Why can’t you just write something nice?’ That might sound a little facetious, but I have genuinely been asked it more than once, and I’m willing to bet that other horror authors have encountered that query too. In many ways the question itself is absurd – would you ask a romance writer to write something darker, an SF writer to write something more real-world, a historical writer to set something in the present day? You might, but the answer would be the same – it’s not what I’m interested in. It’s not what I love. It goes against who I am as a writer.
But there is certainly a conception that I bat up against, which is that – as someone who writes a lot of horror – somehow what I create is ‘abnormal’, and/or worth less than other kinds of fiction. There are times you can visibly see that someone is interested when you mention you’re a writer, only for that interest to cool off as soon as the word ‘horror’ comes into the conversation.