John F.D. Taff is one of the best short story writers and editors working today. Numerous anthologies I have read this year, featured a story by him, and not a single one disappointed. He also edited one of the best anthologies of 2022, Dark Stars: New Tales of Darkest Horror.
Click here for my full review.
After the number o time Taff's writing and editing left me breathless in the last year, I had to invite him to 31 Days of Horror. And spoiler alert, once again, he did not disappoint.
I Kill Because I Care
By John F.D. Taff
Horror, of all the genres out there in the literary world, is the most empathetic, caring of them, and I will fight anyone who disagrees with this assessment. Before we descend into abject violence, though, allow me to explain.
I have been writing horror now for thirty-plus years. I have been reading horror far longer than that, back to when I first began to read. I gravitated toward horror in its most basic form—the horror comic book. I read Marvel in those days, and if you know, you know. I read mostly superheroes, to be sure, but also titles like The Tomb of Dracula, Werewolf by Night, The Man-Thing, The Crypt of Shadows, The Living Mummy, and (to my Catholic mother’s dismay) The Son of Satan. (Ask me sometime to tell you the story of the priest who came to dinner and saw my crayon drawing of The Son of Satan on my bedroom wall.) Even Dr. Strange Master of the Mystic Arts was at least fifty-fifty horror/superhero.
From there to the short stories of Poe and Lovecraft, then on to King and Straub and Barker and Rice. In there was also a thorough indoctrination into horror cinema, mostly through the black-and-white movies of the Universal monsters and the all-too-vivid, full-color horror of Hammer films. I was steeped in horror from an early age, just so my bona fides are established here straightaway.
Like most newbies to horror, sure, I was attracted to the very things that keep some away from the genre, namely the blood and violence. Or the promise, the merest hint of that. Slowly, though, ironic as it might seem, I began to appreciate the other nuances of horror. The subtle, creeping dread, the implications of deeper, darker things, the vast, casual indifference of the universe to the human condition. Things that it took years to discern because my reading skills far outstripped my maturity and life experience.
What it took me even more years to appreciate was what I’ve come to understand is the absolute kernel of truth embedded in all of the best horror stories. And that, simply, is the genre’s profound empathy for the human condition. One of my favorite authors, Stephen R. Donaldson (not horror but a fantasy novelist whose work does contain horrific elements) encapsulated what I think is the through-line of horror and the philosophy I have striven for in my own writing. And that is, paraphrasing here, Write compelling characters, get the reader to care deeply for those characters, then kick the shit out of them. Over the course of my thirty-plus years of professional writing, I have held to that philosophy.
But back to the original sentiment about horror being the most empathetic of genres. Why? Well, if you take that sentiment espoused by Mr. Donaldson as axiomatic, it’s easy. If a horror story is going to take you to some dark places, if it’s going to scare or discomfit you, it has to first get you to care about the character(s) the story is going put through these paces. If you don’t care for the characters in some fashion (and there are, of course, exceptions to this rule, but let’s stick with it for now), how are you going to be in the least affected by what is happening to them in the story?
But if you like them, if you do care about them, then what happens in the story will resonate easily with you. You are, in fact, empathizing with them, and that sense of empathy makes what happens to the characters seem all the worse because, in essence, it’s happening to you. The best horror stories, then, make the horror happen to the reader, and the way they do this is through empathy.
For example, would the events of Stephen King’s It have the same effect on you if you didn’t care for George, Ben, Eddie, Richie, Stan, Beverly, and Mike? Would Stoker’s Dracula be as chilling if you didn’t feel sympathy for Mina and Lucy and Harker? Would Shelley’s Frankenstein work if there wasn’t some shred of pity for the monster? Would Barker’s “In the Hills, the Cities” work if you didn’t pick up on the fractured love the two men have for each other?
I could go on and on. Rice’s ambivalent Louis in Interview with the Vampire. Poe’s tortured narrators in “The Black Cat,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” I hesitate to invoke the name of King again in such a short article, but he is the touchstone of the modern genre, and his work is built on writing characters that readers love. From the huge cast of The Stand to more intimate stories like Pet Semetary, King’s novels and shorts are replete with characters readers grow to love and care about deeply before the carnage ensues.
And it always ensues.
Even in its basest form, such as the slasher movie or stories that involve things sometimes described by readers with upturned noses as “torture porn,” there is some bond of sympathy built, however tenuous, between the character and the observer or reader. Sure, some who prefer these types of horror might not be interested in this aspect or might be inured to it, but I argue that it’s there and its effect is real enough, even if it works on a more subconscious level. I say this because I believe that much of horror, dealing as it sometimes does with eerie and supernatural things, operates on a subconscious level.
I have become known in the genre as the “King of Pain,” a sobriquet bestowed on me more than decade ago by one of my publishers. It used to embarrass me somewhat, but I’ve grown to embrace it. I’m very aware of my role as a creator of stories, of characters, and I want to make sure that readers identify and empathize with the characters I put on the page, so that the shit-kicking I put them through is felt. Felt.
But I also want them to come through the ordeal, whatever that means in the end. Sure, some characters will die or will be permanently altered, but I think that, too, shown in a fictional form, establishes empathy with the human condition. If a reader walks away from any of my stories seeing the characters emerge from adversity, surely this gives them promise that they can, too. And isn’t that the best kind of empathy, the kind you can apply to yourself in your own life?
By better empathizing with yourself, I believe you’re in a solid position to empathize with others.
So, yeah, horror is the most empathetic genre out there, hands down. Science fiction, romance, historical fiction, fantasy, crime. All of these might feature characters the readers can empathize with, but in my estimation they are not built on empathy the way horror is.
Now, about that fight…
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John F.D. Taff is the multiple Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of The End in All Beginnings and The Fearing. His short stories and novellas have appeared in innumerable magazines and anthologies over the last thirty-plus years. Peter Straub once tweeted that he was “mighty cool,” which Taff will undoubtedly have engraved on his tombstone. Taff’s recent work can be seen in The Bad Book, the anthology he edited for Bleeding Edge Books, and Dark Stars from Tor/Nightfire, the anthology he edited and contributed to. His work has also appeared in anthologies such as Gutted, Behold, Lullabies for Suffering, The Hideous Book of Hidden Horrors, and Orphans of Bliss. New work will appear soon in projects such as Human Monsters and Damnation Games. You can follow Taff on Twitter @johnfdtaff.
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