Good Bad Horror or Bad Good, You Tell Me
Okay, as you insist, I’ll tell you. Yes, I’m preparing the paperback version of my psychological horror novel set in Burma (where I once worked) called In the Season of Poison. Available on Amazon in a week or two. Yes, I had to do much more rewrite than expected to improve on the e-book version that’s been out there for years. No, I didn’t expect to have to do that.
So now I ask myself, Is this a good bad horror novel or a bad good one?
What’s a good horror novel? One that scares the bejesus out of you. What’s a bad horror novel? One that doesn’t. Or maybe better put - one that only scares you but doesn’t so mess with your head that even when you walk down a cheery, leafy avenue in the bright of day you think, “Holy cow, can those ghastly things really happen and could they happen to me?”
That’s the difference between Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and any slasher movie, isn’t it?
What really makes a story scary? An idea so disturbing that, even twenty years after you read it, when you are safe and comfy somewhere else in your reading, you wish you had never read it. Because you realize you never really wanted to think about what that scary idea meant.
Slashers are scary. So are demons, mad murderers and swarms of venomous spiders. But each of those things can be dealt with in the usual way. Call the police or the Army or city pest control. Demons might take a bit of extra work, but Hollywood tells us they can be handled.
What can’t be dealt with in any ordinary way is the idea that gets into your head that says at the borders of everyone’s mind - yours included - there are bizarre and terrifying things too ready to fill the empty spaces made by fright and failure.
How do you handle an idea like that? Who do you call to tell you this is real and that is not? Who is there to say that you better jump! right now to save your soul or crawl into a hole and pull the sod over if you mean to save your sanity.
That is the question in Season of Poison. Set beside a lake that is the center of a jungle that is the center of a city of phantoms in a year unfixed. Featuring a man and woman very like you and me, and their son, who, in desperation made by failure, seek a new start in life in a place where every start is new and where every ending is old. Where the demon telling the story is the victim and the horrified human beings living the story are the monsters.
Take a look at In the Season of Poison, please, and let me know if it’s a good bad horror story or a bad good horror or something else - something strangely else - in between.
Cheerio!
© 2020 Steven Hardesty