This week, we’re going to do something different.  Our guest is Joe McKinney, a member of the San Antonio  Police Department.  Joe’s been a homicide detective, a disaster mitigation specialist and a successful novelist.  He’s also won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel from the Horror Writers Association.  Joe is going to give us the content of a workshop he gave on the five aspect needed for a great horror novel. Of course, much of this works for mysteries and suspense novels. Because we didn’t want to leave anything out, we’re going to give the first half of the material today.  The second half will follow in two weeks. 

 Five Reasons Great Horror Stories Work

 There is a fine art to scaring people, and like all art, it is the product of raw talent honed by craft and technique.  No one can teach raw talent, of course.  You either have it or you don’t.  But craft and technique can be taught, and in the following few sections I’m going to walk you through five basic characteristics that all great horror stories share.  Learn to incorporate these into your stories, and you’ll find your stories make more sense and, hopefully, sell better.

 Creating Insularity

 First, let’s talk about your story’s setting.

 The key to good, memorable horror is much the same as it is in the business world – location, location, location.  Many beginning writers come up with potentially great settings, be it an abandoned town, or a graveyard, or a mill, or a big scary house, and then fail to carry through on its potential.  As a result, their great setting never rises above the tired old mainstays of B grade horror.

 Think about all the great works of horror you’ve ever read.  My guess is that, in every single one, you can point to the setting and say, “That right there sealed the deal for me.  When the mother and child were trapped in that Pinto in Cujo, I was scared.  When the priests entered Regan’s room in The Exorcist, I felt her bedroom door close behind me.  When Pennywise the Clown spoke to the children of Derry, Maine through the drains in their bathrooms, I wanted to escape.”

 But why does Stephen King’s story about a creepy old hotel in the middle of nowhere get the scares, and Joe Schmoe’s story set in a similar creepy old hotel fail to deliver?  Well, think of some of the words I used in the previous paragraph.  “Trapped.”  “The door close behind me…”  “Escape.”  In every sense, the effect created is one of insularity.  Through the characters in the story, we get a sense that we are closed off from the rest of the world, that we are no longer free or able to run away, that we are shut in with something very bad.

 This explains why old graveyards, or cabins deep in the woods, or small towns, are such common destinations for the horror story.  But it doesn’t explain why they work.  The challenge, you see, is to show, through your characters, the setting going through a change.  The way your characters perceive the setting is key.  Think about the movie Jaws for a second.  Remember when Brodie, Quint and Hooper are headed out to sea, and they get drunk and trade sea stories?  They’re laughing and having a great time.  Some might say they’re simply whistling past the graveyard, but the mood is set just the same.  The sea seems a peaceful, welcoming place.  But the next day, as they engage the shark, and it starts to wreck their boat, they begin to feel small and helpless, fighting for their lives in a hostile, brutal environment.  The sea has not changed, obviously.  It’s the same sea that seemed so comforting for them the night before.  What’s changed is their perception of the sea.  The characters in all great horror stories show this changing reaction to the settings in which they find themselves.

 To achieve this in your own writing, you need to make readers feel that what was once familiar and comforting has suddenly become oppressive and menacing.  In other words, you need to change your characters’ attitude toward the setting, and you do this by showing the setting before and after the horror takes the stage.  If you’re sending your protagonist into a small town, you might start off by making that small town feel comforting, friendly, perhaps even nostalgic.  Once you’ve established this, you’re free to turn the thumbscrews.

 There’s no set rule on how long you have to take to create this feeling of comfort, of normalcy, but you do need to create it.  Horror is, after all, the intrusion of the extraordinary into the ordinary, and if you’re going to make that work you have to first create normalcy.  A comfortable, familiar setting that suddenly becomes hostile and claustrophobic is the best way to do this.

 Characters Who Act Scared

Remember the opening to the movie Jeepers Creepers, where the brother and sister are driving their old car across an endless plain of cornfields?  Their banter is light, their mood is easy.  The countryside seems peaceful and inviting.  Within seconds of the opening credits, we feel like we understand this situation.  But then the big black truck comes roaring into view and begins chasing them.  The kids manage to get away from it.  But then, a short distance later, they spot the driver dumping body bags into a sewage pipe, and everything changes.  The setting that once seemed so serene now seems vast and empty, and they are stranded and alone, as though at sea.

Jeepers Creepers is a perfect example of how the setting needs to change to create a sense of horror.  But there’s another side to that equation.  Your setting alone can’t create the horror.  We, the readers, need someone to show us why that change is scary.  In other words, we need viewpoint characters that get scared so that we get scared vicariously through them.  The characters are our surrogates, in other words.

 That may seem obvious, but it really is a fundamental component of the horror story.  Look at The Wizard of Oz, for example.  Dorothy encounters a talking lion, a talking scarecrow, a big giant robot-looking thing with an axe, and…well, you get the idea.  The point is, any one of those things should be scary.  Personally, scarecrows creep me out.  But not Dorothy.  She starts signing, links arms with them, and goes skipping down the yellow brick road.  Her reaction informs us how to take all this.  If she had run away shrieking in terror, we too, would be horrified.  But she doesn’t.  She starts signing.  And we sing right along with her.

So the trick here is to have your characters tell us how the setting is changing, and why that change is terrifying.  Think about Jack Torrence’s slow slide into insanity at the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s The Shining.  Gradually we realize that the hotel is possessing him, changing him.  We get some of this from Jack himself, but most of it through his wife and young son, Danny.  They witness the change, and because they are afraid of it, our sense of empathy places us right there with them, scared out of our minds.  

That’s it for today.  In the next session, Joe will start off with A Reason to Stay.  Why do people stay in these horrible situations?  So, do come back. 

Joe’s books can be found at   http://amzn.to/1gb14eg   and leave him a comment about his first two critical points on horror writing.