the Walls” as an example. Here are the closing lines:
When I speak of poor Norrys they accuse me of a hideous thing, but they must know that I did not do it. They must know it was the rats; the slithering, scurrying rats whose scampering will never let me sleep; the daemon rats that race behind the padding in this room and beckon me down to greater horrors than I have ever known; the rats they can never hear; the rats, the rats in the walls.
For context, the narrator ate Norrys. Yeah, like Hannibal Lector.
The horror here is the fragility of the human mind. At the beginning of the story, our narrator is clearly sane. He seems confident, intelligent, and refined. Yet when he sees what lies beneath his family’s ancestral home, it drives him mad. That’s all it takes. The line between sanity and madness is thin. There’s nothing like a first-person narrator to illustrate this idea.
Happy Halloween!
Okay writers. We’ve learned some scare tactics from the best in the genre. Now let’s go scare our readers!
Kyle A. Massa is a speculative fiction author living somewhere in upstate New York with his wife and their two cats. His stories have appeared in numerous online magazines, including Allegory, Chantwood, and Dark Fire Fiction.
