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Wednesday, October 21, 2020

31 Days of Horror: Day 21-- "Why I Love Horror," Grindhouse Press Edition with Bryan Smith and Patrick Lacey

Each year during the blog-a-thon I choose one of my trusted indie publishers for libraries [listed here] and invite the press and their authors to introduce themselves to all of you in the library world.

This year I chose Grindhouse Press, a female owned press putting out high quality, high interest titles, celebrating their 10th anniversary this year. After reading and enjoying both True Crime by Samantha Kolesnik [featured in my Readers' Shelf column and giveaway a few days ago] and The Perfectly Fine House by Kozeniewski and Young [for my Library Journal June Horror Review Column], I reached out to CV Hunt, owner and publisher, and asked her to gather 6 authors of her recent and upcoming titles to share "Why I Love Horror" with all of you. 

Before we get to today's authors, a quick reminder-- Grindhouse Press is sponsoring this week's #HorrorForLibraries Giveaway. Click here for details and rules.

Today I am highlighting Bryan Smith and Patrick Lacey. Click on their names to learn more about each author.

Why I Love Horror
By Bryan Smith

I love horror because it speaks to the side of my psyche--the predominant side, quite frankly--that is fascinated by and drawn to the strange things in life.  I don’t just mean the eerie and macabre or accounts of supernatural phenomena, though of course those are all prominent elements in many of my favorite tales of horror.

People who love horror or simply enjoy a scary movie once in a while come from all walks of life.  At horror conventions, I’ve met dedicated fans of the genre representing a vast spectrum of personality types and backgrounds.  There are those who are outgoing and talkative, ones who are shy and reserved (much like myself), and a whole range of people at some point in between.  In a general sense, there is no stereotypical horror fan.  We’re like any other subsection of people in that way.

I do believe, however, that horror holds a special appeal for the misfits of the world.  I use “misfits” in this case as a loose descriptive term.  It can mean anyone who feels they don’t fit in, but people who think of themselves as existing outside societal norms also vary wildly in personality.  To a regular person, some of them might seem completely “normal”, while inwardly they feel estranged or apart from regular society.  I do include myself in this category.

Horror especially appeals to many such people because it is, at its core, a genre that largely concerns itself with examining strange and unbelievable things happening at the margins of modern society, within the dark and strange spaces people tend to avoid in reality.  Spaces within which many of us feel more at home than anywhere else.  Often in horror films and books, characters are terrified of supernatural creatures or misshapen, deranged individuals labeled as monsters.  It should come as no surprise that people viewed as “freaks” or “oddballs” by some will often identify with or see something of themselves in these so-called monsters.  Many times the “monsters” in horror stories are simply misunderstood.  They are victims of society’s frequent lack of compassion and understanding for those who don’t fall into line and cheerfully function as uncomplaining and unremarkable cogs in the machine.

I’ve objectively known this to be true in my years of meeting and knowing horror fans at conventions and online.  It is also, in large part, a viewpoint informed by own experience in life through the decades.  I wanted to be a writer from a very young age.  My first stories date back to early childhood.  In those early days, however, my original aspiration as a storyteller was to become a science fiction writer.  I obsessively read everything I could get my hands on by Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, and the like.  Ellison was one I got into in my early teens and he certainly told stories with a strange bent, even if they were mostly in the realm of SF.  Reading his stories could certainly be seen as an early precursor of what was to come for me.

I should note that I wasn’t immune to the allure of horror entirely in those early years.  As a child in the 70’s, I did enjoy watching monster movies on the afternoon Creature Feature shows.  Dracula, Frankenstein, Creature From the Black Lagoon , etc.  I occasionally was able to convince my mom to buy monster magazines for me during trips to the grocery store.  All this, however, was only a secondary interest at the time, taking a backseat to my overriding fixation on SF.

Back to the point, which is that even before my transition to being a horror fan primarily began in earnest, I read a lot.  Constantly, one could say.  In my school days, I was always carrying a book around, and I read from those books in any quiet or unoccupied moment that came along.  Back then I felt like an alien sitting in those raucous public school classrooms and wandering those crowded hallways.  The vast majority of other kids in those classrooms didn’t have their nose buried in paperback novels all the time.  A lot of those kids didn’t get it and because they didn’t understand it they chose to mock it.  They labeled me as weird, which I guess was true from their skewed perspective, but I kept reading my books because they remained my best source of solace in a world that seemed openly hostile to those who don’t fully conform.

That’s not to say I didn’t have friends when I was young.  I did.  A tight group of pals from the neighborhood in which I grew up.  After school and during those long, hot southern summers, we all rode our bikes around the neighborhood constantly and got into various forms of youthful mischief.  If you could peek back in time at these antics, it would almost seem as if we were living out scenes from Stranger Things or Stephen King’s It , only minus the deadly encounters with supernatural evils.

Speaking of Stephen King, he was my gateway into adult horror, as he undoubtedly was for countless others.  Back in 1980, Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of The Shining was about to come out.  I remember seeing the commercials on TV for the movie and something about it piqued my interest in an usually strong way.  Then one day at the grocery store, I saw the movie tie-in paperback edition of King’s book sitting in one of the racks.

The Shining was longer than the books I usually read at the time, but I devoured it like nothing else before.  It’s not often one can accurately say a book truly changed their lives, but that one absolutely changed my life.  Almost overnight my devotion to science fiction became a thing of the past.  Horror fiction immediately became my new fixation and there was no going back, at least not for a long, long time.  At the time I read that back, I was fourteen-years-old, and unbeknownst to me at the time I’d suddenly locked onto my new path forward in life.  I began my own primitive attempts at writing horror stories and right away the genre felt like a more natural fit for me as a young and developing writer.  It felt right.  It felt like home .  The genre also spoke much more deeply to me about my own inner alienation from the world than anything else ever had or ever could.

It still feels that way to me, even today.

Reading this, one could get the sense that my own tastes in horror fiction run toward the more cerebral, quiet side of things.  Moody ruminations on alienation and societal decay.  That is not exactly true.  There are writers who work in that vein I admire greatly and I enjoy a lot of their work.  For the most part, however, my tastes veer more sharply in the direction of fun and gory spook-shows.  I did come of age in the 80’s, after all.  In addition to the vast mountain of horror books I read in those years, I also saw tons of horror movies.  The decade is widely and rightly revered as a golden decade for horror films.  My neighborhood pals and I watched so many of them together, pounding beers as we got a little older and laughing at the insanity on the screen.  It was a great time.  All these years later, all those guys are either moved to points far away or no longer with us.  Yet I still experience a lot of the same spirit whenever I tune into a new episode of Joe Bob Briggs’ The Last Drive-In on Shudder.

Because horror is my home.

Horror is where I feel happy and comfortable, with the monsters and dangers of the world held at a safe remove on the other side of the screen, where I can laugh at the spook-show and sip my craft beer instead of the Budweiser I favored as a youth.  Horror is my world, even--perhaps especially--during times when the world itself feels like a horror show.  Like now, for instance.  This October arrives during one of the more difficult periods in recent history.  And once again, perhaps more than ever, the spooky season consoles those of us with a taste for the strange and unusual.  For the weird and quirky.

For the misfits all over the world.

Happy Halloween.


The Importance of Horror, or How to Make Sense of Bad Things by Reading about Them

by Patrick Lacey

Around the time I first read Stephen King's Skeleton Crew, my father was dying two rooms over. The doctors gave him three months but he held on for five. A fighter, that one. He spent most of his time in the living room, on the couch, because it was comfortable and his oxygen tank was more accessible. Those things are heavier than they look.

Since that was a tough year on all of us, I didn't have much time or mental capacity for extracurricular activities. After a day of school, work, band practice, and whatever else you can fit into senior year, I'd read for a few minutes before sleep pulled me away. I'd inherited my mother's copy of Skeleton Crew and judging by the way its pages were falling from their binding and the paper was stained with who knows what and especially by the way the spine was bent to the point of no return, I suspect she'd bought it second hand. It could've had an entire life or lives before it made its way to our living room bookshelf. As a kid, that cover, the one with the toy monkey and the tambourines from King's titular story "Monkey Shines," it scared the crap out of me. But it left an impression, too, because I'd think about that little primate long after I'd seen it staring from its cardboard cage. Years passed before I could pick the book up but when I did, I learned a valuable lesson about the genre.

Nothing in horror is as scary as real life.

The opening piece in Skeleton Crew, The Mist, is more of a short novel than a short story. It clocks in at 200+ pages in my mass market edition and seeing as how I was under a few million pounds of stress, I'd only make it through ten or so pages—twenty on a good night, of which there weren't many—before I'd wake hours later with the book pressed against my cheek, drool lending more stains to the mix, the corners of the cover digging into my flesh. They always left an impression. Still, a few pages at a time—that was plenty, because the book stayed with me long after I stopped reading. If you're unfamiliar, The Mist is about a group of people stuck inside a small-town Maine grocery store while the world outside goes to hell. Everything's grey and dull as an inexplicable mist (hence the title) rolls down from the hills. As you might expect, factions form within the group of survivors. Some folks take the practical approach, draw up plans to escape, and others take the opportunity to form a cult. And all cults require sacrifices.

You might be thinking: why on earth would you want to read something like that when your real life was already well past dark? The answer's simple: because I could make sense of that supermarket and its factions. I could see King breaking down society into its most fundamental ideals and hypothesizing how things could (or would) play out. It was a safe space to observe the worst possible scenario, hold a microscope to the bad folks without any repercussions. And that's what I think horror is at its core and at its best: a way to make sense of things. I don't know why people step into schools with assault rifles

or strap themselves with improvised explosives and I certainly don't know why loved ones head to the hospital for a routine check-up and head home with a death sentence. Real life has never made any sense, and that's what makes it so scary. But within the confines of fiction, specifically the kind that deals with the things that nag us on the wrong side of midnight, that's where we can try to make some sense. In The Mist, there are creatures just outside the walls of the market. Things large and misshapen and uncaring. Fine. No problem. I can deal with creatures, no matter the size of their teeth or tentacles. Things like that, they don't exist here, outside those stained pages, but what they may or may not represent does. Sickness and suffering and hate, if we reverse engineer them, plop them into a mold, do they not form the monsters in our fiction? Monsters we can observe from a safe distance without ever having to feel any real pain?

Reading through that seen-better-days volume, for however long it took, kept me sane during my father's decline. It offered focus, offered meaning to something horrific. That's why horror is so vital, so important, to the human experience. It gives names to our fears, yes, but it does so much more. We don't just need names. We need answers. And while I couldn’t find all the answers inside that closed-off supermarket, I did find good people doing good things when faced with the worst news of their lives. So for me, horror's about monsters and haunted houses and all that wonderful stuff, yes, but it's also about trying to piece together a world that, on the surface, is entirely unpredictable. I can't tell you why bad things happen but in horror fiction, I don't need to. We can flip to the next page, you and I, and try and make sense of it from a safe distance.

Just, please, go easy on the spine.

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