I was recently having a conversation with a friend of mine about horror, and why I don't read it. It's not that I don't like horror, it's just that it doesn't really scare me...which I think is the point. I'm much more terrified by what I see on the nightly news than what I read in a horror novel. And vampires, serial killers, and zombies don't scare me anywhere near as much as George Dubya Bush and the neocons.
Still, if a writer can touch something that does actually scare me, it sticks with me. To this day, the drowned zombie from Dan Simmons' Song of Kali haunts me, and the reason is that I'm hydrophobic. The idea of drowning scares the hell out of me, so he was able to tap into that personal fear. The idea of something being under the bed or in the dark doesn't scare me, so those horror tropes don't seem to work for me.
Horror, I think, works more on people who have lots of fears...I guess I'm just not one of them.
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
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I used to read all of Stephen King when the books came out. I quit at Gerald's Game. The book terrified me and made me sick at the same time. Yup. Personal fears.
Watch for an interview on my blog with horror writer Rick Reed. I'll ask him about this in the interview questions.
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