31 Days of Horror: Day 11: Why I Love Horror by Rachel Autumn Deering

Today I am featuring the fourth author who appeared in my Library Journal column on horror novellas, Rachel Autumn Deering.

Deering's novella, Husk was always going to be on this list. In fact, hers is the only title that did not come out this year on the list, but after listening to Episode 19 of The Ladies of the Fright Podcast where Lisa and Mackenzie discuss this novella in detail, I went to Amazon and ordered my own copy immediately. That was a little over a year ago, but the book stayed with me.

As I mentioned on Monday, I was inspired to make this year's column about novellas after attending a panel on the format during StokerCon, but Husk is the first title I thought of while everyone was talking. I knew it had to be included no matter what.

Husk comes fourth on the list because it also features an unreliable narrator, like One for the Road before it. This makes an easy transition between the titles. But Husk is also the most realistic story in the bunch. It could be supernatural or it could be a psychological suspense, and it is up to the reader to decide. After the clearly supernatural One for the Road, Husk was a nice counterpoint, and the pair clearly illustrate the range of the very best of the genre.

Some of you may find Deering's name familiar as she is also an accomplished media and comics writer.

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

Here is Rachel Autumn Deering, author of Husk, on sharing, for the first time honestly, why she loves horror.

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Why horror?

I would be lying if I told you I had an answer. I'm asked the question often—why horror—and I almost always whip up a reply that I hope will satisfy the interviewer. Just this once, though, I would like to try being honest, if you'll allow it. I don't know why I love consuming or experiencing horror. Until I became somewhat known for writing within the genre, I had never even stopped to consider how or why I found joy in being afraid. I had also never questioned why I liked playing video games or why kisses from my aunt were gross but kisses from the young lady down the road were magical. That's just the way things were. Monsters were always a kiss from the girl down the road to me.

Horror is diverse, though, and I might be able to give you some insight into why I write and enjoy my specific brand of deep southern, Appalachian gothic. Broken families and mental illness are a way of life where I come from and those influences are heavily reflected in the stories I choose to tell. My characters are messy and sometimes difficult to love but always (I hope) impossible to forget. To accurately relate my experiences as a young person, and to tell personal stories that are true to who I am at my core, I had to frame things with trappings of depression, domestic violence, drug addiction, poverty, and religious fanaticism. I don't aim to say every person who writes horror has had a troubled past that looks anything like mine, but I can almost certainly guarantee you that horror is their way of taking power away from whatever their traumas and obsessions and fears happen to be and turning it into something larger-than-life and almost cartoonish. Horror is our way of making reality unrealistic, getting it out of us, and letting it go. Shoo, now. Go and keep someone else up at night. And sometimes it works, and sometimes we feel better for a while, and sometimes people pay us for that over-inflated honesty and it lets us know it's okay to be so vulnerable and human.

Horror helps us make sense of things. There is a good and there is an evil. This is who you root for and this is who you avoid—or else! In a world where very little makes sense and the rules change day to day, horror is stable. Horror stays horrible so we don't have to.