Earlier this week, when I welcomed Brian Matthews to the blog I also mentioned James Chambers, promising to give him a slot as well. Today is that day.
Chambers is a tireless HWA volunteer. A few things he does-- along with Brian he is the StokerCon guru and is actively working to create the documentation we need to keep it going, he oversees the Stoker Awards [click here for a piece he organized with Lit Reactor about that], he has worked to revive the HorrorU classes, and he is very involved with his local chapter. This is not a complete list, but a sampling.
But here is something more important. I cannot say enough kind things about Chambers as a human having gotten to work closely with him over the years. And some of those times when we worked together were very stressful [one example, an actually Nor'easter as we hosted StokerCon and the hotel started to spring leaks], and yet, he never lost his cool. On our HWA Board conversation forum he is often the voice of reason in stressful situations as well.
We are all lucky to have him as part of the HWA's leadership, but he is alway a great writer. I have given his collections Star reviews in the past. But, let me let him explain why he loves Horror to you for himself.
Why I Love HorrorBy James Chambers
“One needs nightmares… to appreciate dreams.”
Several years back, the late and much-missed Rocky Wood led an online “challenge” for horror authors, readers, and fans to post why they loved horror and tag it “Read More Scary Books.” I contributed the above quote to the delightful cavalcade of posts supporting the horror genre and encouraging readers to delve deeper into what it offers. The overall celebration of this dark genre impressed me at the time as did the many different reasons people found to express why horror is so important to them. It took me some thought and consideration to distill my own affection for horror into such a succinct statement, partly because my love for the genre has evolved over the years. I wanted to capture the most enduring aspect of it, the one element that keeps me coming back to read and write horror fiction despite my love of several other genres from crime to urban fantasy, from military science fiction to steampunk.
Horror first sank its teeth into me with imagery. I loved monsters as a child, not an unusual thing at that age when boys often become fascinated with dinosaurs, sharks, robots, and other fantastic creatures and creations that spark our imaginations. They inspire us to learn all we can about them. The names of all the dinosaurs. All the parts of a robot. What fishermen find in the stomach of a captured great white shark. Horror took all that a step further by breaking the bounds of reality to suggest, however implausibly, that ghosts, vampires, and werewolves might also be real. Five-year-old brains don’t possess the same grasp on reality as adult minds. How children that age perceive life changes almost daily. They haven’t yet developed the cognitive skills to close the door entirely on what if. Children can know sharks exist in the sea, and know that coffins hold no true vampires—and yet, the teeth, the monstrosity, the ferocity, the sense of dread and excitement these two disparate things, one real, one not, share? That sticks a foot in the door of a young mind, keeping it open enough for that question to linger: What if? What if, despite everything I know, both are real? Most children only see pictures of sharks and vampires in children's books, in movies, or on TV. Their experience of them is the same. Only rationality and trust in their parents, teachers, and other adults helps them discern the difference between the real one and the imaginary one.
As children grow, though, the façade of the “trusted adult” often comes crashing down. Adults lie, fib, or mislead kids on countless occasions, some well-intentioned and fun (such as Santa Claus), others malicious and damaging such as lies to conceal abuse, some to protect the parent or adult from sharing embarrassing information with a child, and so on. Children grow up to see through these falsehoods. Years of presents and good times soften the blow of realizing there’s no Santa Claus, but that’s an exception. Other truths that become apparent as we grow to see the words or stories intended to shield, dismiss, or victimize us for what they were, kick that “What if?” door wide open again: What if everyone who told me Tyrannosaurus rexes once existed, but vampires don’t and never did was lying about that too? It’s the harvest sown in the horror brain.
Many horror readers and authors I know discovered the genre in earnest around the age when they experienced these revelations. For my generation, it’s almost a rite of passage to have read Stephen King’s Night Shift, Salem’s Lot, and Skeleton Crew, followed closely by Clive Barker’s Books of Blood. Those of use who read them around middle school and early high school have a significantly higher ratio of having grown up to be a horror writer or reader. That’s my theory, at least. I base it on purely anecdotal evidence. I’m confident, though, that if anyone ever undertook a serious survey it would bear this out in some fashion. Having the curtains of childhood reality torn down to expose things we lived with unquestioned for so long sends us seeking a means to make sense of it, to adapt, to adjust, to recalibrate, and renew our designations of what is right or wrong, good or evil, safe or dangerous, challenges that characters in horror fiction experience—often with the added obstacle of no one believing them, leaving them on their own to solve their troubles, which holds a mirror up to the alienation and isolation many young people feel in those years.
As a child, my introduction to horror came in the form of comic books, specifically giant-sized issues of Tomb of Dracula and Werewolf by Night, and movies, especially the Universal Horror films featuring Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr, but also made-for-TV fare like Gargoyles and B-movie reruns of Battle Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Empire of the Ants, Food of the Gods, Kingdom of the Spiders, Them!, and many others. As a teenager, the short fiction of Barker and King galvanized me to return to the genre. I obsessed about how to see movies such as Day of the Dead, From Beyond, and The Thing, which Hollywood and wizened adults deemed unsuitable for my impressionable mind. Those stories, regardless of their media, seemed more authentic and truer to me than any action, comedy, or drama. Those types of stories exaggerated reality to idealize it. Horror exaggerated reality to expose it.
The fantastic, grotesque images seeded in my young brain bore fruit years later when they helped me comprehend the expanding world unfolding around me as my awareness and responsibility increased. Horror stories helped me understand that real-world monsters exist and that it was not only okay to question what adults around me taught and believed but a necessity. A core survival skill, in fact. Around the beginning of that period in my life, I read a comic book that captured so much of what horror had come to mean to me. The story, “In the White Room,” appeared in issue four of The Saga of the Swamp Thing. Daring for a comic book, it struck a gruesome chord with news reports of the Atlanta child murders, which officially ended the year before the story saw print. In the tale, the Swamp Thing encounters a series of child killings committed by the “Pineboro Child-Stalker” and discovers the killer is a popular TV host in the mold of Mr. Rogers on a local children’s program. His singsong catchphrase about dealing with strangers: “Give the benefit of the doubt, when you trust it all works out.” Using his show to teach children to lower the guard and trust strangers, he then preys on them. The effect of that story was seismic for me.
Soon after, I read Clive Barker’s “In the Hills, the Cities,” which remains to this day, for me, the most compelling story in the Books of Blood and one that shattered my nascent ideas about what horror stories can and should be. It included no gothic castles, graveyards, cemeteries, ghosts, or monsters, and yet proved so effective it has never left my head. Other stories I read and movies I saw around that time further shaped my ideas of horror as a genre. Back then, I was exploring all the genres, reading J.R.R. Tolkien, Terry Brooks, and Thieves World; raiding my Dad’s science fiction paperback library for Bradbury, Clarke, Dick, Niven, and Pohl; even my toes into crime and mystery with the occasional Alfred Hitchcock anthology. Although I loved it all, horror resonated for me the deepest.
I went on to read several other authors who helped define my ideas of the genre (and continue to read many today because horror is alive and well and constantly reaching in new directions), and discovered Jack Ketchum, David Schow, and John Shirley, all of whom wrote beautifully about ugly things. That idea took root in my writer’s brain. Horror literature should—and often does—stand with the best writing of any genre. I love pulp horror and what it brings to the genre (and have written my fair share of it, especially my Corpse Fauna cycle of novellas and stories), but it says volumes that classic literature and pop culture are so dominated by Frankenstein, Dracula, and the works of Edgar Allan Poe.
I loved each of these aspects of horror as I encountered it, understood it, and came to embrace it. When I seriously embarked on my own writing career, part of the challenge became synthesizing these different ideas into a clear concept of why the horror genre has been so important to me for long, why I wanted to write horror more than any other genre. I looked back at what I had gained from a life of reading and writing horror fiction and realized that—despite the gruesome, terrible things that populate much horror, the reprehensible tortures authors inflict on our characters—the genre is a fundamentally hopeful and optimistic one.
Horror writers seek to expose what hides in the shadows, which I attempted to capture in the title of my last horror collection, On the Night Border. We wrestle our nightmares into the light and make sense of them so our readers may learn to do the same. We delineate and illuminate the darkest aspects of the human experience to help people appreciate what is good, to recognize the innate power in their hopes and dreams—because that power almost always outweighs the power of nightmares, real or imagined. And that is why I love horror.
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