It's day 4 of my spotlight on Lethe Press and today I am featuring H. Pueyo. That name should be familiar to those of you who read the general blog, as I just reviewed her excellent, bilingual collection, put out by Lethe Press, A Study in Ugliness & Otras Historias, in the October 1, 2022 issue of Booklist.
Pueyo's piece is short but very powerful. It is about writing Horror when you are surrounded by violence. This one is a must read.
Why I Love Horror by H. Pueyo
Horror brings me a familiar sort of comfort. When I was younger, people used to question why I wrote the things I wrote: why is it so dark, so violent, so morbid? And the truth is that I never really thought of myself as writing horror, not even to this day… That’s why I say it brings me comfort, because I was born into a life of violence and all its consequences, and horror is a genre that acknowledges those dark and morbid things. They’re real. They’re following you. They’re tearing you apart. They’re inside you. You overcome them or you don’t.
In Brazil, we don’t have a long tradition of horror fiction, but horror is often part of reality. The colonial past, the pain of genocide, the living memory of the military dictatorship, the brutal and unequal present. And, so, horror slips into other genres, and lives within us, the reader/viewer/citizen. In my collection, A Study in Ugliness, I tried to tackle both, the individual horror of trauma, and the collective horror of South America. Nostalgia is a monster; humiliations stains you. Memories can comfort and disturb, and sometimes they fail and lure you into traps. But I didn’t write them to be horror! Still, many turned out like that, because horror is part of life.I have no doubts that heart-warming and escapist fiction helps a lot of people. But, to others, it might make them feel abnormal, alienated from the “average” human experience. Horror provides proof of the contrary: the world also has bad feelings, bad people, bad actions, bad conclusions. And it’s the comfort of that proof that I loved growing up and still love now.
In Brazil, we don’t have a long tradition of horror fiction, but horror is often part of reality. The colonial past, the pain of genocide, the living memory of the military dictatorship, the brutal and unequal present. And, so, horror slips into other genres, and lives within us, the reader/viewer/citizen. In my collection, A Study in Ugliness, I tried to tackle both, the individual horror of trauma, and the collective horror of South America. Nostalgia is a monster; humiliations stains you. Memories can comfort and disturb, and sometimes they fail and lure you into traps. But I didn’t write them to be horror! Still, many turned out like that, because horror is part of life.I have no doubts that heart-warming and escapist fiction helps a lot of people. But, to others, it might make them feel abnormal, alienated from the “average” human experience. Horror provides proof of the contrary: the world also has bad feelings, bad people, bad actions, bad conclusions. And it’s the comfort of that proof that I loved growing up and still love now.
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