O! The horror, the horror!

horror novel, the--a genre which the reader knowingly seeks in anticipation of experiencing fear and possible revulsion; narratives which exploit the hidden menace in ordinary characters and details.

Just as historical fiction has morphed into a convenient hybrid force combining it with the likes of romance, mystery,fantasy, and speculative fiction, horror fiction has proved agreeably flexible. So long as one or more characters is placed in chilling, frightening circumstances, horror stories are appropriately set in past, present, or future surroundings in which other generic categories play supporting roles.

The quintessential late twentieth- and early twenty-first century horror writer is Stephen King, whose prolific output of fiction might cause the reader to overlook his text-book-perfect 1981 publication, Danse Macabre, a personal-but-highly evolved history of horror fiction and, via the frontage road of subtext, an excellent resource for horror writers.

The primary goals of horror fiction include frightening the reader, unsettling, disorienting, and bombarding the reader with potential conspiracy theories that often involve supernatural elements. Haunted houses are so plentiful in horror fiction that they have become a sub-genre. Vampires are another recurrent horror theme, with zombies and werewolves representing yet another fork in the road.

Robert Louis Stevenson's novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde, certainly fits the category as does Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Another contemporary writer to consult for insights into the medium is William Peter Blatty (1928--), whose The Exorcist uses the extreme vulnerability of a twelve-year-old girl as a host for invasion by a malevolent, deamonic force, and allows a natural match-up between dark forces and religion.

Henry Farrell (1920-2006) produced instructive examples of horror fiction with What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and How Awful About Alan.

In Danse Macabre, Steven King has credited Ira Levin's 1967 novel, Rosemary's Baby, a progressively more horrifying novel in which a vulnerable protagonist is impregnated by a demonic force, as his early inspiration.

Not to forget William Faulkner's notable horror story, "A Rose for Emily."

Nor to forget Howard Philips Lovecraft (1890-1937), whom Steven King has also called out as the greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale in the twentieth century. Lovecraft, a brooding cynic and pessimist, was in his way a polar opposite of the religion-based optimism of C.S. Lewis; he relentlessly took on such major icons as Romanticism and Enlightenment, saving major dramatic thrusts, almost as though he were a Cyrano de Bergerac in a sword fight, against Christian humanism.

Until Stephen King's popularity became established, horror fiction was more likely to be shelved in libraries and bookstores as weird fiction or weird stories. Indeed, a major pulp magazine published between 1923 and 1954, and which featured stories by Lovecraft, was called Weird Tales.

Hint: If the explanation for the horrific or supernatural elements in a story is too rational, the work is more likely science fiction or at least speculative fiction than it is horror.

Design for Living

design--a dramatic plan or structure; a deliberate manipulation of dramatic elements with the intent of producing a story; a plot or story arc intended to generate a lasting and memorable effect on the reader.

Design is, in this sense, a noun; it may also be used as a verb in which case it becomes the act of producing a plot line or arrangement of significant dramatic elements that lead to a satisfying conclusion. Plot-driven stories are those in which the design may become predictable, even though the emotional effects such as suspense, tension, horror, anticipation, dread, longing, etc may vary. The better of the plot-driven stories, say those of Harlan Coben or Lee Child, implicitly offer a design of sufficient complexity and issues at stake to lure the reader's attention away from the design while producing one or more of the previously listed emotions. In many ways, such stories are the equivalent of Navajo rugs, intricate, colorfully patterned, pleasing to experience. Character-driven stories are designed to provide emotional responses as well as moral, intellectual, and aesthetic challenges. Richard Powers's The Echo Maker, while superbly plotted, brings characters on stage with issues that actually call their very sense of self into question, luring the reader well past the notion of mere formula or suspense and into self-examination that could produce uncomfortable feelings.

A conventional approach for producing both types of pattern, the more geometrically structured as well as the more open-ended design begins with confronting a single character with a choice of behavior or the need to make some choice within a narrow time frame. On a more plot-oriented design, a character may be given a choice between serving out a long prison term or accepting a life-threatening assignment as a ticket to forgiveness for the crime that landed the character in prison. As well, a character may be confronted head-on with the need to chose allegiance between two feuding factions. One possible approach for beginning a character-driven story is to present the lead character with the need to find out some highly relevant information from his own past or from the past of family, a quest that will lead to the discovery of some unspeakable information. Jay Gatz, later to become Jay Gatsby, began a quest to find his former love, Daisy Buchannan, a quest that brought Gatsby into the midst of a complex pattern or love, betrayal, and social collision.

Particularly in a longer short story, a novella, or a novel, changing points of view in rendering the narrative will have a measurable effect on the dramatic design.

Two

genre promise--the set of expectations a reader has when selecting a work from a particular category of dramatic narrative; the circumstances and arrangement of plot devices a reader anticipates (and a writer delivers) when choosing a particular story. Thus a reader embarking on a romance expects to root for a youngish woman who is often not aware of how attractive she is, rushing to an appointment of some consequence to her, when she is literally bowled over by a man who seems to be rude and unthinking. Thus a reader embarking on a mystery expects to be confronted with a corpse or threat of death, followed by investigation, pursuit, clues, and unraveling of the motives leading to the corpse and/or threat of death. Thus a reader of fantasy will expect a narrative tale in which magic, quests or chores to be performed, and the possibility of a portal through which characters from another time or place may enter will provide major structural moments. Thus science fiction promises the reader an extrapolation on an already established scientific principal to provide a quest, contest, or dramatic struggle. Science fiction may also promise extrapolations or variations on such "soft" or social sciences as anthropology, political science, psychology, and sociology. Thus do young adult and younger reader genres confront individuals of a particular age with moral, ethical, and physical challenges, the resolutions of which lead them to an understanding of how to cope with adult life. Thus do readers of horror fiction expect to be led on a fearful journey, where they are frequently confronted with such scary events as persons, places, phenomena, and thing. Thus do readers of historical fiction expect immediate and evocative transportation to an historical time and place where the details, politics, and social atmosphere play integral parts in the development and resolution of the story.

Genre promise in the twenty-first century has gone fusion, at least to the point where historical fiction has merged with such other genera as romance, mystery, suspense, Gothic, horror,YA, young reader; other doors remain open, limited only by the collective imagination of the writing community.

To instill one's self with the sense of reader expectations in a particular genre, read at least five of the first generation works in that field, verifiable from virtual reference librarians or that quintessentially knowledgeable reference librarian, Google. Then read another twenty published since 2005, focusing where possible on prolific authors. Clue: The verso of the title page of a book is called The Card Page or Author's Card Page, listing previous works from the same author. Additional Clue: The writer's mantra is "Never take the reader where the reader wants to go," which means to keep the genre promise in mind but deliver it later rather than sooner. If the young woman in a romance realizes immediately that the rude sort who bumped into her was Mr. Right, the story would be over. The late delivery of a pizza may cause the pizza to lose some of its warmth but the lateness will enhance the hunger for it. If the delivery is late because of some misadventure or whim on the part of the delivery person, story becomes another ingredient from the dramatic menu.


roman a clef--a novel in which the reader assumes the characters to represent actual, historical persons. Somerset Maugham, a well-known employer of romans a clef, is universally regarded to have intended his character, Charles Strickland, in The Moon and Six Pence, serve as a substitute for the painter, Paul Gauguin. Not so well known was Maugham's work, Cakes and Ale, which is thought to be a roman a clef take-off on the widow of the nineteenth century novelist and poet, Thomas Hardy, and her subsequent liaison with Horace Walpole, a writer who was the Tom Clancy of his day. Not true, said Maugham of the accusations, although there was also a character named Ashenden, a name Maugham used later in a novel. Indeed, Ashenden was a former doctor, as was Maugham, walked with a limp, as did Maugham,

A roman a clef provides a tingle of excitement for those given to seeking and recognizing the real life counterpart of the characters and situations portrayed. The character of Mark Rampion in Aldous Huxley's novel, Point Counter Point, could easily have been D. H. Lawrence; the character Jem in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking Bird is thought to have been Truman Capote, and Robert Penn Warren's novel, All the King's Men, is a fanciful-but-plausible substitution of the character Willie Stark for the noted Louisiana political figure, Huey Long.

Romans a clef provide the opportunity to satirize persons, places, things, customs, thus Pride and Prejudice. One of the ironies resident in the use of the roman a clef is the belief that it is more truthful in its depiction of character and event than a nonfiction rendition.