Here is an excellent review by my colleague Cody Daigle-Orians.
Guess first got on my radar when she created the Black Girl's Guide to Horror, a resource I use frequently. I was so excited that Guess had time to participate this year. She is a college professor and also busy promoting a 2020 release, so I knew her time was limited, but thankfully she made time for us library people.
After reading why horror is so important to Guess, especially as a black, bisexual woman, I would also suggest you listen to her recent interview with the Ladies of the Fright's podcast, where she dives even deeper into her own biography and connection to the genre.
Again, don't sleep on Guess or her debut novella. Hers is a name we are going to be hearing about for years to come.
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The Justice of Horror
By Jessica Guess
Horror shaped my life. My worldview, my sense of justice, my career, my writing, all of it leads back to horror. Until recently, I never examined why exactly I fell in love with a genre that repels most people. I’m a Black bisexual woman, so it’s not like there’s a lot of representation for me in horror, and the rare times that there is some type of representation, it’s usually negative, insulting, or careless. So, why horror? Why love a genre that doesn’t love me back? I think it’s because horror gives me something that nothing else does—justice.
A few weeks ago, I was on a panel called The Skeleton Hour with some of my favorite horror authors. We were discussing 70s-90s horror and Grady Hendrix asked a question about how we were able to identify with characters in horror we watched and read growing up. Was it hard to identify with so a genre that had so many male characters? Was it hard as a person of color to identify with a genre that was so white for so long? It was the first time I thought about how, as a child, I saw A Nightmare on Elm Street and was instantly hooked. When I watched it, I didn’t care about Tina, or Glen, or Nancy. I cared about Freddy. In the original Halloween, Laurie was a great character, but I was more interested in Michael. It wasn’t that I identified with monsters. What I wanted was what the monsters provided.
Imagine you are a Black teenager living in America. It’s the early 2000s and though you can’t quite articulate it yet, you know that there is something unfair about how the world treats you. You watch TV and see white teens live in huge houses and not worry about food or whether their parents can pay this month’s mortgage. They aren’t followed in malls or asked by security if they’re in the wrong store. When they go to a classmate’s house to do a class project, the guard
at the gated community doesn’t ask if their mother is the maid. Their clothes are stylish, and they go on dates and do drugs and stay out late without a care in the world. These constant reminders of what you are in this world and what you don’t have can build resentment.
In horror movies, you get to see those who have everything yet appreciate nothing, be punished. The boys who are jerks and are only after sex get speared through their necks. The pretty blonde girls with perfect boobs get chased through the woods, falls in the mud, and shish kabobbed to a tree. I know it doesn’t sound like it yet, but there is a weird sense of justice that happens in horror movies that don’t happen in real life.
Stephen Graham Jones talks about it sometimes—that in horror you get to see people immediately punished for their sins. I think what he refers to when he says this is the sin they commit in the actual movie—they read from a forbidden book, bully a girl who happens to have telekinesis, ignore warnings about a haunted carnival. I think he’s right. I think the surface of what they are punished for is the sin they’ve committed in the story, but I think that at the core of it, they’re all being punished for something else. They’re being punished for the abuse of their privilege.
The best way I can describe what I’m talking about is by re-telling a story that I had with a fellow Black writer, Zin E. Rocklyn. We were talking about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and one scene in particular that reeked of white privilege. In the movie, the unlucky group stumbles upon a weird house while waiting for a gas delivery. One of the male characters, Kirk, walks up to the house and knocks. After no one answers, Kirk opens up the door and simply waltzes into the house. Let me say that again. This white man waltzes into an unknown person’s house like he owns the joint without a care in the world because he felt like it. No regard for the people on the other side of it who may or may not have heard his knock. No sense of boundaries.
No sense that a stranger’s home wasn’t a place for him to barge into. He just assumed it was okay for him to do this because the world is his.
But what Kirk walks into isn’t his. On the other side of that door he flung open, whose house he was ready to invade like it was his own personal manifest destiny, is Leatherface. Justice is swift in this scene of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It’s not so swift in the real world.
Just recently, a Black woman was murdered while she slept when police officers burst into her house because they felt like it. There isn’t going to be any justice for her in this world. There won’t be any justice for any of the millions of Black people, Indigenous people, Trans people, disabled people, or any other marginalized group that isn’t afforded the privilege given to groups that hold the power in this country. Horror is one of the few places where the rules make sense. Though Black people may be punished first in a horror movie, we’re definitely not the only ones. There’s true equality there. No breaks for anyone.
Horror doesn’t seem like it at first, but it is the perfect place for someone like me to retreat to when the injustice in this country is overwhelming. When it’s stifling and I need something that makes sense, I go to horror. When I need a reminder that good people can triumph and bad people can be punished, I go to horror. In horror, especially when I’m writing it, I create my own justice. For now, that will have to do.
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