I was first introduced to John Fram through his book, The Bright Lands, which his publisher passed on to me for review. [Click here for that review]. I was very impressed with the novel, especially considering it was a debut.
Although my review appeared in the June issue of Library Journal, the book wasn't coming out until July 2020. I wanted to also include it in my 2020 Horror Preview that appeared in the July issue. I asked Fram for a quote about the current state of horror, especially from his perspective as a gay man to include in that article. Here is the full quote he contributed to my 2020 Horror Genre Preview for Library Journal:
"When I began work on "The Bright Lands," I only knew two things about the story: that it would feature a queer hero returning to a hometown that terrified him, and that he would learn things there were even worse than he could ever imagined. I didn't even realize I was writing a horror novel until a monster started whispering in people's dreams and a strange pit loomed at the limits of everyone's perception, but the moment I understood what I had on my hands, I ran with it. Horror has been producing some of the most mind-bending, diverse stories of the last five years, a trend I don't see stopping anytime soon. We live in a gaslit era, a time when straight, white society is finally being visited by the fears and uncertainties that the rest of us have been battling all our lives. Horror seems ready to tell us that yes, things really are more terrifying than you could have imagined...What a time to be alive."
This quote immediately made me want to know more about Fram and his horror roots, so he was one of the first authors I contacted for this year's "Why I Love Horror" guest posts. And as I suspected, Fram did not disappoint. See his essay below, and keep you eye out for more books from this rising star of horror.
Why I Love Horror
by John Fram
In the book of Genesis, Jacob's daughter Dinah is raped by Shechem, a prince of the Hivites, a man who then begs his wealthy father to help him secure her hand in marriage. Dinah's thoughts on all of this are conspicuously absent, but the feelings of her brothers are not: in order to secure the marriage, Jacob's sons insist that Shechem and all the men of his city circumcise themselves. They do so, and three days later—when all of the men are still in pain—two of Dinah's brothers "took their swords and attacked the unsuspecting city and slew every male," carried off their women and children and everything in their houses. Just like that.
I was twelve years old when I first stumbled across this story during an unchaperoned trip through the Bible, and the horror of it—the frankness its brutality, the blithe duplicity, the third act explosion of violence—shot through my body with such force I might have licked a battery. I had always been an imaginative child, and my parents (not unwisely) had done their best to limit the amount of darkness I ingested. R-rated horror was strictly off-limits at our house in Central Texas. Stephen King was a dirty name. We admired the classics of the genre, but after a weekend reading Edgar Allen Poe stories and watching adaptations of Frankenstein inspired me to dismember a few Barbie dolls and suspend them in water bottles (I ask you: how else was a boy supposed to assemble a monster?) even these were more carefully monitored.
Yet no one ever thought to police the Bible. In our house, church began at 8:00 A.M. on Sunday morning, and if there's one thing a twelve-year old boy hates worse than sitting in a pew at 8:00 A.M., it's sitting in a pew and listening to a sermon about grace and forgiveness and anything that didn't involve obese kings getting impaled with swords (Judges Chapter Three) or women getting turned into salt (Genesis Chapter Nineteen) or the moon turning to blood and stars falling out of the sky and everything else blowing up in Revelation. Thankfully, whenever I got bored in the service, I was allowed to read The Good Book with impunity, and I tripped over a thousand brutal horrors.
All of them gave me the same thrill as the story of Jacob's sons revenging their sister had, and with that charge there came a strange comfort. For a boy growing up in the shadow of 9/11, the Iraq War, SARS scares and anthrax letters and Black Rock murders and torture, it was almost a relief to see that nightmares of such a senseless magnitude were nothing new. They were tragic, they were destabilizing, but people had survived them, written about them, even given them a sort of meaning with the help of a little theology and a lot of supernatural imagination. The brutality of the Bible, its honest depiction of human failing, was more encouraging than any sermon in church or press release from the Bush administration. Yes, the Good Book said. Things are, indeed, as terrifying as they seem. God takes no prisoners. Sometimes the stars just...fall.
After the service, I was so fired up with gore and horror and the thrill of the unknown I could have powered a small car. The old folks in the pew behind us always made a point to compliment my parents.
"You must be so proud," they'd say. "John is so diligent about reading his Bible."
If they only knew.
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