Now, longtime readers of this series know that each year I have spotlighted a small press during 31 Days. Well, this year I decided to try something different. I reached out to Becky LeJeune from Bond Literary Agency to see how we can work together to promote Horror authors.
But why Becky LeJeune? That one is easy to answer. LeJeune has not only come to StokerCon the last few years, but also, she has made a point to come to Librarians' Day. I have gotten to know her over the last few years. I both trust her as a human and trust her to not represent a-holes.
Look, I was honest with LeJeune and I will be honest with you, I have had pretty good luck with the small presses I have invited over the years (only one turned out to be shady), but with the number of bad actors out there and having exhausted the publishers I feel confident about, I am trying something new.
So for 9 days, we will meet a variety of authors from genre legends to up and comers and even a nonfiction writer. You will be exposed to a wide variety of horror practitioners, all of whom are great for your public library collections.
I know there are some aspiring writers who read this blog as well, so I also asked LeJeune to share what she is looking for in clients, and she said:
I am looking for authors who are passionate about their work but are also open to edits and discussions about how we can potentially improve the work for submission to editors.I'll reopen to queries January 2024
Over the course of this series I will note which posts come with a chance to win a book. Please see the most recent giveaway for rules. Those rules apply here as well.
I pulled 6 separate winners over the weekend. Those people have been notified. The last 2 days of this feature do not include a giveaway. However, the giveaway will be back as usual this coming Thursday.
Today we have Jon Bassoff, high school English teacher by day, "deranged writer guy" by night with 9 Horror novels out in the world. Here is Bassoff explaining why he has loved Horror for different reasons at different ages.
💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀
Why I Love Horror
by Jon Bassoff
by Jon Bassoff
Not the only one who longs for haunted screams and blood-soaked floors. Or waking nightmares and hidden corpses. Or buried traumas and forgotten ghosts.
I’m not the only one who longs for horror.
But not the real kind. Not the real violence. Not the real death. I want it to be pretend. In film. In literature. In art. In music.
After all, horror, the real horror, has been around as long as humans have. Picture Cain bashing in Abel’s skull in with a rock, removing his organs, and covering his own face with his brother’s blood. (Okay, maybe I tend to embellish a bit). And that unpleasant circumstance took place years before God started sending plagues and floods and fires.
And even after we were SIVILEYEZED, we’ve been creating havoc. You know the tales. The Hungarian aristocracy hacking to death peasants who dared to uprise. Harlow’s Pit of Despair. The Alexandra Hospital Massacre.
Yes, horror is all around. Thankfully, the vast majority of us are nauseated by this grotesqueness. We learn about the atrocities committed by our fellow humans and shake our heads in disgust. But if we’re being honest, we want to look. Even if it’s from the safety of our Coke-stained couch. Well, horror movies and novel allow us to quench our curiosity without quenching our bloodlust. Ketchup is cheaper than blood.
As for me…
It begins with The Shining. The first time I heard that title, I was six years old. My parents and their friends were going to go see the Kubrick movie in the movie theater. I asked if I could go. I liked movies. Why, over the past year, I’d already seen Fantasia, The Black Hole, and Clash
of the Titans (oh, Harry Hamlin, where art thou?) If I had seen those movies, I asked my parents, why not The Shining? They answered in serious tones. Because it was scary, they said. Because it wasn’t meant for kids. Because it would give me nightmares. No, little Jonny Bassoff wouldn’t be watching The Shining. I would stay with the babysitter instead. We would read wholesome stories.
I tried imagining what images and ideas could possibly be in this movie. I knew about ghosts and goblins and witches. Hell, for the Halloween previous, my mom had placed a sheet over my head, cut out a couple of eye holes, and, voila, I was a ghost. But that didn’t give anybody nightmares. The Shining would.
When my parents returned, they confirmed that the movie was indeed terrifying. Even for them. And they were adults. My mom said she wished she hadn’t seen it. It was too scary.
The legend of The Shining was born.
I didn’t see The Shining until years later. In those days, it wasn’t so easy. We didn’t own a VCR. If you missed a movie, you missed it. I saw other great movies in the movie theater—Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back—but not The Shining. No horror movies at all. Not until we rented a cabin in the mountains and rented a VCR. I was fifteen then. I begged my parents to rent the The Shining. I hadn’t forgotten. I wore them down. They finally agreed.
Of course, the setting couldn’t have been better. The middle of the winter. Snow falling. The mountains of Colorado. Finally, that evening, it was time. My dad hooked up the VCR rental. He pushed the tape inside. He pressed play.
And I got scared. Really scared. I mean, Room 237? The Grady twins? Redrum? The blood elevator? All work and no play?
It was everything I could have hoped for. I was now in the know. I had eaten the forbidden apple. And I wanted to gorge on an entire bushel.
Some people get a taste of horror and spit it out. When my son was young, I showed him the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Not horror, exactly, but scary. Especially at the end when Donald Sutherland points and shrieks. You should watch it if you haven’t. And my son was terrified. He couldn’t sleep for days. He would never watch another scary movie, he told me. Even to this day, he’s very cautious about the movies he watches, making sure that it won’t creep him out too much. That’s the way my wife is too. But not me. I can’t get enough. And why is that? Is it because I’m deranged? Well, yes. But not only that. I think I get tired of the mundane. So much in life is routine. Brushing teeth, getting dressed, eating breakfast, going to work, eating dinner, going to bed. Repeat. I long for an escape from the mundanity. Some mystery. Some excitement. I don’t want to skydive. Don’t want to munch on monkey brain. I’ll settle for horror.
Over the years that followed my viewing of The Shining, I tried to watch as much horror as I could. Halloween. Friday the 13th. Nightmare on Elm Street. Even the ridiculous B horror like Sleepaway Camp. And maybe, after a while, I got desensitized a bit. Like a drunk who needs to drink a pint of bourbon for a buzz, I needed more and more blood and dread and terror. Until it got to the point where I couldn’t be scared. Not really. Maybe a bit creeped out. Grossed out, certainly. But not scared. I think that’s where I am today. And yet I still watch as much horror as ever. But these days, I view it in a different way. These days, it’s about the art of the grotesque.
The wonderful thing about genre film (and fiction) is that it follows certain expectations and standards, and when those expectations and standards are twisted or broken, art is created. I think about a movie like Angel Heart, which starts an homage to old film noirs, complete with the gumshoe detective and smoky set pieces but turns progressively dark and horrific. It might be my favorite movie of all time. Or I think about Polanski’s Repulsion, where a woman’s descent into madness is accentuated by the claustrophobia of her apartment. Or I think about Lost Highway, one of my favorite Lynch films, which is so strange and disorienting that a viewing leaves you emotionally exhausted.
There are hundreds of other beautiful horror films, where fear is turned into art. But, of course, there are also exponentially more sleazy, unartful ones. I like those too. They’re like comfort food. Just ridiculous story lines with questionable taste and cheap special effects. And some of them are so weird, it’s reasonable to ask what the hell the filmmakers were snorting when they made the film. Like Tokyo Gore Police. Or Killer Klowns from Outer Space. I talked about my aversion to the mundane? Those films, for all their ridiculousness, are as good a way as any to escape from that mundanity.
Finally, I want to talk about horror fiction. My wife told me about her experience of reading Dracula in college and throwing the book across the room in terror. I haven’t had that experience myself (although I do envy her). What novels can do better than films is get inside the psyche of a person gone mad. And to me, that is the most brutal terror. Because while we can laugh off ghosts and witches and killer klowns from outer space, we know that madness is always just one trauma away. I think about a novel like The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe. Or
The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson. Or, hell, Lolita by Nabokov. All of them are about losing control. Drifting away from reality. That’s what scares me most.
Most of what I write is influenced by that fear of madness. From the wounded Iraqi war veteran in Corrosion, to the obsessive lobotomy doctor in The Incurables, to emotionally damaged sister in Beneath Cruel Waters, my characters face the horror of their own psyches. My hope is that other people will want to take a peek, just like I did when my parents mentioned The Shining.
Because it beats real madness.
No comments:
Post a Comment