Photo by Pelly Benassi on Unsplash
This summer, lunching solo by the ocean in Provincetown, I wrote down a list of my fears. Ten fears and ten loves, that was the exercise. I numbered facing pages in my spiral-bound notebook, one to ten.
This assignment was not part of some therapy or shadow work, but rather from Andrea Lawlor’s wonderful queer and trans fabulism writing workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center. The prompt’s purpose was to generate ideas around creating dystopias and utopias, building worlds from what we personally fear and love.
I didn’t even make it to the second half of the exercise, the loves list. As soon as I wrote down my ten fears — a list that came way too quickly — I realized I’d left off some pretty big ones. I added them to the bottom of the page, my handwriting getting smaller and smaller as I neared the edge.
Amputation. Car crashes. Pregnancy. Accidentally killing someone. Needles. Television static. Crying in front of an audience. Low-flying planes. Going broke. Losing my eyesight. Sudden loud noises. Literally all guns. Public humiliation. Failure. Of course, failure.
Once I got up to nearly twenty fears, big and small, tangible and abstract, I realized I needed to stop and redo the exercise. I had to create some order and priority to my fears! I flipped to a new page and made a new list. I still only managed to narrow it down to twelve.
I took a picture of my fears and texted it to my partner. She wrote back: “Isn’t your biggest fear volcanoes?” VOLCANOES! Specifically active volcanoes that could erupt any time — an intense fear that I didn’t even know I had until I visited Iceland and couldn’t escape the mountain peaks that appeared ready to blow before me. How could I forget volcanoes?
I felt helpless then, and not just because I was missing the point of the exercise. I thought — how am I living like this? I’m scared of everything.
So that’s why I was surprised when, upon sharing the draft of my in-progress novel with some readers, I got feedback that genre-wise, it was leaning towards horror. Horror? Sure, there are some speculative elements and even a splash of blood, but this novel wasn’t meant to be scary. And I should know, because I just recently realized that I’m scared of everything!
My pushback against calling the manuscript “horror” was so strong, I felt I had to investigate it. The novel is a semi-autobiographical faerie changeling tale based on my own queer awakening in my mid-twenties (yes, I may or may not be a changeling, so be it). I suppose, in some ways, it was a scary time, just not in the ways I typically associate with the horror genre.
But what even is horror? Am I writing it? Should I write it? What are the boundaries? These questions prompted me to enroll in a horror writing course this past fall. I signed up with some hesitation, thinking that if I already carry so much fear, do I really need to be reading and writing scary stuff on top of that?
The course is now in its final weeks, and I’ve read a lot of horror over the last few months — stories of hauntings, evil things, madness. And I have to say, very little of it actually scared me the way I think horror stories are supposed to. At least not in the way that my real-world fears do.
More surprising, the texts that have stuck with me the most are ones I’m not sure I would’ve categorized as “horror” in the first place.
One such text is Iain Reid’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things. At first, I groaned when I saw that it was one of two primary course texts on the syllabus (the other was Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, already one of my favorite books). I’d already seen the Charlie Kaufman movie adaptation, and honestly, I didn’t like it. Particularly the ending, which I felt went out of its way to make me feel dumb. I was also confused why it was part of the class. I didn’t think the movie I watched was horror.
Not only was I’m Thinking of Ending Things my favorite text from the class, it is now maybe one of my favorite books ever. That’s because the real horror for me was not so much the creepy parents or cryptic caller or even the twist ending, but in the novel’s perspective.
The unnamed narrator is in her head overthinking things so much all the time — constantly questioning and philosophizing and remembering — that she doesn’t see the horrific situation unfolding around her until she’s in too deep. That cerebral (and sadly all too relatable) “in-your-head-too-much” kind of horror is mostly lost in the movie adaption by the nature of the form. But in the novel, I loved it, and felt deeply unsettled by it long after.
My other favorite piece from class was Franz Kafka’s ultra-short story “The Cares of a Family Man.” Before this course, I don’t think I would’ve called any of Kafka’s work “horror,” this story included. The story describes something(?) named Odradek, that looks kind of like “a flat star-shaped spool for thread” and keeps hanging around the narrator’s property like a sentient clump of dust that can talk, won’t leave, and will never die.
Very absurd. Very Kafka. Like with I’m Thinking of Ending Things, it made me feel more unnerved than afraid. It got me thinking about my own personal Odradeks — little dreaded things hanging around in the corners, reminding me of my own mortality and the potential pointlessness of my daily doings. It’s an existential sort of horror.
When it came to writing horror for the class, I mostly workshopped pages from my manuscript. I tried leaning more into the horror motifs already present in the draft. Snakes. Cellar doors. Smiles. Portraits.
At first it felt a bit silly and cheap, especially since I gravitate towards the more abstract horrors of Reid and Kafka. But then I found some play in it. I discovered that horror motifs can provide familiar foundation on which I could build my own unique story perspective. With a snake or a smile, I can send the reader signals in order to subvert them.
Still, I wasn’t finding any of what I was writing particularly frightening. Readers, in general, had a different opinion.
I submitted a draft of a chapter titled “Red and Silver.” My instructor’s feedback: “You took two colors and managed to make them horrifying.” She asked to use the piece as a sample for a future horror class. I was surprised. I didn’t want to tell her how much the chapter is based in my own reality, lest she pathologize me.
Later I read the chapter out loud to my partner. Midway though, she exclaimed, “Jesus!” I stopped reading and laughed. I’m scary! Oh-so scary!
I had a thought. Maybe the fact that I’m scared of everything is a reason why readers were sensing “horror” in my manuscript. More than I’d like it to be, fear is a significant part of my perspective (hello generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, adjustment disorder—all of which I’ve been diagnosed with at some point in my life). Leaning into the scaries feels almost too easy, too natural, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t let my writing go there.
It’s also maybe why I don’t find much traditional horror writing scary, but fun and strangely soothing. For years I’ve considered Stephen King my comfort food (I reject the term “guilty pleasure”). The second novel I picked up after burning out of academia, when I was trying to reconnect with the joy of pleasure reading again, was The Shining. The first was Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, which arguably has its own kind of horror.
Horror on the page doesn’t affect me the same way on-screen horror does, and that has also affected my attitude towards the genre. In addition to being afraid of everything, I’m also hypersensitive.
It doesn’t matter what genre of show or movie I’m watching, if there’s blood or gore or general bodily harm, I have to look away, or else the visual could replay in my brain and upset me for a long time. For that reason, I’ve never seen a lot of classic horror movies like Scream or Halloween.
Begrudgingly, I had to stop watching Breaking Bad after the exploding head-on-a-tortoise episode in Season 2. It bothered me so much, I had explosive nightmares for days. And I will never forgive the movie Drive (if you know, you know). Any sudden loud sounds or unanticipated jump scares can cause me to disassociate.
This goes back to me being a hypersensitive kid. I couldn’t handle anything remotely frightening on TV or in movies, especially if it involved bodies and body parts. Perhaps most ridiculously, I was so upset by Doritos commercial that included a disembodied face trying to snag a bag of chips, I refused to watch any more TV with my family after.
And yet, the first writing contest I ever won as a kid was for a story about a boy who encounters monsters in a haunted house (he ultimately befriends them). It was published in the local newspaper, and my prize was a copy of Scary Stories for Sleepovers, which I read with fervor. I also liked Goosebumps books, even if some of the jackets made me uncomfortable.
As my therapist can confirm, I have difficulty naming my emotions (though I’d argue that there are a lot of emotions that just don’t have a name). But I know that the feeling I get from watching an eye get sliced open on screen (disgust?) is not the same feeling I get from reading about an eye getting sliced open (intrigue?). Both feelings are not at all the same as the one I get from thinking about my own eye getting sliced open (fear! that’s fear, right?).
Which is all to say — I can write scary things even if I, myself, don’t find what I’m writing scary. And just because I have a lot of real-world fears and I’m hypersensitive to audiovisual stimuli, that doesn’t mean I can’t or shouldn’t write horror. If anything, my sensitivities might actually predispose me to writing in the genre.
I’m also broadening my definitions of what horror can be. Before, I used to think of horror as mostly involving violence, blood, and lots of screaming. But in class, we talked about a broader definition of horror being anything hat taps into a human fear of ambiguity and the unknowable, the collapsing of boundaries and binaries. Those liminal, “in between” places are as exciting to me as they are scary, and I think especially ripe for exploring through a queer perspective.
In considering my approach to writing horror, I’m reminded of one of my favorite movies, Donnie Darko — another film I hadn’t considered “horror,” even though it’s pretty creepy. One of my favorite scenes is one where Donnie questions a classroom exercise to assign human actions as coming from a place of either fear or love. “Life isn’t that simple,” Donnie tells his teacher. “You can’t just lump everything into these two categories and then just deny everything else.”
One approach to writing horror is consulting and drawing inspiration from my long list of fears that I wrote down beside the beach. But another approach—one that’s more interesting to me personally—is to explore the complexity, the “everything else,” that surrounds those fears. After all, I believe you can fear what you love, and love what you fear. In writing horror, I want to contribute to the collapse of those binaries, and all binaries.