Writing Horror — Part 1

I’m not an expert. Never claimed to be. But I’ve written a mountain of horror, and more to the point, I’ve read one.

My influences are two-fold: James Herbert and Shaun Hutson. That’s the list. Stephen King gave up writing horror decades ago. You can argue with the wall about that, but Herbert and Hutson knew the trade. The monster was sniffing round the door by chapter two. The dread didn’t let up, the blood stayed warm, and under all the gristle, they told cracking yarns.

That last bit matters. Buckets of gore without a yarn is an abattoir with an ISBN. You need a skeleton underneath.

Strip it down and any proper story needs four things:

• A hero.
• A goal.
• An obstacle.
• Stakes—something real that bleeds if it falls.

Creative writing tutors love to waffle. But there’s one rule that actually matters: if your hero can walk away, you haven’t got a story.

That goes double for horror. There is no point unleashing a shape in the dark. Then let your protagonist shrug, lock the porch door, and catch the late train to London. Horror is about survival. Escape has to be off the table. They face the thing, or they go into the ground.

Most people think the obstacle is obvious. The monster. Job done.

Rubbish. Too lazy. Giving a beast claws is easy; giving it an appetite with a reason behind it is where the work starts. If a maniac is turning people inside out in an alley, “Well, he’s a wrong ’un, isn’t he?” doesn’t cut it. Psychological horror works because the human brain is the foulest swamp on earth. Or it is when the rot sets in. But you still have to answer the only question that matters: what pushed him?

I was trying to write a tidy conclusion to this. I had a whole bit lined up about character motivation and pacing.

Then the chair creaked.

Tobias Fenn. That is the name I went by in 1646, when the Witchfinders had the run of the shires.

John Stearne bought my services cheap enough. I rode ahead of their horses into the parishes. Pricking the village gossips. Setting the spite running till neighbours were ready to see their own kin swing from an ash bough. Men, women, dotards—we weighed them all in silver.

I had no truck with scripture. Matthew Hopkins paid on the nail, and the trade ran smooth as pig fat until the business with Alfred Cane. An old dog in a fen ditch, but he had teeth I could not see. He laid a blight upon me: he denied me the pit. Bound me to breathe on, world without end.

You think a man thrives on that? You know nothing. The second my wits dull for sleep, the dead we took come crowding the pallet, cold and staring, waiting for the drop.

The wretch at this keyboard belongs to me. He writes what I bid him write. If I do not heave these necks out of my skull and onto his clean white glass, the press of them will choke me.

He’s still sitting there, by the way. Mud flaking off his boots onto the rug. Smells like a wet sheep trapped in an attic.

That’s what I mean by motive. Tobias doesn’t haunt me because he’s spooky. He haunts me because he’s an exhausted, 17th-century extortionist. One who wants to dump his toxic memories into my machine so he can get ten minutes of peace without seeing a gallows.

He needs an escape. He can’t walk away. Neither can I.

Go look at your draft. What’s keeping your lot in the dark?