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Saturday, October 22, 2022

31 Days of Horror: Day 22-- Why I Love Horror by David Rose

I have had the pleasure of getting to know author David Rose as I assisted him in creating an HWA Veterans Committee.  Beginning November first, you can see his excellent service to his fellow veterans and members of the HWA with our month long spotlight on veterans in Horror, but before that, here is your chance to meet Rose as an author.

Why I Love Horror by David Rose

Does because it irritates my super-religious mother count? 

Nah, she’s all right, but there’s no denying the look in her eye when I talk about a tale I’m working on, or when she must’ve worried the dark strain in the family double helix had passed to my niece when we played a game when said niece was still a toddler. She would nestle up next to me, cutest thing you’ve ever seen, then beg me to pull out my phone, fire up Google, then type Witches

“Good witch or bad witch?” she’d ask; looking down at the cartoon or the Halloween model, where I would then promptly announce my judgment. 

Why do I love horror? Does the thrill count, when I myself was a kid and rode those crappy haunted house rides where the ex-con pressing its buttons can be as unsettling as what waits inside? I absolutely loved those things, you see! Those haunted fair rides: full of the early ‘90s wolf heads and odes to serial killers, fictitious or non, and yes, those splendid carnies who from my father’s side proudly descended. I recall the smell of those tunnels, the clank and bang as your cart meets another not-so-sudden turn, the speakers nestled in the darkness; crackling out the wolf howls, or muah-ha-ha-has, or the gleeful cackle of a very bad witch. 

Horror is fun. 

For those who feel that little thrill when there’s a bump in the night, exploration of the dark and scary also comes with great moments of joy. We read, we write, we watch because it’s entertaining to do so. 

And then the question inevitably arises, why is this? Why does watching a demon summoned from a pumpkin patch to exact a grieving father’s revenge bring such hell-yeah to our day (or probably night)? 

The cynical answer is we are a species removed from death. We don’t kill our own food, we live twice as long as our ancestors did just a few centuries past, and, save for our combat vets and first responders, the gruesome end of a human being in what was their prime of life is reserved for the silver screen or the cream-colored page. Our primitive impulses may just be bored, and pulsing, and demanding to be fed. 

The optimist’s answer, though, is one of appreciation. By witnessing the snarky teens get slashed by Freddy or the sailors pulled into the water by a giant shark, we may look around at the drudgery of our room and see not its blandness but a solace, a secret garden, teeming with safety and comfort and no maniac standing outside our window. Appreciation: for our world, one that could be far, far worse. 

As an author, I think I land somewhere amidst these explanations. If we can say cynicism rests at one end of a spectrum and optimism rests at its other, then in this spectrum’s bellybutton I swim my laps. I think this could be said for many authors. 

It’s important here to admit I am no bona fide writer of horror. I leave that for the juggernauts of the field, who seem to understand its conventional fascination and its devoted audience for better. What I am is a fantasy writer, and a damn dark one at that. Remember that looking around the bland room and not feeling so bad about it? My world, Mulgara, people have told me, is far better at accomplishing that very thing than any pill we could be prescribed. Tolkien made me wish I could live in Middle Earth. I, partly without meaning to, wrote and write stories about a place few would wish to go. Walk a mile on the streets of Nilghorde. Observe their furtive shadows and the windows locked tight. Or grip an oaken paddle and venture into the waterways of Amden Bog, where worse fates wait than a communion with crocodiles. Ghouls and necromancers thrive there, as do politicians of the most corrupt sort—making our own seem like philanthropists and statesmen. And that is apparently the point: one the deepest recesses of my makeup absolutely wishes to convey. 

Examining the darkness in our own lives shows us many things; our strengths, our flaws, what little we control and that vast flow of circumstance which we oh so don’t. 

Don’t tell the narcissists, but one’s strengths and weaknesses often arrive together. Skilled love-making may carry an origin in insidious porn addiction. A fondness for the cerebral has often been accompanied by lackings in the material (just find your nearest bookworm deathly afraid of stick-shift). A fortitude unrivaled may have come from years of being bullied; leaving a Recon Marine still staring in a barracks mirror and seeing the 5th-period weakling, all those years and triumphs later. Now add that pesky fact that we control so little and we’re flung back to Mulgara yet again. Ambition in a fallen world is a recipe for wonder, and no steamier does that stew froth than when characters aren’t monoliths of good or evil but afflicted with the strong-weak dichotomy we all know all too well.

Yet this is not the sole property of a secondary world. My time as a Recon Marine came and is now long gone. The other day I “celebrated” what would have put me at twenty years in the Corps; a day I often see Marine vets commemorating on Instagram. I believe I understand why so many do this. We are caught in a moment of reflection. The twenty-year mark is where most Marines retire, and those of us who got out after an enlistment or two can’t help but take stock in all we’ve done, wonder who we’d be if we’d stayed in, and contemplate who we once were. 

It was this exact mix of imagining and rumination that led me toward Lovecraft’s Iraq, a novella-size piece where I pull from my time overseas and use it to respectfully add to the Lovecraftian canon. If ever is there a place to learn your strengths and your weaknesses, it is in the cowboy culture of a recon unit. And if ever was there a place for all that to be tested, it is in an armed conflict. I won’t even get started on the lack of control thing here, but boy does draping such an epoch in the squiggling tentacles of horror make for a fun writing experience. And from what I can tell readers are enjoying it too, and that whole “the real world could be far worse” takes on a whole new meaning when Operation Iraqi Freedom now includes missing pages out of the dreaded Necronomicon.

Yes, good and bad. Longing to see death and being appalled by it. A cynic’s wit and an optimist’s hopeful smile. All these things are why I enjoy horror; a genre that takes seriously the subjects a distracted and myopic world wishes every so often to sweep under the rug. 

From weakness can sprout strength, and out of the dark often emerges a light, though only the trained eye will see it. One that has put in the time to stare blankly into the abyss, plume its depths, and hopefully emerge with clearer vision. Of course, so few eyeballs actually do this. I suppose that’s why I love horror all the more. 

 If YOUR eyeballs enjoy absurdly dark fantasy, may I recommend my The Scrolls of Sin?

If you prefer that very thing set in a vast swamp; Amden Bog: A Novel in Stories. 

Or our solar system, rife with corruption and devilry, 200 years from now? Forsaken, Fantastic!

And if military horror is your next adventure, Lovecraft’s Iraq may hopefully do the job. 

 Safe travels. 

David Rose is the author of, among others, The Scrolls of Sin and Lovecraft's Iraq. The latter has been included in the 2022 HWA Bram Stoker Award® Reading List. His forthcoming work includes “Shain and Cinnastasia” in Superstition from Redwood Press, as well as the essay titled “McNaughton’s Witches” in S.T. Joshi’s Penumbra journal. 

He lives in Orlando, Florida.bsp;

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