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Thursday, October 10, 2019

31 Days of Horror: Day 10-- Why I Love Horror by Wesley Southard

Today I am featuring the third author who appeared in my Library Journal column on horror novellas, another debut author, Wesley Southard.

I was given a copy of Southard's One for the Road by author Brian Keene at StokerCon. Keene brought Southard up to me and said, "Becky you have to read this book. Meet Wes." I ended up reading this book on a work trip a week later and I LOVED it. I was inspired to write a review immediately on Goodreads, which you can read here.

This book is third on the list for a few reasons. It follows Snow Over Utopia because both are centered around a road trip, but One for the Road is much more violent [in a good way]. I like to build my lists so that the violence hits its peak in the middle of the list.

Knowing that my audience is a little wary of horror to begin with, I gradually build them up to the most in your face title, and then slowly let them back down, so that when they get desposited at the end, they are back in a comfortable location [as you will see in the next 2 days].

But if you are looking for a thought provoking, fun, fast read, with some of the most creative monsters you have ever read, get this one. Your patrons will thank you. It is currently my leader for my category of "most fun I had reading a book this year."

Click here to read the column in Library Journal if you missed it or want a refresher.

Here is Wesley Southard, author of One for the Road, on why he loves horror.


☠☠☠☠☠☠☠☠☠☠


Why do I love horror?    



When I was young, my father and I didn’t have a whole lot in common.  He liked to hunt, fish, watch football, and work out. I was quite the opposite.  I hated sports, I couldn’t stand to be outdoors, and I would have rather kicked rocks than be caught at a gym.  As an adult, I’ve grown to love sports (ice hockey may be a small obsession of mine), and I now have a better appreciation for activities outside of the house, but back then I wouldn’t have any of it.  We were both looking for something to bond over.   



All he had to do was simply look back to when he was a boy. 



Those nights when he wasn’t rearing me on the classic rock he grew up with, we watched the old horror films he saw as a kid.  He would tell me about a film he loved about a young boy who was being chased by a very tall undertaker, and there were these flying silver balls that would stick into people’s heads and drain their blood from a little drill inside.  He was obviously talking about Don Coscarelli’s 1979 film Phantasm, and after watching it once I was hooked.  Another film he remember from years prior was about a group of teenagers who went to stay in a creepy cabin in the Tennessee woods.  They find a book bound in human skin and inked in blood, and after reading the passages within, all hell breaks loose. To this day, The Evil Dead remains one of my favorite films.  Now granted, not every horror film he brought home from Blockbuster was a winner.  I’ll never forget watching an old Bigfoot film called The Legend of Boggy Creek.  I think we spent more time laughing at the terrible soundtrack then actually being scared. 

That didn’t matter to me.  After years of searching, we finally found something to call ours.  It felt great, and it was the start of gravitating toward other forms of horror.  When I wasn’t watching everything Wes Craven or George A. Romero had to offer, I discovered R.L. Stine and his seminal Goosebumps book series.  Now, you may laugh when I say seminal, but for a whole generation of nineties kids, those books were like a drug.  Me personally, I couldn’t get enough of them. Now granted, they weren’t particularly scary. More than anything, they were entertaining.  They kept kids reading, back before we had to worry about their eyeballs rotting in the glow of cell phone screens. I’ll never forget being at my elementary school Scholastic Book Fair.  Before we could buy books, we had to sit through a children’s improv troupe from the Midwest called Tales and Scales. I enjoyed them, but directly behind them, locked up in large metal cases, was the newest Goosebumps book.  I remember the moment the show ended, and the fair runners cracked open the cases, I sprinted down the bleachers and dove head-first into the books.  No joke. I literally crawled under other kids legs just to be the first to have that new scary book with the embossed letters dripping down its glossy cover.  Remember what I said about those books being like drugs? 

Those Scholastic Book Fairs were a big deal to me, as were the pamphlets they regularly handed out in class.  Any book that looked scary, I had to have it. To this day, I swear it had to be a mistake. I’ll never forget thumbing through those pages, looking for something cool, anything to catch my eye―and there it was.  The cover had vampires across it, and their snarling, fanged faces went on in the painting, as far as the eye could see. I knew instantly I had to have it. My parent’s purchased it, and for the next few weeks I attempted to read my very first adult horror novel.  And although I didn’t understand much of the subtext or heady themes, the short novel nevertheless enraptured me. By the time I hit high school and reread it as a teenager, it blew my mind, and I couldn’t help but wonder how this was being sold to children. Thank God it was, otherwise I never would have read Richard Matheson’s pivotal short novel, I Am Legend, a book that I still call my absolute favorite.  Believe it or not, I still own that very Tor paperback all these years later. 

By the time I hit high school, my love for music and horror helped me find many other friends I wouldn’t have otherwise found.  It was a common bond we all shared. When not learning to play guitar in a band, we were staying up late, watching whatever late night creature feature Joe Bob Briggs was showing on TNT.  But it was my old guitar teacher that truly got the ball rolling for what the rest of my life was going to look like. He knew I liked to read, and he told me about this zombie book he was really digging at the time.  So I went and purchased a copy of Brian Keene’s first novel, The Rising.   

Game Over. 

Sure, I read and enjoyed Stephen King―I still do―but he never truly spoke to me.  Keene’s work was like a nuclear detonation in the horror genre, and I had jumped onto that hurtling rocket very early on in his career.  Discovering his work was like finding my R.L. Stine all over again as an adult. Even while going to college for music, I was still devouring his work, along with the work of his peers.  Keene became Richard Laymon, who became J.F. Gonzalez, who became Tim Lebbon, who became Ray Garton, and so on. Even in a school full of musicians, I still felt like an outsider. From the time I was thirteen, all I wanted to be was a famous guitar player in a traveling heavy metal band…but in the back of my mind I wanted to be like one of these guys whose work I loved so much.  They were becoming like rock stars to me, and once I moved back home from college and decided music just wasn’t my passion anymore, it was a fateful meeting with Mr. Keene at a book signing in Indianapolis that lead me to pull completely into another direction. 

I hung up the guitar and broke out the laptop, and over the course of the next decade I wrote my first novel.  The Betrayed isn’t a perfect book, and it sure isn’t pretty either, but it was my little drop in the ever-growing bucket of horror literature.  And it felt good. Really good. You know what else it felt like? Like I had finally found my purpose. At another book signing event, I encountered other young writers like me who welcomed me into their little horror family.  And what a generous, loving bunch they were. Nearly a decade later, I now have four books published and dozens of short stories―with many more to come―and it was all because of their love and support. I met the woman who would go on to become the love of my life, and years later I would move from Indiana to Pennsylvania, where I could be closer to my new friends and family. 

Earlier you asked why I love horror.  Horror means absolutely everything to me.  It gave me a way to be closer to my family.  It gave me comfort and entertainment in those dark times in my life.  It gave me lifelong friendships and the best mentors I could ever ask for.  And it gave me a purpose. I now have the same unique ability, like my heroes―Brian Keene, Graham Masterton, and Edward Lee―before me, to tell my own compelling stories.  I now get to scare people, to make others cringe, laugh, cry, scream, and smile. I get to tell stories that one day someone will pick up and, hopefully, inspire them to write, too, and give their life some sort of meaning.     

That’s all anyone can ask for.

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