Horror vs Paranormal Dark Thriller

An odd thing about the publishing world today. The genre of horror is pretty much shunned by many publishers. Horror has been renamed things like, Dark Thriller or Paranormal Dark Thrillers. Stuff like that. I wonder about that since I know a lot of people love a good Horror yarn. In fact this weekend, Drag Me To Hell is being released with much fan fair into the movie theaters around the country.
But alas there is only one real heavy weight of horror and I think we all know who that is. In case you don't, I'll give you a hint. Stephen King for Christ's sake. He has been "The Man" for like the last thirty years. He is a celebrity. And he writes horror. Okay, there have been a bunch of his work that has not been horror, but much of it is. And I love it.
Some of my other favorites are Jack Ketchum, again not horror necessarily but thriller. And I love Anne Rice. Not horror like Stephen King but horror elements. And she mixes erotica in for good measure. As one of my other posts mentions, sex and horror make magnificent bed fellows. Not the mechanical nature of pornography (which is fun in it's own right) but sex in relationship and horror.
Anyway, I am rambling here so will get back to my point. I believe we are on the edge of a horror Renaissance and I hope to be one of the author's to help spur this on. It has been twenty years since we have seen the like of Mr. King and I hope that we are about to see this come back around.

Who is the next big thing in horror

I am missing the days when the shelves at the book stores were brimming with new horror novels from new writers. I did a gig at a Barnes and Nobel as a part time gig for a vacation we were taking. What they told me was that non-fiction was the stuff that was the biggest sellers; especially history. What is up with that? History non-fiction is the top selling genre.
Okay, people where are your imaginations? You realize that when you are reading a book on history you are consuming other people’s ideas. You have no way to know how accurate their ideas are. You just read the book and kind of accept them.
A work of fiction, now there is an experience you can take part in. A good writer will draw you into a world that you know isn’t real and yet you are willing to travel there all the same. You get to picture the places and the people and the situations in your mind as you read. A good writer can take you into a gossamer world of dreams. Or in the case of horror, nightmares. It is magic.
I am afraid that people may feel guilty these days if they are sitting around reading fiction. They can hear the words of some tight ass teacher from high school berating them for not reading something worthwhile. Why aren’t you reading your history they might have said? You are a lazy good for nothing, they might have said? Okay, you probably didn’t go to school around the turn of the century, but you get the idea. You have been made to feel guilty about imagining, and imagining is how we humans do great things. To think beyond what we are told. To imagine what things could be built or painted or sculpted. That is where greatness lies.
And so I move back to my original question. Where are the great horror authors? Stephen King is still going strong. I suppose Stephanie Myers is up and coming and I am glad for it. Anne Rice is still working. But what is new? Who is new? I want someone great to put out a long line of horror novels. The next H. P. Lovecraft. The next Stephen King? The next Anne Rice? It is time for us to have our nightmares stirred up again. To have new landscapes dreamed into existence that we can travel.
Oh, Cormac McCarthy has done just that by the way. If you haven’t read “The Road” do it now. It is horror of the finest caliber.

Sex and Horror

I write "okay" at the beginning of too many sentences. Not what this post is about, but I just did it and it bugged the shit out of me.
Sex. Fucking. Cock sucking, cunt licking, anal, rim jobbing. Bondage, Three-somes, sex with diapers, scat freaks, bestiality. Cheating on your spouse. Cheating with someone else's spouse. Sex with an older man, with an older woman. With a younger man, with a younger woman.
In America your ten year olds can see any number of people murdered on CSI or any cable movie night of the week. Your kids can watch Freddy Kruger or Jason Voorhees kill any number of men and women in any number of ways on Halloween before they go out trick or treating, but they can not see the two teenagers fucking before they have an a long pipe driven through them.
If Janet Jackson's nipple shows up on television for one tenth of a second this is cause to cancel the Bill of Rights and rescind the Constitution. The religious right, they are fascists by the way not Christians. Christ, who is supposed to be the role model for this group, loved everyone. Would never condone killing or torture. Accepted all of us as God's children. The religious right is a political movement that embraces the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, torture and the death penalty. They are against welfare (helping the poor) even though that is what Christ spent a great deal of his time doing just that.
But I digress. The fact is that in our country, we accept violence but not sex.
Having said that, I will say that I love sex. And I will go further to say, so do you. I know you do. In fact I bet you were thinking about sex just before you read this post. Maybe you were thinking about Janet Jackson's nipple just before reading this post? Maybe you were thinking about sex with Janet Jackson before reading this post? Maybe you still are...
But again I digress.
The fact is that we love sex. It is how we procreate and evolution loves procreation. Look at cockroaches for God's sake.
I have been reading this book of horror/erotica off and on for the last couple of months. I say off and on because I keep it in the car for when I am really desperate for something to read. But it is terrible. Awful. The writing is juvenile (maybe some of you are saying that about this little bit of literary genius right now) and the stories are near unreadable. But she got published. Someone, some agent and some other publisher believed in her. And they published her book of short stories.
I say great. But it is not enough. Sex is where we are most honest. Even if we are honest about the fact that we are lying, we are honest. Sex shows a piece of who we are without pretense. Without mask. It is magic.
I love erotica for that reason. All aspects of human interaction can be seen through sex. The mixture of horror and sex. This would be a potent alchemy. One I want to explore.

Isolation continued

I never did get to finish this one. I got off topic, or maybe on topic, blogging away about population control. You don't have to have children. Remember that.
Anyway, isolation. Being alone. This blog is interesting. I am blogging away on the Internet. Hundreds of millions of people access this virtual world everyday. I will never in my lifetime share the same space with 500 million people, but I may be sharing this virtual space with 500 million people right now. Right this second, countless millions are on this communication medium with me.
And no one has read anything on this blog. And it is very possible no one ever will. I am alone in this bustling over populated cyber-world. It is like being in a Tokyo and never meeting one single person.
I will have to use this in a story. A man alone on the Internet, isolated. This blog feels haunted. There are creaks at night. Doors closing and the smell of blood at the edge of my perception. This blog is haunted and I am alone in it. And there is no help coming. It is like a wagon train trapped in the Rocky Mountains in the winter time, and the members of the caravan are forced to resort to cannibalism.
We humans are like wolves in that we cannot tolerate being alone for long but we become homicidal when we are forced to live in the proximity of too many others of our kind. We need a balance between alone and accompanied.
Soylent Green is people.
I am rambling now. Being alone for too long can bring on madness. Hallucinations. Delusions. I think there is something in here with me. It is laughing, just soft enough that I can't quite hear it. God it's stalking me. Watching me all the time. It is waiting till dark then it will come.
God loves the sun and its light.

Horror and Sex

Fear and Sex. No, that's not right. Supernatural fear and sex. There are more of those fucking slasher porn fucking movies than you can shake a machete at. I am so sick of those. There was a time when those were new, remember "I spit on your grave" or the original "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" ? All sorts of creeping distrubing shit in those bad boys. Now, there is this whole product that is released regularly where some bunch of pretty twenty somethings are getting killed in old and univentive ways. And the whole time you are saying, "Don't go in there." Or "Don't give a ride to the creepy guy carrying the big knife." In fact the characters in those movies are so fucking stupid they desrve to die. It will only make the species stronger.
But are there places where horror and sex mingle in creative, and delicious ways? Or more impotantly, in scary ways. After all the main objective of horror is to horrify. Right? Okay, this is a small start, but here it is. I will be back though.

In love of fiction

I just got my first subscription to "Cemetery Dance" and I love it. And I am sad that more people don't buy and read fiction magazines. Especially horror magazines, since that I what I love. Of course it took me years to get the subscription, so I am not better. But, I would say buy these magazines. I just found this magazine "Red Scream" and it looked awesome. But the day I went to buy my subscription, they were out of business. I found them on a Friday, and by the time I had the cash to buy the subscription, they were gone. What is wrong with our culture that we don't read. That we have American Idol as the most watched show on television. Could you find a form of entertainment that involves and requires less creativity? I don't think you could.
Read and read fiction. This sudden love of non-fiction explains why we are no longer the scientific leader in the world. We have lost our cultural and collective imagination. We need them back. We need to imagine, to make up, to pretend, to play.

Isolation

An odd thing about horror. It, like mold in a coffin, grows best in lonely dark places. I am certain that a great number of stories of terror have taken place in cities. Many have their protagonist surrounded by people, "Rosemary's Baby" for instance. And yet isolation is required if we are to feel the fear that the author or director wants. Mind you, the separation from humanity in horror does not have to be a person alone. In fact it is often a more satisfying story if there is a group that is isolated. Deane Koontz's "Phantoms". H. P. Lovecraft did like to isolate his characters, and he did so to great effect. Ask any of the number of authors who have borrowed some of his "sugar".
Be it a group or an individual, isolation is required for fear to injected into the story. If the person or group is surrounded by soldiers who are blasting away with weapons, and are calling in air strikes, the reader or audience member feels as though they are reading or watching action/adventure rather than horror. Of course apocalypse movies do play with the entire population as alone. The earth is, after all, a trap. If things go bad here, global climate change, mass extinction leading to a collapse of the food chain, we are stuck.
Hold on, I am taking a side trip here for a second. I have the fix for all of our problems. Now this fix will take some time, it can't happen all at once. I would say, we could see results in about 15 or 20 years. We could fix global climate change, pollution, over fishing of the oceans, deforestation, the energy shortage, and probably some of the other issues, like hunger and poverty. Are you ready for the answer? Wait for it.

Population control.

This is not some stroke of genius. We could use nuclear energy if there was a sixth of the number of people on the planet as there are today. We could feed everyone. We would have lots of open land, forest and such. Fewer people with our current and future levels of technology would solve most of our critical problems. We need to educate the world to have fewer babies. Each couple could have two kids, replace themselves. Some would have more and some would, I am afraid, die. But we could reduce the population on this planet and that would allow us more time with our existing resources.
But alas, I am afraid that we are no wiser as a species than bacteria. If you watch the growth of a bacterial colony in a petri dish, you will see that our species has followed the same pattern of growth across the earth. And the earth is our petri dish folks. Don't kid yourselves. I love how "the environment" is looked at as a political issue. I can tell you that no one will have to worry about a job if the human race goes extinct.
But I digress. I guess that is what these blogs are for. Isolation in horror. Oh, wait I am talking about isolation. About our isolation in space. This is where fear lies. I am tired now and want to stop typing. I will edit this later.
Be well and reach out to the rest of us in the Starbucks, while you are getting your coffee. And for our sake, only have one child. Or no children. We are not Bacteria, we don't have to produce. Oh did I forget to mention, those bacteria in that petri dish don't die because they run out of food. After about 3 weeks the entire dish is sterile again. All the bacteria died in their own waste. That is what kills the colony. There is still a mountain of food as far as the single celled organisms are concerned, but their waste poisons them. Sound familiar? Love Canal anyone?

"House of Leaves"

Okay this is the book. The first book since I was maybe ten years old that scared me. I mean really scared me. The protagonist in the story is a young man named Johnny. As he reads Zampano's work he finds himself having horrific visions and hallucinations. He picks up a case of agoraphobia, and begins to lose his mind.
The night before last, I slept a fitful sleep. I was in and out of consciousness. But the odd thing was that all night long I was wandering those endless and ever changing hallways of the house on Ash Tree Lane. When I would rise out of sleep it was more like I floated to the top of sleep. As if slumber was a liquid that I bobbed in and out of all night. But when I "woke" up, I was still in a dream state. Still wandering lost in those dark hallways. Then I would come full enough awake to go pee or roll over then fall back asleep and back into the Navidson house.
The book has gotten into me. Reading Zampano's labyrinthine work has begun to effect me as it has Johnny. Or am I making something out of thin air?
That is horror. To be able to create an experience in me that the character in the book is having, or something similar. My God what genius. If anyone reads this and can suggest any other books of such incredible skill please post them. "House of Leaves" is a work of fucking genius. READ IT if you haven't already. If you have, tell me about your experience?