Finding Comfort In Writing Horror

Guest post written by author Jennifer Anne Gordon
Jennifer Anne Gordon is a gothic horror/speculative fiction novelist. Her work includes Beautiful, Frightening and Silent (2020) which won the Kindle Award for Best Horror/Suspense for 2020, Won Best Horror 2020 from Authors on the Air, was a Finalist for American Book Fest’s Best Book Award- Horror, 2020, as well as BOOK OF THE YEAR FINALIST for Authors on the Air, 2020, it also received the Platinum 5 Star Review from Reader’s Choice. Her second Novel, “From Daylight to Madness (The Hotel book 1)” received the Gold Seal from Book View, as well as The Platinum Seal from Reader’s Favorite, her third novel “When the Sleeping Dead Still Talk (The Hotel book 2)” Was published late November 2020.

I am at that strange point in the writing process where the word count on my new project has tipped in my favor. I might be a little over half-way through, I may be almost done. It’s hard to say, as a panster (just flying by the seat of my pants) I never really know what’s going to happen or even how long it might take. I can see the ending. I know what it is, even though it still shimmers in the distance like heat coming off pavement. But as for how I’m getting there…well that’s for my characters to decide. I have long given up the thought that I was in control of this story, of any of my stories. I can’t stop them from making the wrong decisions and taking us down a meandering nightmarish hole and trapping us there in a dried up old well.

The other thing that starts to happen to me at this point in the writing process, the part when the word count has climbed over the past months well north of 50,000 words. I begin to feel a little bit of confidence. I start referring to the new mystery “work in progress” as a real thing. Instead of being referred to as “a project I am working on” it becomes “My new book”. Because it is a book now…Anything under 50,000 words is too precarious to me, too fleeting, anything less than that can too easily become a short story, or just another failed idea. If I start too cocky too soon, you can see the disappointment in people’s eyes when you tell them that “it didn’t work out.” Like an expectant mother, I don’t want to jinx it, I don’t want to make too much of something when it’s “too soon to tell if it will work.”

And with this, my new confidence, my excitement over “having a title” and the “I think I know what the cover should look like” comes questions from other people. Most, are friends in the writing community, asking the normal ones “is this still the vomit draft?” (draft one), “are you at the point where you love it yet?” (draft two) “are you at the point you hate it (drafts three and four), and “is it ready?” (draft 5). These questions are easy to answer, and most of my inner circle of writing friends will understand if I say, “It’s word vomit, but it’s good vomit.” Or if I say, “the meat is bad, but the bones are good.”

Then there are the questions from some of the other people in my life, family, acquaintances, and near strangers in random online groups. These questions tend to be different and usually land in the family of “I hope it’s not another horror novel, is it?” or “Is this book going to actually be nice?” or “Why can’t you just write something that people will want to read?” and my personal favorite “What happened to you that made you want to write books like this, you seem normal enough?”

I breath in and count to five, and exhale and count to ten. I smile as I say, “I just write the books I want to read.”

Now to be fair, people do want to read my books, there is an audience out there for psychological, grief, or trauma-based horror. I’ve connected with a lot of them. I think the strangeness tends to come from the people who knew me before I was an award-winning horror novelist. The people that knew me when I was a quiet awkward kid in junior high, or the people who only know me as a ballroom dancer and stage performer. There are people that only know me as the girl with the beaming smile on her face who is swooning over the Foxtrot and big band music. They have a hard time understanding the part of me that wants to stare into the darkness, and have it see inside my soul, have it know me…have it say my name.

They wonder why, or how it happened, how a “normal girl” grew up to be this, whatever this is.

I usually chuckle and blame it on the fact that I read “Pet Sematary” when I was ten, I hid the copy I had snatched out of my Uncle’s bedroom in my Victorian dollhouse. I snuck behind it to read, wait…I can blame that dollhouse too, that had to have had something to do with it, my love affair with Gothic horror and old, abandoned buildings. Sometimes I blame the fact that I lived close to a cemetery, and that’s where the neighborhood kids would meet up and smoke cigarettes that we stole from our mom’s purses. We were all eleven pretending to be forty. That’s the true horror right there, maybe that’s where it came from.

The truth is, pinpointing why I fell in love with all things dark, and terrifying is too hazy and vague. I can’t tell which moment was the defining moment. It is all just flashes in my memory of pleasurable terror, images waltz in my imagination and chills run up my back. A cat letting out a low growl in an empty room, a feeling like there was always something “off” about the little room in the basement, the fact that I had an aunt who was Schizophrenic, but she always said it wasn’t hallucinations, they were ghosts, and they were everywhere. And there was the time that I saw my father, visibly shaken and staring out the window and heard him mumbling to himself “there is something terrible in the wind tonight.”

But is this why I love horror? Maybe? But is it why I write horror, I’m not sure?

My first attempt at writing horror came in sixth grade, I was a very naive eleven years old. I had recently been exposed to the highly edited for television version of “Nightmare on Elm Street” I was able to watch it while my mom was at Bingo and my father didn’t care what was on television. To say I was obsessed with it would have been an understatement. So, when we were asked to write a short story for school, on ANY SUBJECT…well I knew already what I was planning to write. “Nightmare on Elm Street 2”. Now, keep in mind, I was eleven, and I had no understanding that there was already a sequel to Nightmare on Elm Street (I think there were two by that time.). My version of Nightmare on Elm Street would be different. It would have all the gore and horror, but at the heart of my Nightmare sequel, was a love story between Freddie and Nancy.

This story had everything, including a several bullies falling asleep on a school bus and waking up to find that half their faces had been ripped off (possibly inspired by the kids that actually did bully me on the school bus…take that mean girls!) But where I thought I was really tapping into some beautiful angst in a way only a preteen girl possibly could, was in my forbidden love story of Freddie and a still Highschool aged Nancy…talk about taboo. Now, the path to true love never runs smoothly as you know, and every time Freddie tried to touch her or connect with her, he did end up slicing her face or shredding her arms. I remember I ended the story on a cliffhanger, and Nancy was finally starting to develop feelings for poor burned Freddie. Maybe he wasn’t evil, maybe he was just misunderstood.

Oh, why do we love bad boys so much?

Now, I know what you are thinking, you are thinking that this is clearly Edward Scissorhands except with more gore and murder. To be fair, this did pre-date that movie. I think…

Q&A: Erin Sterling, Author of ‘The Ex Hex’

When I turned that story in, I did it with pride, I would have boasted to my friends, but as you just read about the school bus bullies…I didn’t have many. Yet at that moment it didn’t matter, I thought, no, I knew that I had written something that was both beautiful, and awful.

Pleasurable terror.

My eleven-year-old mind knew that what I had done was groundbreaking. I waited every day during English class for the stories to be returned. My stomach was a fluttering jar of moon moths. I had never been so excited to get a grade in my life. When the stories were finally returned, you can imagine my surprise when instead of seeing a grade, ANY grade, the only thing written across the first page of my story was the word “NO” it was underlined three times and circled twice.

“No” was not a grade. It was not even a critique. I peeked at the papers of the kids in the desks on either side of mine. The margins of their pages were filled with little notes, and lines pointing to specific things. I flipped though mine, and with the exception of that word “No” there was nothing in the margins, no thoughts, no condemnations, no proof that the teacher had even made it past my first paragraph. After class I asked him if I needed to redo the assignment, and he said “no” again, barely bothering to look up from his grade book in front of him.

So maybe this is it, maybe this is the reason I find comfort in horror, maybe it was that first “no” that had made me come back to this genre time and time again, searching for more than that first reaction. So now, when my mother asks me “are you going to write something nice this time?” I only have one possible answer for her.

“No”.