This week, we’re bringing you Part 2 of Joe McKinney’s workshop on the five aspects needed for a great horror novel.  He’s won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel from the Horror Writers Association.  If you missed Part 1 of this, it’s still on the website.  Just scan back two posts and you’ll find the entire text. But, the first two aspects were: Creating Insularity and Characters Who Act Scared.  Now, Joe continues with number 3.

A Reason to Stay

 While we’re on the subject of characters, let’s talk about why they don’t just up and leave the moment things start getting weird.

 Here again, we need to frame our discussion in terms of the setting.

 Why is your small town there, out in the middle of nowhere?  Same with your blasted ancestral manor, or your haunted motel, or your big spooky mill outside of town.  Why are they there?  What is the economic reason for its existence?

 Give that a lot of thought before you start writing your horror story.

 This isn’t just one of those silly writing exercises, either.  Knowing your setting’s economic reason for being is essential to good characterization, especially when the horror gets turned up later in the story.

 Consider Amity Island in Jaws.  The little community exists primarily as a summer tourist destination for the mainlanders.  This little detail develops into a major plot point when Sheriff Brodie tries to convince the town council to shut down the beaches.  We know the shark is out there, killing, and when the council refuses to listen – because, of course, to do so would be to go contrary to their economic interests – we feel our stomachs turn with mounting dread.  We know the town council’s shortsighted greed is about to paint the beaches red with blood.

 Think of the house in The Amityville Horror.  Or the house in Poltergeist.  In both cases, the family has a vested economic incentive – no, scratch that; an imperative – to stay.  They are economically tied to the setting.  They have dumped a lot of money into the house, right?  I mean, could you just walk away from your house if you were mortgaged up to your eyeballs?  Remember that Eddie Murphy stand up skit where he makes fun of The Amityville Horror.  He says, “You know, you put a black family in that situation, and the house says, ‘Get out!’”  This is what he’s alluding to.  A surprising amount of good horror is built from economic necessity.  There’s a reason why the protagonists can’t, or won’t, just get up and leave.

 Now, if you’re setting is a hotel room in a major city – like “1408” – or a little girl’s room – like in The Exorcist – you’re going to have an easy time of this.  Clearly, the hotel room exists for temporary habitation.  The girl’s room, well, that’s her room.

 But don’t think that your job stops there.  A key element to effective settings in horror is the feeling of being cut off.  It’s that insularity I was speaking of earlier.

 Try to apply that here.

 Consider Regan in The Exorcist.  In the early stages of her possession, when Pazuzu is fighting for a way in, she is effectively trapped by her circumstances.  She can’t go to her mom and say, “Look, we need to move because I’m getting possessed.”  She’s powerless.  She’s a kid.  She’s cut off from escape.

 The same thing applies to the little kids of Derry, Maine in Stephen King’s IT.  They know they are on Pennywise’s menu, but they can’t do a thing about it because they are economically tied to the town through their parents.

 Part of rounding out your characters (that is, making them believable and giving them problems we care about) comes from identifying this economic bind that holds them to the horror.

 A Logical Connection

 A few years ago a young horror writer asked me to blurb a book he had just written.  I said, “Sure, I’ll take a look.”  It was this story about a guy who goes after a demon who has abducted his girlfriend.  It was well written, full of great action sequences and lots of creepy scenes in this abandoned hospital.  But there was a gaping hole in the narrative.  The hole was so big, in fact, that I couldn’t, in good conscience, blurb the book.

 You see, nowhere in those 300 pages had he made a connection between the main character – or his girlfriend, for that matter – and the demon.  Basically, you just had a big ugly demon that swoops out of the blue one day and grabs this girl.  The boyfriend then marches into the ruins of the hospital and starts fighting for his beloved.

 Do you see the problem?

 There’s no connection between the good guy and the bad guy.  There’s no reason for this bad guy to be involved with that good guy.  Why did the demon want the girlfriend?  Where’s the fully developed connection between them?  What’s the reason for all of this?  Yeah, I realize that bad things sometimes happen seemingly without reason, but that is because we lack the appropriate perspective.  It may seem totally random for a serial killer to scoop children off the street, but that is because we are on the outside of the killer’s pathology.  Notice that the best horror stories give us a glimpse into this pathology.  And it is precisely because the young writer I told you about failed to give us that glimpse that the story felt unfocused.  It failed to resonate.  And as a result, the scares just weren’t there.

 It’s impossible to overstate the importance of this relationship.  There has to be a connection between the protagonist and the antagonist.  If they don’t belong together, your story simply won’t make sense.  And if it doesn’t make sense, it won’t scare anybody.

 A Monster with Depth

 A convincing and truly frightening villain, be he a person or a demonic force such as a ghost or a monster, is one of the most important components of a horror story because the bad guy generates most of the conflict.

 Now I’m saying villain, but really the word is just a convenient catchall.  This is horror we’re writing, after all, so we could be dealing with a human bad guy, or a monster such as a werewolf, vampire, serial killer, or whatever.  Maybe your bad guy is the demonic, long dead presence that haunts your dark old hell house as a ghostly presence.  Or maybe it’s the elements, such as in Algernon Blackwood’s story “The Willows,” or maybe you’re writing about giant rats, whatever.  It doesn’t really matter, at least on the surface, who or what the actual bad guy is because what counts – what makes him, or it, scary – is the human element.  The more human, the scarier.

 The best stories are those that bring the villain – the conflict, if you will – into the clearest focus.  This is especially true in horror, but it applies to all the other genres too.  If your story is going to work, your villain must be genuine.  Your monster must have depth.

 But what does that mean?  Well, as I’ve already mentioned, your good guy and bad guy, protagonist and antagonist, have to fit together.  There has to be a reason they are going to lock horns.  Randomness isn’t going to scare anyone.

 Secondly, your bad guy ought to have some degree of moral authority.  Even if his or her conduct is reprehensible, even unforgivable, there needs to be some logic to why they are doing the evil that they do.  Look at the creature in Frankenstein.  Victor has essentially created life from death, and in the process usurped the role of God.  He has become the creature’s God.  Now imagine yourself as the creature.  Your God stands over you and says, “You are so vile, so wretched, that I refuse to acknowledge your existence.  I turn my back on you.”  Imagine the shock at being denied by God.  The creature, in his rage, strikes out at Victor.  He begins to systematically murder Victor’s family.  He is a smart organism, fluent in seven languages, well-versed in the morality of the Bible, but he deliberately turns his back on that and engages in conduct he knows to be evil because at least that way his God will be forced to acknowledge him.  That is moral authority.  And that is why Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the cornerstone of horror fiction.

 Not every monster will lend itself so easily to human moral standards, of course, but everything can be imbued with a motive, a purpose.  As a horror writer, your goal is to give your monster that purpose.

 Good luck with your story.  I look forward to reading it!

Joe’s books can be found at   http://amzn.to/1gb14eg   and leave him a (maybe not too scary) comment about his points on horror writing.  Thanks.