Why WRITE HORROR?
The genre may get bad press in certain quarters, but Alex Davis argues that it’s fertile ground for imaginative writers
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.
All of that tells you that there are probably more popular genres, and genres that are better understood, or even more respected. But knowing all that, I always come back to horror. So why do I – and writers like me – fixate on the darker side of things? And what is it that might draw someone to the genre for the first time?
The influence of childhood
If you talk to any writer, the odds are that they will be able to come up with at least one book from their childhood that had a big influence on them, that really captured their imagination and fired their desire to become a writer. A lot of the time that can start a lifelong attachment to a genre, and if your childhood faves were the likes of Darren Shan or Point Horror or Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark, then odds are that’s going to lead you down a horror road. Horror writer Lex H Jones said: ‘I write horror because monsters have always fascinated me. Whilst never believing in them, the worlds of things that go bump in the night became a source of joy to me as a child and never left. As an adult, when I got into writing, I decided to create some of my own such worlds, and I’ve never looked back.’