Today I am featuring, Dave V. Riser (he/they), a PhD student at University of Pittsburgh, studying Transgender Horror Literature. He has published some short fiction in publications such as The Arkansas International, Dark Matter Presents: The Off-Season, and Brave Boy World: A Transman Anthology. He has also written a few essays: "Enough Rope: Transmasculine Erasure, Violence, and Reading Trans Horror" at Bloodletter Magazine, and "Private Traps: Transphobia, Psychosis, and Grief in ‘Psycho’" at What Sleeps Beneath magazine. You can find him @davevriser on BlueSky.
Here is Riser on why they love horror.
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I love horror because there is something out there, in the dark. Horror and terror are real.
Jack Ketchum’s Girl Next Door is nauseating for the descriptions of abuse, but moreover, because it shows us that child abuse is normal. Every adult that the protagonist tries to ask for help tells him that Meg is essentially owned by her guardian. Even his own father equivocates on whether the abuse is wrong, causing the protagonist to realize that at some point, his father must have hit his mother. Everyone’s complicit. Girl Next Door demonstrates how American culture normalizes child abuse. The complicity of the protagonist is a tragedy, and still understandable, because he’s been taught to respect authority, and authority has told him that abuse is okay if someone in authority is doing it.
Both of my parents were in the military, so I grew up moving around a lot. I was a bookish kid, and I read everything, but I was always drawn to the darker side of whatever genre I picked up. I read Goosebumps, American Chillers (and Michigan Chillers, although we never lived in Michigan) and whatever murder mystery books my mother had on the shelves. Even in the fantasy series my father got me into, my favorite part was the torture of the main character by his brother in a struggle for the throne. Nature versus nurture, right? Billy Martin (writing as Poppy Z. Brite) was writing Dahmer-esque stories about mice before he hit double digits.
My tastes leaned darker as I grew older. I came out as transgender. I dealt with a lot of shit. My friends dealt with a lot of shit. We weren’t always good to each other as we tried to figure things out. I read creepypastas at home and Poe and Stoker and Shelley at school. I read Carmilla. I read the origin of Slenderman and managed to start watching the Marble Hornets videos early on in the series.
In the original Slenderman mythos, you’re only at risk if you think about Slenderman too much. The more you dwell, the more you’re in danger—much like anxiety that way. But it does suggest a level of agency. As did the many, many (and often, poorly written) Slenderman creepypastas I read: someone had to survive to write these down. Someone had an encounter with a dark, violent force, and lived to tell about it. As much as horror is a story about someone being hunted and potentially killed, horror is also about watching someone survive the impossible.
What I remember most about Girl Next Door is the exploration of agency. Meg could run, could escape, but she refuses to abandon her younger sister. David, the protagonist, gets his revenge on the adult who ruined him and killed his friend. The beginning of the novel, the flash of David as an adult, demonstrates that while he is never fully “healed” or made into the version of himself that did not suffer (and sometimes, perpetuate) abuse, he has a life beyond it.
Abuse and terror are real, and horror shows us we can be changed by it, but not succumb to it. Even the most grimdark stories have characters making hard choice to live, to try to live, to bring these fuckers down with us.
Sometimes, of course, these characters are also the monster.
Intellectually, I’ve always been interested in how art shapes and transforms us. I think horror is a landscape of complex, difficult emotions. It’s a place where real questions about ethics, survival, and our collective, inevitable death are explored. It’s deadly serious, and it’s also fun. Pleasurable, even.
The most compelling element of mythology has, for me, been the trickster figure, the boundary crosser. The boundary crosser makes the norms and expectations of their world visible through violation. Through this visibility, the reader (or listener, in the days of the oral tradition) a community can decide what norms to keep around.
Horror’s innate conceit is boundary violation. This violation can make our own world visible to us, transforming the mundane into something new, something we can pick up and discuss.
As a queer person, violation of norms is quite important to me. Especially as gender norms grow more coercive, more enforceable. According to the current administration, I don’t exist, and if I did exist, I’m crazy, dangerous, and should be removed from public life. Shoved back into a closet.
I’ve been watching a lot of werewolf movies, and reading werewolf books. I’ve been thinking about monster logics: there is a fantasy of power, of rage expressed, of biting back, at the heart of the monster movie. There’s a fantasy of alternate connection, a queer world oriented away from normative pressures. I will be everything you call me, and now I have a word to find others like me.
This exists alongside the way that horror has been used, that these logics have been used, to justify real-world oppression: trans healthcare has grown out of and continues to revolve around the fear that trans people will regret transition and come seeking revenge. Not, you know, around our desire to have health care. Our desire to survive.
I love horror because it’s complicated. I love horror because it’s frightening. I love horror because it’s real.
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