I started reading Ashe this year as well and her work blew me away at every turn. She writes honest, direct, and emotionally devastating tales what do not shy away from visceral imagery. Her stories are imaginative and compelling, but be prepared to have both the imagery and the ideas to linger with you long after finishing each tale.
Ashe has a Substack. I highly suggest checking it out.
But back to her Why I Love Horror essay for today. As I began planning this year's series, I not only knew I wanted Ashe to participate, but I wanted her to go last. Ashe is a rising star who needs more attention, especially in our libraries and her essay showcases not only how she writes, by why.
Thank you for joining me on this journey for yet another year. I will be closing out the month with some resources for helping Horror readers all year long and of course, on Halloween, our big 2024 Summer Scares spokesperson announcement here on the blog and across many media platforms.
But first, Paula D Ashe on the complicated feelings behind her love and how she uses it all to fight for the genre to evolve and do better. It is the perfect essay (and person) with which to end this series for 2023.
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By: Paula D. Ashe
My love of horror is dynamic, evolving, and complicated. As a Black lesbian writer of horror, I often find myself tasked with defending my beloved genre from legitimate concerns about the intent of a genre that has in some ways become synonymous with depictions of misogyny, racism, and homophobia (among other things). Why (and how) can I love films and books that revel in having –if any– characters of color who die first, often in service to white protagonists? Why (and how) can I love films and books that glorify violence (especially sexual violence) against women? Why (and how) can I love films and books that cast queer folks as villains, psychopaths, predators, and cowards?
Well, because like my love of the genre, the genre itself is dynamic, evolving, and complicated. Ever since I started to consciously declare both my love of horror and my desire to write horror, someone has always wanted to remind me that what I was doing was wrong. As a child I was told that horror was a corruptive influence and the books I loved reading held literal demons within the pages that would overtake my life if my family didn’t protect me from their schemes*. As a teenager I was told that reading too much would make me unattractive to boys, especially reading all that gross horror stuff. Later in college I was told that writing horror was beneath me, that I was wasting my talents on genre garbage. As an adult I’ve been told that horror is misogynist but also that I can’t write horror because I’m a woman. I’ve been told that Black horror doesn’t sell and that Black people don’t read horror. I’ve been told that queer characters in horror are somehow both ‘too much’ and ‘distracting’ while also being ‘unnecessary’.
The worst part about the majority of these examples, is that they came from people who thought they were helping me, doing me a favor. These were family members, friends, partners, professors, coworkers, and of course the errant internet rando poised to tell me all about myself though they only knew me through a single Tweet or Facebook post. It didn't matter that what they were arguing was clearly false as indicated by the fact that I was standing right there. From those exchanges though, I learned that people have very complicated (and often disappointing) relationships to the things they don’t understand and the things they fear. They’ve been told to view those things with contempt instead of curiosity, because questioning what we fear means questioning what authorities have told us to fear, and heaven forbid we have any of that.
What these folks fail to understand is that it is because of my identities that I love horror. Horror is the place where I feel most complete. I have a tattoo on my arm that’s both a reference to my favorite non-fiction book of all time (Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider) but also a declaration of myself and my pride in that self. I am on the outside, because I like being on the outside. No matter what community I am part of, some fragment of me always seems to stick out. You can learn a lot about people from that vantage point and a lot of it ain’t pretty and I appreciate that. I appreciate that horror is honest above all else.
Horror novels and films that depict marginalized people in less than favorable light are reflections of the assumptions made about those groups by members of ‘dominant’ groups who have been socialized to believe nothing else. Certainly, my argument here isn’t to say that those depictions are fair, accurate, or even desirable**, but rather they instruct us in not what we see but how we should see it. They influence audiences along lines of power and privilege (and I’m sure some of y’all are rolling your eyes but only hit dogs tend to holler so that’s your issue not mine), and in turn that influence carries over into our social interactions, our political beliefs, and our ways of being. Thus, the historically excluded become monsters, become nightmares, become the uncontrollable force waiting to lay waste to the established order of things.
And that is where another power lies.
The rules of normative society were never made for those outside of it and therefore not subject to its parameters. Over the last several decades (and before then in some ways), those ‘outsiders’ started crafting horror stories about themselves and their families, those stories told from generation to generation, by kin, both blood and fictive. Therefore we have the trope of middle and upper class home invasion but the countertrope of urban gentrification. For every depiction of pathologized Blackness, we get depictions of white sociopathy. For every final girl we get what Aigner Loren Wilson delightfully defines as a ‘murder babe’; a woman (or girl) “who revel[s] in and excel[s] at the art of murder and mayhem”. For every tragic, buried gay and psychotic trans stereotype we create multidimensional and complicated queers, because if you’re going to be -phobic, then let us really give you something to be scared of.
Horror for sure isn’t perfect, as any cursory dip into the horror discourse du jour reveals. There are a lot of racists and misogynists and various -phobes and unsafe predators who feel safe in the horror community because of horror’s nature as being confrontational and counterculture. I love horror and truly believe it to be for everyone, which unfortunately includes even the people I don’t like***.
I love horror because it challenges me. Horror makes me think deeply about the social conditions in which I find myself, it makes me more empathic to certain situations that I otherwise would have little access to. I love horror because it empowers me, because it accepts all of me and makes me feel validated in my perspectives and understanding of the world.
I love horror because it kicks ass.
*Some people in my family are crazy.
**Overly palatable marginalized characters also suck too, to be human is to be complicated.
*** It doesn’t mean we have to give them a platform or publish them or not make fun of them for being dumb and dangerous.
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