Today I am back to the guest essay with yet another readalike author from WHY I LOVE HORROR: ESSAYS ON HORROR LITERATURE contributing their own thoughts to the blog-- Andy Davidson who is the readalike fro Stephen Graham Jones.
In his essay Andy writes about how In the Valley of the Sun came to be published. I love this book. I have put it on my Best Horror of the 2010s list, it was a 2020 Summer Scares selection, I gave it a starred review in Booklist (I wrote that I was sad I finished it, it was that good).
Andy has gone on to write more excellent novels since then, but his story about how he rediscovered his love of writing through horror is raw, honest, and inspiring.
Here is Andy Davidson's contribution to the Why I Love Horror series.
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A Horror Story Saved My Life
By Andy Davidson
Let’s start with a quote: “But this too is true: stories can save us.”
I was twenty-one the first time I read that sentence. It’s a line from Tim O’Brien’s “The Lives of the Dead,” about as close to an outright ghost story as you’ll get in The Things They Carried. I read it in a graduate fiction workshop at the University of Mississippi, my first semester in the MFA program. Even then, without any real crisis in my life, peering over the threshold of adulthood, not yet privy to sadness, sickness, or loss, I understood the power of that idea. I knew, somehow, it was true.
But it would be another twenty years before a story actually saved my life.
It was, of course, a horror story.
But first, a love story:
In 2007, three years after graduating with my MFA in hand, creatively burned out with no desire to write another word for at least a thousand years, I found myself on the academic job market, which can be like finding yourself at the end of a pirate’s plank. My one and only offer came from a two-year college way out in Georgia, a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor of English. I took it, and less than a year later, something wonderful happened: I fell in love with my boss. In the spring of 2008, I casually suggested to my department chair—we’d been dating in secret for months—that we get married. She said sure, we got hitched in the summer, and because of Georgia’s anti-nepotism laws, human resources and the powers-that-be rightly shifted me from the English Department to a full-time staff position in our small Department of Distance Learning. I became, with no formal training, an instructional designer. I did, however, have a few years’ experience teaching online, not to mention some self-taught digital media chops, so it seemed like a good fit. Maybe even a fresh start, I thought. After all, what writer really wanted to be a teacher?
Years later, I would remember this thought and think another: You idiot.
(As a reminder, I had not, at this point in time, finished a single writing project in over three years.)
Time passed, life was good, and then the winds of change blew through our small two-year school, and for a myriad of reasons that seemed like they had everything to do with my being trapped in an ever-shrinking cage of my own making, I found myself half a decade into a forty-hour-a-week career I’d never asked to have. Ten years out of my MFA program, degreed to teach and not even a teacher, certainly not a writer, I suddenly and inexplicably felt trapped, doomed, lost.
One day in 2013, I came home and wept.
I got this burning, gnawing feeling in my stomach. Constant pain.
I drank bone broth out of a thermos for lunch everyday for almost six months.
I had tests. Just stress, the doctors said.
(“Just.” As if stress isn’t some world-eating monster that can kill you.)
At some point during this time, like an alcoholic who’s hit rock bottom, or a sinner who’s found his way back to the altar, I sat down at a keyboard. I don’t know what specific event drove me there, don’t even remember when the decision was made, only that it happened out of some desperate, unutterable need to recenter my soul. I started trying to write. Like, really trying. Planning, outlining, organizing. I took writing seriously, maybe for the first time in my life. I’ve likened it in the years since to Jesse Pinkman blazing across the desert in that El Camino.
The first project that bore real fruit was an idea I got while painting the backyard fence, listening to Dwight Yoakham’s “Honky Tonk Man.” Serial killer cowboy, can’t stop offing women at honky tonks. I thought it was a crime story, Tender Mercies meets Taxi Driver, but then I banged out a draft and didn’t like it. It felt uninspired, artless. Cheap, even. About that time, I was re-reading a couple of books, No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy and Salem’s Lot by Stephen King. Both, arguably, horror novels, but Salem’s Lot scared the absolute shit out of me—that scene with the gravedigger and the kid at the graveyard? So, I thought: Vampires, cowboys. Hmm. I rewrote my weird cowboy serial-killer thing and made the main character a vampire, wrote it in language that felt, at least to me, like what a Cormac McCarthy vampire novel would feel like. I’d go on to revise it fifteen, sixteen times in the subsequent year, but in 2014, every agent I submitted to rejected my query (no one even requested pages for my “literary vampire novel”).
Enter Crystal, always my hero, who bought me a ticket to a writing conference in Nashville, Tennessee, where I could sit down and talk to a real, live agent.
Driving those six hours north from Atlanta, white-knuckling the wheel, knowing it was a last-ditch effort? The stakes couldn’t have been higher for me. I needed a win, some success. Even if it wasn’t immediate, just the kindling of a flame to light my way out of the dark.
I met my agent at that conference, and in 2017 In the Valley of the Sun was published.
I’ve since had a lot of people tell me how much that book matters to them.
My hope is that they read this and know how much it mattered to me, too.
It’s the one. It saved me.
Didn’t make me rich. Didn’t make me famous. But it saved my life.
Maybe this is why, in part, horror always holds the promise of hope for me, even in the darkest of stories. Sure, I could tell you a lot of other true stuff about why horror matters to me as a genre, how it shaped my tastes and informed my imagination. I could tell you about this teenage kid I knew, the high school principal’s son. Straight-A student, first-chair trumpet in the marching band. He’s got a bad haircut, pimples. Wears these cheap, mail-order sweatshirts. Like Ben Hanscom in IT, he thinks they’re baggy enough to hide the parts of himself he doesn’t want people to see. This poor sad shambling, self-loathing dip who wins citizenship awards, Woodmen of the World trophies. And at lunch gets spit on by the kids his dad gave detention. I was Ben Hanscom. Eddie Kaspbrak. Bill Denborough. Hell, I even wrote poetry for some Beverly Marsh who never knew it.
But all of that’s just memories, who I was. Truth, maybe.
It’s not salvation.
I was almost forty years old by the time I learned how a story can really save you, like O’Brien says. In his story, the narrator keeps dreaming alive the dead, imaginging other paths their lives could have taken. Memory itself as an act of conjuring.
For me, it was literal.
The agent requested the pages. The book got published.
And a story—a horror story—saved my life.
So yeah. I love horror.
Forever and ever.
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