Back in high school when I started writing, I dealt almost exclusively in horror. It wasn’t planned, but those were just the ideas I got the most excited about. One of the first short stories I ever wrote was about two friends driving around in the country at night, messing with the headlights and accidentally hitting someone. They found the body impaled on a tree stump, which was bad enough, but then that body pulled itself off the stump and slowly stalked after them when they panicked and ran away.
This was how my brain worked at seventeen years old.
I was neck-deep in my Stephen King paperback phase back then, and almost all of the stories I wrote had some kind of horror element. I watched scary movies to enjoy the juicy gore, not even caring if they were cartoonishly silly. I was a hardcore fan of the genre for a good long time. And yes, I said “was.” I don’t think of myself as a horror fan anymore. I’m still a Stephen King fan because I feel his writing transcends the genre so I’d read him anyway. However, I don’t seek out and consume all things horror like I used to. Something about the vicarious thrill of experiencing characters in fear for their lives and getting killed changed for me when I was at my sister’s bedside the moment she died.
That doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned it all, though. Horror isn’t just about death. It’s about confronting fear and fighting to survive, and the relief that comes with finally conquering the things that plague you. There are a lot of good stories to tell inside of those elements.
When I discovered Justin Cronin’s writing several years ago, the first book of his I found was absolutely horror, but written with such art and skill that I would have read it regardless of the story. The biggest take away I had from reading him, which reflected back to why I had read so much Stephen King way back when, was that it was possible to write a story that was scary without it having be just a scary story. And on the subject of the esteemed Mr. Cronin, I can’t tell you how awesome the leftover shadow of my inner teenager thought it was to discover an author Stephen King had widely praised, then receive the last book in that author’s bestselling trilogy as a birthday present from my literary agent before the book had even been released, and then have that author sign the book congratulating me on finding an agent and asking what I was working on. Like a colleague would. Life’s rich pageant, I guess.
So, back to this new project. Even though it’s going intentionally scary (and funny, by the way), it’s still a children’s book, though one I expect will be testing some boundaries. I’m at the stage in the work where I can get excited about how it’s coming together, like finding ways to translate some of my deepest fears into a character just to see how they’ll react. Or to consider the possibilities of what could happen to the story if I kill off a character who is only about eleven or twelve. Or to think of exactly how far I’ll be able to push my characters before they’d reach the breaking point that would force (or allow) them to do the sorts of things that normally they’d never consider doing.
As this story has built up, I’ve wondered a little about what it would mean if this new book and The Ghost of Lake Emily both found publication homes, and both found even modest success. Would I find myself early in my writing career getting pegged as a horror writer, much like I had aspired to be in my teenage short story days? I don’t know if that would necessarily bother me, as long as I was allowed my moments to step outside of the genre and work with other stories as well. I know my leftover teenage shadow would think it was awesome.
I figure as long as “writer” was somewhere in that label, my adult self would probably be okay with it, too.
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