Today let me introduce you to R.J. Joseph as part of the "Why I Love Horror":
Rhonda Jackson Garcia, AKA RJ Joseph is an award winning, Bram Stoker Award™ nominated, Texas-based academic and creative writer/professor, whose writing regularly focuses on the intersections of gender and race in the horror and romance genres and popular culture.
She has had works published in various applauded venues, including the 2020 Halloween issue of Southwest Review and The Streaming of Hill House: Essays on the Haunting Netflix Series. Her debut horror collection, Hell Hath No Sorrow like a Woman Haunted was released in August 2022 by The Seventh Terrace. Rhonda is also an instructor at the Speculative Fiction Academy and the co-host of the Genre Blackademia podcast.When she isn’t writing, reading, or teaching, she can usually be found wrangling her huge, blended family of one husband, five adult sprouts, six teenaged sproutlings, four grandboo seedlings, and one furry hellbeast who sometimes pretends to be a dog.She occasionally peeks out on various social media platforms as @rjacksonjoseph or at www.rhondajacksonjoseph.com.
With Joseph's importance as a writer, teacher, and editor, I knew I wanted her here on Why I Love Horror. I asked her in person way back at StokerCon in June.
Her essay is one of the best of the month. Please take your time to read why those who live in thee shadows are not the monsters the world portrays them to be, and in fact they may be the exact opposite.
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by RJ Joseph
I was destined to exist in darkness—in horror. I’m an autumn baby, born on a chilly November morning, in the shadows cast on the dark threshold between dusk and dawn. And growing up, there isn’t a lot for a poor, inner city autumn baby to do indoors except live through her imagination and that of others—of her kin in horror.
I‘ve always thrived in these horrific shadows.
And I’ve seen what lives in the darkness with me. We are horror. Hungry and mournful, seeking the light but afraid of revelations. Heavy. Wistful. Fearful. Tired. Confused. These are the foundations of the horror genre: but they aren’t the true monsters.
The most bestial of all beings are the creatures that exist in the light of the real world, hiding their deeds behind the false faces and costumes of faux respectability they believe washes away their sins. Greed and envy mark their true natures, and they reek of their desire to harm all they can, seeking to conquer. Aiming to elicit pain and suffering.
They look just like you and me and everyone else—they hide perfectly in our homes and on our streets. They teach our children and drive our buses. They speak with scissored tongues from behind podiums and from atop hills. They lead. They prosper. They sing. We listen. They dine with us and sleep with us and court us and…they destroy. These are they who live in the light.
Many of us in the shadows have been inaccurately labeled as monsters. We are misunderstood. We have been cast into the darkness by a majority that doesn’t truly believe us to be dangerous but say so to keep us outcasts in the dark. We who live in the darkness are harmless. Some of us only exist because we believe in each other. Because we create more of us.
I exist because I know to go back into the shadows for protection. The horror therein keeps me safe.
In the wispy vestiges of a waning sun, horror beckons me to come back to it, again and again, to relish in our dark hearts, away from the light. In the blackness, we can expose every part of ourselves. No one can see us there, and no one can inflict pain where they can’t see. We can be whatever we want to be in that liminal space between the terrors of the real world and those of our own making in the horror world.
In horror, I expect there to be horrible things. I expect the monsters to do monstrous things, even if they’re accidental. No wonder what dastardly deeds they and their creators concoct, the enactment of their actual and perceived monstrosity is predictable. Knowable. Comforting, even. There’s no artifice or pretense in horror. It is as it is stated to be. I am drawn to this authenticity of imperfection, to the void that mirrors the one inside of me.
Outside of horror, this comfort is short lived. Human actions can be debilitatingly surprising. Crushing.
But if these true monsters happen to venture into our dark domain of horror, we have the upper hand there. We can create any manner of terror to haunt them, to take revenge on them for their misdeeds. I can create dark friends to help me torture them and ensure they never have a moment’s peace. I can
wreak eternal damnation onto them with a flash of my imagination. I can banish them to a place beyond the darkness and the light.
But I remain at peace, wrapped in the cold comfort of whispered tales and creepy utterances, decay only pungent to those who don’t recognize the decay for the boon of new life it truly is.
In the rot of horror, I am free. I want for nothing as I dream and create and expand and live. I expect the conclusions to the stories in horror. There is predictability in knowing everything dies. This brings me comfort. Outside of horror, those monsters don’t seem to ever really die. Even if they do disappear, there is always another one to take its place. There’s a never-ending stream of monsters doing monstrous deeds outside the shadows. Horror and I cannot control what happens outside the shadows.
Existing in the shadows, we reign supreme.
I love horror. I’m destined to thrive in these horrific shadows.
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