31 Days of Horror: Day 21-- Why I Love Horror by Jonathan Lees

Today I have another brand new addition to the Why I Love Horror universe, but it is not another librarian for youth. Rather, today I have the man responsible for the Final Frame Film Festival which happens every year at StokerCon, Jonathan Lees.

But Jonathan is not just the Final Frame guy. No, he is also an accomplished writer. In fact, he has a great novella which came out on October 1st from one of my favorite small horror presses (Lethe), entitled August:

Discharged in disgrace and punished for the very thing done to him, a young veteran returns to his sweltering Massachusetts hometown, under siege by a heatwave, to find his parents won't open the door. They've left him a check and a note. They're hiding in their own house. And August, the boy he's loved since before either of them had words for it, is in a hospital bed wrapped in gauze, severely burned nearly to nothing in a fire that gutted a gay bar in town.

Something is wrong with the light here. Strangers dissolve into smoke at the edges of his vision. The men he finds in blacked-out bars shed their skin for something older and hungrier underneath. And every thread he pulls on, trying to find who set the fire, leads back to the people who raised him. August is a novella that burns at both ends-part elegy, part fever dream, part act of arson an inflammatory rant against everything that failed to protect family, country, God. Visceral, hallucinatory, and unflinchingly queer.

So you may think you know him as the short horror film festival organizer, but get to know him as w writer to watch through his new novella and his essay below.

Ad come back tomorrow for a chance to win your own copy of August along with 2 other books.

Here is Jonathan Lees on why he loves horror.

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Why I Love Horror

By Jonathan Lees

Of course I love horror.

Horror is illustrative of danger and I’ve been drawn to danger my entire life— as a child skateboarding through the rusted remnants of an industrial town gone to seed, as a teenager flinging myself into the throng of a hardcore show, as a young man coming out and cruising as the AIDS crisis hit its boiling point. I grew up in an age where parents thought we’d have just as much a chance being impaled with a broadsword trademarked by Gary Gygax than killed for who we were or what we believed in. 

People ask us how we can love horror when the world is horrific enough.

I then ask, when has the world not been horrific? Should we look away? Are the same people telling me not to read it, the same ones that claim I’m welcoming in ill behavior, the ones shutting their eyes and praying it all away, the same people that have no issue watching cities catch fire, or the casualties of foreign lands while they chew on lukewarm animal flesh?

The more the world gave me to fear, the more I investigated with a sharp light and a hesitant step. I am that idiot walking down the dark hallway towards the things others run from, and also, the person that thinks every misshapen shadow is a potential threat. I am very well aware the spider on the ceiling might nest in my throat the second I shut my eyes. In fact, I anticipate it.

So, it came to be that the artists that made such a deep impression on me were like, “Oh, you think the world is scary? Well, what about this?!” Those bold enough to try to marry very real human reactions and emotions with the superstitious, supernatural, or surreal. The ones that understood the rot under your mother’s prized rug or the seed of Satan susurrating from the basement. Whether inhaling the yellowed pages of mass market paperbacks or watching the light flicker through film prints or deciphering the in-between glitches on tape, horror had its hold on me and those that were drawn to the dark arts I considered visionaries, artists who knew how to process all that is terrible and terrifying for those who didn’t want to shy away, those who wanted a magnifying glass held to it.  

Horror can be one of the most honest expressions, the emotions that bleed into everything else from humor to romance to fantasy. There is no life without horror, as I see it, and I must have recognized that at an early age before I even knew what true horror was. I sought out and found horror in everything. So, even when I didn’t have a paperback lying around, or an old copy of Fangoria, I conjured my own sinister imaginings. There is a grace within horror that rests its beautiful head on rot and inhales deeply. In deft hands and daft minds, it is the language, the vision, the senses, that I prefer. I will gladly take its hands and allow it to show me the sights as it offers a protection, a rulebook, a glance at the worst the world could offer and beyond –a world that wants to see us dead. 

Alone or together, facing what we fear whether metaphorical or physical makes us stronger. It helps us understand what others have gone through and what makes us more human.

It was easier for people to assign concern to the demons we want to believe are real rather than the ones we know are. I know better. I sometimes felt safer walking the streets of New York at three AM than I would walking around a suspiciously quiet suburb at three PM. The only horrors I enjoy come with a page count, not an actual body count. A perceived terror over the perpetual punishments of reality. An instinct for survival, against all odds, is what horror taught me… which is more than I could say for the textbooks of my grade school years. More than I could say for the ones that make a performance of turning  away from horror, the ones who pretend not to shiver with the thrill of fear, the same ones think the goth kid is the problem, that we’ll all be sacrificed in an underground tunnel by obsessed gamers, that the queers are grooming our kids, or ignore that the drugs in those teens hands were made and distributed by adults and forced into their neighborhoods. Seemed like the ones who make a show of looking away are often the problem themselves. You might even see a slight grin as they turn.  I’ve learned my nightmares aren’t as scary as what ensues in broad daylight but that doesn’t remove my desire to explore the darkness further and see what new terrors our imaginations can uncover. 

So, twist my wrists, infect my brain, drain me, and drag me to hell and let us scream in the face of fate. Whisper things that make me shake and bury my bones in it. Blood is the paint of horror, and it makes sense since it is literally what keeps us conscious, alive.

Of course, I love horror.