Today I wanted to give you the perspectives of two librarians, other than me, and why they love horror.
First up will be Corey Farrenkopf:
Corey Farrenkopf lives on Cape Cod with his wife, Gabrielle, and works as a librarian. He is the fiction editor for The Cape Cod Poetry Review. His work has been published in or is forthcoming from The Southwest Review, Catapult, Tiny Nightmares, Redivider, Hobart, Volume 1 Brooklyn, Flash Fiction Online, Bourbon Penn, and elsewhere. To learn more, follow him on twitter @CoreyFarrenkopf or on the web at CoreyFarrenkopf.com His most recent story, "Fences and Full Moons," can be read in Flash Fiction Online here: http://flashfictiononline.com/main/article/fences-and-full-moons/
And after Corey, you will find James Gardner:
James Gardner is a writer/librarian/self-styled horror aficionado from Kentucky who loves horror, pro wrestling, superheroes, and cheeseburgers (basically things that you've probably been told were bad for you). He has a blog The Foreboding Home of the Scary Librarian (bewarethescarylibrarian.blogspot.com) and does Booktoks on Tiktok despite being older than the typical Tiktok demographic. At the Clark County Public Library in Winchester, KY, he hosts Books from Beyond, a book club featuring horror, science fiction, and fantasy books.
Why I Love Horror
By Corey Farrenkopf
My buddy’s father likes to tell a story about when he coached me in rec-league soccer. I was six or seven at the time, particularly small for my age, with a thick bowl cut that almost obscured my eyes. Before each game, Ace, my friend Rusty’s father, would get us pumped up prior to taking the field. Lots of compliments, lots of enthusiasm, lots of just go out there and have fun energy. It was rec-league soccer. Not the playoffs for the MLS. Most of the other kids would get fired up. I on the other hand had a catch phrase I’d utter on repeat: “Why should we even try? We’re just going to lose.” At this grim remark, Ace would smile, offer another perky quip about having fun, pat me on the back, and get everyone out on the field, regardless of my dour aura.
What does this have to do with horror?
Early onset darkness. A preternatural draw to the macabre.
Some people are just oriented in such a way. When I was five, my favorite movie was Nightmare Before Christmas. When I visited my grandparents, I tried to sneak watching Jaws on cable. Whenever my parents brought me to their friends house, I’d lurk in the basement, hunkered down in plush leather recliners, scanning tv channels we didn’t get so I could catch Friday the 13th of parts of Alien. I owned every holographic Goosebumps novel, spent all my scholastic book fair money on the like. In middle school, one of my favorite songs was The Exhumation of Virginia Madison by the skatepunk band, Strung out. The song was about resurrecting the lead singer's dead girlfriend. I was at catholic school at the time, so resurrection was totally up my alley. I also loved a band called Choking Victim. Their name alone should indicate the flavor of their music. During college, I mowed historic cemeteries in Harwich Massachusetts (saw a lot of ghosts). I also cleaned beach bathrooms, but that’s another type of horror all together.
So each of these factors (and a thousand more) can be funneled into a particularly long math equation of This + This + This +This = my love for horror fiction.
Now, as a librarian and horror writer, I should be able to synthesize all of that into a more coherent explanation.
I love horror for the atmosphere, the mist-heavy graveyards, the full moon light illuminating something in my neighbor’s backyard that shouldn’t be there, the single candle hovering in the window of the abandoned house, the insane asylums, the condemned factory buildings, the woods dense with spanish moss and the low coo of birdsong... that might not actually be birdsong.
I love horror for the supernatural, for those monsters lurking (much like I did) in your parents’ friends’ basement, for the unknowable vistas glimpsed through a rend in time and space, for the telekinetic teenager who knows all too much about the goings on in the neighborhood, for the possessed books, for the cults that pray to entities neither you now I can pronounce, for the werewolves and the swamp creatures.
I love horror because it projects my own anxieties outside my chest and out of my head. When the words are on the page and not scrolling through my mind, there is relief, understanding (what I assume people who meditate get from meditation...I can’t meditate).
That’s why I recommend it to my patrons (especially these days). To try to help them get those dark dilemas off their chest, to relieve the fears of what’s hiding in their attics, to put the terror on someone elses plate rather than their own.
And also for the pure entertainment of it. Who doesn’t want to read about a woman living in a bayou who has to run drugs by boat for a crazy Christian cult in order to pay for the necessities of a swamp creature and witch (The Boatman’s Daughter by Andy Davidson), or about a town where high school girls are afflicted with a rusting disease that mimics the collapse of the steel industry in their town and only one teenager can get to the bottom of it (The Rust Maidens by Gwendolyn Kiste), or to trace the monstrous origins of three works of art that bring nothing but ruin to all who own them, all eventually culminating in a trip to a vast system of underground caves choked with bioluminescent fungi (The Imago Sequence by Laird Barron)?
The answer is usually everyone.
At least that’s what I tell myself.
When I’m wearing my librarian hat, I like to point out that horror is at once its own genre, but also a genre that consumes other genres. So many of the best authors writing today blend horror with historical fiction, noir, thriller, romance, mystery, and just about any other genre you can imagine...which makes it particularly easy to recommend once you know where your patron’s reading interest lies. So, for example, if someone says they like historical fiction, I’ll point them to Alma Katsu’s The Deep or The Hunger. Do they like gothic romance? Romance in general? Then Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno Garcia is the right choice. Do they like it a little spicier? Then go with the short stories of Livia Llewellyn. Thrillers? Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians or Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World. Noir? Wounds by Nathan Ballingrud or Coyote Songs by Gabino Iglesias.
This is the game I play with myself, sitting behind my desk in the adult services section of the library. If someone wants a book about an aging punk photographer, set on an island, with culty undertones...where should I look? Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand of course. But that’s how I sell it to the horror weary, those that think the genre is all blood and guts (and there’s nothing wrong with blood and guts). If a patron is into cozy mysteries, there is always a logical, three step equation to walk them through to get them to Caitlin Kiernan and Gemma Files. You just have to find those steps..
It always feels like a victory when you can put a new author in an unsuspecting patron’s hands and hear back two weeks later that they loved them.
And that’s the final reason I love horror. Sharing it with everyone else.
Widening the horror community is a beautiful thing. It’s open and accepting and filled with the kindest people imaginable. The more the merrier. There’s plenty of room under the dark cloud where we reside. I promise I won’t be such a downer if we decide to play a round of spooky soccer...whatever the heck that might look like.
My love affair with horror began when I visited the Overlook Hotel in high school. I have never been physically inside the hotel, but I explored its rooms and its hallways when I discovered Stephen King’s The Shining. I found a copy of the book in a high school classroom, and it was a great way to pass the time, teenage me thought. Little did I know that The Shining would be so much more. It would be the book that started me on a new life path.
As I read, I explored the dark, spooky hallways of the Overlook, but also the frayed relationship of the Torrance family, trapped in a hotel all winter while the isolation worked on their minds. Mother Wendy was trying to keep her family together while also trying to help her son. Father Jack, an alcoholic ex-teacher, was trying to be a good man and a good father, having recently failed at both. The son Danny was seeing ghosts, thanks to his psychic powers, and he could also see the malevolent ghosts trapped with them. I remember not only reading that book but devouring it. Then I found King’s vampire novel Salem’s Lot, then more of King’s work, then I discovered other authors just as frightening or even more frightening. In college, I majored in English, read books by Chaucer, plays by Shakespeare, and even X-Men comic books I bought from the comic store that also sold office supplies, but I always came back to horror. Horror had sunk its teeth into me and has still not let go. Who am I kidding? I’m the one who’s never let go.
Why horror, though? People who know me might assume it’s a natural transition from the fantasy and superhero works I’ve read, but I was not a huge fan of horror in the beginning. I didn’t see the appeal of being scared, and I couldn’t fathom why people would want to purposefully enter a panic-inducing situation. The movie A Nightmare on Elm Street, featuring bogeyman Freddy Krueger, actually gave me nightmares. I mean he could kill you in your dreams. How could I defend myself when I was asleep? I eventually watched horror movies just so I could stop being scared. I did stop being scared, but I was also still scared. Moreover, I was enjoying being scared. By the time I got to The Shining, it got me seeing horror fiction as something to reverse engineer. I wanted to dissect horror and see the mechanisms whirring and clanking in the readers’ mind as they read. I realized that I wanted to understand how to scare people.
Sure, it began as a way to manage my own anxiety (If I could understand how horror auteurs made people afraid, I could understand why so many different things make me afraid), but that also grew into my current passion for writing horror stories. I wish I could say that I have a few novels written, but that would be a lie. I haven’t always made the time to write, especially as other priorities have competed for my free time. I’m now writing more while also being a librarian. I haven’t written the Great American Novel, but I’m in a job where I can share the fiction I love with people who love to read it, or who would love to read it if they gave it a chance. I might not be writing the gospels of horror, but I can still be its acolyte, sharing the good and frightening word.
Like how horror is, according to Wikipedia, “a genre of speculative fiction which is intended to frighten, scare, or disgust.” But horror is also more than that. Going by that definition, horror just has to have some ghosts popping out like those hydraulic ones in the haunted house attractions, or a few repulsively vivid descriptions of surgeries, or rotting food. Horror, good horror, is more than that. Take The Shining’s Jack Torrance. He eventually becomes the villain, just as people may have seen in Stanley Kubrick’s movie adaptation, but the Jack Torrance in King’s novel is basically a well-meaning father. King injects a great many father and son moments to show that Jack truly cares about his son and wants to be better for Danny’s sake. King, of course, also shows examples of Jack’s temper, his addictions, and his general character flaws getting him in trouble. Horror is sometimes maligned as a genre that goes simply for cheap thrills, but there are many, many examples of classic horror fiction that takes its time to build its plot and develop its characters. And that number continues to grow with new writers adding to the genre, pushing it in new directions and tackling relevant societal issues.
Yes, horror can provide a cathartic release, but it can also be used to talk about some very difficult issues, as what is haunting or stalking the characters are symbolic of something else, whether it be trauma, tragic personality flaws, or a real world that sometimes seems scarier than fiction. A ghost that is haunting a house might be a secret or a traumatic event the protagonist wants to keep buried. The werewolf is our own worst impulses run amok. The vampire might be a predator, but one that appears to something dark within us. Horror even has villains that could have easily found their inspiration from news headlines. Peel back the layers of a good horror story and the supernatural threats often have parallels in the real world that we can only face in books or movies.
These stories do get told and retold, monsters trying different masks for different time, but that’s also what makes horror great and why horror often breaks free of its conventions and preconceptions. Classics of the horror genre are classics because they are timeless, but there is also horror that speaks to this particular age of blurred lines between genres. Take the vampire, for example. There are vampire movies where it’s the protagonist versus the creature of the night, but there might also be a little romance between vampire and human. Their encounter might take place during the Old West. The vampire might be a corrupt businessman seeking to literally drain the lifeblood of that society’s poor and underrepresented. Horror can not only effortlessly glide among genres but the fears they address can change with the times.
With all that’s going on in horror, with all the new horror I can introduce to the masses, neither of us are letting the other go, not when I have the opportunity to give someone a book that will change the direction of their lives like The Shining did mine. I also feel good knowing I can help people scare themselves out of their minds.
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